A large percentage of the cell phones and PDA's sold over in recent years have the ability to browse the web, either using Internet bandwidth provided by cell phone service providers or using wireless connections to Wi-Fi hotspots. How would you like to have the world be able watch and hear you play guitar on cell phones? Think about something similar in concept to a flamenco-YouTube for cell phones.

You may be thinking that cell phone viewing screens are extremely small. That is true, but have you seen the quality video images produced by the better cell phones? The video image quality produced by my HTC cell phone is excellent. The screen size is small, but viewed up close YouTube videos actually look better than they do on my desktop computer screens.

You may be thinking that the audio quality produced by the small speakers in cell phones is poor. That tends to be true, although the miniature speakers in some of the better cell phones sound surprisingly good for their small size. However, plug in a pair of ear buds similar to those used with iPods and other media players or use Bluetooth wireless stereo earphones with a Bluetooth-compatible cell phone (Bluetooth compatibility is increasingly common in modern cell phones) and the audio quality tends to be better than the audio quality produced by most desktop computer speakers.

Why would someone want to watch flamenco videos on a cell phone? Next time you are in doctor's office waiting room would you rather read old magazines or privately watch and listen to flamenco. What about while waiting to catch your next flight, waiting for your car to be serviced, waiting for your wife to finish shopping, or when you are lying in bed unable to go to sleep in a hotel room? There are plenty of times throughout most days when you and others might like to privately watch flamenco videos without need for a computer or without having to wait a computer to boot even if you have one.

Most people probably are unaware that there is another web of interlinked mobile websites that are not seen by desktop computers. Some are mobile versions of desktop computer websites, but others have been created specifically for mobile users and similar desktop versions do not exist.

Many people also probably don't realize that Google and other major search engines have separate search engines for mobile websites. If someone searches for "Solea" from a cell phone, mobile web pages are listed above desktop web pages in the search results.

Desktop computer websites don't load and display properly in cell phones and PDA's because they are designed to be viewed on much larger screens and because they are coded according to very different technical standards. Desktop computer web browsers are designed to display web pages according to W3C DTD HTML or XHTML standards. Modern mobile device web browsers are designed to display web pages according to WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile coding standards.

Most modern cell phones have Windows Media Players built-in, so it might seem that someone could simply create a website according to mobile coding standards (although most website developers don't know how to do that) and upload Windows Media files to cell phones. That seems logical, but it doesn't work, because the primary customers for Microsoft's mobile operating system are cell phone service providers. They want to charge people to listen to music and watch videos on cell phones, so Microsoft crippled mobile versions of its Windows Media Player slightly to make them incapable of playing standard Internet media files.

However, I think I mentioned above that I am a computer programmer. With a slight touch of programming magic on the server side to give Windows Media Players a "helping hand" the lame Windows Media Players in standard cell phones play media files sent over the Internet just fine.

I have a mobile website that has been streaming audio and video media to mobile users for about nine months (that media has nothing to do with flamenco). I am now in the process of creating a flamenco media site for mobile users. It will provide a free service to the flamenco community (no charge to post or play media). Send me a PM if you would like to have audio or video recordings of your own playing available worldwide at that site free of charge. However, you must own the copyright to anything you upload. I do not intend to post copyrighted material and defend myself against billion dollar law suits like Google is fighting.

-Bob