Kisscafe

I'm just going to highlight a few features or rather "sites" out there that are focusing on the forward movement of getting users off the computer, and onto the mobile computer/smart-phone/telephone etc.. Also some standpoints in which restrict the movement forward quicker.

If your from Canada, were light years away (see 2) from being a smart future mobile friendly nation. Not only do our major service providers monopolize the market, they also make it bloody hard for manufacturers to roll out new features. In fact I think it's safe to say the phones we see as "new" now, are about 1.5 years - 3 years behind those seen in Japan, western Europe, Australia and abroad.

Why? CDMA (locked phones). Carriers demand knowing every inch of that phone, and make it extremely hard to get content on the phone without going through their own service plan (using Internet time, air time, text messaging etc..). Plain and simple, that's where their money comes into play. Those that are on a GSM carrier have the luxury of purchasing new GSM phones, and using them.. but the feature set accessible from the carrier is not up to par with the phones you can import.

One carrier in the US is definitely making a point by attempting to keep on the modern edge, and be "future friendly" (look up under bogus telus ad attempt).

I'm talking about Verizon. Just today they launched a new feature "Youtube on your mobile phone". Utilizing Flash Lite technology (Flash Lite) they have integrated the movies from youtube to stream on the phone. Not only will they benefit from traffic charges, but also the phones will be bundled with VCast (a service Verizon uses for movies on demand, $15 a month USD). This follows very closely to how Japan had a 15 minutes segment delivered to it's phones, that users could watch just about the time they get out of work and would be sitting on the metro. By doing so they could feed a short advertisement before the segment, and after. The support was absolutely mind-blowing for who watched it. Read more on the Japanese market and mobile here.

As TechCrunch put it "they only have access to selected video content how boring.. the beauty of you-tube was that it's so organic". My opinion is this is the start.. they'll see how it rolls out, then not to overload users UI on a phone by allowing them to access all 2Mil + videos, they hand select the top videos of the day/month that the common masses would want to show people. But that will grow just like anything else.

Read more here about this

Now where does the mobile social dating market kick in.. we'll who knows? In Australia such sites as crazysexycool are attempting to do a "clubgoer" mobile network. Other sites like Dodgeball (one message sent, streams via geo-location to all your friends in the same network to let them know where you are), and Zemble a little brother of Dodgeball, a little bit redundant, but time will tell what kind of features they will roll out. Yahoo just recently launched MixD (http://mixd.yahoo.com) which is a group text messenger. Admittedly I tried to use it, but I never received my confirmation code to my number. Perhaps it's only in the US of A.

I think people are limited by a few factors at the moment:

• Carrier's being greedy: in fact they think prices are still too low for services rendered.
• Technology Hump: the mass is getting more and more educated, slowly, about the capabilities of the technology at hand, but like anything this takes time. CD's were made in 1988, they were a standard in 1995 or so. You do the math  .
• Screen Resolution / UI: you can only do so much comfortably on a 3 x 5 (inch) screen or less. Blackberry is doing well, Microsoft blew it entirely trying to port over it's vista system to a mobile device in some wacky scaled down crowded interface. They need to focus on the user, not their branding/look/feel. Focus on the user, then wrap the branding around it. It's the only way to make mobile phones comfortable for us.
• Open-Web Stardard: Not alot of typical standards on the phones.. yes they do have WAP, XHTML, SMS short code.. But in terms of new applications.. flash lite, widsets, loads of java applications.. it makes it difficult to port for every device / phone. Not to mention the inconsistency of the processor/internal memory for the devices. I've heard rumours that this is going to change.

So what can be done? ride the wave.. embrace technology, and don't be afraid to switch carriers, or demand "more" out of your service.

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