ReadWriteWeb

On Thursday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Yahoo's Marc Davis spoke about the mobile internet and the future of the mobile industry. As the mobile web evolves, he said, it's no longer good enough to simply port the PC experience to the phone's small screen - it's time to start building "mobile-first" products instead. What are "mobile-first" products? They're services designed to take advantage of the strengths and abilities of the mobile devices themselves, leading to entirely unique creations that can only be found on the mobile web.

MySpace just announced that it will bring its Open Platform to Windows Mobile phones. The new MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile will be built on top of Microsoft's Silverlight platform. In addition, MySpace also announced its MySpace Silverlight SDK, which will make it easier for developers to build OpenSocial applications using Silverlight.

MySpace also announced that LG will preload the MySpace Mobile application on the next-generation of its Windows Mobile 6.1 phones.

According to comScore, the number of people who accessed news and information sites from their mobile phones in the U.S. more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009. ComScore estimates that about 63 million people accessed mobile news and information sites from their mobile devices in January 2009, and about a third of these did so on a daily basis. The mobile Internet is clearly becoming a mainstream phenomenon, though it needs to be noted that a large number of these users don't use the mobile Web, but rely on SMS-based services.

Part One: "Here's My Card"

This past week, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test thanks to a recent trip to the DEMO 09 conference in Palm Desert, California. You would think that if any group of people would have adopted the electronic business card model for exchanging their contact data, it would be the technology community. Yet at conferences like DEMO and all the others, printed paper cards are still exchanged. Why is that?

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Recession? What recession? According to a survey from ABI Research, many U.S. consumers are spending hundreds of dollars per year on mobile applications. Over 15 percent of those surveyed had spent nearly $100 over the past twelve months and a surprising 16.5 percent had spent between $100 and $500 during that same time frame.