Open Gardens

Hello all ..

The carnival commeth again this week and it’s pitched at my blog. It’s a great concept, created by Russell Buckley, and I am happy to support it. The carnival is an excellent motivation to ensure quality in blogs – because you know that your blogs will get a wide audience within our industry.

So, what have we this week .. A global set of blogs

From London, Tomi Ahonen - wonders if the mobile phone is emerging as the seventh mass media in his blog Understanding the 6th and 7th media

This is a fascinating article .. The first five media are Print, recording, cinema, radio and TV. All are mature with a history of over 50 years. The sixth is the Internet – still only in it’s teens. Followed by the youngest – i.e. the mobile phone. Tomi’s post compares and contrasts the seven mass media – especially the newest – mobility.

As this new mass media emerges, will we see ‘Uncle Zeno’ there? This is the theme of our next blog ..

Following his anti-spam theme, Troy Norcross – again from London – worries (and rightly so ..) about the proverbial ‘Uncle Zeno’ – who forwards every silly joke, coupon, rant etc etc .. While not strictly ‘spam’ (because its non commercial) .. ‘Uncle Zeno’ is a pest nonetheless. And what happens when the good uncle emerges in the mobile world? read more at

When does Viral Marketing become SPAM ?

Meanwhile .. Shannon J Hager from the Charlotte USA provides an interesting analysis to the future of the Motorola ROKR in his post Motorola’s ROKR Was Born To Fail . As the title suggests, Shannon is not very optimistic about the success for ROKR. According to Shannon, for Apple, ROKR appears to be a toe in the water experiment .. in anticipation of bigger things to come .. An insightful analysis

Rudy from Barcelona tackles the familiar topic of mobile DRM – specifically mobile DRM for the ‘family’ so to speak.

Rudy says ..

Let’s look at this now from the end-user perspective. Let’s take my personal family situation: 2 adults, 3 kids each with a mobile. We all still buy a ringtone once in a while (to express ourselves!) but let’s focus on the full track downloads for a while. When buying music we download from iTunes and we still buy cd’s. The songs of the artists we all like we copy to eachothers’ devices for private and family use, I have written on that before. Let’s say we pay an average 15 $ per cd with 10-15 songs on it in 320 kbps quality!

Now, according mobile music players current strategies, if we all like the same tune, we all need to download a full track at 3$ a piece. That’s 15 $ for 1 song on 5 different devices for less good quality (average 128 kbps). Well anybody can see that this just ain’t gonna work IRL. Mobile music is going to be shared from device to device the same way it is shared through p2p networks and pc’s.

You can see more HERE

Walter – down under – reports on the situation in Japan and contrasts with Europe.

While we still see debates about odd things such as whether or not mobile advertising will work, the Japanese are far beyond that debate and are even at the stage where cellular phone users are fast becoming important customers for online merchants. A recent study shows that sales by internet stores via cell phone exhibited a 46.6% year on year surge – as postedat Walter Adamson’s mobile search blog Goobile. This post

also picks up on the power that digital broadcasting to mobile will have in advertising and influencing cellphone users to buy online via their handset.

Jim downing, at smartmobs speaks of your phone as a virtual health network

One of the keys is the mobile phone – because people no longer leave home without their phone.”Mobiles could automatically send signals from sensor devices monitoring a person’s health status to care providers – an instant network that triggered alerts and interventions when needed

Carlo, as usual, comes up with interesting insights about MVNOs and how they are proliferating in markets like Denmark. See his post at

When Your Phone Says Something About You

Debi Jones from USA is now running Fridays as Mobile job days on her blog. Read more about mobile job days at Debi’s blog

The pondering primate(Scott Schaffer) ponders this week about the SMS Land Rush

Finally, my own post laments the sense of deja-vu with the launch of i-mode by o2 in the UK.

And finally – finally .. , my post of the week goes to Tomi Ahonen’s post at Understanding the 6th and 7th media. This is classic Tomi – well worth a read!

Next week’s Carnival is hosted by Troy Norcross (The man who really hates spam) at Mobile Marketing & Spam at http://spamtogo.blogspot.com/

Thanks for all your posts guys!

Adios till next time

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