You’re in a rental car lost in a strange city with an inadequate or no map. What do you do? Do you ask someone for directions or drive around aimlessly hoping to spot a landmark you remember? Or do you pull out your mobile phone and enter the cross streets of the where you are and the address that you are looking for and receive turn by turn directions that speed to you destination? This review covers several mobile web … Continue reading
Salon.com is a pioneer online news magazine. It was founded in 1995 at the beginning of the Internet boom and has always featured well written articles on news, politics, the arts and technology as well as book and movie reviews. Salon has struggled to survive economically and since 2001 has limited access to a portion of its content to paying subscribers only. Salon is also a pioneer on the mobile web, launching a PDA edition in 2001. It was aimed … Continue reading
Six months ago I posted a piece entitled All I want is a good WAP RSS Reader comparing all the mobile web based rss aggregators that I could find at that time. Last week Google released a mobile version of their Reader. Here’s my take on the latest entrant in mobile feed reading wars. First of all, the main advantage that web based aggregators have is that they maintain the state of your feed reading experience across devices. If you … Continue reading
This isn’t new but I just discovered it. Flickr has a mobile site! It’s a beta and pretty basic but fun if you have a Flickr account or know someone who does. There’s no need to login to use most of the features of the site. You can see the latest public photos posted to Flickr – which amounts to a constantly changing random assortment of images – most of them unfortunately not very interesting. If you have someone’s Flickr … Continue reading
I got an email from Shawn McCollum, the guy who created the WamPad site I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. Shawn’s made some nice updates to the site. To quote Shawn’s email: 1. Website Entry – I’ve updated it so you can access sites with or without transcoding . I was playing around with a bunch of different crazy ideas but at the very end I went with a simple approach. So it’s just a list of links … Continue reading
I’ve been trying to build up a little money for retirement and lately I’ve been dabbling in the stock market. I use the mobile web during my two hour round trip commute on the train to try to learn more about the market and research stocks I’m considering. What follows is my assessment of current mobile investment sites. Keep in mind that I’m not a sophisticated investor, these are just my personal observations – mainly on the depth of content … Continue reading
The mobile version of MSN Spaces has really changed since I last looked at it five months ago. I’d say it’s almost a complete redesign. I’m sure you’ve heard of Spaces – Microsoft’s blogging/social networking platform. Spaces can be used as a pure blogging platform but its social aspect sets it apart from traditional blogging platforms like Typepad or Blogger. The social part comes from tight integration with MSN Messenger and Hotmail (a link to your latest blog post can … Continue reading
I got an email from a fellow named Shawn McCollum asking me to take a look at his new mobile site, Wampad.com. I believe that Shawn has actually created a new type of mobile site – a search based portal. The basic concept is that you enter a search phrase once and then use it to query a bunch of different sites. Wampad’s front page is simplicity itself. There’s just a drop down, a text box and a Go button. … Continue reading