A few links and noteworthy stories stumbled across today:

MMetrics released a study that shows that mobile gaming was the fastest growing sector of consumer content used on mobile phones. While gaming grew the most over February (8.2% change), it's also by far the most underutilized of their seven categories, far behind ringtones or text messages. We don't need to sit around and guess why American's haven't yet gone crazy for games on their phones, it's pretty clear to me that it's still just too damn hard for the average user to download, pay for, and install a game on their phone -- even tho' it's come a long way, there's still a lot of work that could be done by cellphone companies to make it easier and better for consumers. It's not that people prefer to play "snake" -- it's that doing much more is too much to figure out. And while I don't believe that passing games around via bluetooth will do you more good than evil, one of the factors that contributed to the growth of apps for the Palm was the ability to beam and share apps.

From slashdot yesterday: http://www.buzztracker.org/ which plots the location of news items from google news. A peek at the archives shows that the majority of the "top locations" is in the middle east -- Baghdad, mostly. Actually, I'm mostly puzzled about the Google News terms of service for something like this -- is this kosher within the rules?

And I can stop trying to do this myself now (or worrying about expending effort above any Google Terms of Service): http://mobile.google.com/local provides a phone interface (for WAP and XHTML) for looking up local businesses, along with features and functions from the Google Local as well as Google Maps (image above). Nice work -- maybe I'll still try hook it up to the GPS.

From smartmobs, a great link to a real, live working service of phone-based electronic payments -- and, get this, it's not in Europe: it's working in Brookline, Massachusetts.

When customers step into a cab from the Hello Taxi company in Brookline, Mass., they don't have to worry about fumbling in their pockets for cash, or about swiping their credit card in a moving vehicle, or even about finding their wireless fob to wave in front of a reader. To pay and tip the driver, passengers just say the last four digits of their cell phones, and then they can run.

Hello Taxi is one of about 80 merchants in the Boston area working with a creative means of payment processing from a company called MobileLime. MobileLime CEO Bob Wesley says the service is much more than a payment method, as it also gives retailers real-time marketing, a cardless loyalty program and a CRM (customer relationship management) package.