Wak Oentoenk

Welcome to the 70th weekly Carnival of the Mobilists. If you're not familiar with the Carnival, it's a collection of mobile-related commentary from the last week, nominated by the weblog authors themselves. The hosting duties rotate from week to week.This week's articles cover a huge range of subjects, from game-playing cameras to RIM's service outage. I tried to come up with some clever theme to link them all together, but I think the main message is that the mobile market is so diverse that...

Here's something I wrote for the Rubicon newsletter. It's relevant here.One of the advantages of working as a consultant is that you get to look at the big picture across corporations. You can see trends and common themes that might not be obvious to somebody working in a single company.A theme that’s become very clear lately is the tech industry’s difficulty telling the difference between “how” and “what” when designing products.Most of our companies tend to focus on building what I call “how”...

Please forgive the commercial message, but I wanted to let folks know about a couple of new services that we're offering at Rubicon Consulting. We're trying to design services tailored to the special needs of tech companies, so I'm interested in feedback and suggestions.Most of the work I do in my day job is big, traditional consulting projects for tech companies -- defining a product strategy, creating a marketing plan, etc. But we noticed two situations in which people needed something smaller...

About a year ago, I wrote an article on "why Web 2.0 doesn't cut it for mobile devices." My basic argument was that because wireless web connections are intermittent and unreliable, a completely thin client architecture for applications won't work. (A thin client application is one in which the code for the app stays on a server, and all you have on your PC or mobile device is a little user interface widget. Every time you do something with the web app, your device has to talk to the server....

I'm going to Web 2 Expo in San Francisco this week. If you're attending and want to chat, please drop me an e-mail here.If you're not going, I'll post a note on what I see at the sh...