SMS is a fantastic service for person to person communication, but just about every other aspect of it is broken. Lately I’ve been paying a lot more attention to messaging because of the mobile web. It’s a current area of drastic disparity between native apps and web apps on mobile, and something that keeps folks tied to a particular platform. SMS sucking is why we have cloud to device messaging for Android and iOS and BlackBerry specific push APIs.

I spent the day yesterday down at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View. Awesome job once again by the organizers, who managed to pull together plenty of interesting companies I wasn’t yet familiar with and a great set of judges. I reconnected with a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a long time too, so awesome day all around.

The topic for November at Mobile Monday Silicon Valley is Top Startup Legal Mistakes. I’ve been talking to a whole boatload of startups lately, and this seems like a really timely topic. There are a lot of folks out there looking to strike out in a new direction. While there are some awesome resources out there to give folks a bit of a lift (see the Series Seed public funding documents for example), there’s still a lot to wrap your head around if you’re starting out for the first time. So we pulled together a few lawyers who have been through the process plenty of times before to point out the common things to be aware of and discuss how to make sure you avoid the most difficult issues.

There was a decent amount of discussion about the virtual goods vs advertising numbers that Flurry released. Awesome set of numbers they put together there, thanks for sharing them!

I think this prototype of an open web app system from the folks at Mozilla is quite interesting. First thing to note is that it works currently on Android and iPhone devices even in the prototype version they have up. Not mobile specific rendering on some Android devices, and there are a few issues with links in overlays, but the core is working.

Getting people to build mobile websites has been an uphill battle for a long time. We had a chicken and egg problem. People didn’t browse the web from their devices because the experience was horrible, and website owners didn’t make mobile optimized versions because people didn’t browse from their devices. That’s all changing now, quickly and drastically. I just want to pause for a second to recognize both Twitter and Facebook for their role in making it happen, cause between the both of them they’re the major drivers of adoption of the mobile web based on what I’m hearing.

Yesterday I attended and participated in a subsection of the CTIA show organized by Jai from Open Mobile Solutions called developer pitch sessions. There were some interesting presentations in there, and some great conversations. Here are a few of the bits I thought were worth mention:

We had our Apps vs Web Apps discussion at Mobile Monday SV Monday night, and unfortunately lots of folks thought we didn’t really do the topic justice. I want to thank Raj and the panel participants for making a go of it, I think they did a great job of covering a ton of ground. This is by no means a criticism of them, just an attempt to summarize and extend the conversation and feedback that came up after the panel. Which actually is a fantastic sign. Most of the time when I talk to folks after a discussion at MoMo they don’t have a strong opinion. But this time we definitely got some reactions! So maybe we did do our job well after all :-)

I don’t have an N8. Apparently some folks at Nokia are surprised by this. Maybe they bought into the corporate line about Nokia really caring about developers these days. Nokia gave Om a phone at Mobilize (and his “Thanks, but do I have to use it?” response probably sums up one of their flaws in gauging the right avenues for promotion), a few of the business folks at Mobile 2.0 had one, but I don’t have one. Normally, this wouldn’t surprise me actually. Despite all the talk about companies who love developers, what they really mean is they love folks who blog about developing. Those of us who just keep building high value businesses and aren’t necessarily quite so vocal, not so much.

I was at Mobilize 2010 yesterday. Fantastic event! Congrats to the whole GigaOm team, great job. Here’s some of the stuff that really stuck out for me: