Apple updated the iPhone firmware to v1.1.4 this morning via a new iTunes update. The iPhone SDK hasn’t been officially released yet, so we’re not quite sure exactly what this new update brings us, but stayed tuned, we’ll update you as soon as we know.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a play-by-play going on here. Obviously, if you’ve previously unlocked/jailbroken your iPhone, don’t do this update until you’ve got confirmation that it’s been jailbroken, as well.

On a more editorial note, does anyone else think it’s slightly odd/interesting that it’s referred to as being ‘jailbroken’? As if it’s being ‘freed’ when you perform the jailbreak? Fascinating.

Another thought, as it seems to be easier and easier for the dev crews to jailbreak the newer firmwares, do you think maybe Steve Jobs has his hooligans setting that up. Any other phone gets a firmware update, it’s slow news. The iPhone, however, hits the front page of most sites, and has the tech world wondering how long it’ll be until it’s jailbroken. Personally I think it’s a BRILLIANT way to keep the hackers entertained, techies attentive, and everyone else interested.

Whatley picked up this tip earlier today. I never knew that Vodafone were shipping unlocked handsets to their contract customers.

Apparently, if we’re to believe Vodafone blog rep, Peter Edward (posting on N95users.com), Vodafone started shipping network unlocked handsets out to contract customers earlier this year. Here’s his comment:

Good afternoon everyone,

moshah is correct- we can now unlock contract handsets for free.

From earlier this year all new handsets sent out on contract accounts are network unlocked, so it’d hardly be fair for us to still charge existing contract customers to unlock their phones.

The £19.99 inc. V.A.T. charge does still apply to Pay As You Talk handsets, unless they’re over 12 months old in which case we can issue the codes free of charge as before.

Happy to help,

edwardpeter

Vodafone UK

I’ll confirm shortly.

I could not be more proud to announce this morning that Abilene Christian University, my alma mater, has officially become the first university in the U.S. to provide an iPhone or iPod Touch to all incoming freshmen. They will use their iPhone or iPod Touch to answer surveys and quizzes, receive homework notifications, and even check their meal and account balances. More than 15 web applications have been developed specifically for this program.

ACU’s CIO Kevin Roberts recently returned from Cupertino where he presented the school’s ‘Connected’ initiative to Apple Execs, as well as leaders from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Duke, and others. They’ve put together this whole ‘Connected’ video, showing just how the university plans to use mobile connectivity to enrich students’ lives and the learning process.

The coolest part isn’t the iPhones, it’s the ideas behind them, and how they’re using advanced mobile devices to help students learn. I think it’s fascinating.

I’m really beaming right now. How cool is this.

I caught this stimulating piece of analysis via StrategyEye this morning.

Apple may sell ‘only’ 7.9m iPhones this year, more than 20% below its target of 10m, warns Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi, quoted in Barron’s. Sacconaghi’s estimates are based on sales of the iPhone for Dec, when Apple sold about 180,000 iPhones per week. They also take into account seasonal factors and “particularly disappointing” European sales, where the iPhone is available in France, Germany and the UK. Sacconaghi is not the only one to cast doubts over iPhone sales. Overall, analysts identify two challenges: a demand that has failed to meet expectations, and the problem of unlocked iPhones, which are preventing Apple to cash in from revenue-sharing deals with network providers.

I think it’s possible Apple might manage to convert the huge demand for the iPhone into reality. Whether they’ll make the 10 million target set my Mr Jobs….? Well, it’s possible now that it’s reasonably easy (think ‘one-click’) to unlock your iPhone. It’s still quite a steep price to pay for a lot of consumers though, particularly when they’re being courted by mobile operators handing out ‘free’ top of the range Nokias and Sony Ericssons.

I reckon Apple will, kicking and screaming, make the 10m target. There’s enough demand from people who will, eventually and ever-so-grudgingly, hand over the dosh for a device (with quite a lot unlocking them as soon as possible).

A colleague of mine recommended I check out ZiPhone. It’s a GUI for unlocking your iPhone.

Think simple. REALLY simple. You literally install ZiPhone, plug in your iPhone and press ‘unlock’. A few minutes later, your device is open. No arsing around. Very, very smart.

You can download ZiPhone for Mac or PC here. If you find it useful, do as I did, and knock them over a PayPal donation.

Avanquest, the global software developer and company behind text service, ‘Text Message Server’ (perhaps a rather unimaginative name — still, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin), have announced that Oxfordshire County Council has launched a text alert service for flood information.

Floods in Oxford are a bit of an issue. Here’s a BBC story from July last year with more details. Back in July, following excessive rainfall, the rivers Cherwell and
Isis/Thames, which traverse Oxfordshire, flooded. Advance warning of a potential flood gives property owners the chance to prepare and take the necessary action to minimise damage. Move stuff upstairs, sandbag the whole place, that sort of thing.

Text alerts for possible impending floods will, I suspect, be extremely, extremely valuable for residents whose areas are prone. It’s very easy in this connected world to sometimes get disconnected from the hive. Simply going out for a meal for the evening then going home and going to bed without viewing any television or listening to radio can result in you missing vital updates. Rare for people to leave their mobile handsets at home though — so texting is a brilliant medium of choice for updates.

I’m not sure about the process is for signing up to receive alerts — when I find out, I’ll update this post.

Dean Bubley over at Disruptive Wireless posed the ‘what is a normob’ question yesterday:

You know that feeling when you encounter a new word… and then within a couple of days you start noting it everywhere?

Well, if you hadn’t spotted it already, let me open your eyes to this particular neologism:

Normob = Normal Mobile User.

Where did the term come from? Well, I knocked it up as a term back in December 2006 when I was going nuts about the cost of New Year’s Eve texting. I’ve since setup normob.com as a repository for key normob-related posts from SMS Text News.

Regular SMS Text News reader and commenter, HeavyLight, has also recently started The Opinionated Normob to record his thoughts — definitely worth a read.

For the past few years I’ve always qualifed normob whenever I’ve used the term, like so:

normob (”normal mobile user”)

Do you think it’s time for me to be able to use the term freely without qualifying it?

Maybe once it’s included in the Oxford English Dictionary?

Have you come across Funambol recently? I’ve been hearing their name quite regularly for a while now (they’ve been giving RIM quite a run for their money recently). Just last night, I found Funambol on my installer.app list on my iPhone so downloaded it to take a look. Very smart. Anyway, first, quick primer on the company:

Funambol provides mobile 2.0 messaging software powered by open source. The company is the leading provider of open source push email and PIM sync solutions for the mass market. Funambol open source has been downloaded more than 1,500,000 times by 10,000 developers in 200 countries. The commercial version of Funambol has been deployed at service providers, mobile operators, portals, device manufacturers and ISVs including customers such as 1&1, Earthlink and Computer Associates. Funambol is headquartered in Redwood City, CA with an R&D center in Italy.

Now, let’s take a look at the Mobile Day of Funambol’s CEO, Fabrizio Capobianco (that’s a small picture of him, above):

- - -

7:05 - the radio starts, somebody is talking about something stupid as usual. Why can’t I set up a system that wakes me up with the sound of waves like in the movies?

7:10 - wife is back snoring, better get up and prepare breakfast

7:15 - daughter (4 years old) asks for Topo Gigio, an Italian cartoon. I play it for her in my hacked DVD player, which plays movies from every region. The region thing is insane. How would my daughter learn Italian in the US, otherwise? Give us a worldwide open DVD system, please”¦

7:25 - Cappuccino is ready. It is the only thing I do around the house, but I do it with pride. Everything else in my life is done by my wife, who is just putting the finishing touches on my bag (I am flying out to Europe tonight). I would be in Frankfurt walking around in shorts in February, without her.

7:40 - I am in the restroom, where I substituted the classical magazine with the iPhone. I check email and read feeds via Netvibes (I have two tabs, one called mobile with the feeds I care most about. Otherwise, it is too slow on the iPhone, even with wi-fi)

7:45 - daughter comes looking for my iPhone. She wants to check the weather. Swipes it off, asks “is this Menlo Park or Pavia?” (she can swipe but she can’t read yet”¦). Darn, weather is going to be great in Menlo Park this week, why am I flying to freezing Germany tonight?

7:50 - Daughter disappears with the iPhone playing some crazy Mika music. I wish I was still four.

8:00 - On my laptop, connected with my external keyboard and monitor, I check email with Outlook and Skype away with colleagues in Europe (with one-ear headset and microphone, looking like a customer support representative which will be with you in a moment).

8:30 - daughter comes again, this time asking to see Sesame Street on TV. I fire up my SlingPlayer on the laptop, connect to my TV in the other room and select Sesame Street on my TiVo. Without moving from my chair. Laziness forever.

9:00 - drop daughter at the childcare where she tells me I should not go on a business trip for 10 weeks because it is too long. I tried to explain it is 10 days but she still claims it is too long. I promise I will videoskype her the next day and she tells me she can’t hug me through the computer. I shut up and sadly kiss her bye bye.

9:05- get on 101 just when the carpool lanes open. I love my seven minute commute, especially later in the season when I can take the top off my New Beetle (in California, I can do it for seven months in a row”¦).

9:10 - in the office parking lot I check new emails on my Windows Mobile Treo 700w with Verizon (on EVDO, which is 3G). I know it is stupid, because I can walk upstairs and read them on my laptop, but this is my only addiction (together with Nutella), so please do not bother me.

10:00 - I spend some time installing the new Funambol JavaME email client, with mobile advertising powered by Amobee, on my RAZR. I use it only for demos, linked to my Gmail account. The guys in Italy delivered the client this morning (time zone difference rocks!). I see it for the first time. It shows me an ad with La Sagrada Familia and beeps when an email is pushed to it. Awesome, I am ready for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week!

11:00 - meeting in the office, no mobile devices but great coffee. My Lavazza coffee machine delivers the best coffee in Silicon Valley.

12:00 - quick Capri panino at AG Ferrari in Belmont. Love the place and the food. They mix up the orders at least 50% of the times. I feel like home.

12:30 - I leave the office for a meeting at a customer site. To get directions, I take out my iPhone and try the Location feature and get direction to their office. It works smoothly. Who said you need GPS for location-aware services? Can Google give us that API on every phone where they have maps? Yes, they can and they will.

13:00 - I show off the JavaME client to the customer, and I get an “ahhh, if you do it like that it could work: it does not look like spam, the ad is not in the face of the user!”. Bingo, we are on the right track. Open source will finally be free.

15:00 - I am back in the office and I play a foosball game. I haven’t lost one game this year so far. This one is close, gets interrupted by the arrival of my next meeting, but we finish anyway (priorities are properly set at Funambol). Nope, streak still good, maybe next time, sorry Ata.

16:00 - I realize I am missing the notes for my iPhone (which I need for the trip) and I left them on my desktop at home. I use LogMeIn and take control of the remote computer, then use Skype to send a file back to my laptop. Just when I am done, my wife buzzes me on Skype and tells me to leave the computer alone. She got scared when the mouse started moving by itself. That’s life in the technology lane”¦

16:30 - The Windows Mobile phone won’t work in Europe (it is CDMA), so I sync contacts on my iPhone with the Funambol iPhone client. Works like a charm. I am ready to go.

17:00 - time to leave for the airport. Halfway, I decide to use a different long-term parking than usual. Anza parking is nice, with the free valet, but their bus never shows up. I am going to try Fasttrack, because I always use it when I leave from Oakland and their bus is there right when I land. I search for it with the Google Maps application on the Windows Mobile. Found it, got directions. When I need to know where to turn, the damn thing shows an http error and the application quits. Didn’t they hire only PhDs at Google? I want to meet the guy who designed the map application sitting in his office with the lava lamps all day, assuming my phone will keep the connection when I am driving. I bet he lives in London. Dude, here the network sucks. Carrier ads are about “lowest dropped calls””¦ The connection will drop. And do not tell me I should not use the application while driving. The iPhone Google Maps works perfectly, because Steve Jobs tried it while driving and yelled at your team”¦

18:00 - despite missing the exit, I get to the airport on time, and while I check-in, it appears I do not have a ticket for my second leg of the trip (London to Frankfurt). But my email said “Booked and Confirmed”! “Sorry Sir, we’ll fix it”. I am sitting on the luggage scale and I open my SlingPlayer on the Windows Mobile. I am watching the news I taped on TiVo about last night’s election. I won on every proposition, that’s good. I feel I could vote for any of the three candidates left for President. That’s even better. A sad thought goes to the future Italian election, but then the BA lady gives me my ticket and I am off to the lounge (Tip1 for entrepreneur: never keep miles for pleasure trips, always use them to upgrade to business. Tip2: if you want to be Gold on BA, just switch your country of residence to Italy. It requires half the miles than if you reside in the US. Odd). I realize that watching TV on my phone for free, I am violating my contract with Verizon. Why did they give me a 3G phone with unlimited data? For email??

19:30 - I am on the plane. I forward my cell calls to my SkypeIn number. From there, I will forward them to my local cell phone in Europe and I will save a bundle (yes, Funambol is a startup, roaming charges are a rip-off). I call my wife to say good bye and turn off all my mobile devices. In a near future, I will be able to keep them on. My flight will be a nightmare. Flying is about a book, a movie and lots of silence. Please do not allow me to keep the mobile phone on. You know, I am addicted to it.

20:30 - Dinner is served. British are not really famous for food. There is a reason.

22:30 - I am ready to sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a short day.

- - -

Genius stuff Fabrizio — thank you for taking the time to record the diary!

The Mobile Marketing Association is on the hunt for papers to be considered for their upcoming June publication. Here’s the request:

There is scant qualitative and empirical evidence to formulate an authoritative definition of mobile marketing and its key enables. In order to address this void and provide a forum to expand the available body of knowledge on the subject of mobile marketing the MMA calls upon academics, students and industry professionals to submit articles to be considered for publication in the IJMM. The following discusses the importance of these articles and details the IJMM submission guidelines

So if you’re a mobile industry professional — and let’s face it, a whopping 70-80% of you reading are just that — you might like to have your say and get your experience published for all to see. Here are some suggested sample topics:

# Review of industry typology, definitions
# Mobile marketing theory, frameworks, constructs, and concepts
# Research methodologies and models suitable for studying mobile marketing
# Effectiveness of mobile marketing across various traditional media channels, i.e. the mobile enhancement of traditional media
# Mobile initiative metrics
# Mobile customer relationship management
# Effectiveness of mobile content, such as ringtones, mobile TV, video, images, etc., within the marketing mix
# Application of multimedia within mobile marketing initiatives
# mCommerce as it pertains to the marketing mix
# Analysis of the various delivery methods: SMS, MMS, mobile internet, IR, IM, Bluetooth, mobile email, mobile portals
# Analysis of future trends and impact of global, environmental, cultural, and/or political activities on mobile marketing
# Use of mobile channel for philanthropy or politics
# Demystification of the technology and elements needed to enhance mobile marketing adoption
# Effective methods for bringing mobile marketing academic research to professionals
# Mobile marketing, a global perspective

I suspect this will be a rather good marketing opportunity — and if this is at all interesting, I strongly recommend you give it a bit of attention and consider contributing.

I had a note in today from SoliCall to tell me that they’ve just released SoliCall Mobile - an enhanced version of their unique personalized noise reduction technology for Windows Mobile.

SoliCall’s algorithm identifies the speaker’s voice and extracts it from the audio signal during the call so you can chat without, for example, the noisy restaurant getting in the way of your conversation. Pretty neat. It’s had some excellent reviews (Ian Williams at The Inquirer was rather impressed with the desktop version).

You can’t quite get this on your Windows Mobile device yet — however interested parties can get hold of the SoliCall SDK and integrate it into their existing applications. More details at Solicall.com or by emailing bd (at) solicall.com.

Remember the post I wrote a few weeks ago on ‘Text a Mars Bar‘? Well the Facebook application is now live on Facebook under the name Celebrate Gift Giver.

Here’s the blurb:

Send friends real sweets! Just select a gift, pay with tokens through PayPal and send to your friends. Your friends provide us with their mobile details so we can text a Voucher ID to let them pick up their gift at participating retailers.

So if you fancy sending me a box of ‘Celebrations’, go ahead:

Or if you’d like to try this out for me, add me as a friend on Facebook and I’ll send you a voucher so we can test the process out.

Late last year, Coolgorilla launched a rather wicked iPhone Translator service with Lastminute.com (here’s the link for your iPhone — worth adding to the bookmarks).

Well, today they’re launching Talking iPod Phrase Books, completely free of charge, thanks to Brent and the team at Lastminute who’re sponsoring the offering. Although this isn’t strictly mobile news, it’s pretty neat all the same so I wanted to document it. The iPod Phrase Books are actually really complex podcasts that contain around 800 words and phrases that will transform your iPod into a portable, talking translator.

It’s not available for iPhone as yet (the Translator service above only gives text, not audio), but it’s worth adding to your iPod if you’re heading to a place where they speak French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish.

How does it work exactly? Well, a separate podcast for each language delivers the necessary sound files whilst another download installs a familiar phrase book menu system onto your iPod to give quick and easy access to the hundreds of audio translations. More info and downloads at the iPod Phrase Book website.

Mobile photo and video company site Tiny Pictures has announced it’s got itself on the business end of $7.2 million in financing. The investment round was headed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mohr Davidow Ventures and will see the company to “focus on international growth opportunities, as well as the further development of its recently launched ad platform”.

Tiny Pictures runs the sharing service Radar, which it claims is the biggest service of its kind with 15 million snaps uploaded every month. The company also offers sponsored content in its Radar Gallery, including film and music promotion, alongside the user generated stuff. Nice work.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has decided to go after a new target: mobile phone companies. The Associated Press is reporting that militants have threatened to blow up mobile phone base stations unless operators switch off mobile phone signals every night between 5pm and 3 am.

A spokesman for the Taliban told AP that it was making the demands to stop the American military gathering intelligence on its whereabouts and gave the mobile phone companies a three day window before the Taliban “will target their towers and offices”. Apparently, none of the countries mobile operators have agreed to their demand for a shutdown.

Is this a tacit admission not only that the US military is using cell signals to track down insurgents, but also that the Taliban uses mobiles?

It looks like Qualcomm and Nokia are preparing to bury the hatchet, according to reports. The two have been engaged in a long-running fight over patent claims, after a licensing agreement between them lapsed last April. Since then, the pair have filed lawsuit after lawsuit in several European countries as well as the US.

Now, it seems, the pair have decided on a truce and agreed not only to halt the ongoing patent litigation but not to file any more lawsuits while the existing claims are reviewed by a Delaware court. Their lawyers must be very disappointed.

Everyone else, however, is likely to be more than happy. While I’m obviously in no position to comment on the validity or otherwise of the patent infringement cases, these two companies need each other to succeed: the world’s biggest phone maker needs chips, the world’s biggest chipmaker needs phones to put them in. Hopefully we’ll see more calm from the two in future.

BeamMe.Info is a cool new service for web publishers that places a small link next to content, so that users can quickly and easily send the info to their handset via SMS. There is a ‘Beam Generator’ that will generate the code, which you merely paste into your website, wherever you want the function to be.

BeamMe.Info securely asks for a user’s mobile number and sends the information via SMS. The webmaster never sees the mobile number, and it’s not stored anywhere, since there’s no registration or anything. Very easy for readers, with no barriers other than an SMS-capable handset.

Standard SMS rates apply to receive the SMS, so readers don’t incur large costs. However, for the webmaster, they’ll be billed per message sent. Rates are mostly <$.20, and are tier-priced according to the number sent. BeamMe.Info also has budgeting built-in, so webmasters can set a monthly limit, and the logos will disappear until either a new month or the budget is increased.

[Via: Textually.org]

In 2007…

We found out that Stuff magazine is loving ShoZu, Ewan was testing Jaxtr and has had enough of the T-Mobile UK system, and the HalfGeeks were loving the LG Shine.

Want to know more? Check out the links below.

Spinvox, everyone’s favorite speech-to-text company, today launched the first device-based service in the form of a Blackberry plugin. For GBP 5.00/year (US$10), in addition to your standard Spinvox package, Blackberry users will receive their voicemail in the form of an email delivered to their inbox with the word ‘Spinvox’ appended to the subject line. From the email they can easily return the call, or file the voicemail accordingly.

There is a free trial period, and interested individuals can cruise over to www.spinvox.com/blackberry to get the full scoop on packages. For the hyper-connected individual with a Blackberry, this is completely priceless, as you can now get your voicemail whether you’re in a meeting, in a library, or anywhere else that’s considered rude to make an actual phone call. Brilliant.

As someone who has completely disabled voicemail on his mobile phone simply to avoid the inconvenience of having to ‘dial in’ to retrieve them, I’d say this new feature for Blackberry users is priceless.

The New York Times today launched a new service called ‘Shifd‘ that allows you to transfer notes, links, anything quickly and easily from your PC to your mobile and back again. Using Mowser, an internet mobilizing service created by Russell Beattie, Shifd has a simple UI and organization, with things split up into notes, links, or places.

Currently free, and not integrated into the NYtimes.com website, Nick Bilton, the creator, says ad-supported is a possibility in the future. Shifd is built on Adobe’s new AIR technology platform. ShifD is in open beta, meaning you don’t need an invite or anything to sign up and give it a whirl. There’s also a mobile-specific site, with iPhone and Blackberry optimised interfaces that will automatically be delivered based on your device.

They’ve got an easy browser plugin, or you can download the desktop application (Mac and Windows are supported), along with the mobile side. I’ve been using the Google Firefox plugin SendToPhone for a long time now, to quickly and easily send links and notes to myself via SMS, but Shifd seems to make it easier to keep a log of all these little notes. Very nice.

Nokia Growth Partners, the venture capital department of the Finnish behemoth, has invested in Morpho, Inc., to the tune of 165 million Japanese Yen (~US$1.5 million). Morpho specializes in image processing software for mobile gadgets. PhotoSolid and MovieSolid, both from Morpho and designed to help with image and video stabilization, have grown to be well-respected in the industry. Morpho also offers embedded solutions for motion tracking, panoramic imaging, and backlight compensation.

With Nokia’s Nseries handsets on the frontline of cameraphones and the Nokia N82 sporting a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics, and Xenon flash, the ability to efficiently process the image with enhanced features is going to be key. Samsung’s G810, which was announced at the Mobile World Congress 2008 and sports Nokia’s S60v3 Feature Pack 1 OS, like the N82, already has an image stabilization feature.

I’ll be anxious to see how Morpho progresses, and if we see more Nokia interest in imaging-related companies.

The Nokia Research Center, together with the University of Cambridge, has created the Morph, a concept phone that allows users to physically stretch and reshape the device according to their usage. The Morph uses nanotechnology, in addition to flexible materials and transparent electronics to create something extremely customisable. It also features self-cleaning capabilities, to eliminate bacteria and germs, a feature that has been making its way onto handsets in Japan for a while now.

The Morph will be shown off at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from February 24th to May 12th, 2008, as part of the ‘Design and Elastic Mind’ campaign. You can check out the campaign’s official website here, and get more info on the Morph in the official press release.

Technology that exists in the Morph could make its way to the mainstream in 7 years or so. The Nokia Research Center looks beyond Nokia’s existing business and product development to challenge current strategies and to stimulate renewal in the company’s direction. Working closely with all Nokia business units, NRC’s research explores new frontiers in digital services, physical-digital connections, human interaction, data and content technologies, device architecture, and access and connectivity. NRC promotes open innovation by working on research projects in collaboration with universities and research institutes around the world.

AQA can help…

Mippin are steaming it. If you haven’t checked them out, take a look at www.mippin.com. Their service elegantly parses mobile feeds from around the planet and displays them beautifully — whether you’re using a piece-of-crap Motorola RAZR or a top of the line iPhone. It’s brilliant for catching up on news or entertaining yourself whilst you’re sat eating lunch on the train. Screw buying Heat magazine, get Perez Hilton and The Superficial — and even SMS Text News — parsed beautifully on your handset.

They’ve got some news today:

Mobile content portal ‘Mippin’ announces the launch of revolutionary video functionality for its global community of users, delivering the millions of clips referenced in RSS feeds to mobile data users worldwide.

In a joint technology development between market leaders Refresh Mobile and blueapple.mobi, the service will convert and distribute flash-based RSS video content of any publisher, from international publishing companies through to independent bloggers. The process will see video transcoded automatically to the .3gp mobile standard in real-time for viewing on users’ handsets.

In keeping with the popularity of video streaming on the internet, almost any content hosted on the web will be made available, including some channel content previously unavailable for mobile. Videos will be available throughout Mippin wherever a clip is included by a publisher. The service will give users the ability to search and view video immediately on request, providing a choice of preview, streaming and download options.

Here’s how it works.

Normally, if you’re viewing Perez Hilton’s main site, this is what you’d see:

Mippin, via Blueapple, converts that from Perez Hilton’s RSS feed into this:

(Or something like that — I took the screenshot using my web browser).

Very swish. This means that you can now via mobile video on a compatible handset from an RSS feed, easily and without arsing around. Smart. Got a moment? Try it out and let me know how you get on.

No dotmobi for LinkedIn it seems, they’ve gone live with their m.linkedin.com version — and I’m sure it will be phenomenally useful to many. Have a play about with it at m.linkedin.com and see what you think. And if you haven’t added me to your network, you’re welcome to do so (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ewanmacleod– use the email ewan@smstextnews.com to connect with me if necessary).

Link: LinkedIn Goes Mobile—Finally

Six months after Facebook came out with a version of its social network for the iPhone, LinkedIn is finally coming around to releasing a mobile version of its own.

It is live now. Just go to http://m.linkedin.com/ on any mobile browser. Of course, if you have an iPhone, you will see a version optimized just for that device.

(By the way, some enterprising chap has registered linkedin.mobi, which explains the .m strategy).

Jeff Jarvis, writing in today’s Media Guardian, makes some interesting points about Twitter and the medium of microblogging (or, picoblogging, I think that’s a better term — Microblogging conjures up images of sentences, whereas a picoblog is, to me, just one sentence).

Given that Twitter first started via text — and that a large amount of Twitter users use the medium of text to interact with Twitter, if you haven’t taken a look at Twitter recently, it’s worth a second look.

Link: Why short is tweet for the blogging community | Media | The Guardian

When I first used the microblogging platform Twitter - which enables users to publish 140-character-long messages via the web and mobile phones - I thought it was silly. Or rather, the uses to which it was being put were silly: people announcing that they’d just woken up or what they’d had for breakfast. I couldn’t have cared less. But then I should confess that when I first used blogs and podcasts, I didn’t fully comprehend their impact either. So, when my son and webmaster told me I should take another stab at Twitter, I did. And I now see it is an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging.

If you’re new to Twitter, try it out by subscribing to the SMS Text News Twitter update here. You’ll get the headline of every post sent direct to your mobile by text message moments after we publish it.