Uncool Mobility

Apple's stock follows RIM's

Bloomberg.com: U.S..

Apple succumbs to the market and dives, following RIM's pounding after their earnings call last week. Will the real world intrude upon mobility and web services beyond punishing the stocks?

Google phone launch temporarily knocks out T-Mobile website

You would think Apple's highly publicized failures along these lines would have had T-Mobile prepared for this...

nice catch from MoCoNews
T-Mobile USA Customers Lock Up Web Site Following G1 Event

Android phone is finally here, looks interesting but not overwhelming

T-Mobile announced the first Google Android phone today at a press conference in New York, calling it the "G1". The announcement stressed the integration of Google services onto the HTC touchscreen device, particularly search.

The two elements of Android which will draw the most attention as being directly competitive to Apple's ecosystem are the integration of a music store and an application store.

Watching the video it looks like it has some features which are ahead of Apple and RIM but the overall integration and service experience may lag.

T-Mobile announcement and information:

Details:

Amazon has provided a music store and purchasing capability. There is an Amazon MP3 icon which lets you surf the site's music store and do one-click ordering. Its default music player has options to search for related material on services such as Google or YouTube while a song is playing--a step beyond what Apple's "Genius" feature can do.

The device OS also has an "Android Market", an application store comparable to iPhone's Appstore. There are three high-level differences between Apple's App Store and Android's Android Market. Android will only feature free applications, Android has no approval process, and the Android Market will have no website or desktop element.

The G1 also features push email for Gmail; pull email for other POP3 and IMAP. No native support for Exchange.

Google products bundled on phone:
- Google Search
- Google Maps
- Gmail
- Google Calendar
- Google Talk
- YouTube

Pricing: US$179 for the device with a 2-year plan required of voice ($29-99) + data ($25-35/mo) (therefore minimum of $65/mo w/only 300 voice minutes and 400 messages, unlimited data)

Availability: October 22 in the US, November for UK, Western Europe to follow early 2009

Social networking transforming to mobile social address book?

This article about the lack of true solutions for how business users actually use their mobile address books and manage contacts has attracted a lot of attention. I think he gets it right in his "key features" list.

I love this quote from the article: "Facebook is working on something in this area, but won't say what. Yesterday at the GigaOM Mobilize conference in San Francisco, an audience member pointed out to a panel that a phone's address book in fact is that person's social network. Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya responded with: "That's a great observation. Stay tuned." That sounds to me like Facebook will be announcing something in this area soon."

Xumii launch similar to Yahoo's OneConnect

Last week at CTIA Yahoo! launched it's new OneConnect client. The iPhone version is branded Pulse and integrates messaging and social network features into one client. The previous week, startup Xumii launched a similar product.

Xumii Launches First Social Address Book for Mobile Phones at DEMOfall 08 « Xumii Blog For The Socially Mobile.

It will be interesting to see if integration happens inside people's existing mailboxes or if consumers will try a client which stands atop various mailbox, IM, Facebook, etc. accounts.

Film Studios, Electronics Makers Form 'Play Anywhere' Content Consortium

What a massive vaporware announcement. A content consortium is putting together some industry standards for creating a digital content locker in the cloud.

The biggest players currently in the space, notably Apple, aren't included. Previous efforts by Intel, Microsoft, and others have failed miserably--how do these stunts even generate media coverage?

Film Studios, Electronics Makers Form 'Play Anywhere' Content Consortium - The Channel Wire - IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness.

CTIA Wireless wrapup from San Francisco

I spent last week in San Francisco at CTIA Wireless. The biggest takeaways I had were:

Apple dominated the show. The extent to which the iPhone has shaken up both service and device aspects of the industry was widely evident as the not-present Apple was constantly mentioned.

Business as usual for RIM. RIM had formal product announcements and booth appearances for the new flip phone and Bold, both of which have been extensively picked over in blogs. RIM also announced content partnerships in the form of specific applications to be natively built BB with MySpace, Ticketmaster, and a streaming audio startup called "Slacker" which I'd never heard of. Microsoft will also have Live search bundled on the RIM OS. As other service providers focus on creating a platform (and specifically an appstore) RIM seems determined to keep with a one-by-one approach of selecting partners to co-develop applications. Will this scale as a model?

Search is rapidly being co-opted into the same structure as web-based search.  I had thought mobile search would see different UIs, different ontologies/taxonomies driving definitions, and a new vertical within internet search but clearly that will not happen. The need to drive growth rates in ad spending has stomped all the smaller players as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft invest to extend reach to mobile. Search is also becoming a trojan horse to package and/or pull related applications (such as Google apps or Windows Live Hotmail) onto devices.

Operators continue to struggle with "open" and by resisting concepts of openness for so long are now deeply in the hole trying to launch app stores. Verizon and ATT in particular are scrambling to catch up on this front but will not be able to move quickly enough to overcome iTunes + AppStore, the Android app store, and RIM's selected partnering model. Waiting in the wings: Microsoft Mesh.

Yahoo had the only significant new play. Blueprint and its integration into the new OneConnect is an interesting system that will dig into in a future post. Is it too late for Yahoo as a company despite innovative new products and services?

Visto launches white label social networking app for operators

Visto is announcing a new version at CTIA which includes email, social networking, SMS, IM and photo sharing.

" Featuring an innovative "living address book," VISTO Mobile 6 offers end users expanded push mobile email and mobile social networking capabilities. This living address book combines favorite contacts from multiple sources, including social networks, into a seamless user interface. VISTO Mobile 6 utilizes VISTO's patented push and synchronization technology to keep users constantly up to date in real time on their messaging and social networking activities.

In addition, VISTO Mobile 6 provides end users the ability to filter updates from their list of contacts; meaning each user has the control to see only the updates they truly care about. This eliminates the clutter of unnecessary updates and requests."

Visto will target both small business, SOHO, and consumers with this offer. For operators Visto will emphasize the ability to federate many solutions through one client application and control data costs through Visto's NOC and data compression capabilities. There are no announced operator customers yet.

Visto's product positioning:
"VISTO Easy Setup(TM): End-to-end self provisioning with pre-installed clients, enabling mobile email users to set up their service from their device in a matter of seconds

VISTO worklife.freedom(TM): -- access email from the most popular portal email providers and social networking sites including Yahoo!, AOL, Google Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Photobucket

VISTO ConstantSync(TM): instantly pushes data right to the phone so the end user is always up-to-date - alerts, emails, status messages - everything is always current. -- get notification of new pictures, posts, and other important events from social networking and photo sharing sites from your favorite contacts pushed to your phone -- share photos from your phone to multiple photo sharing sites. Support for multiple services: send and receive messages from work and personal email and social networking accounts, each with its own inbox, with full attachment handling"

How iTunes could become the ultimate DVD ripper--and why Apple won't let it

How iTunes could become the ultimate DVD ripper--and why Apple won't let it | Crave, the gadget blog - CNET.

Interesting commentary Apple's business model. I think Apple will be driven to add DVD ripping as it migrates iTunes to more cloud-based services and needs key feature differentiators to add.

MobiComp + Danger = WM7?

Microsoft to expand mobile business with MobiComp - Mobile Marketer - Legal/privacy.

Wondering what role Mobicomp services will play in adding services such as backup/restore and social networking tools directly to Windows Mobile.