As an email company, we see our customers thinking more and more about how they communicate with readers on small screens—namely on mobile devices via HTML emails. We know to design for mobile first, but what does that mean for HTML emails being read on iPhones and Android devices? We wanted to find out what people really want when they read email on their smartphones.

We spent four months researching the way email is consumed on mobile devices in an effort to define best practices for this communication channel.

What funders need to know about mobile - New report by @zerodivideorg #philanthropy #mobile #fundertech #nptech

RT @berkmancenter: RT @Harvard: Berkman Center and Pew Internet release first in-depth study of #mobile giving

Discover and join the vibe around your city, neighborhood, or building. Chat anonymously with people nearby without necessarily knowing them!

Vibe displays thoughts (text and photos) posted by nearby users whether at work, home, school, parties, ball games, conferences, etc. There's no registration so it's quick, easy and anonymous.

To contribute to the vibe, just post what's on your mind and select how far and for how long you want it visible.

You can share text, photos, and videos with people within 160 feet or miles away and for as little as 15 minutes or up to 30 days. You also have the option to tweet your vibes to your followers.

Vibe is useful at work (back channel for meetings and conferences), at school (lectures and campus life), sports (football and baseball games), and for fun (clubs, parties, treasure hunts).

Here are the distance and time options of your vibes:

Start groups with the people already in your contacts. When you send a message, everyone instantly receives it—it’s like a private chat room that works on any phone.

Later this week, I’ll be heading to South by Southwest Interactive, and joining about 15,000 others interested in the tech portion of the music, film and interactive conference in Austin, Texas. In preparation for my trip, I’ve been downloading mobile apps.

Here are some of the latest and greatest apps I’ve found to help me connect with others, find places to go and document and share my experience.

PirateBox is a self-contained mobile collaboration and P2P file sharing device. Inspired by pirate radio and the free culture movment, PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) to create mobile wireless file sharing networks where users can anonymously share images, video, audio, documents, and other digital content.

Accepting micropayments by phone is almost certainly the easiest way for you to instantly grow your business without any significant development or marketing investment.

Probably you are loosing many potencial buyers because you are not accepting mobile payment, it's not because they don't like your products, they really do; they just don't feel comfortable sharing their credit card number over the internet or they don't have a credit card at all, which is still very common outside the United States.

Accepting Micropayments with PayGol your buyers don't have to share any personal information and even not creating any account with us.

Of course, everyone has a telephone - there are more than 3 billion worldwide, twice as many as there are Visa cards, and even fifty times as many as PayPal accounts. By adding PayGol as a complementary payment option, you reach more people and receive more payments than with any other payment method alone.

AudioBox.fm is an open and mashable platform to store, manage and stream your media library in the Cloud.

Upload your media files and access them with the highest possible number of devices.
Developers can use our APIs to build cool and useful apps to manage their music in the cloud.

USAID is Cutting Edge When It Comes to #mHealth. Really? Really. /cc @katrinskaya #mobile #health

All of Facebook's privacy controls are now available from any browser-enabled mobile device to the more than 500 million people, like you, who are using Facebook in every country around the world. Few online services offer any privacy controls to their mobile users. None that we know of offer the same control as the desktop version.

Fascinating @AP article on #mobile and #healthcare - cell phones for health reminders, feedback, apps

reader poll: which niche tech topic would u like to see @rww cover more? #geolocation #ar #mobile #bigdata #IoT other?

Recently, the Progressive Communicators of Washington, DC (PCDC) held a panel discussion on Mobile Communications for Progressives at the World Wildlife Fund here in DC. The purpose was to bring together some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the area of mobile campaigns and to find out what is working for nonprofits.

The speakers Included The Following:

Jeff Lee: Moderator and past President of Distributive Networks, the company that ran the Obama text messaging campaign in 2008.
Jed Alpert: Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Mobile Commons, a leading mobile SMS campaign provider.
Susan Murray: Sr. Officer for the Red Cross managing corporate partnerships. Susan was responsible for the record breaking Haiti SMS text campaign that brought in over $30 million via mobile phones.
Ron Vassallo: CEO of Kaptivate and Author of Are We There Yet? Non-Profit Adoption of Mobile Giving.
Rachel Labruyere:  Reform Immigration FOR America (RI4A) Campaign. Rachel LaBruyere is the Deputy Online Director for the Reform Immigration FOR America (RI4A) campaign where she manages one of the largest SMS lists in the nation at over 140,000 names and numbers.

David Miller: David Miller is the founder and CEO of Mobile Discovery, a leading mobile and social media technology company enabling new types of interactive marketing

One key take away from the event from my perspective was around the fact that SMS and mobile giving dominated the discussion. This is no surprise, as Susan Murray from the Red Cross was a panel member and non-profits are always looking for additional channels to raise money.

Let's just put this out there: the Droid Incredible is the best Android device that you can purchase in America right now. It's better than the Droid, better than the Nexus One, and certainly beats the pants off of any previous generation handsets like the Eris, myTouch, or Cliq. It's not just a very, very good Android phone (though it is); it's also an excellent smartphone no matter how you cut it. If you're on Verizon right now, you're finally getting really great options for phones, but the Incredible is currently sitting at the top of that heap with a good bit of distance to the next in line. Sure, there are still issues like a lack of quality titles in the Android Market, and if a hardware keyboard is a must, this won't do the job for you. Also, while Sense is truly great on this phone, there may be users who prefer a more streamlined, stripped down experience. Still, if you're looking for an ultra-fast, extremely capable smartphone that has the guts and gleam to go the distance, the Incredible just might be the Droid you're looking for. Yes, we made that joke.

Mobilize helps nonprofits, political campaigns, and other groups utilize the power of crowdsourcing by giving their supporters a tool for sharing info, collecting data, and receiving donations.

More than half (52 per cent) of mobile phone users are now using the mobile Internet with email and social networking the most popular activities, according to new findings released today. The mobile Internet usage poll, carried out by user experience consultancy, Webcredible, revealed that of the respondents who used the mobile Internet, over half (55 per cent) mostly used it for emailing and social networking, demonstrating the evolution of mobile Internet usage since the poll was last conducted in 2007.

As the number of people using mobile devices increases, so too does the pressure to ensure that our websites look good and are legible on a mobile device. The ideal, and unrealistic situation, would be to test on real handsets, but obviously this would be impossible for most designers. Fortunately, there are number of tools available online, allowing you to put your site through its mobile paces.

The Mobile Commons platform makes it easy to launch interactive mobile campaigns in minutes. Campaigns are flexible. You can quickly make single purpose programs to do things like collect people’s email addresses at live events or you can build richer interactive experiences by combining phone calls or pushing messages to the web. Our features all work together to give you the power to create better experiences which drive higher response rates, get people’s attention, and fundraise more effectively.

FrontlineSMS is free software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub. Once installed, the program enables users to send and receive text messages with large groups of people through mobile phones. What you communicate is up to you, making FrontlineSMS useful in many different ways.

When those Apple advertisements tout "there's an app for just about anything," they aren't kidding. The latest example? A new iPhone application which just debuted in Japan's App Store transforms the handheld into a full-blown web server. Called "ServersMan@iPhone", the application allows your iPhone to appear just like any other web server on the internet.

For each of the 5 big topical trends described below, I've assembled some resources I think will be useful for anyone who wants to keep up with cutting edge developments in these fields in the next year.