Blog: MobileActive

At any given time at SXSW, starting at 10 am and ending some time close to 2 am, there are 8 or more events happening simultaneously. It gets exhausting after 5 days, but there have been some great highlights.

Mobile conversations of all kinds have been interesting, ranging from designing applications and sites for the mobile web and mobile devices to using a single mobile phone to provide internet and telephony access to an entire village in Sub-Saharan Africa. Taken together, the “point” appears to be that the distance between mobile devices and our desktop computing is blurring, and will continue to do so. Integrated communications technologies and strategies will be the way of the future.

Some of the really neat ideas that I’ve heard discussed:

Almost every hand shot up in the crowded auditorium when Zack Exley, a chief organizer of Roots Camp, asked, "How many of you have been to an election recap meeting?" It was close to 11:00 am on Saturday morning, and 400 progressive political junkies had descended on Washington from all over the country for a different kind of election recap. This time we were just looking at what happened online and what we can learn from each other as we move into the national election.

Ian, Jeff, and I joined the crowed. We weren't sure if it was going to be the official kick off to 2008 campaign planning or if it would simply reveal that there is no break between elections. By the end of the day the energy in the room clearly showed that it was the latter and that everyone was fueled with the momentum of the huge Democratic win and looking for the tools to take it up a notch.

This week I’m hosting the 42nd Carnival of the Mobilists over at MobileActive. The Carnival is a weekly roundup of the best stories on the web about anything and everything mobile, and is a fun and fast way to read all the news from the last week. This week’s stories range from ways organizations are using cell phones for activism, to reviews of the latest pdas, to predictions on the future of the mobile web. If you’re new to the concept of the Carnival, you can read more about it here. Thanks Eric for the awesome images!

I was at an awesome Netsquared DC Meetup on Tuesday where we learned how SMS (text messaging) could be best used to monitor elections. Since we are in DC, of course there were some people in attendance with first hand expertise at using SMS for international development. The National Democratic Institute (NDI) just finished an SMS pilot project for the Montenegro referendum on independence. NDI’s main office is about two blocks from the bar we were at so Ian Schuler, a friend from the tech scene in DC and ICT Project Manager at NDI told the story of how NDI went about setting up their SMS network, using a combination of a cell phone plugged into a computer to receive incoming messages and an aggregator (Clickatell) to help handle the sending load.  

Political ringtones are back in the news, this time in the UK. This
article
discusses the origins of the political ringtone, pinpointing it back to
the "Hello Garci?" ringtone from the Phillipines, which was featured on
TXTPower.org. Then comes the MobileActive
conference, followed by a big shout out to Eric of Development Seed for his
ringtones on Bush's reaction to Katrina and on DeLay's
legal troubles.

Iraqis have seen a lot more campaigning and advertising for tomorrow’s elections than for the previous one, and the candidates have gotten more sophisticated too. Not only are they using typical media sources like television and newspapers, but some candidates have been sending text messages to try to bring voters to their side. ABC News reports: