Xumii, a mobile service that lets you access feeds of activity from other social networks and services, is launching a private testing version (beta) next month.

When I first looked at it, I was skeptical. I've already written that large, web-based social networks such as Mypace and Facebook have moved to offer their services on mobile, and have momentum. It's a little late for new players to enter the mobile social market.

Specifically, MySpace and Facebook are closing deals with carriers at a furious pace, I'm told. Carriers are attracted by their large web audiences and the promising growth of their mobile web sites and applications. I also hear that mobile-only networks (there are many of them ...

Two weeks ago Google announced the first-round winners of its two-round Android Developer Challenge (ADC). The contest, which is promising a total of $10 million in prize money, is intended to entice developers to come up with exciting new applications for the company's mobile Internet platform, Android, which is clearly important to Google's future (chief executive Eric Schmidt says the mobile web will be bigger than the PC Web within a “few years”).

The contest’s first round drew in over 1,700 applications sent in from all over the world. And its 50 winners each get $25,000 plus the chance to compete in Round 2, where 10 winners will get $100,000 each and another 10 ...

Mobile life is blooming. Some 47 mobile social network companies have emerged globally, to help cater to our need to message and communicate while on the go.

But what about the huge incumbents, like MySpace or Facebook? Will they thrive on the mobile web?

Well, the 47 mobile-only networks will probably tell you that mobile is a whole different animal, and downplay the threat of a switch by their millions of users to those big guys. But in reality, even though some mobile-only social networks have gotten big — Mocospace, for example, has 1 billion page views worldwide, most of it in the US — their computer-based rivals are catching up now that new wireless devices, such as the iPhone, are making ...