How Much Mobile Data Do You Actually Use?

It’s human nature to worship the power of unlimited choice.  Take food. Even though our bodies are designed to digest a single meal at a time (and a finite number of calories) we go crazy for all-you-can eat buffets. Hence the undying popularity of high-end hotel buffets in Metro Manila like Shangri-La’s “Circles” and Sofitel’s “Spiral” and even mall-based restaurants like Dad’s in Megamall and Yakimix at the Podium.

Never mind if buffets are much more expensive than a single meal. The notion of having unlimited choice makes the buffet a “good deal” - although what it really makes us do is consume more than what we normally eat. Hence the expanding waistline of the modern urbanite.

It’s the same with mobile data. Given the choice between 250MB of data or an unlimited data plan, our buffet mentality always kicks in. We want unlimited! It might be more expensive, pero mas sulit! Because you never know when you might want 252 MB instead of 250.

Mobile data plans available in the Philippines now give us the power of choice. Do you want unlimited data? If so, the typical unlimited data packages for prepaid and postpaid mobile subs on an operator like SMART are P50/day, P300/week, P1,200/month. That is all you can eat, without data caps.

Mobile Internet Opportunities: My IMMAP ’08 Presentation

As I promised in my IMMAP talk, I’m making my presentation (on the topic “Opportunities on the Mobile Internet“) available for download here. It’s a PDF file of around 2.5MB in size. I think that’s pretty compact, considering the Powerpoint was about 40 MB. Bon apetit!

Download the PDF file here.

We’ve Been Mobilized!

A recent change in job function meant that for myself, promoting the mobile internet had become no longer an oddball interest, but a full time occupation. In the time-honored tradition of “practicing what you preach,” I decided a mobile version of this blog was in order, but thought I would need to go through the trouble of setting up a full version of WordPress and hunt down a mobile-friendly theme that rendered in plain xHTML to do so.

It turns out there’s no need to go to all that trouble, as I just stumbled on a quick and dirty method.

Kaiwa, that Swiss company I recently wrote up who provides free QR Code and Data Matrix readers, has a site up called Feed2Mobile that can turn any site into a mobile-friendly site, and it even provides a QR Code that allows you to enter this into your mobile browser without typing in the lengthy URL (after which you can bookmark the site).

You can also paste the code on your blog so other readers with code readers can access your mobile site as well.

Here’s a step-by-step procedure:

1. Go to http://feed2mobile.kaywa.com
2. Enter your site’s URL.
3. Feed2Mobile generates a QR code,a URL of your mobilized site, and some javascript to paste into your blog to display the code.
4. Test the site by scanning the code with your phone using one of the many code readers out there.
5. View your mobile-ized site on your mobile browser.
6. Bookmark the site and send the link to your friends via SMS.
7. Drink beer and celebrate.

Ayus. If there’s a shorter and easier method, I’d like to hear about it.

One caveat – Feed2Mobile doesn’t actually convert all content in your site to mobile format. Essentially it’s an RSS reader (hence the name), so it works best on sites like blogs, where most content is available as an RSS feed. It’s good enough for most blogs though.

If you don’t have a QR reader, you can visit my mobile site by typing this URL on your mobile browser: http://decode.kaywa.com/202185820

In the meantime, here’s a short list of sites you can download QR readers from:

• Kaywa Reader
• Nokia (for Nokia Series 60 phones)
• i-nigma