30/10/2007 by nicola.

Funambol “Our vision is to harness and popularize the innovation that open source can bring to the new world of mobile 2.0 messaging. We believe this will spur important, creative and exciting new forms of mobile communication, collaboration and entertainment.

Started in 2001 as the Sync4j open source project, Funambol has grown to be the world’s leading mobile open source project, with more than one million downloads, supported by the largest global mobile community, and used by mobile operators, service providers, enterprises and OEMs/ISVs/ODMs everywhere”

They offer a free trial available through the link above - interesting ideas !

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30/10/2007 by nicola.

Nokia’s Mobile Rules competition

SCOPE OF THE COMPETITION
The goal of the competition is to seek out the developers and entrepreneurs who are
creating new value, new revenue and services for mobile workforces and the mobile lifestyle.
The Mobile Rules! is a “two-track” competition:

Track 1: MOBILE APPLICATIONS
Categories are Multiplayer/Connected Games, Multimedia, Enterprise and Infotainment.
We are looking for new applications that use the unique enablers of the Nokia Platforms.
Applications will be judged on uniqueness, design, ease of use, and overall end-user experience.
Important note: don’t let categories restrict your ideas; it’s your application that counts.

Track 2: MOBILE BUSINESS PLANS
The main focus areas of the business plan competition are “Communication and sharing”,
“Internet innovation and mobility” and “Human and green applications”, but there’s no
limitation to your plan – as long as it’s about mobile business. Plans are judged on
novelty value and innovation, market potential, customer adoption, revenue opportunity
and investor value.

COMPETITION TIMELINE
Business plan submission deadline is November 16, 2007
Application submission deadline January 25, 2008
Finalists announcement February 15, 2008
Award ceremony mid-March 2008

PARTNERS
BlueRun Ventures
CMEA Ventures
FinNode
Nokia Corporation
Nokia Growth Partners
Orange
SK Telecom International
SVASE
Swisscom
Vision Capital
ZEF Solutions
SINA Mobile
Palo Alto Software
IDEO
Accel

MEDIA AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS
Red Herring
Mobile Game Developer Magazine
TechCrunch
LIVEdigitally
Stirr
VentureBeat
GigaOM

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25/10/2007 by nicola.

Creative Commons are a charitable organisation, working and researching how to best provide creators of original works with options for others who wish to use or re-use their work.

There is a whole wealth of information, advice and support provided to assist in understanding the bewildering world of international copyright.

I support them and I have been able to benefit from their advice and information so that I could find the best way of ‘protecting’ and ’setting free’ my own original works.

They have a 2007 campaign underway. They are helping anyone who wants to do anything on the web in a huge way, so it is a great organisation to support or to donate.

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24/10/2007 by nicola.

Future of Mobile, November 14, 2007. 1 day conference, schedule, speakers.
Mobile site for the conference now live.

Lots of cool mobile web stuff being presented. Can’t wait and its only 15 min walk from work for me
Happy to twitter and blog back.

This is one in the Future of series - the web design one is in NY the week before, which I can’t make but have ordered the conference-in-a-box pack.

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23/10/2007 by nicola.

Interesting post from Richard Leggett, who mentions that with newer technologies coming through development (e.g. Flex, AIR), smaller hardware components being manufactured (the post on IST results yesterday on chips is indication of that), less focus on RAM requirements and others.
He suggests that Flash lite has a shorter-term future, that as handsets have increasing computing power, there will be less and less need to adapt something that was created for the desktop, onto a mobile device. He expects that Flash lite will be replaced by more advanced Flash versions and/or AIR on a device.

Will also depend on how/what being developed with mobile client platforms. So no need to think Flashlite is no longer useful for developing aspects of mobile learning, it is still very useful, especially if you are putting Flash files on Nokia devices.

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21/10/2007 by nicola.

Is now available and the comparison between the mobile web coding and the pc web coding can be found on this page

I used three reference sources/tutorials to try and work out the differences between what I had already written on my website in Xhtml and writing a mobile web page in XHTML MP. There are some differences but not too many which is good. This step does not include writing a mobile stylesheet which may be where the fun starts ! I have also not yet tested the mobile page on either a mobile phone or an emulator (due to the lack of a mobile stylesheet).

What I have found out is whilst there are some differences, you can design a mobile page which includes images, links, a form (which means you can ask questions and users can input answers) with radio buttons, check and text input boxes, providing you keep the formatting simple and not in the xhtml but in a stylesheet. So whilst temporarily putting the technology ahead of the learning, there may be some functionality which could be used to create learning using all of the above as you are likely to find images, links and questions to answer in most eLearning.

Not using tables and putting each bit of content on the page in an organised way (div tags) will also make it easier for the mobile user to view and navigate the pages.

After comparing both, initial thoughts are that the amount of content on the pc version of this page would be too much for a mobile screen, it is not necessary to display it all, how will it help a visitor? Also is all of the navigation on the pc version useful, or will it just make page scrolling even longer? This comes back to the objectives of displaying content on a mobile phone, what is it purpose, is it useful/entertaining for a visitor and can they navigate and interact with the content quickly.

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17/10/2007 by nicola.

A Media Circus provides an overview of the highlight statistics from Ad Mob. US, North America unsurprisingly leading the way in impressions.
Other highlights show that 74% phones support polyphonic ringtones, 35.6% support streaming video, 59.2% able to download video clips and 81% support WAP push messages, which are all interesting for mobile learning design considerations too, although AdMob do not claim that their statistics are fully representative of mobile internet as a whole. What is also interesting is that they are seeing ad requests from over 160 countries, this seems to contradict some of the current opinion that people don’t want to see ads on their phones. They don’t have to be revenue generating - what about new course or elearning material announcements, would it be useful or annoying to have a text or multimedia message showing a preview of what is coming out that month ?

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11/10/2007 by nicola.

on Digital Opportunity and i4D
At Seriously Mobile in June, I remember hearing about this initiative which had come from one of the Reuters employees as an internal venture capital initiative - trialling updates to Indian farmers, mainly in the form of receipt of SMS messages, so that local farmers could get an idea of how to price their crops when going to market.

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10/10/2007 by nicola.

As seen today on Biskero, nice idea - once you’ve downloaded the application you can pick up detailed information about your device, save it to a file and if needed then send onto customer care for analysis - helping to troubleshoot device problems quickly.
It can be accessed via phone or pc once installed. More details on Nokia

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07/10/2007 by nicola.

Now website is up and running, going to get started , using some mobile device or learning considerations, learning objectives, learning design theories not detailed at this point (there is more than enough good stuff on this which doesn’t need to be repeated by me, (will mention any being applied in very brief details shortly), trying out mobile web pages by designing wireframes and then the pages, investigation of navigation, linking to see if a set of mobile web pages can make a good mLearning ‘package’.
Planning to start documenting this over next few weeks - but is being done outside of FT working hours so don’t expect to update on a daily basis.

Having just read a 2 page spread in Independent on Sunday about increasing risk of developing brain cancer, should re-iterate that any audio or spoken parts of mobile learning should be completed via a handsfree unit i.e. the closer the handset is to your brain, the increased risk (or that’s how I understood it). Slightly worrying that I could put three microwaves next to my head and achieve the same level of risk… but hopefully scientists will develop some useful solutions.

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