Mobile news round up

I've been a bit quiet this last week due to having guests over the half-term holiday. But I thought I'd start the new week with a round-up of some interesting bits and pieces happening in mobile from my in-box in the last few days. So, in no particular order of importance...

• 89 million SMS per day and rising in the UK which is a 25% increase on 2004. This is just peer to peer messaging and doesn't include any commercial text messaging.
  

• The UK Government is planning to use SMS for communications with the general public.

• The StarSight project has been nominated for “Best Short Range Data Application” in this year’s Mobile Data Awards. I'm particularly pleased about this as not only is this a brilliant idea, but I helped to put the team together and have done a bit of work on this project myself. Fingers crossed they win.

• If you're interested in mobile internet best practice, then this is for you. W3C's MWI Best Practices Working Group has released the first public draft. It is not yet complete and the group will be working hard on this document before it will become an official recommendation. The group is willing to hear the opinions of the community of mobile developers to see what's the opinion. As you will see there are some chapters where it clearly states that the group would like to receive comments, but I would like to point out that I would be happy to hear comments on ANY part of the document so that we'll be able to discuss it and find a solution. You can download the document here.

• Women have overtaken men in their interest in VAS (value-added services) with 53% of women interested compared to 47% of men - a reversal in the numbers from 2004. This is according to a recent round table discussion held by Buongiorno (via 160 characters).

• Nokia has introduced the Nokia Local Content Channel Solution, CoolZone, that is a Bluetooth based end-to-end solution for distributing digital content to consumers' phones in retail locations (via 160 characters).