Tied in with the start of voting on the N2Y4 mobile challenge - Version 0.1.3 alpha of Community Mobile Channels has been released and is available at Sourceforge. It is now getting close to a beta release and we encourage as much feedback as we can get. This version has a few important changes as well as a number of fixes and improvements.

The major new features are detailed below: -

From http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3810911/Daily+Mobile+Internet+Use+Doubles.htm

"The number of people using mobile devices to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled in the past year, according to figures released by market firm ComScore this week.

Young males are the most avid users of mobile news and information, according to Comscor (NASDAQ: SCOR), with half of 18-to 34-year-old males engaging in the activity. The mobile Internet is also quite popular among females in the 18 to 24-year-old demographic. The report covered January 2008 to January 2009."

Since the first alpha release last week there has been activity on the project. The latest alpha release (version 0.1.2) provides a few bug fixes, format changes and the following additional functionality:

• Simplified method of adding internal and external links. External links are also sent to mowser transcoder to allow for mobile reading of non-mobile optimised sites.

I am very pleased to announce that the Community Mobile Channels Version 0.1 Alpha source code and demo is now available (on this site!). To visit the demo go to http://mainstreamingict.org/cmc

There are a few example M-sites (micro websites) loaded up onto the demo and you are free to register if you would like to upload content and publish a M-site of your own - a (very quick) guide to registering and publishing is given below:-

Following on from my previous post about a very relevant and topical project I wanted to see - I have been pulling together a number of scripts and other resources I have which should be a good start. With some more coding I am currently doing this will act as the framework for a open source project I have just started on sourceforge called 'Community Mobile Channels' .

Community Mobile Channels is a project which aims to utilise the power of new mobile technology to allow communities to create and publish quality mobile phone based web content without the need for a computer. 

This utilises the mobile web and will be based upon PHP and MYSQL. The 3 things which make this project different to a standard CMS are :-

I've been thinking a little about this challenge and it raises a few question marks in my head,

Firstly - it seems that many of our existing tools - including the thousands of web2.0 aps are not designed to meet needs of human rights or advocacy organisations or indeed most people who want to make a change. Most are designed to fulfill an already saturated market. Even new mobile applications are basically gimmicks - look at http://code.google.com/android/adc_gallery/ for the big prize winners of the google android challenge. Amongst them are: