Carnival of the Mobilists #142

I haven't written here in a while due to the preparation for MoMoTLV grand event last week and also some consulting projects that keep me busy - so it is my pleasure to make a great "comeback" by hosting Carnival of the Mobilists #142. The Carnival is a (relatively) old tradition where the best mobile posts of the past week are linked from one blog (More on this mobile tradition here).

Lots of good mobile posts this week... My personal favorite was the one from John Puterbaugh from Nellymoser who writes about the evolution of applications/content delivery in the various platforms in his very elaborate post Closed is the New Open: From Vending Machines to Marketplaces.

Following are several other posts that also touch the subject of appstores. It seems that due to the success of Apple's appstore, the idea of appstores and what are the secret ingredients of building a good one captures many of the bloggers this week. Starting with M. Radedeas from Techhype who asks How Many App Stores Does The World Need?

Another interesting post in the same area is The Happy Medium: Building a Smartphone App Store that Works by Malcolm Lithgow from Smart Dreaming. Malcolm explores the idea of creating an appstore for smartphones.

On a related topic, iPhone being the connecting line, Ram Krishnan dives into recent web browsing statistics, and tells us that while that showed the iPhone is considered a significant growth factor in this market, the numbers tell a different story. All this in his post Revisiting iPhone’s Browsing Market Share.

And some more interesting thoughts on mobile web/apps come from Ajit Jaokar from Open Garden who asks Can Carriers execute Long Tail / Web 2.0 applications? discussing how can the longtail model that works so good on the web be translated to the carrier dominated mobile world.

You can find more On Mobile Browser Based Applications in About Mobility by C. Enrique Ortiz, founding member of Mobile Monday Austin, who takes a deep look into the cons and pros of mobile web vs. mobile client applications, and provides guidelines to choose between the two.

And since we mentioned Mobile Monday, James Cooper from Mjelly writes Mobile Platforms - MoMo London September notes which is about MoMo London's last event on Mobile Platforms. On a personal note, I'd like to believe that I had something to do with the rise of that topic as a MoMo event - I posted my article on the battle of the mobile platforms (see below in this blog) in MoMo London's discussion group and it spawned a discussion thread from hell... This subject is definitely hot, and a few weeks later it became an event...

You can find more on platforms in Capuchin: Sony Ericsson strikes back in the Application Environment, a post by Thomas Menguy in Vision Mobile that discusses Capuchin, a technology that combines flash lite with J2ME, which is supposed to take the best of both worlds: UI from flash and engine from J2ME, sounds like voodoo to me... (Just kidding, it's actually a very good idea given the what these platforms can acheive when combined).

And speaking of UI, Barbara Ballard from Little Springs shares with us an interview with Jason Ward, head of UX for Sprint, about mobile UI design, always a very interesting subject.

And last but not least, on a less mainstream subject but certainly a fine one, Antoine RJ Wright claims in his blog that Reading Shouldn't Require an Interface shares a very interesting vision of how reading on mobile should look like.

That's about it for this week, stay tuned for NextGenMoCo next posts and if you liked this carnival (and even if you didn't..) you can follow the next one at The Smartphones Show.