Molecularist

Scott posted a sweet note from a WINKsite user in Gambia (link below). His co-conspirator, David Harper, had shared it with me earlier and I had asked if they could find out more about this user. I think it would be an enlightening story.

Scott, David, and I have spoken before about the simple power of something like WINKsite in a place like Africa or India. Indeed, whenever I go to check out active mobile chat rooms on WINKsite, the most active one is in Mumbai (afternoon in Europe is evening in Mumbai). I am pretty sure that the mobile versions of Google and Yahoo are also big in India or Africa relative to their PC Browser based services.

Hmmm, that’s a lot of Africa posts for me in the past week or so.

Follow the link below to the message.

Link: Scott Rafer’s Mobile Chair � Blog Archive � A Thank You Note from The Gambia.

Making money is super, and there’s many ways to do it. However, very few put you on the receiving end of thank you notes from The Gambia, per capita GDP $1900.

Ajit points to a good BBC article on the changes in communications in Nigeria in the past 25 years.

The same theme keeps popping up – the mobile phone is transforming the developing world. And, as Ajit says, it’s about communications. Fuse the mobile with the Internet and watch how creative people, without PCs and fixed-line phones, can be.

And to think that the next billion phones will mostly be like folks like these Nigerians.

Link: Open Gardens: How mobile phones are transforming societies.

The interesting bit is – I observed the same phenomenon with Cable TV more than twelve years ago when I last lived in India. Once people get connected, their aspirations rise, they become more informed, corrupt politicians can’t cheat them, governments can’t censor information easily

This is just the beginning ..

Darla recently wrote about a content aggregator (Wireless Watch, hereafter referred to as ‘that aggregator’) who was not only violating her copyrights, but possibly of many other fine writers. The copyright for Darla’s content is attribution (via the Creative Commons license she publishes under). But what about the others?

Yet, reading the list of sites that are being used as sources (Yours Truly, sadly, isn’t on the list) I realized that these are pretty much the best mobile writers out there.

So, thank you Darla, for bringing to our attention ‘that aggregator’ and notifying others that they should make sure ‘that aggregator’ complies with their copyrights.

But, also, thank you for publishing this list of great mobile writers.

Load up those feed readers.*

Link: Darla Mack: Pimp My Blog – Do You Have The Right To Republish?.

So, I guess what I’m saying is… who the hell as the right to republish my stuff?  Have control over my feedsm get revenue from my hard work and then control the amount of revenue that I get from them?

*But DO NOT use ‘that naughty aggregator’ until they straighten out the pesky copyright issues and give credit where credit is due

David finally managed to get special dispensation to avoid Google’s all-embracing transcoding mechanism. I am amazed that Google even had such an automated exceptions system in place.

Link: Different Things � Blog Archive � How to Free Yourself From Google’s Mobile Transcoding Services in 5 Days or More..

The other day I wrote about Google’s mobile transcoding services and the reasons for our issues with it in a post titled, “An Open Letter to Google: “Page adapted for mobile phone?” Please stop now, you are crippling sites, not adapting pages.”

The lack of clarity as to how the transcoding services worked and how you could opt-out was frustrating. In our case, Google’s transcoding service was doing more harm then good. Naturally we “Googled” Google and eventually found a mobile FAQ that stated:

Mobile marketing. Hoo hoo! Mobile marketing. Hoo hoo!

Rock on, 2006!

Link: The Pondering Primate: Verisign Acquires mQube.

This deal is sending ripples throughh the mobile marketing space.

From MoneyCentral VeriSign Acquires m-Qube

March 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — VeriSign, Inc. VRSN, the leading provider of intelligent infrastructure services for the Internet and telecommunications networks, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire m-Qube, a leading mobile channel enabler that helps companies develop, deliver and bill for mobile content, applications and messaging services.

Link: Rudy Can’t Fail at MobHappy.

Apologies to Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, but sometimes you just need a title. Anyhow, I just wanted to point to two posts fellow Mobilist Rudy de Waele’s written this week that were both pretty excellent.

First, on gotomobile, he takes Russell’s recent posts about Google as well as what I wrote about mobile design and some other posts to jump off into a discussion of mobile web browsers, including a series of interesting side-by-side images of how pages are rendered by different mobile browsers.

The second post, which is at m-trends.org, is an open letter to Vodafone regarding their mobile web and data pricing. It’s a clearly reasoned, well thought out argument of why Vodafone’s data pricing leaves something to be desired — and hurts the company as much as it annoys users. Let’s hope somebody over there is reading.

Nice work, Rudy!