Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Patients can now use mobile phones in hospital wards after government guidelines were relaxed yesterday.

The move could spell the end of existing bedside phone services which are way too expensive. Hospedia, which operates 80,000 bedside phone, TV and internet stations in wards said

We will watch developments closely

I bet it will – rip-off merchants – they charge patients 10p a minute to make a call and incoming calls cost up to 49p per minute! It’s about time, huh?!

O2 Litmus, a new developers’ portal to help mobile application developers and content providers sell direct to consumer, whilst getting the attention of O2’s new business development team, held a Hack Day at The O2 today. This is an iniative I’m behind 100%, as it helps everyone to generate more revenue whilst providing customers with more choice. It’s yet another distribution channel which I think developers should get behind.

5 companies pitched their ideas to a panel of 5 judges, of which, I was one, with the infamous Ewan Spence being the magical compere. Below are the three winners.

1st

Mark Kirby and Antony Ribot from ribot. Their Twitter details are @markirby and @ribot.

Pitch

Call and text your jet-setting dopplr friends from your mobile.

2nd

Adam Cohen-Rose from KiTZOOM. His Twitter screen name is @adamcohenrose.

Pitch

Share your train journeys on twitter with myRail Lite on iPhone. Click the Tweet button on your departure, select your destination and carriage and it will send a tweet for you. Also see which train your friends are on and track them as they go.

3rd

Tim Langley from magami. His Twitter screen name is @TimLangley.

Idea in less than 240 characters
Environmental parking monitor
Uses LBS and match supply and demand
$500 mod for hire

Oh, by the way, I won 2 tickets with VIP passes to the Cold Play concert at The O2 for this Sunday

I consult brands in how to be more innovative in marketing and product development (yes, I know they’re entirely different). Mobile Operator O2, is one of the companies embracing an approach I like to call permanent beta with a new project called Litmus. In summary, it’s a new developer community portal which will enable them to accelerate new content and applications direct to the consumer.

Check out my post on the BIMA blog if you’d like to read more.

I’m delighted to announce that Paul Birch has just invested £150k (approx. $280k) in Wubud.

Paul is Co-founder, Bebo - sold to AOL for $850M. Founder, Cominded and Co-founder, Birthday Alarms; a social network with 50 million subscribers. So, he knows a thing or two about social networks.

Read more on the Wubud blog.

TechCrunch covered the story here.

I heard news of this from one of my Google contacts this morning - Google has just released an API to enable geolocation for mobile and desktop web sites. Lastminute (http://m.lastminute.com) is amongst the first to launch a useful location-aware site - it locates you without the need for GPS and then displays restaurants in your local area

What’s surprising is that the API is only useful if you have a Windows mobile or desktop browser. Watch this space for more device support soon though.

This will be extremely useful for social networks.

Check out the official Google blog for more information.