This week MOBIFY is proud to host the amazing Carnival of the Mobilists! Even though USA is having a long weekend, the number of submissions from there and around the world was great. Let’s see what the best mobile blogs have in store for us this week.

Mark Hooft from Ubiquitous Thoughts presents a collection of links to recent uses of mobile technology in education. It’s interesting to see some institutions introduce entrance requirements related to having an advanced mobile device. However, most students will likely end up already owning one for quite some time before entering college.

Tam Hanna is raising some questions related to the ownership of Palm OS. It would be great to find out the arrangement behind Palm’s newest platform, WebOS in this regard.

Howard Rheingold of SmartMobs is showcasing a new paper by Scott W. Campbell and Nojin Kwak that deals with Political Involvement in “Mobilized” Society. We will certainly see more and more influence of Mobile and Web in tomorrow’s political duels, so read this to get an in-depth overview.

Consuming Experience offers an extremely thorough guide on contact syncing with Zyb. Do you think once everybody has a modern mobile the sync concept will go away? Not sure, but for now there is Zyb!

Nick Dillon from Timono writes about innovation in mobile historically coming from several device manufacturers. Did you know that Motorola had the first devices with GPRS and 3G, while Siemens pioneered Java and MP3 playback? We didn’t and would like to recognize Nick’s work with the Post of the Week award. These facts are a must-know for every mobilist.

Peggy Salz from MSearchGroove shares some research regarding effectiveness of voice search apps. There is solid methodology behind the comparisons and it would be interesting to see more excerpts from the white paper.

Volker Hirsch ponders the future of the Vodafone Appstore, outlining its advantages and disadvantages when compared to the much-hyped Apple Appstore. Microsoft killed Netscape using the distribution power of Windows to push Internet Explorer and theoretically, carriers have the same kind of leverage – but do they have the DNA to do it? Make sure to read Volker’s post for some great insights regarding this topic.

Steven Hoober from LittleSpringsDesign sent in an incredible article discussing various mobile hardware form factors and their applicability in different contexts. Bonus points for great pictures within the post =)

Tomi Ahonen wrote up a fun short story about payphones. We won’t spoil it for you, but chances are you’ll smile while reading it!

Aaron Chua sends in a big list of mobile pearls - defined as innovative, novel mobile applications and services. Great for a burst of inspiration.

Last but not least, Rudy De Waele is calling on start-ups to sign up for Mobile 2.0 conference this year. Another great event from Rudy – can’t wait.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s reading. Now take a breath, channel your passion and inspiration and… make something!!! Because only through creating something new we can move mobile to the next level.

See you at the next Carnival!

One of the trends which is becoming apparent is that more and more mobile web users prefer to access the same content they are used to on desktop. A HackerNews fan? You’re going to want to read the same articles in the mobile setting. Popularity of Facebook Mobile and Mobify-powered sites like iLoveTypography (http://m.ilovetypography.com) and CSS Tricks (http://m.css-tricks.com) is another testament to this.

This also means that proven link sharing mechanisms like Twitter apply on mobile. A mobile user will attempt to click the links in their twitter stream, usually to be disappointed with slow loading times and bad rendering. What’s more shocking is that most mobile sites and iPhone apps are useless when referred to by Twitter, as the matching URL structure and proper redirection are missing. Similar thing occurs in mobile search, except Google can be a bit smarter about routing mobile users to mobile destination.

Here is an example – CNN has a mobile site, both in generic and iPhone flavours. Here’s a link to their current headline news story:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/05/11/namibia.race/index.html

Navigate to this link on mobile and nothing changes. This is CNN we’re talking about – a company that heavily invests into mobile is absolutely unprepared to the social media angle of it. It’s not because they’re clueless – it’s hard to engineer a full mobile view for an evolved CMS, where mobile users seamlessly get an optimized rendering of any internal URL.

Mobify solves this problem, as the URL of the source site is fully mapped to the mobile view with any of our redirect options.

My favourite example is Vancouver’s TechVibes which broadcasts on Twitter heavily. All the links open up the corresponding mobile views, thanks to Mobify!

It’s always a pleasure to see Mobify used to quickly extend a large amount of websites to mobile without sacrificing content or quality. This week Ko-San from No Shortcuts Design has created beautiful, fully functional mobile views for Vancouver Digital Week, PopVox Awards and the Vancouver International Partner Forum – check them out by heading to vancouverdigitalweek.com, vipf.ca or popvoxawards.com from a mobile device such as the iPhone (should take you to vdw.mobify.me, vipf.mobify.me and popvox.mobify.me). Here are some screenshots:

Aren’t they beautiful? The biggest win is that these aren’t dedicated mobile websites, or iPhone apps – it’s the same site remixed for mobile use. As mobile views are engrained in the fabric of the website itself, deep links or offsite pages that haven’t been mobified will open in their original shape. This allows our users to have an incredibly cost-efficient mobile presence.

Good job Ko-San!

Do you host your own websites? Probably not, especially if you rely on your blog, corporate site or a content portal as a way of making money.

Sure, way back in the day it was cool to have a retired IBM PC sitting under your desk, serving a few dozen visitors a day. However, pretty soon it became apparent that a dedicated hosting company can do the same job better, cheaper and faster. It makes sense to let somebody like RackSpace focus on their expertise – keeping your site fast and stable – while you can put more effort into site’s content and purpose.

Like hosting, Mobify is a specialized managed service. Today, it’s common to have a mobile site or a native application done in-house (or by a boutique mobile design firm), developed from scratch for a lot of money. The hype surrounding iPhone apps in particular is such that few check returns on their investments (yet), trying to build a native app for every use case under the sun. Soon this will change as more mobile application platforms enter the playing field, increasing the cost of cross-platform development (although PhoneGap is here to help!).

As more web publishers go mobile, they will be solving the same problems in parallel:

How to detect mobile devices and tell them apart?

How to create a subset of the source website for mobile access?

How to efficiently transcode image/video content for hundreds of devices without a huge performance hit?

How to maintain link structure for perfect SEO?

How to keep track of new device releases, their screen resolutions and capabilities?

…and many more.

At Mobify, we know that trusting a managed service with solving these problems lets the web publisher focus on mobile design. Managed hosting services became a no-brainer years ago and managed mobile publishing will soon follow. Join us in that bright future!