1. Fring

The best and ultimate aggregator for Social networking, Skype and leading Messenger services including Win Live Messenger, ICQ, Y! and Google Talk.  Fring brings all of your contacts into one list, including those from the handset, Messenger and Skype accounts.  As you scroll down your list, Fring indicates whether they are are a Messenger or Skype contact, and you then connect to that contact via chat, VOIP or a normal mobile network call.  It also now supports an open developer API, and new app's for Fring include Facebook, Google Mail indicator and Olympic reports and news.  It's not quite as powerful as the individual applications...so for instance Win Live messenger has allot more features in it's original stand alone version (see below), but the beauty of Fring is that it brings everything into one place.  Very good handset support already, which is key and pretty challenging to get right.  Great branding too.  Not sure what their business model is..but one to watch

2. Google Maps for Mobile

Still the easiest and most impressive of the mapping services, particularly just for on foot city navigation...less good as an in car alternative.  Easy to use, intuitive search.  Perhaps it's best feature is that it does not need GPS, and can make a pretty good stab at your location by triangulating mobile phone mast locations - not as accurate as GPS, but surprisingly good, in Sydney at least. It's also fast,  it really bugs me when even the latest phone takes five minutes to get the necessary number of satellite links when I'm running late for a meeting.    When they incorporate Streetview (already enabled in the PC version for Sydney) this will take on a whole new way of navigating through cities.

3. Windows Live Messenger app

Easy to use and gives instant access to all of your Messenger contacts.   Most of the power of the PC version...see who is on-line update your profile and personal message just like the full PC version.  With a QWERTY keyboard phone it is superb.  Favourite feature - the ability to record your voice and send your buddy a voice file.

4. Gmail app for Mobile

Just streets ahead of Hotmail for mobile....man, why is Microsoft so slooooow at stuff.  This is POP 3 enabled, easy to use.  But best of all, it enables you to read html formatted emails, and as around half of mails are now in this format this is a pretty important feature.  Neither the Hotmail wap version, or trying to bring Hotmail into a native handset email reader, enables the user to read html mail, and just renders it in a meaningless techo babble.  Come on Microsoft, give us a decent version on Hotmail for mobile yer lazy geeks

5. Music Station from Omniphone

A simple, powerful premise....get unlimited music from a library of 1 million tracks, for a low weekly free.  Music station gives us a real alternative to iTunes, and it's custom designed to work on mobiles.  This means that it cleverly plays to the strengths/limitations of Mobile phones, and optimises play lists based on how much you play a particular song, and the extent of your phones memory, dropping out less played songs for more popular ones.  This is going to be an awesome way of getting music on your mobile.  The main barrier to mass take up?   Handset support

6. Zyb

Vodafone's recent acquisition, and big ambitions lie ahead for this Scandinavian company.  The premise for now is a simple one - store and back-up all of your phone contacts on-line, and never worry about losing them if your phone get's nicked or lost down the back of a cab.  I use it to manage and transfer contacts across multiple handsets.  In the future, Zyb will play an important part in bringing the contacts that are truly important to you, the people in your mobile phone, closer together through innovative sharing of music, location and a bunch of as yet un-imagined mobile based experiences

Google have switched on Streetview for Sydney in the last couple of weeks. As usual, it is a predictably brilliant execution, though not without controversy.  The street level photography  as well as filling Sydnersiders with wonder, as they take a virtual walk around their City, has already exposed several cheating spouses, and one bloke who had passed got drunk on the side of the road, caught on camera by the passing Google camera, and then spread across the Aussie press for everyone to have a good laugh at.

Anyway, here is my 'hood. Click on the link here, click on A, then click Streetview on the window, and then use the nav keys for a squiz around Kirribilli

I was lucky enough to go to the main winter music festival here - Splendour in the Grass - at the weekend, with some very friendly record label people.  Great weekend, smallish festival, about 30k people, up in beautiful Byron Bay.  The music scene here is un-expectantly brilliant...i say un-expectantly as about four years ago it was shite and seemed to be comprised of second rate guitar bands. Now it's electronic eighties influences a gogo, with Ladyhawke (brilliant tho strictly speaking Kiwis), the Presets, Cut Copy, Sam Sparro, most of which are good enough to be picking up plenty of air play back home.  We've got my other favourite electro band of the moment Ladytron visiting these shores next month.  Happy Days

I had an interesting night the other day, at a very enjoyable dinner organised by Random House.  Their MD was in town, and they got a bunch of Australia's Digital leaders to talk to them about where we think the digital content business is headed over the next few years across devices, mobile and the web. 

One of the interesting things about the book business is how resilient it has been in the age of digital delivery.  Book sales, especially fiction, have been pretty much stable over the last ten years, while broadcast tv viewing, and paper newspaper sales have been in a tailspin, ravaged by new digital distribution channels.  And they remain a refreshingly advertising free haven by and large. 

They're also portable, relatively cheap, and DRM free - by which I mean you can just quite happily pass it onto another interested reader without fear of being prosecuted by the publisher (unlike the record industry).

I think we all agreed that even in their current, environmentally unsound, dead tree format, they'll be round for quite alot longer, until roll out paper thin electronic displays become the norm (which is a way off, but not light years away).

For my business, i.e. distributing content over mobile, the audio book phenomena doesn't really work - they're way too long to download over a 3g connection.  apparently audio book sales through iTunes and other channels are a big growth area now

I refer not to the Pope, who also arrived in Sydney today, but to the new 3g version of the i Phone, or the Jesus phone, as it's become known, due to it's devout band of Apple disciples, who queued for much of the night last Thursday for the official launch.

Went sailing on Sunday.  22 degrees, sunshine and blue skies.  A pod of 15 Dolphins jumping in front of the boat. Pretty good.