Smartmobs writes about Open Mobile It is not often one comes across a book which encourages an entire industry to reflect upon its essence and purpose .. :) You can download the entire book in pdf format HERE ...

Following on from Friday’s post that smartphone users may number 970 million by 2013, I have been thinking through whether this might happen and, if so, what sectors might see the most growth. It seems that Apple and Google have the capability to make this happen. At the MWC, Google talked about ‘Mobile First’… "When we announce new services for desktop computers, such as real-time search, we will debut an equally powerful mobile version." Meanwhile, Apple are already stating they they are now a mobile-device company… "The vast majority of Apple’s revenue now comes from mobile-device sales or from content for those devices, and not from its Macintosh" One sector that might see significant growth is enterprise mobile. Recent...

Wow, we are less than a week away from SXSW Interactive and Film Festivals. And I’m very excited. The Interactive Festival runs from March 12 – 16 and this year is looking solid! One of the new additions to the Interactive Festival is the Future15 series on Convergence, Greater Good, Emerging, and Business. These are 15 minutes talks by experts on the aforementioned topics. Under Emerging is the Wireless Future15, which I helped curate and will be hosting on March 13 (Saturday) on the Hilton Room K. The agenda is as follows (starts at 11 AM): 11:00 AM | Mobile, the Great Channel Equalizer | David Gill 11:20 AM | The Real Mobile Scoop | Agency, Manufacturer, and Carrier | David Hewitt 11:40 AM | Web Evolution: The Rise of Mobile, APIs and Runtimes | Daniel Appelquist [BREA...

Let's look forward 10 years.We've all got augmented reality browsers on our handsets, or perhaps our 4G-connected sunglasses. They can overlay all sorts of data and images onto our field of view.There's a plethora of micropayment systems available, accessible via APIs to any developer with the right tools.There are open and closed appstores. Any app you can imagine is available for unlocked devices.Operators are starting to monetise contextual advertising - there are digital posters, sponsorship of content, location-based coupons.And then there's the sudden backlash."You can't use my eyes for free""My visual cortex isn't a dumb pipe""I spend lots of money on contact lenses & eyetests""Let's prioritise certain aspects of our visual input""We should charge advertisers for access to our r...

[The PC-esque commodisation of the mobile industry has been prophesied many times before, but never before has it become so lucidly clear. Research Director Andreas Constantinou uncovers the dynamics of the mobile industry that will lead to a Wintel future, and the impending disruption to the network business model] We ‘ve all heard this before. The story of the bit-pipe future for mobile networks/carriers and the threat of Google and Facebook to the mobile industry status quo. But this time the facts are clear; the dice has been cast and is pointing to a Wintel future for the mobile industry. Bear with me – this is a long argument. The virgin years of mobile The mobile industry has rapidly evolved through two decades: – 1990s growth: The 1990s was the decade of unrestr...

Something about Teletext selling 300,000 iPhone apps makes me feel warm inside. The iPhone App Store ranking algorithm has been reverse-engineered: "The formula is 8 times the sales of the current day + 5 times the sales on the 2 proceeding days + 2 times the sales on initial date." Amazing article on alternatives to acceptance testing: "think of defects as coming from four sources: programmer errors, design errors, requirements errors, and systemic errors. When trying to eliminate defects, I look for practices that address these four causes." The Android Marketplace has its first public success story; one swallow doesn't make a summer of course, but I'd put money on this being the start of a something big. Err in fact technically I think I *have* put money on that. Stop delegating. ...

Today we'll be making some changes to the badges that you can earn as a contributor at Beta Labs.  We're going to simplify the badges we give out and switch off the Top Reviewer, Bug Buster, and Innovator badges since they were proving difficult to maintain in a reliable and fair way.  In short, we're adding two new badges and holding on to two old badges.Active ContributorAny Beta Labs community member can earn the Active Contributor badge by - you guessed it - being active on the site!  Giving feedback, commenting to others' threads, and rating the helpfulness of others' posts all contribute to your reputation as an Active Contributor.  You'll get the badge if your activity over the past six months is over a certain threshhold, and it's likely that if you have one of ...

Have you seen the movie? No, but I’ve read the iPad. Writing a book is hard work and selling it is equally difficult. That’s why publishers were invented. But something is happening in the book business and the change is driven by mobile web tablets: books are going digital. While the Amazon Kindle is a great product, it’s also very limited. No, the mobile web tablet from Apple, iPad, is what will bring ebooks to the masses. In fact, this is already happening on that smaller web tablet from Apple, the iPhone. Books will most likely be sold just like any other application as part of the One Billion Apps App Store, which is basically an app store for every digital content item you can think of, way beyond the current scope of about 150′000 apps. No one is building ...

As mobile phones become increasingly powerful and can store more data, we've introduced new methods of search to get you to your content faster, such as search suggestions or search by voice. But sometimes, typing to get to the right search suggestion takes too long, and you may be in a quiet environment where speaking a query is inappropriate. Today we're pleased to announce Gesture Search, a new Google Labs application for Android-powered devices running Android 2.0 or above in the US. Gesture Search lets you quickly find a contact, an installed application, a bookmark or a music track from hundreds or thousands of items, by simply drawing alphabet gestures on the touch screen.Say you want to call your friend Anne. Just open Gesture Search and draw letter “A”, and Gesture Search retu...

Although a lot of people are excited about ebooks, it's very difficult to get hard information on how the market for them is growing. We don't even know how many Kindles Amazon has sold, let alone more detailed specifics on the market.So I was very happy Wednesday when the Book Industry Study Group (a publishing industry trade group) gave details from its recent survey of ebook adoption in the US. The survey was first revealed in January, but the press release was very sketchy and sometimes confusing. In its presentation at the Tools of Change conference, the BISG gave much more details on the results. My highlights from the presentation:Ebook usage is growing fast, but it's still small. Roughly 2% of American book buyers over age 13 are active ebook users, meaning they obtained an eb...

In-flight entertainment with N900Flying to Barcelona over the Alps.N900 takes the pictures and monitors the speed of the plane … keeping the pilot honest.Open source and BusinessSo how was Barcelona? I met with many device manufacturers, software houses, and chipset and technology providers. It became clear that many of them will be looking into MeeGo as a viable target platform. The feedback was very positive.We managed to get a very good traction with open source community on Maemo. MeeGo now expands that to next level -- and this is one of the biggest contributions Maemo will provide to MeeGo. I've been discussing with community members, seen the discussion and work taking off at the MeeGo discussion forums, and so forth ... the ball is rolling! Now it is the time for you to get on-bo...

Nokia 3210 Nokia 6210 Sharp GX10 Sharp GX20 Nokia 6600 Nokia N70 Nokia N95 HTC G1 HTC Nexus One...

The Feb 8th Mobile Monday is all about increasing app store sales, a topic that I’ve been personally paying a lot of attention to given the position that Chomp currently occupies in the environment. And guess what, I should actually be able to make it to the event this time! Woohoo! It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get out to one, but thankfully getting Kate and Mario to help out has meant the events continue even when I’m plowed under. So drop by and thank the two of them if you come out to the event, and say thanks to our sponsors AdMob and Flurry. Should be a great conversation, hope to see you all there!...

Like every other techy out there, I also have an opinion about the newly launched iPad. I'm not going to wade in the minutia of various hardware or software decisions like the wonky micro SIM and the lack of SDCards or USB ports, nor the lack of background tasks or Flash support, or the pricing etc. Instead, I want to focus on the bigger picture, and came up with a couple thoughts I wanted to share. First, if you've read this blog before, you already know that I'm in love with the idea of tablets as the next generation of computing devices, so I was looking forward to Apple's announcement as much or more than anyone. In fact, I've been expecting a tablet from Apple for, oh, about 7 years now. No, really. I wrote this post back in 2003 - Urgh! Steve, we all want a Mac Tablet! - when Steve ...

We’ve been quite silent the past monthes, because one of the big project was the launch of our iPhone app, iWebwag! iWebwag is a full widget engine for iPhone, with a very powerfull RSS reader and sharing capacities trough email or Tweeter. Go to our app page description to have a nice overview of the features, but here are a few screen shot of this App. One of the cool feature is the “exposé mode”, where you see all your pages in a single view: This is a page view. Note that each widget can have different size, choosed by the user: And now the great news reader: ...

Packt Pub kindly sent me a copy of LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers to review. Anyone who was involved in professional Java ME development knows that one of the biggest challenges of Java ME development is to write appealing and consistent UI across various devices. For the past few years I found many Java ME UI frameworks on the web. Among those, LWUIT definitely is one on the top you should consider because: - It is backed by Sun - It is free and open source - It is still under active development. - It has a rich set of features and good development tool Another question you may ask is: is Java ME still relevant? For the past two years, the landscape of mobile development have been changed dramatically. With the introduction of iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS and computer grade Maemo OS (Li...

Some interesting news on Spinvox, a company who's MWC stand design I have always rated as top notch - after $100m funding, with 250 employees, they appear to be struggling to pay salaries. Instead, they seem to be offering employees share options instead of salaries - I am in all in favour of offering share options on top of wages, but instead? Can you eat options somehow?More worrying is the suggestion that the more big deals they get (having already got some huge ones with Telefonica), the more funding they need - which makes their voice recognition technlogy sound a little unscalable... read the comments and find out why: almost all of the recognition is done by humans, hence the need for such a headcount and lack of scalability / chance of profitability.Big confidence trick on the VCs...

Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days is only 6 weeks away... The event will be again held in Santa Clara, on January 21st and 22nd. The agenda is now fixed and it seems to contain a number of highly interesting talks and looks like one of my proposals was accepted as well (to provide the other end of the spectrum of presentation quality :-) I know what slides I am working on over the xmas break... ...