Flickr Photo: johnmukA couple of weeks ago, my 2-year-old was kind enough to let me listen to NPR on our way downtown, and I heard a funny little snippet about Spain's most popular ringtone:

...a royal voice saying “Why don't you shut up?” — the recent outburst of Spain's King Juan Carlos to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela at a summit in Santiago, Chile.

I meant to blog it but forgot. (I think my mind was trying to erase the subsequent event of that car ride, namely listening to "A Spoonful of Sugar" 13 time in a row.)

Imagine my delight when Katrin Verclas, esteemed former NTEN ED, tweeted a link to an Economist piece stemming from an event she ran in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It's a great summary of some of the cutting edge mobile work that's going on around the world, from election monitoring in Nigeria to getting around censorship in Pakistan -- and it references the King Juan Carlos ringtone.

Are mobile phones really the next big thing? It certainly looks that way. An article in the Baltimore Sun points out that the US market is really busy right now making sure that the next generation of mobile phones will be much more than phones:

Some say the moves are adding up to a U.S. mobile phone market that looks more like the computer world, where consumers choose a basic model and load whatever optional software they want.

This is exciting news for nonprofits, but it raises a few important issues for the sector to think about:

1. Compatibility. Those of you who format HTML newsletters know what a pain it is to get your message to look nice in Hotmail, Outlook, Mail, Gmail, Yahoo and every other email client out there. Try running a multimedia mobile campaign. Certain ringtones only work on certain models. Videos need to be encoded differently for various service providers. We need carriers and phone makers to agree on some standards before mobile campaigns become really affordable.

2. Access. The Federal Communications Commission is holding an auction next year (starting January 24). They'll be selling the airwave space that allows all those multimedia bits to get from one part of the ether to the other. As it stands now, bidding carriers will have to promise that a portion of the spectrum is "open access," or can be accessed by a device from any other carrier. That's good, and it needs to stay that way.

It's kind of wonky stuff -- but it's pretty critical to our ability to implement and pay for mobile campaigns in the future.