The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Santa Clara Valley Society organized an event on Saturday April 19, 2008 titled “Short Course: WiMAX Opportunities, Challenges, and Concepts”.  I had a very interesting day and will post the details about this event soon.  Details of the event and pictures are here.

The Carnival of the Mobilists #117 is on mobilestance.com - a blog started in 2007 by Jamie Wells, mobilestance.com is a resource for those following the movements, trends and key happenings in the mobile marketing industry.

Click here for the Carnival of the Mobilists #118.  Paul Ruppert is hosting it on Mobile Point View.  The over-arching theme of CTIA is clear.

Debi Jones is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists #119 on her site mobilejones.

Here are some of the upcoming events that I will be attending.  If you are going to be at this event, let’s meet:

• Chuck House, Executive Director of Media X at Stanford University is speaking on “Innovation - the Secret Sauce” as part of the Media X Spring Lecture Series on April 16, 2008 at the Stanford University.  Details of this event are here. 
• The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Santa Clara Valley Society is organizing an event on April 19, 2008 titled “Short Course: WiMAX Opportunities, Challenges, and Concepts”.  Dr. Mohamed Sayed is the Chairperson of this Society.  Click here for the details of this event.
• Carnegie Mellon West Coast Campus and UC Berkeley’s Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business are organizing a conference on “The Mobile Future: Technology Revolutionizing our Lives”.  It is on April 22, 2008 in Santa Clara.  Details of the event are here.
• The Supernova 2008 will be held in San Francisco from June 16 to 18, 2008.  It is organized by Wharton professor Kevin Werbach and includes topics such as: Does Telecom Have a Future? * Wireless Disruption * Whose Social Graph … Details are here.

In his work, “Manuel Castells, Open Source, Technology of Cooperation“, Howard Rheingold said:

When social communication media grow in capability, pace, scope, or scale, people use these media to construct more complex social arrangements—that is, they use communication tools and techniques to increase their capacity to cooperate at larger and larger scales. Human history is a story of the co-evolution of tools and social practices to support ever more complex forms of cooperative society.

The Economist is carrying a special report on the social consequences of the mobile communication revolution across the planet.

It sets the context with the following words:

As a word, vision and goal, modern urban nomadism has had the mixed blessing of a premature debut. In the 1960s and 70s Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the most influential media and communications theorist ever, pictured nomads zipping around at great speed, using facilities on the road and all but dispensing with their homes. In the 1980s Jacques Attali, a French economist who was advising president François Mitterrand at the time, used the term to predict an age when rich and uprooted elites would jet around the world in search of fun and opportunity, and poor but equally uprooted workers would migrate in search of a living. In the 1990s Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners jointly wrote the first book with “digital nomad” in the title, adding the bewildering possibilities of the latest gadgets to the vision.

A few interesting nuggets that I gleaned are:

• It provides an example of Coburn Ventures - an investment consultancy that has only virtual offices.  All employees are always connected through their BlackBerries and work mostly through the internet.  Considering that about 40% of IBM’s workforce have virtual offices only, I see this as a positive trend in a truly global, flat world.  Funny, that this is an example where “location, location, location” takes on a different significance.
• Nomadic work life is moving to the ‘third places’.  Yet, James Katz of Rutgers feels that these places are “physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated”.  Talk of being in Second Life in the third place using the 7th Mass Media.
• Humans are evolving from Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo mobilis.  Tomi Ahonen called this the “Generation C” or “Generation Connected”.  As Manuel Castells says, “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing.” 
• The thumb generation is giving rise to “linguistic whateverism”.  “The more we write online, the worse writers we become”.
• Andreas Kluth, the author of the report says, “Nomadism increases productivity—you get more done. With it comes an addictive behaviour that also occurs in gambling. There is a random pattern of awards, you never know when it pays out, so you keep going.”

In spite of some dire predictions, I am optimistic that something good can still come out of all this.  Before that, may be we will go through paying more and more attention to less and less.

Here are the links:

Our nomadic future
Prepare to see less of your office, more of your family—and still perhaps be unhappy

Nomads at last
Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth

Labour movement
The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere

The new oases
Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic

Location, location, location
It matters

Family ties
Kith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers

A world of witnesses
When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor

Homo mobilis
As language goes, so does thought

Author interview
A discussion with Andreas Kluth, Bay Area technology correspondent of The Economist

Sources and acknowledgments

Need to play catch up … took an unplanned blogging break due to heavy workload.  I apologize to those who missed me.  Lot of exciting things have been happening.  Let’s start …

Situational Marketing is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists #116.  The best post was snagged by Barbara Ballard for her comparison of the Sanyo and Blackberry phones.  Click here to access the link.

I attended the Mobile Advertising Book Event at Stanford yesterday, organized by Mobile Momentum.  I wrote about them earlier (click here for the link).  Details of the event are here.

Authors Chetan Sharma and Victor Melfi gave an interesting presentation about their book “Mobile Advertising”, explaining what they had covered and focused on.  Brian Cowley of AdInfuse, Tony Nethercutt of Admob and Ujjal Kohli of Rhythm New Media participated in a panel discussion with time for questions from the audience.  I was able to have a word with all of them later.  The book is a must-buy for anybody in this field.  I expect somebody will cover the contents of the panel-discussion; most of the stuff was fairly standard fare.

Thanks to Prof. Tom Kosnick and Mohit Gundecha for organizing this event.

Tomi Ahonen has written an interesting post “Permission Based is not enough: Understanding mobile advertising” today which also talks about about User-generated advertising and shares nuggets like “44% of Japanese mobile phone owners click on the links on their ads”.

Andrew Gill, who focuses on mobile advertising, mobile location and local search is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists #115.  This time the listing spans (among others) Social Effects of Online Networking, Stupid Networks, iPhone,  US Mobile Market numbers and personal Mobile TV Channels.  Thank you Andrew for the hosting.  You can access the site here.