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This week's carnival #221is brought to us by newcomer Holly Kolman at mobiEnthusiast.mobi.   Keeping with carnival tradition, there are many great submissions. Are service providers ready for the smartphone revolution? and So Many Devices, So Little Time are two articles looking at different sides of the same issue: people who buy smartphones and don’t know how to use them, and the difficulty companies have in supporting smartphone users in their call centers.  Andy Favell of mobiThinking.com gives us the numbers on mobile this week: Global mobile stats: all latest quality research on mobile Web and marketing in one place. Ajit Jaokar of Open Gardens writes about a new OS from Japan. Read more at Good news for Japan but bad news for LiMo? Japanese phone makers to develop new operating system AND open it to the world.

On Wednesday, June 9, we'll be in Berlin to host a WIPJam at the IT Profits 6.0 event. Our focus is on "mobile profits" -- meaning we'll be talking about making money via mobile. But as far as specific UnPanels and Discussion Groups -- that's up to you! We're trying a new model for this event where we're asking the community what topics they're most interested in. So head over to the Call for Participation, and enter your ideas there. We'll take the best ideas and work them into our agenda, and we could even ask you to present or lead a discussion!

In addition, the 100 most interesting entries will win a free ticket to the event! After we close the call for participation on May 3, they'll cost €99, so get your entry in soon.

This is your chance to explore the areas in which you are most interested, and is an opportunity for you to lead the community as well. Whether you are a developer, designer, creative type or an entrepreneur, we are interested in your stories, experiences...

On Wednesday, April 21, 2010, WIP will host the first OneAPI Briefing Session in Toronto, Canada.  This is the Pilot Project to introduce OneAPI to Canadian Developers.  More briefing sessions will follow in May across major Canadian cities so stayed tuned to WIP Connector for future dates.

On April 21st, all the key OneAPI folks are in Toronto and available to give you a briefing and to answer YOUR questions.  In true WIPJam UnPanel fashion - in addition to our strictly enforce No PPT, No Panels and No Ties - you'll get the chance to hear from and interact with:

Speakers
- Graham Trickey - Senior Director, GSM Association, direct from London (volcano permitting)
- Lawrence Chinsam  and Greg Meyer -  Aepona, the guts behind the OneAPI

and from the Canadian carriers:
- Mike LaCouvee, Manager, Product Develoment, TELUS
- Renee Szuhai - Bell
- Saigin Govender - Rogers

Facilitated by:
Caroline Lewko, CEO, WIP

Register NOW!

Here are a couple of FAQs...

So what's this...

Tsahi Levent-Levi @ VoIP Survivor is the host of this week's carnival on Israeli Independence Day.   As always, there are many great blog to be enjoyed: Andy Favell on mobiThinking explains why Asia will (continue to) dominate the mobile Web, James Coop of Mobiaffiliates points out to the importance of targeting when it comes to advertising, and Martin Sauter of WirelessMoveslooks at some rudimentary security issues associated with public WiFi. Carnival is looking for a host for next week so please do volunteer.

At our WIPJam at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona back in February, we held a Coding Smackdown in which four teams of developers had just a few of hours to come up with an application to see whose skills and tools reign supreme. Participants were tasked with building a connected media application to help WIP members interact. The constraints were—obviously—the time and that participants couldn’t bring any code into the event, just commercially available APIs and libraries, and their app had to run on multiple devices.

This was no mean feat! Four teams had signed up to the event, representing Enough Software, MoSync, Nokia and OMTP joined at the last minute by Simon Maddox, catching everyone by surprise by jumping out from the audience. They all stepped up to the challenge, taking on their wrestler-inspired nicknames (no one accepted to wear a wrestler's costume), and cranking out apps. While Enough was the winner according to a show of hands from WIPJam attendees, the results...

This week's carnival is brought to us by Antoine RJ Wright on his 31st birthday.  Happy Birthday Antoine.  As always, there are several very interesting blogs. Indigo 102 diagnoses the “i Syndrome” , taking a look at why are so many apps being developed for such a small slice of the pie .Ajit Jaokar, at Open Gardens, posts his 36 Trends and Directions in Mobile that he’s tracking.  Our WIP Connector post questions if iPhone application developers will sit in a now fragmented iPhone world, or port their applications and services to other platforms.  Also included is the opportunity for mobile developers to have their voices heard in an Open Letter to WAC.  Be sure to add your comments.  The letter along with developer comments/input will be presented to WAC as a starting point for open dialogue between WAC and developers.

As you might have noticed on a few blogs here and there, Apple announced version 4.0 of the iPhone OS yesterday. Perhaps the most attention-grabbing new feature is that they've finally added multitasking, in the form of 7 multitasking services that developers can utilize to let their apps run in the background. It isn't "full" multitasking in the truest sense of the word, as Apple says enabling it through these services will allow developers to take advantage of the benefits of multitasking while protecting battery life and other system resources.

Other big news for developers: Apple has added a number of enterprise-focused features, including the ability for companies to host and distribute apps directly to employees' iPhones, bypassing the App Store, then manage them remotely. That's a pretty huge deal in terms of pushing the iPhone further into the enterprise.

Apple is also bringing some fragmentation into the iPhone ecosystem with the news that multitasking won't work on...

A big part of every WIPJam are the deep-dive discussion groups. In these, the main group breaks up for some small group discussion based around certain topics. Discussion leaders, with expertise and experience relevant to the topics, facilitate the talks, sharing their own experiences as well as drawing in those from other participants. Like every part of the Jam, they're built around community participation, not top-down lecturing or sales pitches. By bringing in everybody's knowledge and know-how, we're able to help each other grow and succeed.

Along those lines, we want to keep the great discussions started at our CTIA event going by posting some highlights from each one here, and giving attendees -- and the rest of the developer community -- the chance to comment and ask questions. We'll list the topic of each group, then based on notes from the discussion leaders, summarize some key questions, points and conclusions from each one. We hope they'll serve as a jumping-off point...

Thanks to our nearly 300 attendees, sponsors and speakers who turned out to our Jam in Las Vegas at CTIA! The event was a great success, with our audience representing a wide array of companies, interests and viewpoints. We managed to have lots of great discussion, interaction and education, and squeezed in plenty of fun as well, including our first annual paper airplane contest. We've got a rundown below of some highlights from the day's events, or you can check out the full agenda.

We kicked off the day with something new: some "Mobile Development 101" presentations covering some high-level basics of mobile development. At our CTIA events, we often get a lot of people who are just getting started in mobile, and we wanted to provide them with some quick sessions on some of the basic info to consider when developing for mobile. So we invited Robert Virkus from Enough Software to give an overview of platforms and operating systems and Raj Singh from Skyfire to talk about browsers,...