This week marked a historic if artistically indistinguished moment in the world of mobile music.

For the first time ever, a ring tone topped the British singles best-seller chart.

The piece was "Crazy Frog Axel F," a series of melodious rings and beeps based on a decade-old high-pitched sound edit of a Swedish mo-ped revving up with the hook, line and stinker from the theme to 19xx's "Beverly Hills Cop."

I've been trying to assimilate all this. Of course I can recite back all the analysis and perspective I gathered from the interviews I did for Music Goes Mobile, the fourth part of my Future of Wireless series. Everyone's mobile, cell phones have better sound quality, ringtones rule.

On a personal level though, I just don't understand. Maybe it is because I come from the school that the only useful purpose for a ring tone is when you are in a crowd - to distinguish the sound of your mobile's ring from that of others. And the older I get, the less often I am anywhere near crowds. In fact this afternoon, we're going to forgo a huge festival down at our hometown's riverfront to spend a weekend in a county that has more cows than people.

If I want to hear music, I have a separate device for that. iPod works fine, and so does the music in my head.

But then again, maybe I'm just too dang old.

So I have a few thoughts on why Apple is talking to Intel. First, let me quote this Reuters article to provide context:

"To port to an x86 platform would be a massive undertaking and I'm highly suspicious of that," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, referring to Intel chips.

Apple always has a lot of projects in the works and could be evaluating Intel chips for use in future products, Bajarin said, adding that when Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs was asked Sunday night at a Wall Street Journal technology conference whether Apple would use Intel chips, "Jobs basically said no."

So I'm going to assume that porting the Mac OS is not a high priority at Apple these days. What I think is a high priority is wireless. Apple launched its Wi-Fi-power Airport way back in 1997. Here we are eight years later and Wi-Fi is everywhere, particularly in the home.

There have been lots of speculation about Apple launching an A/V equivalent of iTunes. Now, connecting the cable or DSL modem to the TV is a hurdle we're seeing lots of companies tackle, with limited success.

I've spoken to a number of techs who see WiMAX as the next-generation home wireless technology. That's because only WiMAX can stream multiple streams of HDTV content in difficult RF environments to all ends of the home.

Apple is also rumored to be getting into the smart phone business. I'd certainly love to see how they could simplify my Palm Treo 650. But what wireless technology are they going to support if and when they do get into this business? I wouldn't bet on EV-DO and I don't think they want to bother with EDGE or HSDPA either. Apple likes to lead with wireless technology, not follow.

I think Apple sees a lot of opportunities with WiMAX. And I think Intel sees a lot of opportunity in getting Apple to support WiMAX. Because the applications that WiMAX will support don't really exist yet. Sure, we're going to see wireless last-mile proliferate using WiMAX, but that's the easy part.

Perhaps all that Apple and Intel are talking about right now is processors. But I have to believe that there are people on both sides of the room thinking WiMAX.

This week, the Portland, Oregon City Council will discuss a five percent tax on cell services.

To which I say: it is about time. We need the money. Bring it on.

The issue here, as well as in the community where you live, is that many land-line users have forsaken their traditional public-switched telephone to a cell-only number.

Currently, those users are not taxed. As the proportion of land-line phone accounts declines in most North American cities, it stands to reason that the city- already strapped for funds - is even that much more hurt.

Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard has the best solution. Lower the land-line tax from the current 7 percent to 5, and match that with a cell phone tax.

Cool, I say. Too many of us use our cell lines too often, anyway. I mean, hang out at any mall, store, in front of the local high school, on public transit, even the street corner, and you see the teenagers gabbing away about what they are doing at that precise moment.

Tax 'em on over-minute fees, too. Collect $3-$5 a month from several thousand jabbering high schoolers, and heck, junior high schoolers, and maybe you'll raise enough money to hire another teacher for the school they go to.

The other day I was thinking how far hotels have come in providing Internet access for travelers.

Wasn't all that long ago that you would find hotels that were so freaked out their guests would steal the phone itself that they bolted the instrument to the wall. Unfortunately, that precluded easy compatibility with the laptop computers of the time. Anyone remember acoustic couplers?

Then, in the late 1990s, it was rare to find a hotel that didn't at least let you run a cord from the back of your laptop to the back of the phone. Whether or not your laptop's dialing software was compatible with the hotel's PBX was a matter of doubt.

That lasted a couple of years. Soon, by the turn of the millennium, hotels started to offer second lines for data. In most cases, that meant you could talk and be online at the same time. The only bummer: in most cases, speed was limited to dial-up.

Just two or three years ago, hotels that offered guests in-room high-speed Internet access were still somewhat of a novelty. Those properties that did provided such services offered it by means of an Ethernet cable that a guest could plug in to their own laptop computer, or a keyboard guests could use to control a basic-featured broadband Internet browser on the in-room television.

While in-room high speed wired Internet access is still growing, a relatively new feature has been coming to guest facilities in the last year or so: wireless high-speed broadband. I am talking about Wi-FI throughout the property, not just in the lobby, business center, or in-house restaurant but down to the farthest reaches of each hallway.

Most often, these services are offered for free. Although hotels have to pay wireless Internet companies for these services, they eat the cost to guests. After all, the type of guest who would use this amenity is likely to be tech savvy, a decision-maker. These are folks who, if pleased, would book you again - and recommend that their colleagues and peers do the same.

The growth of high-speed broadband has coincided with the rapid expansion of Wi-FI (Wireless Fidelity), a technology that allows laptop computers and other mobile devices equipped with an appropriate card to access the Internet directly over the air.

The widespread availability of these services in high-volume traffic locations such as airports, coffee shops and bookstores has convinced computer makers to offer laptops with the built-in ability to access the Internet via wireless broadband. So, with plenty of conditioning and marketing about the convenience of this technology, business travelers have been asking hotels if they provide the service.

Hoteliers report installation is inexpensive and with the use of wireless Access Points to relay wireless signals, the technology relatively easy to enable throughout the property. Plus, if a guest requests Wi-Fi, they are already likely to use the technology - making detailed training of front-desk personnel in Wi-Fi unnecessary.

Hundreds of properties are offering the service. In the next year or two, expect thousands.

Not long ago, a song from my early childhood entered my brain. The tune was, "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," by the late comedian Allan Sherman.

In the song, a homesick lad in his first moments at sleepaway camp is writing a letter home to his parents, complaining, in essence, that he is both bored and freaked (believe me, that combination is very plausible, and I say that as an adult).

Then, driving around on Friday night, the old song "See You In September" came on the radio. The lyrics had to do with a guy temporarily saying goodbye to the lady he had a crush on, biting his lip as he sang out loud how worried he might be that he would "lose (her) to a summer love."

What does this have to do with the Unwired world? Let me explain.

The world of the kid at the sleepaway camp, as well as the city gal at the summer lakeside resort, doesn't exist anymore. Communication meant writing a letter just before going to bed, and then dropping it off the next morning for pickup. Then,two or three days later, the letter would be delivered to your parents, or your loved one, or your now-ex loved one - in the hot steamy city.

Now, with cell phone and e-mail ubiquity, kids at summer camp can call their city-bound friends hanging out at the mall, and rub it in. Or, that 16 year-old camp counselor can call her high-school sweetheart every night on her Verizon calling plan.

I'm all in favor of staying in touch, but something's lost here. The ability to retreat into another world, to be essentially unreachable in summer, is lost.

No more "see you in September." Now, it is "I'll call you on your cell tonight."

I've been reacting with some skepticism to the recent FCC ruling that (apparently) all Internet phone service providers provide E911 services within four months.

The mainstream media has been portraying this decision as one in which the FCC has finally gotten it right, and that, besieged by public outcry, the four major U.S.-based regional phone companies who would need to provide all their 400 or so Voice over Internet Protocol rivals access to E911 have finally bowed to the public's wishes.

Would be that this were true.

Instead, the phone companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into this. They are announcing all these deals with the likes of Vonage because investor's hate uncertainty, lawsuits and regulation.

The problem is that while SBC's, Qwest's, Verizon's, and BellSouth's apparent deals with Vonage to provide them with E911 sound so cooperative, what is really going on with here is the industry equivalent of "most-favored nation" treatment. I don't see such a rush to accede to the E911 technical needs of those independent VoIP providers who are less capitalized than Vonage. And,given Vonage's latest $200 million funding round, that means about everyone.

Vonage is playing with the big boys now, no longer leading the charge for its fellow pure-play VoIP providers. That's why I say Vonage is now part of the establishment.

You hate commercial radio, right?

Of course you loathe the same focus-tested, 300 songs over and over. If that many. "More Than A Feeling" by Boston - what, for the 5,567th time?

And what if you are in, or manage, a local band? Good luck getting played on commercial radio. That station you'd love to play your music has a focus-tested playlist configured down to the last song. And the disk jockeys that sound like they are in your community could be hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

By now, you may be well aware of the Internet's ability to let your music get heard. You may not have heard of Mercora, a user-contributed digital radio network with more than 20,000 fully searchable channels available daily. Sound quality is great, and access costs either $4.99 per month, or $3.99 a month for an annual sub.

Just today, Mercora became available for Windows Mobile-based handhelds. Mercora IM Radio Mobile v1.0 is more like a portable radio with 20,000 channels than a mobile iPod. That's because most of its source material is streaming music tracks in real time, rather than downloads transferred from a Mac or PC to an iPod.

I'm not saying Mercora is better than iPod. It's just different, and may open you up to music possibilities you've never even knew existed. You can also IM fellow Mercora members about the tracks you are listening to, or to suggest that they tune in to a specific channel.

I hope this doesn't sound like an ad, but if you were to see an ad for Mercora, you would see that the new Mercora IM Radio Mobile v1.0 costs nothing extra if you are already a Mercora subscriber.

Just in the last week three of the four major old-style regional phone companies in the U.S., have been making frantic announcements that they have been talking to Internet-phone service leader Vonage about ways to ensure that Vonage's subscriber base (600,000 and gaining weekly) can call E-911.

Count Qwest, BellSouth and SBC among the ranks of those who are promising to play nice. Verizon made a similar declaration a few weeks back.

But, as so often happens in the world of corporate speak, those announcements aren't what they seem.

What is really going on is that all of a sudden, after protesting loudly that they are under no obligation to grant Vonage rights to their E-911 infrastructures, the big telcos are playing nice for two reasons. Which are:

*They don't want to be forced into providing E-911 access.

*They don't want to get sued anymore than they have for not offering this access.

Jes' so happens that the FCC is taking up mandatory E-911 on May 17. That's a week from today. And new Chair Kevin Martin has made noises about the fact that he'd really like his staff to come up with technical guidelines for making mandatory E-911 feasible.

Do I need to tell you how like almost any enterprise, big telcos hate to be regulated? See, if they provide E-911 access to competitors such as Vonage, that would render obsolete a key marketing approach on the big telco's part. That would be because the flavor of "911" that you get in most VoIP services does not route the emergency call directly to the dispatcher.

And, if Vonage - a company that wants to eat the old Bells' lunch - gets their way, you can bet thy pippy most of the other 500 or so VoIP providers in the U.S. will insist on the same rights.

Now as to the lawsuit part, State Attorneys General in Texas and Connecticut have each sued Vonage for making misleading statements about E911 in their subscriber contracts. I have read this contract, and as I have commented elsewhere, I think the problem is not intentionally misleading wording, but the fact that these contracts are clumsily crafted and poorly arranged from a topical organization standpoint.

Such transgressions are more sins against the language than the law. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think sins against our language are actionable.

Wait, there's more. It appears almost inevitable in that hockey-deprived land north of the 49th parallel, cumpulsory emergency services access will be mandated by Canada's telecommunications regulatory agency. Looks like a 120-day countdown.

That, I must tell you, scares our telcos half to death. They are acting nice because they don't want to be told what to do.

But even if Vonage does get welcomed into the E-911 infrastructure bosom of the big telcos, that really doesn't solve all the problem. You see, if you call 911 over a VoIP connection that does not map back to your physical address of record, there will not be an easy way for the emergency responder agency to know where you are. Third-party solutions exist, but it's unclear whether roaming VoIP E-911 will be mandated.

The bottom line, then, is the telcos are saying they will make nice with VoIP leader Vonage to stall for time.

Stall for time until these E911 access solutions become so transparent, so easy and inexpensive to implement, that it will be no sweat off big telco's back to do so.

I cannot recall ever using my Wi-Fi enabled laptop in a public library. Reasons: I never take my laptop there because most libraries don't have suitable connections. So,when I am on the road and not in a hotel with high-speed access, I either have to hook up my laptop for dial-up or find a hotspot.

If I were traveling in Maine, though, I'd have another option. Suupported by a $120,000 grant from the Maine Telecommunications Education Access Fund, the Walk In Wireless project has turned dozens of library branches in that state into free, Wi-Fi hotspots.

You have to bring your own laptop. For that very reason, true, we're not looking at feel-good-bridge-the-Digital-Divide stuff here. Still, my overarching reaction is that, OK, if I was (pun alert) a Maine man, and was out and about with my notebook, I'd have another choice. I wouldn't have to subscribe to a fee-based Wi-Fi service. I could just walk into a local library and surf the Web and check my e-mail.

I have an idea to make this service even better, though. Some of the first laptops to have built-in Network Interface Cards for Wi-Fi are starting to age. Library systems ought to have programs where you donate your used Wi-Fi laptop and get a tax credit for the current value of the laptop. Then, the laptop could be configured to work at a library with a hotspot capability funded by a service similar to the Maine Telecommunications Education Access Funds

I know a woman who is an organizer and fundraiser for choices at the beginning and at the end of life. Causes such as making sure that government does not force pregnant women to give birth, and ensuring that the same civil authorities would not deny a terminal patient with intractable pain a way to leave their body consensually, and with some degree of dignity.

But in terms of means to spread her message, this woman is more into meeting with like-minded people in small discussion groups in the basements of progressive churches than she is into advocacy spread by mobile multimedia technology.

Goddess bless her, but when she encounters someone who disagrees,she was, and is, also one for beating people over the head with her message. You know the type that talks at you rather than to you, and tries to shame you into thinking the way they do.

I remember showing her my fancy video and photo-capable cell phone. Not in so many words, she viewed my new handset as just another exotic creation of a transnational technocracy using technology to get us to spend our obsessive consumerist, materialist dollars.

At the time, though, there was not a Web site called Ourmedia.

Ourmedia is not an agitprop site, but one on which you can freely upload your photos, images,videos, or music you've made and have them available for all the world to see and hear. Your creations can come from a pricey SLR (single-lens-reflex) digital camera, professional DV camcorder, or in the case of images,just a pixel-ly cell phone camera.

The cool part about cell phones with cameras is that unlike digital cameras that most of us tote along only on special occasions, if you carry a cell with you, the camera inside it travels with you. So, maybe you can capture that iconic image that reflects your sociopolitical passion - the homeless man on the sidewalk with his dog, your aunt in the final, painful throes of cancer, an elderly farmer standing out in a field surrounded by suburban sprawl, a clever bumper sticker that says it all.

And then, through an easy process, you can post it to Ourmedia. Then, the next time you make up a fundraising letter or a poster touting a rally, you can include a link to your photos or clips.

Ourmedia is far from perfect, though. I hope that in the next several months, they really get their site usability thing together. Search is awkward and extremely limited, indexing of sections is confusing, and pageloading is timely and occasionally unsuccessful.

There is, though, vast potential in sites such as Ourmedia to act as true community tools for what we can do with our mobile devices.

Qualcomm is the Microsoft of the telecoms industry, for better and for worse. People in the telecoms industry typically either love the company or hate the company.

I lean toward the latter, so please keep that in mind as you read this brief review of The Qualcomm Equation by Dave Mock.

In this book, published earlier this year, Dave does an excellent and meticulous job of documenting Qualcomm's against-all-odds rise to the top of the telecoms industry. I did not realize the degree to which Qualcomm relied on government business in the early days and also did not realize just how close the company came to missing the cellular boat completely. Back when Europe set in place one standard and many in the US wanted to follow suit, Qualcomm stuck to its guns.

And I think that the US is better off for it.

By and large, the mixed-standards "mess" that we have in the US has turned out to be a pretty good thing. Because of competing standards, we have EV-DO, which is a much-faster technology than single-standard Europe has to offer. Competing technologies keeps everyone on their toes, and Qualcomm has certainly kept the GPRS vendors on their toes. Dave Mock documents this drama and makes sense of the very complex technical standards and jargon.

Mock is perhaps too kind to Qualcomm, particularly in the latter years, as the vendor transforms from David to Goliath. For example, the company has been in an all-out war with Wi-Fi and WiMAX over the past three years, and it is only recently that we now see the company starting to co-opt some of the same technology underlying WiMAX. Qualcomm recently ditched its much-hyped EVDV technology when it became apparent that carriers want IP and big pipes, something WiMAX was designed to address from the ground up.

I find Qualcomm to be a little lost these days, as if it is searching for another big bully to take on again; the trouble is, Qualcomm is now the big bully and it's taking on the types of innovators that it once was.

That said, anyone in the telecoms industry who wants to know how Qualcomm got to be Qualcomm should read this book.

Nochee is a restaurant and bar in downtown Minneapolis that by all accounts, caters to the unattached and newly unattached business crowd.

You know... Lexus, in-town loft, very comfy and growing portfolio, dressed to the nines, drinking the wines, politically liberal but fiscally conservative.. the finer things in life.

And as many of us would maintain, the finer things in life sometimes come in carbon casings of that other chromosome.

And for those of us who have gotten lu.. I mean, have met some really nice folks in these types of establishments, part of the initial hurdle is getting heard above the din.

But text-messaging requires no sound. Just a handheld communications device and a spare hand (while the other holds your fine Merlot).

To the rescue comes a thus-described Minneapolis restaurant and bar called Nochee. Every Thursday night, they give out a total of 50 BlackBerrys already set up for text messaging. They are only yours for the evening, but during the evening, the massive text-messaging and pingfest goes down.

At closing time, that's when the BlackBerry fest ends. You have to return them. But I wouldn't bet against every once in a while, the introductions facilitated by this promotional text-messaging communication perpetuate after closing time.