Firefox groans under the weight of tabs, it must be time for a link-dump:

  • Mobclix have some great stats on iPhone App Store downloads, MarkJ summarises them nicely, and PEE points the way to iPhone app success;
  • Ow. Some fairly outdated views on mobile, music and DRM from Hugh Griffiths of Microsoft (wasn't he previously at O2?); locking music purchases to handsets? Hopefully this'll be one of the things MS amend and change after getting feedback from users, few of whom I can imagine will support such locking;
  • For reasons which I hope will become apparent later this year, we're very interested in cross-cultural design right now: putting Hofstede to bed, the washing machine that ate my sari, and this excellent article on design for international users have been good brain-food;
  • Robots: organic and sweating;
  • Palm vs Apple, a lawsuit seems inevitable...
  • And for comedy value, SnifTag (eerily similar to a use case we stuck into some design work for an operator back in 2003), and I Get Your Fail, a blog of game cockups (probably getting funnier the more you know about rendering technology, I suspect);
  • Cute example of thinking beyond the UI your software provides, courtesy of 37signals;
  • Mobile marketing is "burning hell hot" - more details of the ad campaign Tomi Ahonen referenced at the Future of Mobile last year: "Tohato introduced two very spicy snacks, the one called ‘Burning Hell Hot’ and the other, his archenemy, ‘Bazooka Deadly Hot’. The two flavours were represented as masters of an army that could be joined by buying one of the two flavours in the supermarket. Using the QR-codes – 2D barcodes - on the packaging, the consumer could join the army of his master in a massive online multiplayer game. Every night at 4 a.m. a new battle between the two armies would start at one of the 31 different online battlefields, indicated with names like ‘Sweet Suckers Execution Hall’ or ‘Ouch, The City of Anal Torture’. By either training or recruiting friends to signup, players could get promoted and have a better chance of winning. "
  • Interesting interview with Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, who've funded Palm - particularly good to hear him critique the iPhone as a device strong on consumption, weak on production;
  • Depressing news from the average hotness rating of various academic disciplines;
  • Conference videos from PICNIC last year - yay!