New and noteworthy in mobile for 5/25/09

By Ben Gross
in

Why text messages are limited to 160 characters: Mark Milian at the Los Angeles Times has written a brief and entertaining overview of how the Short Message Service (SMS) came be to the standard for mobile to mobile messaging and why the messages are limited to 160 characters. The length was originally determined in a decidedly non-scientific manner by the head of the non-voice services portion of the GSM standards committee and has stayed with us ever since.

Report: Mobile Website Performance Getting Worse: ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus covers the recent report from Gomez and dotMobi analyzing the performance of mobile sites in the airline, banking, and search industries. The data show that overall from March to April the performance of mobile web sites has gotten worse. The report scores each site on five metrics: discoverability (how easy it is to find), readiness (how easy it is to read) , availability (how reliable it is), response time (speed), and consistency (how consistently the site performs in different times and locations). The data from the report is interesting, but it unfortunately does not include either Google or Facebook leaving much to be desired in the search category.

Why Does The CDC Have Better Data On Mobile Penetration Than The FCC?: Mike Masnick at Techdirt points out the absurdity that National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has collected more accurate data on mobile phone penetration than the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The CDC’s wireless data are a byproduct of the agency recognizing that it was missing crucial portions of the population it was trying to survey. The CDC then began to gather data on mobile phone use in households to be able to better target its public health surveys.

Published May 25, 2009