All Your Base Belong to Amp'd: "Its target market is 18- to 35-year-olds, and the stuff it's got lined up should be wide and deep enough to satisfy the whole range: lots of video (streaming and download), music, tons of games and so on. The phone ships as a blank slate, essentially, and users set it up via the Amp'd Web site to make it appear exactly as they want."

I first heard about Amp'D at BREW2005 this year and they sound a bit different from your run-of-the-mill carriers... but are founded by a guy who's kicked off umpteen MVNOs. One to watch.

• Using Flickr for moblogging games: "...people are going to start moblogging their virtual worlds just as much as the real world."
  
• Balls from the Guardian blog, equating high ARPU with expensive. The analogy with petrol and cars just doesn't hold: high ARPU can be a result of extremely usable interfaces. For instance, I remember hearing a statistic a few years back that users of Nokia handsets texted twice as much as users of other handset - and this was put down to the usability of the product.
  
• The Friday-Ad (Sussex's answer to Loot) seems to get mobile. And their content is perfect: bite-size chunks of gloriously unsexy advertising that *really matters to real people*.
  
• The new game from Will Wright: "Spore could end up being quite literally the biggest and most ambitious game ever attempted. Although it begins at the microscopic level, with players taking control of a monocellular organism in a tidal pool, the scale changes as the creature evolves and grows. The end result: A massive adventure spanning an entire galaxy with player-driven gameplay and design shared seamlessly online among the entire Spore community."
  
• Changes in advertising: "they may well start to divert their advertising dollars away from TV broadcast if thet feel this medium becomes less effective". Presumably if an even half-effective, vaguely accountable form of advertising became available, it would get adopted in favour of some of what we have today.
  
• The US is ripe for mobile gaming: "(1) the larger population and (2) the percentage of game content is already much larger on mobile in the US than the percentage in Japan."
  
• Vodafone extends its mobile TV offering
  
• Approaches to handling multiple phases of development in Scrum.
  

Nice piece about the "subservient chicken" online ad campaign which Burger King ran a while back. But, lovely tho it is to hear that it's generated 396 million hits, isn't it slightly worrying that the guy behind the campaign can offer only anecdotal results as to whether it actually led people to buy more chicken?

As the franchise owner in this story puts it, "It's difficult to show a causal relationship between sales and the advertising"

Beautiful piece here on the problems of selling specialist software to oodles of tiny niche markets:

"You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day. Overture figured it out, Google perfected it and we all know what happened from there. "

Lovely stats from Mark: "...according to Unisys the banking and credit card industries claim that it takes an average of 26 hours for a user to (notice and) report a lost wallet. But the average time taken to report a lost mobile phone is 68 minute"