Tomorrow’s MoMoNY will be focused on sports brands and their mobile strategies. Since Clearspring has been working extensively with big media and big brands, and are bringing our discovery, syndication and viral distribution to mobile, I’ve been asked to be on the panel. So I’ll bring the infrastructure provider viewpoint.

Beyond Scores. Sports Brands & Their Mobile Game Plan.

The format for this event will be a panel discussion with audience questions/discussion followed by networking with refreshments and snacks (graciously provided by our host Samsung.)

Agenda:

* Welcome/Intro
* The Moderator:
o Evan Neufeld, VP and senior analyst, M:Metrics
* The Panelists:
o Oke Okaro, ESPN
o Bhavesh Patel, NBA
o Lincoln Hochberg, MLB
o Rich LaBarca, Clearspring

Additional panelists pending.

Cost: FREE, please just RSVP here.

When: Monday, July 30th, 6:45-9 PM

Where:

Samsung Experience Center
Time Warner Center – Shops at Columbus Circle
10 Columbus Circle, 3rd floor
New York City, New York 10022
(map)

At the intersection of Broadway, Eighth Avenue, Central Park South and
Central Park West.

Subways to Shops at Columbus Circle: A/C, 1/9, B/D
to 59th Street/Columbus Circle

I’m heading to the west coast next week, and I was just about to buy the headphone jack recharging thingie I mentioned in this post. But then I realized that United is running what they call “premium service” between JFK and LAX. I don’t really care what they consider premium, but according to SeatGuru, their premium 757’s include power jacks for every seat. Very very nice.

My opinion, though, is that enough of the coach population uses their own electronic devices at this point to stop considering power jacks “premium luxuries”. I still see more defunct armrest ashtrays than power ports on planes nowdays. That has to change.

Clearspring purchased a Nokia N75 as a test phone recently, and I’ve been using it a lot for development. Of course, I couldn’t help playing around with it - Nokia always includes a ton of cool (and sometimes even useful!) apps with their S60 devices.

As I’ve been browsing through the device, however, it blows my mind how much branded crap and trialware is on it. It reminds me of a new Dell machine, which I find almost always requires a fresh install to get rid of all the preloaded software on it. If you compare the carrier-purchased N75 with my Nokia Store-bought N73, it’s even more ridiculous.

First of all, the services (WAP) icon is Cingy’s “Media Net”. Boooo. Second, there’s links for Cingular Video and Music services clogging up the main menu. As you dig through the barely-interesting offerings, you find that many of these things require additional fees to use anyway.

Games&Apps is loaded with trialware. The only full version apps are Lifeblog and 3D Pool Hall. 3D Pool Hall crashed when I ran it so I am only guessing that it’s not trial. The rest are extremely crippled versions of Lumines, Tetris and EBay, and a MobiTV 3 day trial.

At least there’s a solid version of Quickoffice and Adobe PDF.

I could be wrong, but my guess is that Nokia is factory-loading the Games&Apps folder and Cingular (they haven’t rebranded this thing AT&T yet) is customizing icons and preloading their links and software. The combination does inflate the device to seem like one big advertisement, but it’s not as big a sin as a notebook or desktop with pre-loaded daemons and TSRs that clog your memory. We’re not reducing performance here - we’re just turning the device into a billboard.

Sigh. Verizon, what do you have against a simple URL?

Verizon doesn’t support WAP Push.
Many Verizon phones, including the Motorola RAZRKRZRROCKR line don’t parse URLs out of messages.

Yahoo’s official coping mechanism? If they manage to detect your number and allow you to send an sms, you get a “Verizon customer? Enter m.yahoo.com on your mobile browser to begin.” when you try to send the Yahoo Mobile link to your device.

Many smartphones, including the WinMo devices parse URLs out of text messages, so you can still use standard texts as a solution here. You just have to keep the URL reasonable so the poor folks with non URL-parsing phones can stay in the game.

What’s your coping mechanism for Verizon’s love of making your SMS life hell?

Has anyone tried this product from Inflight Power?

One thing I hate about flying long haul flights is the rarity of in-seat power ports. If this product does what they claim, you’ll be able to use any USB-chargeable gadget by plugging into the headphone jack next to your seat! That’s something that’s almost always there (save for puddle jumpers).

Unfortunately, this isn’t enough juice to run a laptop, but it could drive a Pocket PC or iPod or a PMP for an entire flight. That’s a huge deal if it works.

If anyone gives this a try, please comment!

A couple years ago, I remember hearing that Danger had the desire to move from the hardware+software game into a pure software play. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but it looks like they’re making steps toward that goal by working with Motorola on the Zante.

Check out the article at Gizmodo.

I’ve been a big fan of the Sidekick OS. It’s the only mobile OS I’ve used that uses network storage so extensively. As an example, I downloaded an SSH application for my Sidekick II and set up a few hosts on it. When I did a hard reset on my phone one day, after entering in my username/password, it downloaded the same app again, then downloaded the settings for all of my saved SSH hosts as well. The device was able to restore itself pretty much to the exact same state I left it with no intervention.

Imagine having this on any phone. If you’re on a business trip and lose your device, you can buy another one, enter your login, and have lost absolutely nothing.