Bebo acquired by AOL for $850m

more here

Guitars v's Art v's Wine v's Stocks

Sources – The Liv-Ex Index/decanter.com, Mei/Moses All Art Index, The Vintage Guitar Price Guide, Bloomberg

US Mobile Access, Data & Info research...

The Pew Internet and American Life project have just released some results of a research project in to US use of mobile data, wireless, mobile phone usage by age, income, gender, education, region etc. go here.

Social Network Atlas

via LeMonde.fr

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

a must read over at Wired

Naked Beta, Roll Up, Roll Up...

I would hereby like to cordially invite my regular blog readers (Feedburner says there's about 200 of you) to an early peek at Naked. Pls ping me your email address (mine is my firstname dot lastname at gmail.com) and early next week I'll add you to the Beta.
We'll have 1:1 and 1:M messaging working globally using a UK longnumber and the US shortcode will be added in a couple of weeks.
I'm hoping for a bit of honest and constructive feedback and some thorough feature testing. Thanks

iPhone Clones...

Redferret has a review of 5 iPhone clones

Naked explained...

Graffiti Wall

I think one of these would go down a treat in our new offices..


Graffiti Wall from Alex Beim on Vimeo.

Microsoft acquires Danger

First Yahoo, now Danger.

MS assets now include device (Danger + [OEMs]), device OS (Windows mobile & Danger), Mobile Service Platform (Danger) and Services (LiveMail + Messenger). Now potentially add in to the mix Yahoo assets; device app (Yahoo Go), Mobile Service Platform (they've got one but it's not widely known) and Services (Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Portal, Search, Ads etc) and you have the ingredients for an end-to-end integrated consumer proposition across mobile and web.


Oms got the scoop here
Danger press release here

Mobile World Congress Blogs

With most of my peer group enjoying a grueling schedule of meeting and parties in Barcelona this week, I'll be in the Naked office, putting the finishing touches to our Private beta release. But I'll be following the news at:

SMSText News
Mobile Mentalism
MobileCrunch
MobHappy
The Nokia Blog
Ft.com
Vodafone's Mobile World Congress Blog

Wi-fi hotspot in your pocket

Download this and you can turn your 3G Nokia Smartphone in to a WLAN - neat ;-)

[via Lifehacker]

Spooked

I'm completely spooked. Today, the team at naked came across this article by Nick O'Neill in The Social Times titled; "Get Naked But Do So in Private". We've never met Nick, never been in touch with The Social Times, nor are we aware of them knowing us.
Over the last 10 months we've been quietly building Naked to provide people with a way to share, interact and communicate in a more closed, private and intimate way. It addresses a growing wave of net debate and concern over the privacy of social networks and introduces a contextual construct to communication which has to date, been missing. This is important because it dictates how and who I want to communicate with and respects my privacy rights over that communication, rather than assuming that what I want to communicate is with everyone and everywhere.
The irony in the article is that "getting naked" is assumed to mean that you want to open up and share everything on the net with everyone. But with our upcoming Beta, you will soon realise that it means something very different...stay tuned...

GadgetStylist

A friend of mine has just launched GadgetStylist to help UK consumers decide which mobile best suits their needs; "the Trinny and Susannah of the gadget world – without the prodding and grabbing".
The site helps you find the right phone, points you to where you can buy it, and then once you've got it, they answer any questions you have on how to get the most out of it. Currently mobiles only, but planning to add lots of other gadgets in the future.
Well done Chris ;-)

Great creative...

saw this on socialnetworkingwatch - its for a chain of stores in the Netherlands

What Mobile Operators can learn from Politics...

Great post over at GigaOM

great ad

I like this new ad from Vodafone. Creative, atmospheric and clever.

Happy Christmas

Bubble 2.0 ;-)

Love it! Thanks Colin. Via the new Naked team blog

Mashup Event & Merrill Lynch Social Networking Research

I went along to Mashup Event last week which was on the topic of Social Networking. Merrill Lynch hosted the event and used it to present some research they did on the topic. Sadly I dont have time to offer you insightful and intelligent analysis of the results, but you can read the results here.

Give One Get One

"From now through December 31, 2007, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. $200 of your donation is tax-deductible (your $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will be receiving)."

How about a One Mobile Per Village (OMPV) Programme anyone??

Jason Devitt testifies to Congress

At Future of Mobile the other week, Brian Fling showed us this video - it left an impression on me and made me wish that I was as eloquent.

Future of Mobile - November 14th

There's a "Future of Mobile" event on at the BFI IMAX Cinema at London's South Bank on the 14th Nov. It's cheap to attend (£89) and they have a great line up of speakers. It's organised by Carsonified who put on a great show at FOWA last month.
Topics to be covered that caught my eye include; Beyond WAP: Advance Browsing, Mobile Ajax, and the future of the Web (Dan Appelquist from Voda & MobileMonday), Gmail and the Next Generation of Mobile Web Apps (Marcus Foster from Google), and the keynote from Tony Fish: Tuning in to Mobile Culture. See you there?

Pipl - better people search

I like this - Pipl is a search site specifically for people - the returned results are more comprehensive and its a category which has a lot of scope as more and more of people's personas and lives are mirrored on the net.

"Unlike a typical search-engine, Pipl is designed to retrieve information from the deep web, our robots are set to interact with searchable databases and extract facts, contact details and other relevant information from personal profiles, member directories, scientific publications, court records and numerous other deep-web sources".

Prostate Cancer Awareness

The UK is sometimes known for it's eccentricities and this month is no different. November is now "Movember", and to raise awareness of Prostate Cancer, men up and down the country are growing a variety of facial hair styles to make the point. Here's my efforts - I went for the Mexican druglord look which ensured I had plenty of room to move on the tube this morning ;-)

Donations welcome here