When buying a phone not only does the phone’s appearance influence your buying decision but also what the phone can do for you.  The first thing we do when we get a new phone is customise the wallpaper, ringtones and install our favourite applications.  I compiled a list with some of the most popular and useful applications:

Opera Mini is a free mobile web browser that compresses data before it is sent to your phone, enhancing your browsing experience.

Fring is a mobile platform that allows users to chat with friends via instant messengers like Skype, Google Talk and MSN to name a few.

If you are one of those people that gets withdrawal symptoms when not connected to the Internet, Pooosh is the application for you.  Pooosh allows you to chat with your IM friends and access Twitter and Facebook.  This is a great application especially when are stuck in traffic.

Gmail on your mobile is a handy application that allows you to access your email on the go, access and save drafts as well as view attachments like images, PDF files and Microsoft Word documents.

Pocit is a useful South African payment management application that is secure and cost-effective to use.  It allows you to make payments from your accounts, manage payment requests and transfer POCitMoney to any cellphone number.  POCitMoney acts like a prepaid debit or credit card and the money is available immediately.

amAze is a free GPS navigation tool on which you can search any location by address.  Other helpful features include vocal guiding through your phone, weather reports for your searched location or address, detailed maps and satellite images.

Put Things Off for iPhone is a paid-for application for those of us that like our to-do lists.  Users can create notes and lists and if a task is not done for three days the application moves it back to the Today tray.  Very nifty!

Which mobile applications do you prefer to use and do you / would you pay to use your favourite applications?

For the last two weeks I have been having major issues with my Telkom line, and not knowing what to do about it, until know…

I stick with Telkom because I’ve signed a contract, but I voice my utter disgust at the service delivery while singing the praises of an age old method of getting a message, and now data, from one point to another via the wings of a carrier pigeon.

Winston the Pigeon, owned by The Unlimited,  has gained overnight fame on all  social and media fronts with over 2600 Facebook fans, nearly 400 followers on Twitter and mentions across many news channels.The idea for Winston was born from the concept that a pigeon could do a better job transferring large data files than a Telkom landline. And who did a better job? Well, Winston was able to get a 4Gig card from Howick to Hillcrest in an hour and 8 minutes according to Kevin Rolfe of Unlimited, this excludes the download and short travel by car. This added to the total “data transfer” time which took it to two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds, giving Winston an upload/download speed of about 525kbps. The Telkom line was at 4% complete by the time Winston was picking at seeds and being admired by many, for his awesomeness.

So with the arrival of Seacom and now Winston, at R1 per day, it seems that Telkom might have a bit more competition than it had initially expected.

 Tracking users and their location has been, up until now, a crude form of trying to pin point a web users whereabouts using IP logging and guestimates.

GeolocationBut now, with an increasing number of web users surfing through their laptops and mobile devices, geolocation has become possible within a couple of metres of your actual position using IP and wireless data piggy backing on Google Location Services.

Firefox 3.5 is leading the charge in the browser category that allows websites to request your location, once you have given them permission to, of course. According to Mozilla, Firefox doesn’t track your location it only supplies it when a website requests it, so you have full control over who has access to your info.

This use of current technologies opens a host of new opportunities for marketers to target their market. Online advertising will become more relevant, search will become more efficient and using your mobile device to scan your surrounding will become second nature.

Many sectors can benefit from thinking innovatively about how to harness this technology. Having location data will make effective marketing, unstoppable.