Cleaning Out The Links Drawer

Links start to pile up every so often, as bookmarks I mean to come back to, RSS entries I mean to discuss, or things I flag as interesting but can't organize enough coherent thought around. So, I thought I might put some of them together here with some very brief thoughts on each to see if they spark anybody's interest or comment. Here goes:

Cell phones as sensors - My buddy David Pescovitz wrote this for UC Berkeley's College of Engineering research publication, and it subsequently got written up all over the place. It's about a grad student there that envisions swarms of mobile phones being used as environmental sensors. The possibilities for applications here are endless. Not necessarily a new idea, but interesting and exciting nonetheless.

The America's Cup live on your mobile - Wasn't really sure where to go with this. Interesting, perhaps, as a proof of concept. But that there really that many yachting fanatics that will pay 13 euros plus traffic charges to watch some animation of a sailing race? I can't imagine the action is all that exciting, anyhow. While the web and mobile do allow content providers to cater to niche audiences, the number of yachting fans willing to pay to follow this on their phone must be a pretty tiny niche.

Wanna build a mobile app? Read this. The ever-illuminating Charlie Schick points to some guidelines for "useful mobile applications" that are worth a read from the developers of some mobile blogging software called Rabble. Strikes me as a little odd, though, that for all the original poster's posturing, I can't use Rabble because it's won't work on my carrier -- or any carrier in the world other than Verizon (for $3 a month, natch), from the looks of things. So what good are his criteria if hardly anybody can use his application?

Help Shape The Web on Mobile Devices - The W3C's Mobile Web Initiative is calling for participants in a trial to help shape best practice guidelines for the mobile web. Definitely sounds interesting, hopefully I'll have more on that later on.

Comments

[charlie]

i think rabble is also a good example of going for the low hanging fruit. they are based in san diego - cdma country. they went first for brew and cdma since in the us, those are the most advanced networks for downloadable apps.

i've even seen a operator choose cdma over gsm simply because of the strength of brew versus java.

yes, i too am waiting to see if rabble expands beyond cdma.