I attended the Mobile Monday New York demo night this week, so I got to check out some of the cool mobile projects going on around the area. Here are some quick links to the presenters and very brief blurbs about them.

Mobivity
Put your keyword on a shortcode and configure voting, polls, raffles, etc. from a web interface. You’re up and running in minutes.

Wireless generation
Helping teachers assess kids performance via PDAs. Collects performance data for regions that can be accessed online.

Salespitch.mobi
File sales reports more easily. Interact with your sales database through your phone (mostly voice with manual voice to text for now)

Iloop Mobile
Create your mobile presence. A very powerful mobile marketing and content platform.

Septet Systems Inc.
Mobile personal search syndication - assemble info and share it. Now has a mobile portal.

Vectormax
Streaming 3D avatars on the phone that use very little bandwidth. They can create a talking head avatar on your phone with a 10kbps data stream from a real video feed. They recreate the scene on your phone with 3D models, textures and motion paths. They can create video ringtones with this tech as well.

Sco Group HipCheck
A framework and bi-directional platform for monitoring and controlling your servers through your mobile. For all the sysadmins who want to have a life.

Send Word Now
Create a contact directory for people in your organization - all modalities. Then blast out alerts and announcements everywhere. Great for emergencies.

Here are some photos of the event. Sorry for the craptastic quality - they were taken with my Blackjack.

Mike has a totally on-point post on his blog about choosing WiFi over cellular while abroad at 3GSM. His opinions reflect exactly what I experience while abroad - ubiquitous cellular service or not, the outrageous costs of roaming data scare the pants off of me.

Since a lot of the phones I’ve had over the years have done random network things in the background, I’ve played it safe and never even turned my cellular connection on after arriving. It’s WiFi or nothing. This means, if I don’t have a WiFi-capable handset at the time, I tether myself to my laptop for everything. If I do have a handset with WiFi, it’s actually kind of fun to sniff open networks while abroad and steal a little bandwidth here and there. The SSID’s alone are fun to check out. This, however, doesn’t do wonders for battery life.

In these situations, Skype, of course, is invaluable. If you even think of using Skype over an international roaming data connection, you might as well just hand over your credit card to a stranger and tell them to go nuts. But here in the states, Skype is fighting a battle for domestic use over cellular as well.

This quote from CTIA had me steaming:

“Skype’s self-interested filing contains glaring legal flaws and a complete disregard for the vast consumer benefits provided by the competitive marketplace,” said Steve Largent, chief executive of the CTIA in a prepared statement. “Skype’s ‘recommendations’ will freeze the innovation and choice hundreds of millions of consumers enjoy today. The call for imposing monopoly era Carterfone rules to today’s vibrant market is unmistakably the wrong number,”

Wow. Opening networks will freeze innovation and choice? I can’t see the logic here. If the only thing it does is force carriers to bolster their data infrastructure to handle the increased use, we have some great innovation right there.

But all-in-all I’m optimistic. As data becomes more popular, and more necessary, attitudes and policies will change - and these little fights are roadmarks along the path.

Last night, my sister was telling me how she’s constantly on Craigslist looking for apartments in Brooklyn. It’s a very competitive market, and she has to wait until she gets home from work to check it - she misses all the good ones during the day.

I immediately thought of Pipes!

I quickly created a simple one to merge the Craigslist filtered RSS listings with another RSS listing feed for Brooklyn. I then signed her up and ran the pipe to an email alert that she could get on her phone. It was quite easy for me, but pretty much unintelligible to her. I just kept thinking how hard getting pipes to the masses will be. But that’s another story.

The output seemed great - it was exactly what I expected. Problem is, she hasn’t gotten an email yet.

To test it, I used the pipe and sent it to my own email. I even changed the delivery options to see if that made a difference. Nothing. I can’t get the damn thing to email me.

Has anyone gotten email alerts to work from a pipe?

Yeah I know… Beta.

Boy am I glad I posted my Sourcestreams idea before Yahoo announced Pipes. They are eerily similar I think.

Pipes is very similar to the middle layer I proposed for sourcestreams - probably the layer that will spawn the most creativity. I still think however that a scripting layer (even if it’s somewhat limited) below the piping layer would allow the system to expand and become more useful much more quickly. Also, a layer above the pipes layer to make it fall-down-the-stairs easy for users to configure existing pipes with no idea of how they work would increase adoption rate.

Pipes is a great start though, and they have some great transformation capability - like their Content Analysis module. Their output is only RSS now it seems, but that’s ok for a start. I think it starts to get a lot more interesting when you add inputs and outputs like email, IM, web-accessible images, etc, and then you can start making some amazing mobile and desktop clients.

Here are a couple more use case documents I produced for my original Sourcestreams idea. They’re a little dated, but they show how to get your social networking lives to blend using the system. Yahoo Pipes still can’t do this, but it’s getting there.

MyCircle Example

PhotoSharing Example

Web 2.0… Mobile 2.0. A huge component to them (in my opinion) is input/output, aggregation and transformation.

Make your own channel of media aggregated from all over with SplashCast.

Aggregate / filter / combine your feeds into a superfeed with FeedShake.

Get your specific information in bite-sized chunks on the phone with Widsets and Bluepulse.

OK, great. But I want to take this to the next level. I want a service that can access many types of data sources, let me transform them in various ways, and output them to data sinks like email / IM / mobile devices, or to become other information sources themselves.

I envision a community where power-users can create their own ways to access, transform and send streams of information. These “stream widgets” can then be represented as pluggable blocks that can be used to build new ways of aggregating, transforming and serving up streams of data. Complete streams made of these widgets can then be packaged to the novice user, like

“Grab your online status from Skype, superimpose it on an image from your webcam, and post it on your blog.”

or

“Grab your latest Flickr photo, superimpose the last listened track from LastFM onto it and send it to this cool Widset widget that all your friends can see.”

The trick here is to create these various levels of participation and make it powerful for the expert while enticing and useful to the casual user. Based on these levels of participation, I believe a thriving community could form - all based around taking control of your information.

I have a little presentation from 2005 that I made to flesh out the idea.

DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION HERE.

I’ve been keeping this little idea a secret for about a year and a half now, but I keep seeing Web 2.0 or Mobile 2.0 products that start brushing up against the idea or offering components of it. Since none of the companies I am currently working with have the resources to take it on, I thought I’d put it out and get some feedback and see if there’s any interest.

Best case scenario - someone is interested and wants to explore it. Let me know!

Worst case scenario - no one cares.

Medium case scenario - someone steals the idea and it makes it exist so I can use it.