Carnival of the mobilists 167 – G20 special edition

This week sees London host two important events, one being the G20 meeting, the other is carnival of the mobilists, hosted right here in London at London Calling.

For those of you who don’t know much about the carnival – have a look at www.mobili.st and to the one person this week who emailed me thinking that the carnival was an event – perhaps we will do this in the future.  For now though, the sights and sounds of the carnival are in a purely virtual form 😉

This week we have a wide range of interesting and thought provoking posts, and while we don’t have representation from all the G20 nations, we have a good few listed below.  Note I have grouped representation by where the poster lives (or the country they are discussing).  If you would like me to group your post under your home country, please contact me and I will fix it straight away.

Let’s get to a roll-call of countries…

Representing the United States of America, India and China, Chetan Sharma looks at the mobile opportunities in both India and China and how important it is to take advantage of local knowledge in these exciting and growing markets.

Representing the United Kingdom, Ajit Jaokar has a thoughtful post on how the various sensors in phones can become a “magic wand to the cloud services”, and explains how it is kind of like waving the phone as a magic wand to trigger sensors via the cloud which will trigger new services.

Ram Krishnan from the mobile broadband blog in the US looks at how consumer gadgets in the future may all be 3G enabled – with the new Amazon Kindle being a good mass market example of what might happen.

Also representing the United States, Barbara Ballard sent us a post from Steven over at little springs design which asks how long it will be before all of the radios in our life (2G, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID) might all work together seamlessly – we can only hope this is around the corner.

Also from the USA, Dennis Bournique from wapreview makes the bold statement that  “The iPhone Does NOT Drive 50% of US Mobile Traffic“.  In the post he argues that web designers absolutely need to ensure that their sites deliver a great experience on the iPhone and Touch, but they shouldn’t neglect the other devices that still drive over 82% of mobile web traffic either.  This is enough to earn my award as post of the week.

Per-Fredrik from mobiletribe is based in Luxembourg (members of the G20 via their EU membership) looks at how to make money from mobile social networking – and suggests we actually charge for it!  Wow what a concept – perhaps it will catch on.

Representing Germany, Martin Sauter from wireless moves has done some research on the cost of calls in Africa and expected very cheap prices compared to high income countries but was very much surprised by the results.

Next week’s carnival host, James Cooper from mjelly (also in London) has a new mobile advertising and affiliate marketing podcast called mobile space on geekcast.fm – more information over at mjelly.

A late entry to the carnival was my friend Tomi Ahonen with his thoughtful post about “7th Mass Medium in context of 6 legacy mass media – about time to set facts straight about mobile“.  The post title speaks for itself – and it is well worth a read.  Tomi adds… “Its been a while since we last wrote a major overview of the 7th Mass Media space but now, in a post iPhone and post Obama SMS campaigning age, in the time of Twitter, it is time to do a major update posting.”

That’s it for our G20 special edition of the carnival of the mobilists.  Remember for inclusion in the carnival, please send your posts to mobilists [at] gmail.com

For those of you who have not visited London Calling before – why not bookmark londoncalling.mobi or subscribe to our RSS feed to ensure you get the freshest posts on mobile advertising, mobility, mobile social networking and everything in between.  You can even follow me on twitter via @andrewgrill.

As you would expect, the site is mobile friendly and will render a mobile version so you can take us with you! 

For those of you based in Sydney – I will be visiting from April 20 – 24.  If you would like to meet in person please contact me.

About Andrew

Based in London, The Actionable Futurist and former Global Managing Partner at IBM, Andrew Grill is a popular and sought-after presenter and comementator on issues around digital disruption, workplace of the future and new technologies such as blockchain. Andrew is a multiple TEDx and International Keynote Speaker.