Looking for the next big thing...

I've been very busy these past few weeks. First, I am consulting to several companies on issues concerning Mobility - mainly R&D stuff (High level architecture and design), this alone can take all my time, but I am trying to take only a few selected projects to make some time for my other main activity...

And this activity is "looking for the next big thing", I definitely know I will launch a new startup some time soon. The only questions remaining are in what field, with who and which funding to take.... 3 simple questions...

As for the first question, there are a lot of interesting fields out there. The field I've been engaged with the past few years is mobile content (and more specifically games). I still think there's a great potential there but some of the problems that should have been solved by now, are still here (i.e. operators closed gardens, device fragmentation etc.). However, the opportunity seems to be around the corner as devices are becoming easier to handle, so everything is still open.

There is of course a broader field and that's mobile. Working in the mobile content field requires deep understanding of all things mobile, and I am very familiar with other fields within the mobile space. In fact, many of the problems and challenges are the same. And the good thing is that all the problems in the mobile space that I've been surprised to discover time after time are now known and easier to handle - "Know thy enemy..."...

So mobile is definitely a good sweetspot for me, but I am also looking at other ventures some in the (non-mobile) gaming field and some in the IT/Security field, in which I have a long history (I've been in this space for about 5 years, all before my deep descent into the mobile space).

Regarding the second question (with who), I have been meeting with several entrepreneurs groups this past month with ideas in all the spaces I mentioned above. I must say that all the ideas I saw are quite good - but I am trying to figure out whether they're excellent... Some of these entrepreneurs are old friends, so it's fun to catch up. There are a lot of advantages going with other entrepreneurs as a group rather than founding a startup alone (which is what I did in GamearraY), but it all depends in the opportunity and the situation.

And last but not least - funding... the first thing is when to seek funding - on one hand developing the product in a garage company mode, coming with more to show, is a good approach - on the other hand if the vision is clear and the opportunity is there - why waste time and sit in the garage instead of getting funding and increasing the workforce from the start? Of course the first approach is better in terms of evaluation - but - you can rarely get to a point that your garage work made your company pass the seed stage and get immediately a round A.

There are also 2 smaller projects I am thinking about that can reach the user phase without funding (aside from me not working...). In fact a lot has been said about the trend of entrepreneurs that try to postpone as much funding of any kind. It has been claimed that Web 2.0 apps can be easily written by 4 capable entrepreneurs in a garage mode. However I think that's not enough since you have to "make some noise", go to conferences, spend some marketing dollars and constantly improve the application (And if it really has a great potential you'd rather have dozens of programmers working for you), so I still think that for most projects VCs/Angles will be necessary - but it is true that a lot can be achieved without funding, which may improve the term sheet you get at the end.

Well, these are my thoughts, I plan to settle on one idea sometime soon... however, setting up the startup and get the funding can easily take 6-12 months, so in the meantime I am still accepting consulting projects. The ones I have taken so far are interesting, sometime not less than the startup "scene"....

P.S. - My post on deploying J2ME apps in the US was published on Reddit's programming community. This led to 7,500 visits to my blog in two days (4,500 in one day), definitely a record for me.... Thanks to whoever posted it. This post seems to attract a lot of attention and in fact it is the entry point to my blog for most new visitors. Just shows how the closed gardens issue is bothering the industry.

P.S.2. - Since this is a mobile blog, I can't end without saying something about the iPhone 3G: It looks like Apple is going to create another revolution, and aside from the added GPS, I am talking about the platform openness on one hand and the surprising price on the other hand. If technology advances failed so far to drive sophisticated devices to the hands of mainstream users around the globe, the significant pricecut has a great potential of doing it. However, I was disappointed to learn that the 2MP camera was not upgraded.

P.S.3. - I should get a Sony PS3...

Java Day and LWUIT

Earlier this week, on Monday, I've been to Sun's 2nd Annual Java Day here in Israel. It is a kind of a mini version of the famous JavaOne conference (which is held in San Francisco).

The conference started with keynotes from Boaz Yehuda, Sun Israel's CEO for quite a lot of years (I know him for almost 8 years now) and Vineet Gupta, Sun's Java CTO and then split to tracks including a mobile track which yours truly naturally went to (Surprise surprise)...

The highlight of the conference for me and for other technologists and developers I spoke with during the conference and afterwards was definitely LWUIT. LW what now you ask?.. Well LWUIT is Light Weight User Interface Toolkit. It is developed in Sun's development center in Israel and was announced recently at Sun's JavaOne conference about 2 weeks ago (And has been making a lot of buzz in the J2ME community since).

LWUIT solves one of the pains that J2ME developers handle with since... hmmm.. well, since J2ME existed... The thing is that the UI classes in J2ME are very basic, and moreover render differently in every device. Moreover, their implementation is bug infested, and it seems that every handset vendor has its own "interpretation" on the spec provided by Sun.

This led most if not all J2ME developers not to use J2ME's UI and instead develop their own UI over low-level classes that the platform supplies (Canvas). Now, obviously UI development is not at the business core of most companies (Aside from UI companies...), but many simply had to really dig deep and develop all sorts of proprietary UI, to supply some kind of a decent experience for their users.

According to the development team from Sun who developed it in their labs in the last couple of years, LWUIT comes to bridge between the current situation and what's to come at newer versions of MIDP (And mobile technologies in general).

The result is very impressive. I downloaded the demo app and played with it on a couple of devices and it works quite smoothly (Better on Sony Ericsson as usual...), and also took a look at the API (And part of the 115-pages developer guide...) - and it looks very comprehensive and well-thought through.

LWUIT supports a lot of cool stuff such as screen transitions (Fade, flip and even 3D cube), themes for dynamic look and feel of the UI and most importantly it features a real UI model that resembles Swing (Container-Component model) including a layout manager with several layouts, menus, tabs, animations, standard components that render nicely (buttons, checkboxes, dropdown lists etc.) and event handling. Simply put, forget everything you knew about GUI in J2ME - this is a different story...

The toolkit also includes a resource editor in which graphic designers can design the look and feel of the UI and the various themes - load backgrounds and animations, set colors and fonts to the various objects on screen and more. Now granted this is not as user friendly as Photoshop, but a tech savvy designer/HTML-ist can probably handle it.

In addition LWUIT is already integrated with NetBeans Matisse GUI builder, so you can basically build an application by dragging and dropping components (That is unless you are a real programmer of course ;)

What's the catch? Well, the footprint of LWUIT is not that small, but then again also not that big for today's devices. The PPT at the conference claimed that it can be as small as 50KB (Don't know if that includes everything). The demo app, which is basically LWUIT and classes that demo all its capabilities is 123KB (Without any resources).

It also supports MIDP 2.0 and up, so if you're planning to use MIDP 1.0 - forget it... (But you probably forgot MIDP 1.0 before LWUIT anyway...). On the porting issue, LWUIT promises to work on all MIDP-2.0 compliant devices with the same JAR, and indeed I've seen it running on a multitude of devices, but I'm sure there are weird JVMs out there just waiting to crash with it...

Anyway it looks like a good solution, and if you're not sure whether to use it in your project at least take a look at it, there's a lot to learn from the API. In terms of licensing you can integrate it even in commercial apps. However changes to LWUIT itself if you make them should be shared back to the community as it is open sourced under the GPL+CPE license (Anyway the source code is not available yet in the site - so we dodged that bullet...)

The toolkit can be downloaded from LWUIT site (There's also a video demo of the demo app). For more info you can check out Shai's Java & LWUIT Blog (Shai is on the LWUIT R&D team).

Thumbs up for Sun for making it up for us after all these years... Keep up the good work! I am looking forward to the next Java Day to see what will we see from Sun's Israeli labs this time...


P.S. - A year ago in Sun's 1st Annual Java Day in Israel, Sun's UI team guys saw our GamearraY application and were fascinated with the GUI capabilities that included animated menus and other shiny UI components, and said they haven't seen anything like it... Now I understand the full scope of this compliment.. obviously these guys saw and did things in this area...

IVA 2008

This Monday I've been at the IVA Hi-Tech Conference. IVA is Israel Venture Association and it holds an annual event. This is the second time I'm visiting there (Last time was IVA 2007).

The event theme was "The Golden Age of Israeli Entrepreneurs" and there were high-key speakers both from the local VC industry and the global one (See the agenda here).

But as always, the main thing in these types of conferences is the networking outside the lecture hall... In fact this time I think I can count on two hand (and maybe one foot...) the total number of minutes I stayed in the lecture hall... And I wasn't the only one.. Aside from the keynotes from Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson) and Michael Moritz (Sequoia) in which the lecture hall was quite full, most of the time the real action was out in the "networking hall"...

And that's not a bad thing, it means that all the relevant people were there, and I myself had a good time catching up with old friends and meeting some new ones. In any case, the second day, which I couldn't attend, seemed to have interesting panels, maybe it helped tipping the balance towards lecture hall attendance and less "yapping"...

Until the next IVA conference...

MoMoTLV launch event

I'm glad to say that MoMoTLV's launch event went great - we had an attendance of around 150-160 people and everyone had a good time and we got great feedbacks.

The speakers (including myself) had a bit of a hard time overcoming the noisy bar atmosphere... but that's understandable - put a lot of Israeli mobile professionals in one room, give them free alcohol and sushi - and you know the rest...

Anyway you can find a summary post on the MoMoTLV blog, including links to some PR we got and pictures in the facebook group. Founding MoMoTLV and getting this event up was quite time consuming so now I am trying to catch up in my personal and professional life... but still I am looking forward to the next event, since the first was so much fun.

P.S. - In the picture above you can see the MoMoTLV team with the cork board we used for people to put their business cards on...

MoMoTLV first event on May 12!

I am pleased to announce that we will be holding the first ever official Mobile Monday event in Israel this Monday (May 12) at the Elizabeth pub in Hertzelia Pituach (Event details and registration here). This image here is the temporary logo of the Israeli chapter called MoMoTLV (Short for Mobile Monday Tel Aviv).

As I have written in the previous post about MoMoTLV, The Tel Aviv chapter of the global Mobile Monday organization (Check out the PR about us in MoMo global) was forming in the last couple of months, and since I was joined by great people who are also mobile enthusaists, and also due to the great response of the industry here (Which translated to sponsorship $$), we have managed to organize quite a big and colorful event very quickly.

So if you are involved in the mobile industry in Israel or anywhere in the world you are welcome to join us for drinks and great content and networking and participate in the event. Just make sure to pre-register in our facebook event and also join our facebook group while you're at it.

See you there!

GamearraY and me...

Today I have ended my involvement with GamearraY, the start-up company I founded 2.5 years ago. I cannot go into too much detail about the circumstances that led to this right now, but suffices to say that this was definitely the right move both for me and the company.

I am now developing a new idea and also seeking new opportunities, but I thought this might be a good time to summerize my time at GamearraY.

Starting a company from scratch was a real experience, and not as easy as it looks... It all started with an idea back in the end of 2003, that unlike other ideas that pop out from time to time, this one didn't fade and all my searches in the internet didn't show that anyone does it (unlike most ideas which are already in market by the time you think of them...)

The original idea was to develop a generic mobile game engine that can run proprietary game files. So in 2004 I sat down and started my own "garage company" in my house (BTW - I have no garage...) and started working on the engine. I wrote it in J2ME, since I was very familiar with Java (Didn't take any market considerations into account, but luckily for me J2ME turned out to be the de-facto standard in Europe and also very dominant in other regions).

After writing the engine, I needed some files to test it with. It became very elaborate and generic so simple "dummy" files didn't do it anymore. So I went out and wrote a very basic editor for the files, first for my personal use, but very soon I realized that this can be the framework in which game developers that want to work with the engine use.

The engine grew and the editor grew. and I always tried to find a way to make my editing work easier, so it took the form of an interface, not very user friendly, but geek friendly... I then realized that since I am not using any code to build the game files, but rather upload images, sounds and defining rules from combo boxes or free text fields, not only developers can use it, but the end users themselves. I wasn't really aware of the user generated content trend that was brewing up, but this made the most sense to me.

Aside from the R&D progress, I made a connection with one of Israel's biggest operators. The people who first saw the product (which was very basic at the time) were excited, but gave me a few things they would have liked to see (mainly interface issues...). I returned with the changes and started meeting after meeting. I thought everything was going fine, until I reached the actual decision maker - who didn't seem to like it...

So there I was with what I thought was a great product and no clients... Up until this point I was working as a one-man bootstrap company, funding myself through freelance projects, but at this point I decided I should get an investment. I went out and searched for a business partner so we can go as a team to investors. I found a partner (that later on when we got the investment didn't join from personal reasons) and we started "raiding" VCs. I don't think there's a VC in Israel we didn't try to get into...

The response rate from VCs was quite good and we had a lot of first meetings and sometimes second ones, but Israeli VCs unfortunetaly for us, were not that into the games/entertainment thing, most looked for a server-side platform, and this was not a surprise since VCs here are more focused on the traditional areas Israel is known for: secturity, enterprise software etc. (Things have change since, but not that much in my opinion).

At the end there were a few VCs that held extensive due-diligence with us, and the first one to take it to a term sheet was JVP Studio, an incubator that gets its funding from the Chief Scientist of Israel and JVP one of the biggest funds in Israel.

Getting funded by JVP was a major breakthrough of course, and it happened about 1.5 years after I started working on the idea, but then I realized that I am just getting started....

I started recruiting engineers and team leaders, it was not easy finding the right people but once I did I knew I had the "good guys". We started working day and night to release a demo version, which was surprisingly enough done in just 2 months, and looked 10 times better than the interface I worked with... After the demo came the alpha and after the alpha came the beta.... Now all of those fit in one sentence but it was long months of burning the midnight oil and sometimes working at weekends....

Eventually we signed an agreement with Orange Israel, another big Israeli operator. We were also given international recognition at the Orange group innovation contest at Cadiz when we became one of the top-5 finalists (out of around 80 companies), and then were also featured on the java.com site.

We went live with Orange in March 2007, more than 3 years after the original concept was thought of, and I must say you know when you start, but you don't know how it'll end up - the product was a very new and improved version of the original prototype, and the hard work that was invested on it by all team members could have been seen.

We were all very encouraged to see on the first month that a lot of users are using it - and I mean a lot. Every minute a new game was created, and downloads were also done in great numbers (I remember the development team sitting and clicking on a virtual bell saying "another satisfied customer"... the phrase from the known Seinfeld episode...)

In addition we saw several competitors rise Other companies started offering user generated games (mobile and online), but all were behind us in terms of features and market (Most were beta services, while we had a commercial deployment - granted it was in Israel which is a tiny market, but still better than nothing).

Anyway, it was a hell of a run. Currently the company is working on a different product (but still connected to the mobile and gaming spaces), and I wish them luck in the coming deployments. I had my reasons for parting ways (which I can't detail here...), and it was all done and coordinated with the investors, shareholders and management so everything was done in good terms and I believe all parties are happy with the agreement we reached (I know I am...). And so it became that last Thursday I have parted with the great team I've enjoyed working with, and left the company.

So, what now? Well, first I will continue to lead Mobile Monday Tel Aviv which I recently founded. I believe it is a great platform which is currently missing in Israel's mobile scene, and as one of the industry players I felt I should pick that glove up and make it happen.

In addition I intend to spend some time in consulting projects in the fields I am most known for, and eventually bring another venture to life (I already started drafting some stuff on the drawing board a day after I left...), and of course still posting from time to time in this blog...

Israel Games Conference 2008 and more

This week has been a very eventful week here in Israel. It started with TheMarker's COMvention. TheMarker is a leading financial paper here and it throws an annual 2 day internet conference.

The conference attracted internet talents from abroad including Craig Newmark, the founder of Craig's List, The known blogger Robert Scoble, Dan Dubno (Digital Dan), who is always fun to watch when he shows off his gadgets and many more.

Overall the conference was good and insightful, and I got the opportunity of catching up with some of my local colleagues after spending a lot of time either in business trips abroad or "caged" in the office...

In between the days of the conference I went to a BBQ at the GarageGeeks. The GarageGeeks are a bunch of cool geeks (weird combo...) that create all sorts of cool things, or more accurately, things that geeks would think are cool... For example I saw at their warehouse a "Guitar Heronoid" which is basically a robot playing guitar hero... Anyway it was fun, these guys throw these events every once in a while, if you have a chance go there.

But the real treat, at least for me, was the GameIS 2008 conference. This is the Israeli annual gaming conference, and it grows every year. This time I saw so many new faces. Aside from technologies and platforms for games, there are also real titles coming out of Israel. Battledawn is a good example of a PBBG game that started as a bootstrap and is now a profitable company without taking even a dime from any VC. The game succeeded in creating a vibrant community around it, and many of the game ideas/assets were contributed by the community, and in fact almost all of the current employees come from its worldwide community...

Another promising game and less casual is Rising Eagle, this is a full 3D multiplayer shooter/strategy game, also coming from an independent Israeli company. Very impressive.

Aside from those we saw a lot of young game developers starting with the 16-years olds that developed Portal: The flash version going through 2 game "deselopers" as they call themselves (designer-developer) from Pilon Games that make flash for ICQ to the duo who made the hilarious low-budget Hebrew quest "Boundless Happiness" about a guy that decides to run for prime minister after getting a 9M bill from social security...

It was a very interesting and fun day, it looks like the industry has made some real progress since last year (I wrote about last year's conference here) and I already can't wait to see what's coming next year...

Since Passover is upon us, I will conclude by wishing happy holidays to all those who celebrate it - see you after the holidays!

So, you want to send an SMS in the US?

As a follow-up to my post on deploying mobile apps in the US, I am writing this post focusing on SMSs which is also a part of the deployment process.

Almost every mobile application makes some use of SMS. The most common case is the use of SMS for the application delivery. If your application is off-deck, the flow of the application download probably starts at your web page, where the user enters his phone number and receives an SMS with a link (WAP Push) to your application (P.S. - Don't even think about asking users to type a WAP link, unless you want to decrease the load on your download server drastically...)

There are other applications who also use SMS in additional ways such as sending messages between users (Either from within the application by using WMA in Java for example, or from a central server), sending system alerts, waking up applications (J2ME's Push Registry/Binary SMS) and there are of course the pure SMS applications (no client) like weather reports, news and other content services. But whatever you're developing you will most likely need SMS as part of your application.

I will focus in this post only on the simple flow I described first: an SMS with a link to a downloadable client application. This should have been an easy case since there are no premium charges associated, no subscription - just a one time SMS requested by the user.

Now how would you go about doing that? The good news is that you can find service providers that can connect you to just about any carrier without you having to connect yourself to each carrier's SMSC. These are the SMS brokers or gateways, which provide with very easy to use APIs (Took us 1 day to get it up and running) so that activating an SMS service in every country on the globe is a snap... well, that is except the US....

To be exact from the technical point of view you can set up an SMS service in the US as easily as in any other country, but there are several regulations that may mean that later on your service will be interrupted if you don't follow these carefully... (Also to be accurate, almost all the carriers worldwide have some kind of regulations but usually they are just a small subset of the US ones like for example special regulations for adult content, obscene language etc.).

Let's get back to our case: suppose you want to use SMS just to deliver your app. This requires what is known as an MT (Mobile Terminated) SMS, meaning from the server to the handset. This is the easier direction as opposed to handset-to-server or MO (Mobile Originated) SMSs.

You probably know MO SMSs from voting in TV shows (text 2 to the number 12345), download flows for media advertised content and registration for various services. MO requires a setup of a shortcode (the 4/5 digit number to which people text) and preferably it has to be recognized by all carriers, and be the same in all carriers in the targeted region(s).

Setuping a shortcode (a service which is also done by the SMS brokers) is quite costly, it usually costs around several hundreds/thousands of dollars per month per country. So if for example you want to launch such a service just in the US you are looking at $2K-$3K/month, add to that just a few countries in Europe and you will get easily to $10K/month.

On the other hand MT SMS does not require any shortcode since the user doesn't need to communicate back. For example in the scenario of sending a WAP link, the user gets the message and presses the WAP link which opens the browser - there is no need to reply to the SMS and as such no shortcode setup is needed.

The costs for MT SMS are rather cheap: Some providers supply such a service with no monthly or setup fees, just pay as you go for messages actually sent. You can also buy bulk packages in advance and pay less per SMS. And you can send messages to wherever your provider is connected too - and some supply a very impressive worldwide coverage.

So what's the catch? Well, in the US if you want to go by the book, then even if you only send MT messages you would have to setup a shortcode. At least that's what the big SMS gateways say. And why is that? The formal reason is to allow a user that received a message to unsubscribe from your service by sending a message to that shortcode ("STOP" is the preferred code, but application providers must recognize also "QUIT", "END", "CANCEL" and "UNSUBSCRIBE" and act upon).

US regulations require that a user can unsubscribe in almost any way from a mobile service, and that includes doing that by SMS. When you think about content services (especially paid ones), that's very understandable - you don't want to get spammed on your phone when you don't really remember how you can unsubscribe. And unlike email, here you might also get charged for each message you receive...

However, in the context of a single message that you specifically requested, and are not charged for (The application provider pays for the SMS with the link) it is not that clear that regulation has to be so harsh, because of the high price the application developer has to pay to follow it. The problem is that carriers don't really know (or care) to differentiate between the two.

The regulations specifics can be found at the Mobile Marketing Association site. They include a whole set of rules and examples of how-to and how-not-to. FYI - the case of SMS for downloading is an easy one - for premium services there are double opt-in procedures needed and exact flows to follow etc. (You can take a look at their Best Practices document). BTW - The MMA also detail what are the restrictions of each individual carrier across the world, so it's worth a visit.

Now don't get me wrong, I think these regulations are very important to protect consumers, especially since we saw a few companies take advantage of that (Remember the Jamster fiasco?). However, I think there should be a way in which cases like this can get authorization to work without a shortcode, since there's no meaning to unsubscribing from a one time message... This would make things easier for application developers that want to deploy in the US.

Luckily for us, even without the formal processes, in the field you can basically bypass that - at least for some time. If you go to a top-tier SMS gateway such as mBlox or NetSize (NetSize actually ceased to work in the US...) they will tell you all of the above, and that you have to buy a shortcode, so even if you're a starving startup and want to deploy a closed beta with a capacity of a few SMSs per month, you will still have to pay around $2K-$3K monthly, mostly for the shortcode, but also for account management and don't forget to add setup fees...

However, if you approach other gateways such as clickatell (which we have successfully tried and integrated with) or redoxygen, they will let you send MT SMSs without a shortcode and pay as you go per SMS. The problem would be that instead of having your own sender ID (which is the shortcode) you actually share your sender ID with other services - and if one of them (or you) spams users or charges them inappropriately, your service might get blocked along with a bundle of other services....

In the reality of things, it actually works pretty well and I know a lot of startups and even established companies that use these providers. But as usual all goes well until something happens, and there's also the question of "why risk it?" - but since we are talking about a lot of money the alternative looks quite attractive. Also if you plan for the worst you can always pre-integrate with 2 such providers and if something happens you can just switch to the alternate one...

So to sum up if you want to be 100% sure - go by the book with the big ones. This also applies if you have a big volume of message, then the big providers can also offer discounts per message that will pay off. But if you can afford being 99% sure (and don't want to spend $3K/month just for that 1%...) go for the pay-per-message providers, there's no reason to pay that kind of money for a closed beta or even for an open one until some point... Good luck!

Mobile Monday Tel Aviv is here!

I am proud to announce that the Israeli chapter of Mobile Monday is forming these days. For those of you who don't know, Mobile Monday is a global non profit organization that helps bring together mobile professionals around the world through monthly gatherings and other activities.

Israel has a lot of promising mobile startups, and mobile innovation is one of the themes around here in recent years. However, there is no organized community for people engaged with the mobile space, so I thought that since Mobile Monday does just that around the world, it can happen here too.

I got the official go from the Mobile Monday Global last week, and currently the Israeli chapter is forming, and we have plans to have the first event in April, the exact date will be announced though it will probably be the first Monday of the month, according to the Mobile Monday tradition...

Usually the events have a certain theme with some lectures by people from that field, a "launchpad" in which a few startups showcase their technologies and most importantly - networking in a nice atmosphere (bring your business cards...).

To stay in touch and receive updates, I recommend you to join the Mobile Monday Tel Aviv Facebook group and also invite other people that you think may be interested. We will soon also launch a website, but in any case for the actual event coordination, Facebook is definitely the platform of choice.

If you would like to speak about anything mobile in the upcoming events, or think your company may be interested in sponsoring an event please contact me via my facebook profile or via email (My full details are in the Blogger profile page). In addition we are building the core team these days, and though we already have several great people on the team, we can always use more, so if you want to help contact me.

It is about time we have a mobile community in Israel... Mazal Tov to us all...

GDC 2008 and some 3GSM/MWC 2008 blogs

I am spending the weekend in LA after attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The show was okay, nothing too exciting, but maybe it was because I was spending most of the time in pre-scheduled meetings or because I saw most of the "new" things already in the E4 conference last October (and blogged about it here).

Another major conference held the week before this was the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (formerly known as 3GSM). I couldn't make it to the conference this year, but to learn about insights from the show, I recommend you read Carnival of the Mobilists issue #111 hosted at the Vision Mobile blog. It refers to several posts from various bloggers that blogged about MWC.

Well, that's about all the time I have to write... I am trying for some time now to write a post about SMS services in the US as a continuation post to my post on deploying J2ME apps in the US (which BTW was published in the Carnival of the Mobilists issue #110 hosted at Debi Jones' Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog)

The post would probably include info on the various services such as Bulk SMS, Premium SMS etc. Info on US regulations and carrier-specific regulations, SMS brokers and their different approaches towards those restrictions etc.

Hope I will find that time soon enough... till then have a good weekend (and let's hope the weather here in LA improves...)