So another World Cup is over. 64 games broadcast around the world. And with games being played at various times throughout the working day, this meant alternative ways were required to view them. First up for me was streaming online. I watched a number of games whilst in the office, and my experience was pretty good. I can probably count on one hand the number of times the stream buffered for the opening game, while I have no complaints over the quality of viewing. I particularly liked the BBC coverage, providing short clips of important action I missed while involved on a conference call! I did manage to see the England v Slovenia game on television, so was not one of the record-breaking 800,000 concurrent streams, but having spoken to several people who were unfortunate (or fortunate) not to be able to get out of the office, the experience sounds somewhat mixed in terms of quality. For one week of the World Cup I was over in the US benchmarking a number of mobile video solutions – one of which happened to be Sprint TV on the new HTC Evo (its large 4.3” display and fold out stand make this a great device for consuming video content). I was very impressed with ESPN Mobile’s coverage of the World Cup. Aside from a few glitches (e.g. temporarily showing the commentary for Nigeria v South Korea but pictures from Argentina v Greece), it was easy to follow the game. The picture was about 7 seconds behind television coverage, but I don’t remember a single instance of buffering – and I wasn’t even in one of Sprint’s few areas of WIMAX coverage. So while congratulations go to Spain for winning the World Cup, I must also say congratulations to those who made the World Cup a successful experience viewing over multiple screens. - Paul Brown ESPN coverage on the HTC Evo

Every now and then I read something online that I want to share with other people. The BBC is one of the websites I visit most using my mobile, so I was quite excited when reading an article I noticed the option to share it via SMS. Thinking this was a great little feature, I decided to give it a go, and clicked on the ‘SMS’ icon. Unfortunately I was disappointed at what greeted me. In order to share the article, I was taken to another webpage, where I needed to enter my friend’s number. Suddenly, sharing this story got a little complicated. I don’t know about you, but the days of remembering people’s phone numbers are long gone for me. I wasn’t compelled enough to go and look up their number in my phone book, write it down, and return to the webpage, so I just gave up. What I would have liked was to see some kind of integration between the browser and my SMS application, where clicking on ‘SMS’ opened up a new text message with the link to the story, and then I could just send the message to my friend (or friends) who I thought would be interested. So while I have to give credit to the BBC for introducing this initiative, my engagement will be minimal unless it is integrated with other phone applications, or I can start remembering people’s phone numbers… - Paul Brown

Strategy Analytics has found that Facebook and Google are the brands that users most want to have on their mobile phone in 2009. Personalized content and services are more desirable than media brands, with Yahoo! rated highly in the USA and UK, while MapQuest and Weather.com in the US and MSN in the UK both received strong interest from respondents. When it comes to television channels, US respondents show strong interest in FOX, Comedy Central and HBO, while BBC1 and Sky Movies are the most desired UK channels. The top five most desired brands in each country were:

WML clients can view the full report, Facebook and Google Most Desired Brands for Mobile. Paul Brown