Archive for Mobile Tech
by Ewan Spence
May 6, 2008 at 5:36 am · Filed under Mobile Tech, News, iPhone
Should it be news when a popular website launches a ‘mobile’ version of their site? I ask this as a flurry of sites pick up the press release from Associated Press that around 100 of their member newspapers will ‘make available’ stories on a website for the iPhone and other mobile devices.
Come on! This is the 21st century, the principle of web design where content is divorced from layout has been entrenched for years, there shouldn’t need to be a big song and dance that a web service is ‘now available’ for a certain browser. We should be in a position where everything just works, the browser is detected as the site loads, and the appropriate style sheet is selected (or ajax code delivered, or flash disabled as required, etc, etc, etc).
But we’re not, and yes I do live in the real world, and these announcements are a good thing. Because it means that the usage of mobile browsers is leaving the realms of the geekerati, and moving into the real world. Which is exactly what should be happening.
And even though I live in the real world, and think that ‘iPhone and other mobile devices’ does a huge disservice to the hundreds of other mobile browsers out there - and yet again elevates the iPhone into an interesting position where the perception of it being a game changer actually makes it a game changer.
by Ewan Spence
April 16, 2008 at 6:59 am · Filed under Mobile Tech, iPhone, Apple, Nokia, 2008
The sky is falling the sky is falling, there must be a 3G iPhone around the corner all the tea leaves and chicken [little] entrails say so!
Yes there is more furor around certain dedicated parts of the internet in regards to an update to the iPhone line, especially with the ‘why wasn’t it there in the first place’ 3G connectivity (to which I suspect the answer is a mix of cost, high power consumption, and Apple’s relative inexperience in the mobile market place). And driving that discussion over the last few days has been the drop in price of some one hundred pounds ($195 US) by UK carrier O2 on the 8GB iPhone – bringing it to a respectable (but still overpriced) 169 pounds
Yes I said overpriced, but let me refine that. It’s over-priced for the UK market, where you can pick up the high end Nokia Nseries devices for under 50 pounds in many cases. As we’ve said time and again, the nature of the market in different territories can affect a device and how it is received. The US finally had a phone with a good set of features for the tech crowd, and they loved it.
Please don’t read too much into a price cut of a company that has likely got excess stock on a unit. If there was some devious plot to clear the shelves, don’t you think that the 16GB unit would also have a price cut? Or that the cut would also be given to O2 customers in Ireland?
I’ve no doubt there will be a 3G iPhone in the near future, but Apple are traditionally very good at keeping things quiet, especially when there’s not been a squeak of an FCC filing for a 3G variant (which needs to be done some 90 days before a product release as I recall).
Apple fanboys, seeing patterns when there are none. Gotta love em.
by Darla Mack
February 5, 2008 at 10:31 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Mobile Tech, Usage + Usability, News, Mobile Applications, Nokia
MTV Citizen Journalists will be covering Super Tuesday today across the states using mobile technology and the web to keep people updated. Street Team 08 will be armed with Nokia N95’s and Flixwagon software to cover 23 states during the primarys.
This is a very unique use of mobile multimedia. As quoted by Bill Plummer of Nokia and Christina Norman of MTV:
“Nokia is proud and excited to see our flagship Nokia N95 multimedia devices being used so creatively to support and promote the electoral process,” commented Bill Plummer, Vice President, Sales, Nokia Americas. “Nokia Nseries devices are at the forefront of mobile technology, in this case delivering real-time high-quality Internet- ready audio and video reporting from the polls — the very way that first-time and future voters have come to expect their news.”
“Young people are taking hold of the political process like never before, and are clamoring to share and react to the stories as they unfold on the campaign trail in real-time,” said Christina Norman, President of MTV. “The Street Team’s Super Tuesday coverage will be hyper-focused on the issues and stories that matter most to our audience, empowering them to experience the day’s historic events in a whole new way.”
Now other than following the web (God forbid we should sit in front of our laptops or pc’s for a whole day), users can text the word STREET to 44686 on their mobiles or visit m.street08.com from their mobile browsers.
by Ewan Spence
November 23, 2007 at 10:47 am · Filed under Devices, Mobile Tech, Platforms, Software, ARPU, iPhone, Google, Apple, Instant Messaging, Openmoko, Communication, Convergence, Symbian
The launch of Android, and the Open Handset Alliance (primarily with Google and over 30 other partners) has prompted a huge amount of discussion around the internet, from Telecoms Analysts, Industry Watehrs, Developers and enthusiatic bloggers. That’s been reflected here on Mobile Messaging 2.0.
So what exactly is the impact of this in the mobile space? Debi Jones and I sat down to discuss that very topic in our latest podcast.
Google, Android and the Implications - MM2.0 With Debi Jones and Ewan Spence:
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by Debi Jones
November 20, 2007 at 7:05 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Mobile Tech, Events + Conferences, Mobile Email, mobile social networking, Instant Messaging, FOMM, Venture Capital, Under the Radar, 3Jam
Venture capitalists Tim Chang, Norwest Venture Partners, and Veneet Buch, Blue Run Ventures, speak from an investors perspective on “The Future of Mobile Messaging.” While attending Under the Radar - Mobility last week at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, I had the chance to ask Tim and Vineet about their predictions on the future of mobile messaging. They have different ideas about what will be the most critical aspects of messaging and the role of mobile network operators in those developments.
To toggle between the two interviews, click on the “Play Now” link associated with the interview you wish to listen to.
Tim Chang on FOMM [6:39m]:
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Vineet Buch on FOMM [6:23m]:
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by Ewan Spence
November 12, 2007 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, SMS, Mobile Tech, Platforms, Mobile Email, Nokia, Instant Messaging, Communication, FOMM
In all the fuss over technology, I wanted to take a step back and think about what the next form of messaging will be, and if we can’t do some logical thinking about it.
We all have five senses, touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell (and the arguments about there being a sixth sense too, that’s hard to explain, it’s a psychic connection, inside of your brain, so you can understand people like Shirley McClain are best left to The Animaniacs). Whatever form the next form of mobile messaging is going to be, it’s going to be using one of the first five.
While Nokia have piloted a touch screen with feedback (so that touching an on-screen key feels like a key), I think the vibrate alert on most mobile phones is about as far as we’ll get with touch – although I’m sure some enterprising programmer will come up with a morse code signaler it’s not going to be mainstream. Taste and smell are also something else I think we can safely ignore – scratch and sniff movies never made it out the drive-in 50’s movie scene, don’t expect Verizon to hail this as the next great boundary.
Which leaves hearing and seeing. So, audio, pictures, and moving images in some form or another. Seeing works for images and video is naturally a combination of seeing and hearing – plus of course we shouldn’t forget text or rich media (text, images and layout) content, which comes under seeing.
What about how it gets to your device? Well let’s talk timescales. You’re going to be having some form of communication with another person – and it’s either real time, or ‘delayed.’ So let’s take these and throw them into our senses and see what we can get.
Real Time Hearing
This should be obvious – it’s the core function of a phone, and what every single handset has to do. Important to remember that any service complements the full duplex audio of voice calls.
Delayed Hearing
An obvious way to supplement voice calls is to have an answering machine, where people can leave you messages for you to listen to at a later date. Again you’d be hard pushed to find a cellphone plan that doesn’t include voicemail in some form. And don’t forget a number of these allow you to forward just a voicemail to someone else, without actually having to phone them, Of course this is all network based, forcing you to dial in. It is possible on some smartphones to record audio, and then send that as data, so here’s one avenue that isn’t being fully exploited – although some carriers in the Far East make a great play on this.
Delayed Reading
Get some text, read it, and if you can, reply to it. Your classic SMS (Short message service) takes you to 160 characters, and MMS (Multimedia Message Service) originally took you up to 100K of textual data.
Real Time Reading
Strangely, the chat room experience hasn’t really made it mainstream on mobile phones yet, although you could argue that SMS just about manages to be real time with two people. Certainly the likes of IRC can run on devices (WirelessIRC running on Nokia S60 devices proves that to critical acclaim), but I’d regard the speed of text entry to be too slow for mortals (as opposed to 14 year olds) to do real time chat on current devices.
Real Time Watching
Video calls – the classic sci-fi of having a camera on you and conversing that way. It was demo’ed in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and the technology is on pretty much every single 3G enabled handset. It’s here, it’ll improve over time, but are we going to see an uptake on it?
Delayed Watching
Think a mix of podcasting, video calling and voicemail and you have one of the missing elements in the matrix that isn’t talked about. It’s not something that the networks provide in their infrastructure directly, but there’s nothing to stop you doing a little home recording on your hone, and then get the option to send it on to other - normally via email or MMS, but don’t discount ‘broadcast’; options such as a direct upload to YouTube.
Breaking it down into the areas like that, and you see that the actual properties of a mobile message are all pretty much covered in today’s modern devices. So looking for gaps isn’t going to find the next form of mobile messaging. After all blogs had been about, and SMS had been about, but it wasn’t until Twitter came along that the idea of ‘blogging SMS’ took hold in the technology market (and even then people are still working out what Twitter actually is).
No the future of mobile messaging isn’t going to be filling a product gap, it’s going to be exploiting the existing technology in strange ways, with new twists, and a crazed mind coupled with some VC funding to let them work on it for six months. To be honest I can’t wait to see what the next idea is going to be.
by Nancy Broden
August 13, 2007 at 6:55 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Mobile Tech, Software, iPhone, Video Conferencing
Mobilewhack reports on “possibly the coolest iPhone app” yet to be devised. The app was hacked by Ken and Greg Aspeslagh during the Iron Coder Live competition at Chicago’s C4 Developer Conference.
The video conferencing application uses your WiFi network, iPhone camera and - here’s the hands-on, shop-class part of the project - a modified Huckleberry mirror that captures and beams the caller’s video to the recipient’s iPhone. The app doesn’t support audio but all you need to do is simply call the person you wish to video conference then turn on the speakerphone.
While I am not a rabid iPhone fan - I’m waiting for the next version to come out before buying one - I love that, true to the Apple spirit, the iPhone is this ‘hackable’, pointing to a future where the mobile experience will be ever more customized to each person’s individual needs and tastes.
by Debi Jones
August 6, 2007 at 11:07 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Mobile Tech, Podcasts, Mobile Applications, Twitter, JuiceCaster, MOKO
Mobile Social Networking is a hot topic for 2007. Perhaps, it is the hot topic for 2007. Witnessing the success of MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo on the web along with increasingly robust handsets has inspired the whole of the mobile ecosystem to get social. Operators like US MVNO Helio have place social networking at the very center of their entire service through an exclusive arrangement with MySpace. Nokia has announced a soon to be released handset based social networking tool, and of course, Twitter has made news through rapid adoption, inspiring competitors Jaiku and Pownce and receipt of their first VC round.
And then their are those who been pushing white label solutions for brands and platforms for mobile operators.
The program features 3 MoSoSo experts who employ different mobile technologies including SMS, Java clients, WAP and even web assisted social networking to enable connections and sharing among mobile subscribers. Is text enough? Can a mobile only solution be successful? Listen to and learn from the thoughts and experience of Nick Desai, CEO of JuiceWireless, Biz Stone, co-founder and creative director, Twitter, Inc., and Paul Gruber, head of business development and marketing at Loop Mobile.
Nick Desai is the co-founder and chairman of the board of Juice Wireless. He co-invented Juice’s flagship, award-winning mobile social media product — JuiceCaster. Prior to Juice Wireless, Nick co-founded a market leader in IP based cellular infrastructure solutions. Prior to Lemko, in 1998, Nick was Founder and CEO of Zkey.com – a multi-award winning market leader and early trailblazer in consumer mobile applications. Zkey was the first mobile address book and email WAP site available in the US, launching in 1999.
Biz Stone is the co-founder and creative director at Twitter, Inc. Biz also helped make Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious. Biz sometimes writes books about what people are doing on the Internet.
Paul Gruber is the head of business development and marketing at Loop Mobile, Ltd. Paul is responsible for the global expansion of Loop’s mobile social network, MOKO, and Loop’s mobile social networking partnerships with global brands which include Big Brother, Australian Idol and ITV. Previous to Loop, Paul was Head of Social Media for 3 mobile.
The podcast is a bit longer than I’d hoped, but with 3 dynamic speakers it’s easy to use time. Leave a comment if you’d like to receive the podcast in as a two part episode, and given enough requests, I’ll split it into two files for you.
by Russell Shaw
July 14, 2007 at 5:22 pm · Filed under Mobile Tech, Mobile Applications, Mobile Email
Of late, I have been receiving numerous invitations to add specific people to my LinkedIn list. Business associates, publicists, former college classmates, a woman I used to date in a galaxy long ago and far away.
Sorry, I have been running behind. Yes, I know I need to catch up and add these people.
But you know something? When I looked at my LinkedIn list just a little while ago, I noticed something was missing.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have an IM icon next to each listed name?
Here’s how it would work. When you register with LinkedIn, you add your IM or even email details. You go thru a Preferences menu in which you indicate if you wish to “publicly” list this info, keep it “private,” or reserve the option of providing messaging icons on a case by case basis.
Then, when I add you to my LinkedIn, or you add me, icon(s) for obne or more of the messaging services I specify comes up. Then, via my mobile or desktop device, I see your name on LinkedIn, and click one of the IM icons next to your name.
Then we’re really LinkedIn.
Do you think this is a good idea?
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