I'm pleased to announce that we are launching the Mumbai chapter of Mobile Monday and are holding its first event on July 3rd, 2006.

Mobile Monday is a open community of mobile professionals and enthusiasts. It is a forum to network, share knowledge and discuss developments in the mobile world. Founded in Helsinki (Finland) in 2000, it has more than 25 chapters worldwide.

Click here to know more about Mobile Monday.

Mobile Monday’s main activities are

David Berlind writes:

With RSS as both the notification mechanism and the content subscription mechanism, you basically have a single technology that takes e-mail, e-mail attachments, and far too many round-trips (of email, to fully facilitate the collaboration) completely out of the equation.

With wikis, which can notify you when their content is changed via RSS, not only can the collaborators use 95% standard technology (there is no standard wiki markup language, yet), any and all virtual expression of the collaborative activities (new content, revisions to that content, annotations, comments, approvals, etc.) happen in the context of the collaborative environment. It's all in the same one — one that involves almost no proprietary parts.There's no jumping back and forth between systems or even integration of multiple systems. No word processor. No special content management system. No e-mail. No strapped-on transfer stations to get it all working together.

WSJ writes about YouTube's efforts to build a lasting business around video:

Through YouTube Inc.'s Web service, consumers view short videos more than 70 million times a day, ranging from clips of unicycling jugglers and aspiring musicians to vintage Bugs Bunny cartoons and World Cup soccer highlights recorded from TV. Users post more than 60,000 videos daily, with a limit of 10 minutes for most clips.
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YouTube's 29-year-old chief executive, Mr. Hurley, and its 27-year-old chief technology officer, Mr. Chen, see two big challenges. The first is to figure out how to make money. The second is to address concerns of copyright holders that many of their TV and movie clips, music videos and songs are available through YouTube without permission.

The New York Times writes that only 40,000 of the city's 2.6 million people are using the wireless network.

That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.

Like Taipei, these cities hope to use their new networks to help less affluent people get online and to make their cities more business-friendly. Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and P.D.A.'s.

Michael Mace writes about the reasons:

The first is that the two platforms that had been driving the most app sales, Palm OS and Windows Mobile, are not growing in total.
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The second problem is that as the mix of devices shifts from handhelds to smartphones, I think application downloads become less attractive.
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The third problem is that application sales haven't tracked the growth of some of the smartphone platforms (in particular Nokia S60, which is producing most of the reported growth in smartphones).

Kevin Werbach captures the essence of the coming Videonet:

I get a lot of skepticism, even from technology enthusiasts, when I talk about the convergence of the Internet and video. People point out all the ways that TV is hard to distribute over today's broadband and wireless networks, and all the business or regulatory challenges new entrants face in trying to replicate the businesses broadcasters and cable TV operators developed over decades.
That's not the goal.

The Internet won't completely replace television as we know it. Instead, it will mutate and extend it. Right now we're seeing the long-promised "convergence" play out on two levels. Big phone companies are deploying digital platforms on fiber optic networks to compete with cable operators, who are rushing to add on-demand features in response. To me, though, that's less interesting than the distributed, bottom-up activity around short video clips on the Net and wireless networks. One is about competition; the other is about transformation.

At some point, thanks to VOIP, most of the voice conversations we engage in across the network won't be phone calls. (That's at least part of what eBay/Skype is about.) Similarly, most of the video content we watch won't be television. Those traditional forms will still be around, but they will become specialized, much like radio after the emergence of television.
This is what the incumbents can never appreciate. They are hard coded to assume that voice = phone calls and video = TV. The two great economic drivers of the communications industry, advertisers and users, will have no trouble adapting. AOL, Yahoo!, and Google, each in its own way, cracked the code for harnessing the text Internet as an advertising medium. Those companies, and perhaps others, are bound to do the same for the video Internet. Once they do, look out.

Last November, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet—from text to pictures, music and video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in whatever form and on whatever scale. This does not have to mean that “people write their own newspaper”, says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo!, an internet portal. “It could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie they saw,” or as sophisticated as shooting a home video.

This has profound implications for traditional business models in the media industry, which are based on aggregating large passive audiences and holding them captive during advertising interruptions. In the new-media era, audiences will occasionally be large, but often small, and usually tiny…With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible.