"Survivor" mobile trading cards: "Fans can receive, trade and collect the mobile cards by texting the word "Tribe" to a short code. A total of 61 cards are randomly distributed in sets of three, which fans can then trade with others. Certain combinations of cards can then be redeemed for cash and prizes."

Why not? Cut out production and some distribution costs of physical cards, make it easier to provide new ones, link in to a communications network for swapping, etc. Seems to make perfect sense to me.

A few links that have piled up:

• Why be agile?
• Advocating the use of code coverage
• InfoQ and the roots of Scrum
• Quality is a bogus variable
• Anything but waterfall
• Automate your J2ME porting with preprocessing - we consider this an essential part of our development process: 1-click to compile 90+ versions of a mobile app :)
• Is software development like manufacturing?
• 7 deadly sins of programming
• Eventum, the bug tracking system used by the MySQL team.

Snipperoo: 10 seeeeeriously cool workplaces: "Our office is cool, but maybe not the coolest. We designed and build the table above to fit the space and to fit our working practice (we sit around it and work and chat)."

I had a longish email conversation with Andy Budd about office space recently. We're very fortunate with our office - more by luck than by design, we inhabit a near-dotcom-cliche loft space with exposed brickwork, wooden floors, and lots of light.

But FP has inhabited quite a few offices over the years: the spare room in the house that Jay, Dan and I shared; a small, flea-infested and burgled unit on the site of Magnus Volk's engineering workshop, now the Silicon Beach Training premises; Wayland House; the living room of Rosehill for 3 weeks; the attic of Rosehill for several months; and our current premises at Gloucester House.

In this time we've also played with several layouts, and the one which I think works the best is where we've had a group of 3-4 people, all facing one another. You get a lot of good communication, you all feel engaged with one another (particularly working on the same project), and distractions don't become too much.

A company whose office I loved was ThoughtEngine - they had a huge round table which individual folks would come and sit at when they needed to work together. I'm not sure how well this works when you're not all laptopped up, but I liked the freeform nature of that.

It's NetNewsWire clean-out day... Some mobile links I've not gotten around to writing about in more depth:

• Banking as a missed mobile opportunity
• Papers from a workshop on pervasive computing
• ScanR: "turns paper into useful digital information"
• Bluetooth distribution of menus
• A design pattern for interstitial ads on mobiles
• "Mobile must not make the same mistake as consoles"
• Flat rate pricing might eliminate minutes as a currency

  
  

Many think texting is safer, more fun than face-to-face: "A growing number of high school and college students who say they prefer electronic methods of communication for their speed and brevity as well as for the sense of control and security they can provide."