Mark and I were deeply saddened when Nokia shut down TheFeature yesterday. Fortunately, our intrepid editor and pal Carlo Longino has joined Russell Buckley at the MobHappy blog and former Feature writer Mike Masnick at Techdirt! We look forward to following Carlo's insightful rantings on mobile tech at those two sites and at his own Mobile Music Blog. Carlo's first MobHappy post is about the potential for Podcasting to become a perfect form of mobile phone media:
My basic idea is that RSS makes a lot of sense in the mobile space to deliver information to devices. My first idea was movie listings: a user could set up a profile with their 5 favorite theaters, and then the showtimes for those would be updated via RSS every night at 3am, transparently to the user. That way, the current information is always available on the handset, without having to fire up the browser and connect to the network. Other information could be delivered the same way, using RSS to replace SMS sports score alerts and so on.
So what happens when audio content (or even video, down the road) is thrown into the mix? Instead of just having static content regularly updated to a device, now you've got multimedia. It also solves one significant hiccup for podcasting: to take content mobile, you've got to sync your MP3 player with your computer. Using mobiles over the network takes that out of the equation, making podcasting a little bit more exciting…
That way, a user's always got the latest content in a device that's always with them, and the only action required to get it is to subscribe. It becomes real radio on demand — the shows you want to hear, anytime, anywhere, since they're delivered right to your mobile handset.
