Mobile Groove

But before we dive into this week’s line-ups of posts from bloggers, pundits and practitioners, allow me to thank Judy Breck, the “Keeper of the Tents” at the Carnival of the Mobilists. She is stepping down

In brief: MSearchGroove proudly steps up to the plate and hosts the Carnival of the Mobilists for the first time.

The last weekend in August and I spent much of it at a two-day summer festival in Siegburg, Germany, where I’m based. I’ve been on a natural high with good friends, great food and a wonderful line-up of home-grown entertainment. But not all the excitement was at the local fairgrounds. The Mobilists have also come up with a mix of thought leadership and must-read posts that give us new perspectives on mobile and start our adrenalin flowing.

Andy Favell and the team at mobiThinking.com do us all a great service and compile a comprehensive list of mobile industry facts and figures. The first in this series focuses on the size of the mobile Web and the implications for marketers. What do the numbers tell us? Should investors/companies take advantage of the economic slowdown and move ahead while others are standing still? Read on, find out and tell us what you think.

Another round of important mobile stats comes from Jose Colucci at Mobile Strategy, who continues the countdown of the 12 Reasons Why Canadian Banks Should Really Offer Mobile Services.

It’s the start of another week and another Carnival of Mobilists. This week’s host is Eric Chan over at Mobileslate, a blogger who describes himself as “an aspiring Renaissance Man and 100% Mobile Evangelist.” Given his background at Caboodle Networks (a company later acquired by Mobile Content Networks), Eric also has keen insights to offer into mobile personalization and his past guest columns for MSG still speak volumes about the pivotal importance of recommendation.

Contributions this week (from Antoine RJ Wright, Sachendra Yadav, Holly Kolman, Andrew Grill, Andy Favell, Ajit Jaokar and Embee Mobile Blog) cover an eclectic mix of topics including location-based services and the importance of user trust, an analysis of the rise and fall of Virgin Mobile’s Sugar Mama service and an insightful look at Mobile Advertising – 2020 Vision, a new white paper from Ogilvy and Acision that examines the future of advertising. (When the paper landed in my inbox I immediately reached out to Jo Wall, the white paper’s author and Proposition Manager – Mobile Advertising at Acision, for an interview/podcast. I’ll keep you posted on what we arrange.)

MSG’s contribution this week was a post recounting the highlights of the recent Mobile Search Masterclass, an event that brought me together with an impressive roster of industry authorities from companies including AmbieSense Ltd., a provider of ambient search services; Microsoft Research (Cambridge); g8wave Ltd., a mobile marketing company; and Mobile Commerce Ltd., a provider of location-based services that also possesses what the founders call a “piece of enablement” that gives them deep insight into the search queries passed through the operator portals in the U.K., and the results set returned to the user.

A special personal thanks to Ayse Göker, who invited me to participate in the masterclass for the second successive year. Ayse, who holds a senior lectureship at City University London, is a recognized pioneer in context-aware information retrieval systems and Co-founder of AmbieSense Ltd. She is also one of the authors of Information Retrieval: Searching for the 21^st Century. This new book on search, slated to be published within the next few weeks, also looks at mobile search and includes contributions/analysis from MSG. More on the book and details where you can order your copy soon.

MSG is expanding in all directions and part of this new-look and new focus is to showcase the thought leadership and commentary that is a well-known trademark of the Carnival of Mobilists . From mobile pundits (Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore) at Communities Dominate Brands, to mobile industry strategist Rudy De Waele, to Andrew Grill, mobile advertising evangelist, the Carnival brings together the best posts of the week from bloggers who walk the talk.

This week’s host is Punchcut, a San Francisco-based UI design company focused on strategy, user experience design and development for the digital lifestyle. Carnival of Mobilists #184 comes from the company blog Idlemode. Contributions this week (from Tomi Ahonen, Dennis Bournique, Judy Breck, Tam Hanna, Volker Hirsch, Holly Kolman, Sanjeet Matharu, C. Enrique Ortiz and Howard Rheingold) cover an eclectic mix of topics including app store fragmentation and frustration, Palm Pre’s real market share and a look at how researchers leverage portable, camera-enabled mobile phones for diagnostic imaging and telemedicine.

MSG’s contribution this week was an in-depth analysis of Blyk’s partnership model and its first deal with Vodafone Netherlands.

Enjoy!

Next week’s Carnival will be hosted by Eric Chan at Mobileslate.

First, an update on MSG. The site has been down over the last days due to some server problems that also kept me from posting yesterday, but Paul Nash and the team at fifty50 have it under control. We’ve decided to move the site to a new server tomorrow in preparation for MSG expansion and a few surprises.

In the meantime, I’m catching up on my reading and planning coverage/features/podcasts for the next weeks. Top of the list is the Carnival of Mobilists (CoM), which is on this week at Xen Men…