A web design colleague of mine, Peter Merholz, recently wrote ask why people weren't excited about mobile technologies. He cited Janice Fraser's essay A Whole New Internet, describing trends such as Ajax, amateurization, social software, and so forth. He argued that nobody is excited about mobile, at least in the portions of the blogosphere
Of course, my UK colleague and mobilist Paul Golding would beg to differ. As would I. Paul's site is stuffed full of mobile ideas, and you'll find a few scattered on my site.
I think a lot of people are excited about a lot of the capabilities of mobile. Personally I am thrilled that Sprint has finally launched commercial location-based services, and I hope that they will soon turn on the J2ME MIDP2 location API.
There are a bunch of mobile dating services, allowing users to find who matches their profile and is nearby so they can go introduce themselves.
Camera phones are used for life caching, which are some interesting combination of photo sharing like flickr.com and blogging. In fact, mobile blogging in general is quite popular.
Personalization is huge, and only getting bigger. Already ring tones and wallpaper are huge hits; now things are going further. For example, operator-defined user interfaces could be branded by company (Coke phone), pop star (Jennifer Lopez), brand (Hello Kitty), sports team (Chelsea Football Club), sports figure (Tiger Woods), employer, or anything else.
Mobile phones are also starting to influence our daily lives in other ways. DoCoMo just took a 34% stake in a credit card company to support its mobile wallet business. In the US and Europe, PaperClick from NeoMedia is getting ready to allow us to use our cameraphone to integrate the physical world and the Internet.
There are many other exciting things in the mobile space, including new device types, new device keyboards, hard drives on phones getting ready for music phones, games, operating systems, and so forth. The amount of stuff is pretty amazing. Not only that, we will inherit anything useful that the larger internet community comes up with, leaving us with the best of both worlds.
Great links! Another thing to consider that should increase the excitement of mobile development in the US is the recent merger of Adobe and Macromedia. With this merger will come a whole new world of possibly making a hybrid of SVG and Flash Lite to be used for numerous interactive purposes on mobile platforms. I really think that this will push the graphic design industry to become interested in the mobile platform.