Mobile phones have had a huge effect on society by making interpersonal communication instant and always available. They are also becoming important tools for political and social change. Here are a few examples:

* Most of the reportage, both text and pictures, documenting the repression of the Tibetan Independence movement has come from camera phones and SMS eyewitnes accounts.

* Twitter proved it’s value for emergency communications in use by police and fire departments and the Red Cross during last October’s Southern California wildfires.

* Barak Obama’s presidential campaign is using text messages to get out the vote and organize rallies. The candidate also has wallpapers and sound bite ring-tones for download by supporters. Hilary Clinton is using text messaging political organizing too.

* Zimbabwean workers in South Africa use mobile banking to send their money home to avoid having to pay bribes to border guards.

* In Nigeria, teenagers can get their questions about AIDS and safe sex answered by a free SMS service sponsored by the government and a consortium of agencies.

Some of these stories appeared in the mainstream press, but I heard about them first by reading MobileActive.org’s blog. MobileActive’s motto is “Mobile Phones for Civic Action”. They do this by reporting and encouraging the use of mobile technology for the common good and by connecting non governmental political action organizations working in areas like human rights, democracy campaigns, environmental awareness and disaster relief with mobile technology and mobile technologists. Besides the blog, MobileActive’s web site has a directory of current activist projects using mobile technology, another directory of tools and vendors supplying technology of interest to political action organizations, and a great database of global mobile usage statistics.

MobileActive is a must read for anyone interested in social change and mobile technology. And you can read it on the mobile web. The mobile edition of the MobileActive blog at mobileactive.mofuse.mobi is created from the site’s RSS feed using Mofuse (review) and offers the full text of the ten most recent posts. Since my review, Mofuse has added Mowser integration which means that you can click through to a transcoded version of the full MobileActive blog to leave and read comments on items.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Ok everyone… I must admit I am in love… with Hey San.. no it isn’t a Japanese gentleman.. it is Heysan! a mobile chatting site or should I say THE Mobile Messenger Service ?

Ok so lets go through it together and I will explain why I find this mobile instant messaging service the best out there. Lets start from the beginning.

Firstly When you go to the web page the site is extremly simple and uncluttered. They simply point you to their mobile site :

Normally on other sites you have to go through a lengthy sign up process on the web, choose your mobile, your carrier… here none of that. Straight to their mobile site.. Hey we are talking about the mobile web.. seems mots people haven’t got it like these guys do… So you go from your mobile.. to their home. And once again it is simplicity itself :

Oh.. did I mention, they support all the main instant messaging communities ? :

And did I say that there was no download ? It is just like MSN Web messenger.. you just login and start chatting. Before that you go about grabbing your contacts for each of your messenger programs.. If you are like me you have several.

Then you just do that for your other messenger services. And voila !

You can see all your contacts from your various messengers all in the same place much like Killian on your PC.

Up to now.. very good so let’s try chatting shall we ?

So as you can see it is simple as that. I would suggest that you all try it out. It is finally the mobile web made simple. And that is why I like it. Of course there are disadvantages like you have to refresh.. But for that there is a setting… you can choose auto refresh or you can simply hit the refresh button. On Opera I noticed that the refresh button didn’t always work. But on the iPhone it was perfect and on my Nokia E85 as well.

The advantage of not having to download is manifold. Firstly when you talk about downloads you automatically mean compatibility issues! That is why these guys are 5 people ! Because they are focusing on the usability of the service rather than on porting to hundreds of devices! Second of all you can access your account from any mobile device without having to download again. Thirdly you can get a new device without having to see if Heysan! has ported it.

Now when crunch comes to crunch how will they survive ? I mean financially ? For the moment they have some AdMob ads.. does this earn them enough money ? We shall see ?

Conclusion of the story.. These guys are great, they have a service that works really well.. within the limits of the the present technology and bandwidth. I can see obviously many improvements but I think that they are on the right path. Oh and one thing guys.. please add Skype!!

Join MobilOpen – the off deck mobile internet group : News, networking, cooperation…

Sign the Manifesto! Rules for Ethical Reformatting: A Developer Manifesto is developers’ answer to the arrogance of Vodafone, Novarra and all of the others who find it legitimate to disrupt the mobile web.

A ghost is haunting the mobile web, the ghost of content reformatting. The mobile web has never been a simple platform to develop for, given the fragmentation of the underlying technology: different devices, different browsers and different networks have made mobile web development a challenge for programmers and content authors from the beginning.

Yet, in this hard environment, one thing has stayed sacred throughout the years: the HTTP Protocol.

Until today, developers of mobile websites could count on the fact that the HTTP headers from a mobile device would reach the intended webserver with their integrity respected.

Alas, this basic assumption on which thousands of developers have built their applications is put to the test by a recent trend among Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

Tools that were originally devised as utilities to split up web pages and deliver a best-effort user-experience on a mobile device are today being marketed as solutions to bring the full web to mobile by reformatting vendors. Some MNOs are buying into this vision and are implementing reformatting proxies into their networks that will intercept and reformat all HTTP traffic to any HTTP server without safeguarding those sites which strive to deliver a mobile-optimised user-experience, or, at least, not safeguarding them sufficiently.

This situation is a threat to the neutrality of the web and one that can jeopardize the mobile web as a platform in the years to come.

To this end, mobile developers of various nationalities and background, assembled on the WMLProgramming list at Yahoo Groups create this manifesto to make their position known in the face of those who try to misrepresent the needs and the wishes of the mobile ecosystem for their own petty monetization needs.

If you want to sign, drop Luca an email with your name, title and company.

From : Luca Passani passani at eunet dot no

When I last looked at Bluepulse a year and a half ago, it was an Australian company with a Java ME based mobile widget platform. Well that has changed and Bluepulse is now headquartered in Silicon Valley (in YouTube’s old offices!) with a “social messaging” service. What’s that? Bluepulse describes social messaging as “as the love child of a social network and an instant messenger”, combining typical social network features like profiles, chat, friends, groups, photo and video sharing and a status update feed together with mobile messaging via SMS, email and the web.

Although Bluepulse used to be a Java application it’s now a purely mobile web, SMS and email based product. It’s all on the mobile, there is a Bluepulse PC web site at www.bluepulse.com but it’s about Bluepulse with FAQ’s, help texts, privacy polices etc. To actually use Bluepulse including signing up, messaging, profile and group management you must do everything on the mobile site at bluepulse.com (without the www). The mobile site can be used from a PC, by the way, if you aren’t yet entirely comfortable with a purely mobile platform.

Bluepulse Friends status Bluepulse’s messaging interface is strikingly simple with a single inbox and outbox. If you want to message someone, you just type their phone number, email address, Bluepulse Login, full name or the name of a Bluepulse group into the to: field and enter your message (top image). Likewise you receive messages, friend requests and status updates all on the same screen on the Bluepulse mobile site or, if you choose, as text messages. This is true unified messaging, no modes, multiple inboxes or folders. In user interfaces simple is always best, especially on mobile.

Bluepulse seems to be the hottest of the new pure mobile social networks with over 3 million users in 160 countries and it recently received $6 million in seed funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners. In an interview with SFist, 26 year old Bluepulse founder Ben Keighran makes the point that Bluepulse is a:

“…mobile-only Internet service rather than a window or portal into a desktop Internet service. This differentiation is important because a service like ours is specifically designed to be consumed on a mobile phone and is not a half-baked or trimmed down version of a desktop Internet service/website.”

This is very true, the mobile sites of established PC based social networks like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook, are very limited compared with the full sites and have some serious usability issues as well.

Mobile is going to be a huge part of future of social networking. The major use of current social networking sites is to keep up with what friends are doing and to share experiences with chat, pictures and video. As phones become more powerful and “all you can eat” data and messaging plans become affordable, status and messaging (the core activities of social networking) will move away from the PC were we (hopefully) only spend a part of the day to the always available mobile phone. Networks designed from the ground up to be mobile are best positioned to profit from this shift.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Renan Ayrault from Maeglin Software ageed to explain to us what exactly Pleex does and what is a “Peer2peer mobile social network”.. apart from being quite a mouthful.

Q:: Could you present us Pleex and your company?

Pleex is the first Peer-to-Peer Mobile Social Network. Once you have downloaded Pleex on your mobile, you can :

• Secure your mobile content (address book, pictures, videos etc) on our Web site (coming in April)
• Communicate freely by Bluetooth & meet new friends or business partners thanks to the profiles they automatically exchange via Bluetooth
• Automatically exchange their MP3, pictures, videos, and résumé by peer-to-peer
• Win presents every month thanks to our Pleexos loyalty program

Maeglin Software is based in Paris and Montpellier (France). Our investors include Paris-based CDC Innovation (a Caisse des Dépôts subsidiary), Innovacom (a France Telecom subsidiary) and CapDécisif (seed funds for companies based in the Paris area).

Q:: Is it free ? if yes will you use mobile ads ?

Yes, Pleex is free to use, and we plan on staying so, as we believe the value of such a service comes in part with a large number of users. We have premium services coming up for Q3 2008. And yes, we will use mobile ads, both on our Wap site and ou application.

Q:: Will your product stay Off deck and/or go also On deck ?

Our product will stay off-deck for the foreseeable future.

Q:: Right now this is product based uniquely in France is there an international roll out plan?

Yes, we plan on rolling out our service internationally in May with an English version.

Q:: What is your vision of mobile web ?

I believe mobile Web has a wide open future provided two issues are addressed: speed and price. Internet use really took off when ISPs started to offer broadband access at moderate price. The same has to happen for mobile Web to become widely used. I also believe that its future is even brighter in countries where PC-based Internet access is difficult and expansive e.g. emerging countries.

Thank you very much Renan for your insight and a brief overview of Pleex. We wish you the most success with your international roll out.

Join MobilOpen – the off deck mobile internet group : News, networking, cooperation…

Newsvine is a popular, user driven news site. It works a little like Digg in that stories are user submitted and voted on by members. But Newsvine is much mellower and more focused than Digg. The site’s Code of Honor stresses respect for others, relevance and avoiding sensationalism. The code seems to be followed remarkably well making the site a fine online news source covering US and world news, sports, tech, business, health and entertainment. The site’s front page has top stories from all topic areas and there are also 17 separate category pages which function as category specific front pages.

There are three kinds of stories on the Newsvine front page and topic specific pages;

* Wire service stories reproduced in their entirety on Newsvine.

* “Seeded” stories which user submitted (seeded) links to external sites. Seeded stories have a Newsvine launch page with a brief excerpt or synopsis by the user who submitted the story and then a link to the full story on the external site.

* Stories by Featured Writers which are user written stories published on Newsvine. These are a little like blog items with comments and the ability to read an archive of each writer’s items.

The mobile edition of Newsvine does a good job of presenting all the content of the PC site in a format that is easy to understand and navigate on a mobile device. Category selection is handled by a dropdown at the top of the page. The three types of Newsvine stories are clearly marked and delimited. Which is a good thing for users on a metered data plan, or with browsers that can’t handle full-web pages as the Read Article links on the Seeded story launch pages lead directly to full-web sites.

There are however a couple of small usability issues:

* Images on Newsvine.mobi are wider (250px) than most mobile device screens and will be truncated or resized by the browser. My phone’s browser can resize images on the fly but pages with images needing resizing load and scroll much more slowly.

* If you go to Newsvine’s PC site with a mobile browser there is code that is supposed to redirect to the .mobi site. Unfortunately the code is JavaScript which, except for high-end smartphones and Opera Mini, mobile browsers don’t support. The redirection doesn’t work on the browsers that need it most. Go directly to newsvine.mobi to always get the mobile version.

All in all, Newsvine.mobi is a great edition to the the mobile web news universe. I think it compares very well with mainstream mobile news sites like Yahoo, the BBC Google News and the NY Times in timeliness, relevance and article quality.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Foreca based in Helsinki, Finland seems to be one of the best mobile weather sites around. I tested the most well known along with Foreca. What is nice is it is truly international which is rare as there seems to be quite a few sites that have great features but aren’t international. When I tested it I tried out NY, Paris, Colombo and Oslo. It also gives towns and cities nearby so that you can see the weather in those areas.

Firstly what is cool is that the service can be changed into a number of languages : English but also German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Polish, Portuguese (both European and Brazilian variants), Japanese, Swedish, Finnish and Russian. You can also select the time format and the temperature system.

Selecting a location is simple. Just type in the name of the town/city it will search through it’s 100 000 locations and offer you a choice in necessary. And voila you have your weather.


Once you have selected your location you get the current conditions and also future conditions, up to 7 days.

Then if you have a PDA like device the quality is superb.

You can also see satellite view of your local area, which I find really cool.

Join MobilOpen – the off deck mobile internet group : News, networking, cooperation…

MobiLuck, which started out as a Bluetooth based chat, dating, messaging and file sharing application now has a mobile web based social network. Like MocoSpace, Peperonity, Wadja, ItsMy, Multiply and several others it’s a pure mobile play rather than a mobile front end to a web based social network. MobiLuck focuses on location and presence. The idea is to share your location with friends (and strangers if your feeling adventuresome) so you can meet up with them in the real world. When you log into MobiLuck you see a listing of friends and other users who are nearby. See someone you know or want to meet? MobiLuck lets you open a chat session, IM them with MSN or phone them. Optionally you can receive SMS alerts when a friend is within a certain distance (1km by default).

The mobile web based version of MobiLuck doesn’t really detect your location . That’s not really MobiLuck’s fault, it’s almost impossible for an off portal web service to obtain location data because of carrier policies. To share your location with MobiLuck you have to enter it manually.

MobiLuck ProfileLocation entry is cumbersome on mobiles at best. MobiLuck uses your IP address to default your country. With Opera Mini it said I was in Norway! (Hint to mobile developers – proxy based browsers like Mini send the user’s real IP address in the X-Forwarded-For header.) Changing my country to US required scrolling to the bottom of a very long drop down listing what seemed to be every nation in the world. It would have been much easier to just key “us”. Once selected, the country does persist across sessions, at least. I also had intermittent problems saving locations in MobiLuck. I’d enter a full location with street address, city, state and postal code and hit “OK” to set that as my current location and get another screen that said “There are many addresses, please select one” with a list of 3 or 4 addresses, none of them the one I had just keyed! This didn’t happen every time but it did occur often to be annoying.

MobiLuck has an attractive tabbed interface and is generally pretty easy to use except in the critical area of location selection. I like the way the main navigation is implemented as tab bar with 4 tabs; People, Places, Chat, Change Location and Settings. I did find it hard to tell which tab had focus on a phone with the Obigo browser. Fixing that was just a matter of going into MobiLuck’s settings and changing display from “Graphic” to “Text”. The tabs do look and work great with Opera Mini and Nokia Webkit. Another thing I like about MobiLuck is that it’s very easy to sign up using just a phone. All you need is a phone number or email address and a password. I’m sure ease of sign up contributes to MobiLuck’s rapid growth, 130,000 users since launching four months ago. The privacy features in MobiLuck are good too, your location is only shared to friends by default, you can change it to be visible to all, none or a subset of your friends. MobiLuck shows a lot of promise – if they can just make setting your location easy and reliable.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com