Welcome to the Carnival of the Mobilists #147, and for the first time, it is here at VoIP Survivor. If you are not yet acquainted with this Carnival, you can become so at their website.

This was quite a varied week, so there’s no single theme here for what happened in the blogosphere when it comes to mobile. As it is, I’ve divided this week’s catch into three groups:

1. Posts relevant for those developing for mobile.
2. Advertising related, as we have a nice catch of ad related posts.
3. Readings built around metaphors and associations.

So what did we have this past week at the Carnival?

Developing for Mobile

Now that Google’s first Android phone is out and the operating system has become open source, MobileMammoth provides a list of resources available on Android developers, even from Google itself.

VisionMobile is also continuing with their analysis of the mobile platforms market. Along with their evaluation of operating systems, they now also go through the different mobile application runtimes available.. In the coming months, seeing these mobile application runtimes “fight for the money” will be very interesting.

Applications that I am a fan of are consumer electronics related. Martin Sauter from WirelessMoves discusses the possibilities that lie in femtocells – specifically how to connect mobile handsets to home services through femtocells. There’s also a link to a video that shows a demo of such services.

Michael Mace from Mobile Opportunity brings a study about online community behavior of people. Although it is not strictly a mobile related post, he does make a point for the mobile market. If you find this information useful, you might want to check the book Groundswell – the best on the subject I have read so far.

Advertising

Advertising in mobile doesn’t quite cut it yet. For a good explanation of why mobile advertising is broken and ways to fix it, Andrew Grill at London Calling provides a nice summary. Although advertising is not my cup of tea, I really liked this piece, so I bet you will as well.

Tomas Zeman from Wirenode believes the problem with mobile advertising is its fragmentation. This makes a lot of sense to me, and Tomas’ solution is straight forward and simple.

Speaking of mobile advertising, another problem that needs to be taken into account is the different screen sizes of mobile handsets, especially now that we’re moving to larger screens. Barbara Ballard from Little Springs Design tries to analyze screen sizes of mobile handsets and advertising metrics. Due to this, there is a call for action there as well for coming up with a database of handsets and their dimensions.

You also may be wondering why certain products like the iPhone have lame advertising numbers despite their exceptional web browser. Ram Krishnan from Mobile Broadband gives the reasons why AdMob’s advertising numbers for the iPhone are skewed. Statistics should not always be trusted.

Metaphors and Associations

The changes in the mobile handsets market is something we are all seeing in the past year. Antoine RJ Wright tries to look at the changes going on inside Nokia and compare them to China in the 15^th century. This allows for a very interesting read and a connection that not everyone would think of.

While we’re at it, Ajit Jaokar from OpenGardens decided to compare mobile broadband operators and pipes – not pipes as in plumbing, but pipes as in smoking. He looks at how operators should add value to their customers.

From my own blog, VoIP Survivor, I’m looking at SMS, Mobile IM and Twitter – these fascinate me when it comes to mobile service usage. I decided to model these services and then see how interchangeable they are.

My Post of the Week

My post of the week is Michael Mace’s study on online community behavior. It fell right into the subjects I am dealing with right now. An interesting read which I am sure you’ll like.

Next Week

That’s all for this week’s carnival. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Next week’s carnival will be hosted by MOpocket.

See you all there!