Interesting, if contradictory, story re Carphone Warehouse: "Pan-European retail giant Carphone Warehouse is planning to pre-install its own content portal in the handsets it sells. Carphone is set to launch its Java storefront – called mymobilelife – in the UK this week as an OTA download delivered via WAP push."

Leaving aside whether this is pre-installed or delivered OTA (which will make a radical difference to its takeup), and the standard of execution, I like the approach: putting content closer to the customer rather than expecting them to browse around to get it. Hopefully the portal will do a bit more than just replicate WAP menus with some extra UI chrome.

Web as a platform "is a non-starter.  If I write a mashup using data from three sources, I'm relying on the reliability of all three of those sources (which opens me up to a lot of risk that I have very little control over).  Given that I may be competing with one or more of them (if I make their data more valuable, I'm probably taking some of their users), they don't have incentive to continue providing me with data reliably, unless they start charging me for the data"

Second Life escapists told to wake up: "An anti-poverty campaign has reminded the inhabitants of Second Life that while they fanny about wasting time and money hiding from their own trivial worries there are people are dying unnecessarily in the real world."

Apple iPhone to have two batteries, no network ties: "the upcoming gadget has two batteries, one for music playback, the other for the phone, so that listening to music all day won't limit the user's ability to make and take calls."

Yay. Here's hoping that all the other phone/MP3 manufacturers take note: the idea of a device which can play me my music without impacting my ability to make/take calls is much more appealing.

Virtual Worlds, Web 3.0 and Portable Profiles: " But the current 2D web, mostly linear to linear linking, is about to be enhanced by virtual environments in which we meet as avatars, interact as 3D moving objects that takes sharing, collaboration and communication to the next, predictable level."

I'd to go on record as saying that the future of the web will *not* be 3D worlds where we all meet as avatars. 3D worlds have been proposed as the next big step for everything for years now, and the fact that there are a couple of really popular game-type environments out there doesn't indicate to me that the whole web is going to move in this direction... any more than YouTube makes me think that the future of the web is all human knowledge distilled into mediocre-quality 10 minute video clips.

Mind you, I thought Gopher was great at this HTTP thing would never take off...