Carnival of the Mobilists #256 Live @ The Fonecast

Happy New Year! We kick off our regular weekly schedule for 2012 by setting up camp with Mark Bridge and The Fonecast for a round up of great posts and insightful 2012 predictions.

TheFonecast.com starts off 2012 with a look back at the milestones that marked 2011.
Carnival newcomer Albert Cuesta takes a light-hearted look back at joke made by Apple in 2004, when the company mused it might launch it’s own phone and bypass the existing mobile operators.
David Murphy of Mobile Marketing magazine brings us the last 12 months in mobile marketing with stories of acquisitions and growth.
Oren Levine offers an interesting opinion on the webOS open source plans.
Caroline Lewko at WIP offers her predictions about mobile development – and the issues that will dominate the 2012 agenda.
Chetan Sharma shares the results of his 2012 predictions survey of mobile industry professionals and practitioners.
Nikhil Pahwa of MediaNama talks about the ongoing decline of text messaging in India.
Antoine RJ Wright (writing for Mobile Ministry Magazine) reviews the potential role of mobile technology in education.
Tomi Ahonen talks about the convergence of ‘megatrends’ and stressed that mobile is the greatest economic opportunity of our lifetime.
Francisco Kattan examines Adobe’s decision to stop developing Flash for mobile browsers and wonders if the company can survive.
Ajit Jaokar delves into the USA’s much-discussed ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ and asks whether we’re likely to see a compromise on SOPA with both sides of the debate finding an acceptable middle ground.
James Coops at Mobyaffiliates compares the performance of admob – the global leader among mobile ad networks – with European contender mobfox.
Volker Hirsch investigates the Angry Birds phenomenon. (A whopping 6.5 million apps were downloaded on Christmas Day alone.)
MobileGroove guest columnist Scott Bown of Mubaloo tells developers to prepare themselves for the Kindle Fire, especially now the Amazon tablet is rumored to arrive in the UK this month.