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Jon ( my brother ) should be winging his way to the Portable Media Expo. He’s been busy building a new resource for podcast listeners and creators over at Podcast.com and has also created a great new tool for SecondLIFE users to blog while they explore the grid! It’s called BlogHUD and I think it’s a real winner. Over the next few weeks he’ll be trying to integrate it with any blogging services he can.

I’ve recently started to build a blog portal which will have weblogs on all sorts of subjects, one being WAP and mobile. Here is a post regarding Skype for mobiles such as the Nokia N80 and N91. Being able to use high data usage applications such as video streaming, Voice over IP or music download services will be a real boom!

Also putting together a Podcasting related area and others on the domain Audioo.net using a multiple blog site content management system I’ve been playing with. One database for Wordpress with an admin for managing and publishing any number of blogs! Cool..

Has anybody thought about how many times a mobile user would be required to push his keypad just in order to enter the .mobi bit of any  url they were thinking about directing their mobile browser to? My brother points out on one of his Braingarden blog that it’s ten, yes TEN times!

I totally agree with him,. .wap would of been a more sensible option if this is something thats necessary. A simple 1927 on a mobile keypad.

Me thinks it’s all about domaineering and giving a boost to the domain market. They want to ride the mobile wave like everybody else!

According to FT.com, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Nokia and Vodafone is promoting “dotmobi” but others in the technology industry have voiced concerns. A senior lawyer at Verizon Communications, the second-largest US telecommunications group, said there was no “particular business need” for “dotmobi” and the company had only registered verizon.mobi to prevent others taking it.

I just came across an application provided by a company in Ireland called alatto which can be used by portals to keep users wishing to surf off-portal from leaving their portal. They’re marketing it as “A new direction in mobile browsing and service discovery” yeah..

It takes off-portal publishers mobile content and places it within the mobile pages of the portal which they serve out. Is it legal to render and serve publishers copyrighted content in this way? And is it legal to place Ads such as those provided by AdMob around this mobile content? Just questions that should be asked I think. I’d say I’m in the camp that thinks it’s illegal.

If you have an opinion or are an intelectual property rights lawyer specialising in mobile content maybe you would like to comment below. I know you’re out there!

It’s clever what they’re doing and I can imagine it could be fairly lucrative as regards Ad revenue, but I think anybody doing this could be risking potential litigation in the future. Especially from the larger blue chip media companies entering the mobile space these days.

New services in the podcasting sphere that take audio content (mp3) and re-encode for mobiles then stream out to users with audio ads spliced in have had to rethink things because of this. Content creators made them aware that they knew what was going on! And that it was possibly illegal to do it!

Licensing this type of application to operators that wish to keep users off-portal browsing within their portals may provide good revenue for the application developer but it still doesn’t get around the problem of serving other people’s content within the pages served without their permission. Operators will have to manage the off-portal content they let there users access by getting permission from off-portal content providers or have off-portal content providers submit content to them that by default they are not letting users get do. When this occurs we then get back into the realms of operators creating a walled garden for users. Operators back in 1999 were taken to court over the way in which users were obstructed from going off-portal and they lost. Anybody remember a company called fonedata and Simon Luttrell? We have him to thank in many ways for the UK market in WAP mobile off-portal content over the past 6 years, although it looks like they’re back to their old tricks!

TSSSSHHHHHH!

Any comments?