Future Mobile Web - Mobile Web News, Applications, Development, Design

MapQuest for Mobile Web, one of the most popular mobile internet sites,1 now has Traffic Reports to go along with a new look and feel.

Best of all - even with all these helpful, comprehensive features; MapQuest for Mobile Web is still a free service.² To check it out on your device, you can either type in www.mapquest.com on your mobile web browser, or you can plan on MapQuest.com from your home computer and click on “Send to Cell” within any of your search results.³

ShoZu has announced BlackBerry support for their self-titled app that allows you to upload pictures and video from your BlackBerry to sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and more. Source: Blackberry Cool

Google’s top priority heading into the auction was to make sure that bidding on the so-called “C Block” reached the $4.6 billion reserve price that would trigger the important “open applications” and “open handsets” license conditions. We were also prepared to gain the nationwide C Block licenses at a price somewhat higher than the reserve price; in fact, for many days during the early course of the auction, we were the high bidder. But it was clear, then and now, that Verizon Wireless ultimately was motivated to bid higher (and had far more financial incentive to gain the licenses).

Russell over at Mowser writes:

Google sent me a notice last week that said they’ve stopped serving ads to Mowser because of a violation of the ToS. It seems they don’t like the interstitial ad pages. Fine - we don’t like them either, so we got rid of them. Additionally, we were only serving a few thousand Google ads a day anyways, as it was just backfill to the more profitable AdMob ads.

I’m not going to bother to respond again. Google actually has competition in the mobile ad space so I really don’t give a fuck about not serving Google’s ads (their loss), but this does affect one of Mowser’s core differentiator which is ad swapping for external sites. I’m sure there’s a technical solution of some sort, as only the “site” has been “blocked”, though I’m not sure what that means since the server is doing the request for ads and displaying them rather than using JavaScript, though from now on it’s going to be sort of a pain.

It’s a shame the Google Adsense team couldn’t look beyond their standand one strike policy and see the value of the service Mowser is providing both publishers and browsers.

Hopefully we’ll see a plethora of competitors to Adsense in the mobile ad space such as admob so that alternatives are readily available should this happen to anyone else.