Our Panda Route Travel Planner widget has made it to Nokia’s Ovi Store. The basic idea behind the widget is that you have all your important travel data with you while you are on the go. It works pretty easy: before you start your journey, you enter all the details of your upcoming trip that you need to remember (e.g. airline, flight times, hotel address, rental car reservation number etc.). Then the widget shows you the current step of your journey with all the needed information depending on the current time. On your Nokia N97 home screen this information will be shown too. So you have access to this information without interaction with the application and even when not connected to the Internet.
We also integrated a Twitter feed matching the location of your upcoming destination. It is a great source for any kind of information, such as events, news, things to watch out for or people nearby; and you know what is going on there before you arrive.
The widget is free and available for Nokia N97. So, before you start your next trip, try it out and let us know what you think!
The ads for Nokia’s N97 have started to appear and in Germany as it will hit the first shelves by June 18th at 5 pm in four selected cities. With the release of the N97 our travel planner widget “Panda Route” will be launched, too, and we are pretty excited about it!
Widgets are now becoming more and more popular on mobile phones and we think it’s gonna change web- and application development quite a bit too. Nokia’s new touchscreen phone comes with several widgets already pre-installed, but you can also download more from the Ovi store. With this step Nokia is especially addressing web developers. Recently they launched new mobile development tools that take advantage of three of the world’s most popular software development environments used by web designers and developers.
“These new Nokia WRT tools open up the mobile development market to more than 10 million web developers and creative professionals worldwide who work with these widely used development environments every day to create web applications and content,” said Craig Cumberland, Director of WRT Tools and Technologies, Nokia. “These WRT plug-ins enable the easy creation of feature-rich widget applications for the enjoyment of mobile consumers around the globe, providing new horizons to untold numbers of individuals and organizations seeking to extend their web content and Internet presence into the mobile space.” Nokia says.
“[...] The Nokia WRT plug-in for the open-source Aptana Studio IDE launched in February at Mobile World Congress, has been applauded by many developers, including Frankfurt-based PavingWays, which specializes in bringing web-based applications and services to mobile devices. “We immediately identified the businesses advantages of using the WRT plug-in to quickly and efficiently complete mobile widget creation projects within the Aptana Studio development environment,” said Rocco Georgi, Co-Founder and Lead Developer at PavingWays. “In a few short weeks, we experienced considerable savings in time and resources and were able to bring our Nokia WRT application to market in time for the launch of the new Nokia N97 touchscreen device.”[...]“.
Widgets are drastically increasing the functionality of a phone and we are sure that we will see a great selection of widgets in the Ovi store soon.
Today Nokia has globally opened their long-awaited Ovi Store to an estimated 50 million Nokia device owners across more than 50 Nokia devices including the forthcoming N97.
To all Nokia device owners out there: open your Nokia device browser and go to store.ovi.com. Now you can personalize your Nokia phone by downloading apps, ringtones, widgets, games, videos etc.
The mobile client is available in English, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish and supports operator billing in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom. Globally, credit card billing is available through the mobile application and the mobile website. On the N97 the store application is pre-installed, same for all other new devices that are supported.
We did a quick test on our N78 and N97 (we have a prototype) and all seems to work great now. Apparently the store was down this morning for a few hours (German time), probably due to the high load after all the press releases were published.
In case you are looking for our Panda Route Travel Planner widget in the Ovi store - it will be available pretty soon, as it is in QA currently. We’ll let you know as soon as you can start downloading it - it’s even gonna be free for N97s!
We were invited by Nokia to attend their Hackathon Widget coding contest alongside the Nokia Developer Summit in Monaco/Monte Carlo (we mentioned that earlier). It was a great chance to get to know many interesting people in the mobile development space and especially in the area of widget development based on Nokia’s Web Runtime (WRT).
The hackathon contest was all about implementing ideas of customers in a 24h period and we implemented an idea for a travel planner widget by Bruce Hopkins from Joplin, Missouri, USA. The basic idea was to create an application to collect all travel related information, such as flight numbers, times and car rental reservation info of a trip to have that handy while you are on the go so you would not have to mess around with printed paperwork. But let’s tell Bruce the whole story (and myself a bit about PavingWays and the contest):
Related to one of our new services, called Panda Route, which is a travel diary service (with a planning part), we created the Panda Route WRT widget - Read the rest of this entry »
On Tuesday the Nokia Developer Summit started. The conference was opened by Rob Taylor, Head of Forum Nokia. At the beginning he showed us a demo of a coming service (powered by qik) where consumers will be able to share videos live from their mobile devices.
The topic of this conference was mainly Nokia’s Ovi Store, which will launch this month. 500 people were at the event, mainly developers from all over the world, but also bloggers, press, analysts, students etc.
Yesterday we attended the Mobile Monday in Frankfurt. The topic was Mobile Internet and Applications. Forum Nokia was one of the sponsors of this event. For us it was a good accommodation for the upcoming Nokia Developer Summit next week in Monaco.
The first presentation was held by Jarkko Tolvi from Forum Nokia. He introduced Forum Nokia, an important platform for developers of mobile services. Forum Nokia offers them a wide range of resources to help them design, build, test, certify, market, and sell or promote their applications, content, services, or Web site to mobile users. It’s the worlds biggest mobile developer community with over 4 million members.
Arnaud Caigniet from Opera was next. The topic of his talk was “What can the industry do to see ‘One Web’ everywhere?”. With statistics Arnaud showed that the mobile usage has grown and the growth still continues. The most growth in mobile usage Opera sees in Indonesia, China, Russia and India.
During this summit in Monte Carlo on 28-29 April, Nokia is holding a “N97 24-hour Hackathon” competition. I am one of 10 developers selected by Forum Nokia who is gonna hack together a Web Runtime (WRT) widget for the home screen of the new Nokia N97.
The Hackathon session will be streamed live and I will be in action 24h competing face-to-face with the other developers. At the end of this Hackathon, all widgets will be judged by a panel of experts from Nokia Forum & Nokia’s N97 team. The winning designer will get a Nokia N97 pre-loaded with the app. Also, the next to cash prizes, “[...]The winning widget will also be awarded premium spotlight status on the main page of the new Nokia Ovi Store, which is opening in May. It will be free to download in Australia, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Russia, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. The apps which come second and third at the Hackathon judging panel will also get spotlight placement on the sight.[...]” (Source: Nokia).
Nokia is going through quite some replacements on the widget and content distribution front these days: Their WRT Widgets will replace formerly well received WidSetsâ„¢ and maybe other apps too, and Nokia’s new Ovi store will replace their current offering called Mosh.
I am really looking forward to the event - not just because I can spend some exciting days in Monte Carlo :), but also because it’s a great opportunity to get in touch with many people in the mobile and mobile web area since a long time.
Recently, Opera released its new “State of the Mobile Web 2009″ report and revealed that they had one of their largest monthly increases ever in January 2009. Opera Mini now has more than 20 million users. Those users viewed approximately 7.6 billion pages in January. Page views and data transfers increased 18% month-over-month. That means, not only more people are using the mobile web, but they also use it more often.
The mobile Web usage is booming in developing countries. Among the top 35 countries using the browser, Armenia, Nigeria and Egypt showed the most growth between January 2008 and January 2009 in terms of unique users. The most significant growth (2800%) was in Armenia (a country with 3 million residents). On average Armenians surfed 669 pages per user in January and that is far more than it is in other countries.
“Looking back on a full year of mobile Web growth, it is easy to see why mobile devices will become the primary device for Web usage in most of the world,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s CEO, in a statement. “Developing countries may lead the way due to the sheer prevalence of mobile devices versus PCs, but the solid growth rates in developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, show the entire world is moving in this direction.”
During February 16-19, Barcelona again has become the “capital” for the whole mobile industry with the Mobile World Congress taking place. Despite the global economic crisis and declining mobile phone sales (for the first time ever since 2001), the mobile industry expects global growth due to new devices and services. This optimistic outlook is also proven by the sales figures of smart phones. In 2008 almost 160 million smart phones were sold worldwide. This year as much as 190 million smart phones could be sold.
A survey by analyst Nielsen and Tellabs, based on more than 50,000 mobile users in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the US, shows that there will be an dramatic increase in the use of mobile data services (such as mobile internet, email, photo uploading and MMS) over the next two years with a significant ramp up in the next 12 months. 71 per cent of consumers anticipate the daily usage of services such as mobile internet and more than half of the approximately 200 million mobile data users in those countries expect to increase use in the next two years.
According to the study, about 49% of US respondents said they were planning to surf the mobile web more in the next year, compared to 34% of those in Europe. Preferences of US and Europe users differ (see the following picture below). In Europe, Italy tends to be the leading adopter across all services, while Germany shows comparatively low adoption rates.
I really liked the presentations of Dr. Andreas Pratz and Daniel Ãœberall. Dr. Pratz talked about “Disaster Recovery: Chances in the financial market crisis”. He gave an interesting overview about how the financial market crisis developed and showed us chances in the crisis, e.g. alternative business financing. Social lending websites like smava.de have great potential in times of crisis. These web sites offer a market place for credits where consumer or entrepreneurs can invest or lend money to others without dealing with a bank. Here are some social lending web sites:
ABI Research released their quarterly report about the mobile devices market. There, I found this interesting chart about the market share of mobile device vendors in the 3Q 2008:
Last Wednesday evening we attended the MissionFuture Emergency Session. Founded by CScout Trend Consultancy and innovation agency TheFutureKitchen the event took place in the famous Löwenbräukeller in Munich. The idea behind this initiative is bringing together people from different industries and with different backgrounds to inform, assist and help each other during this economic crisis.
The event started with short presentations from Dr. Aleksandra Weber (EUCON - European Institute for Conflict Management), Prof. Hugo Kehr (Professor of psychology at TU München), Jörg Schallehn (Vermögensakademie GmbH), George Zoche (Transnational Republics), Jan Wildeboer (Red Hat / Linux Evangelist), and Stephan Doesinger (Doesinger & Partner).
All the presentations treated the financial crisis topic really differently and from different point of views. Prof. Hugo Kehr talked about his latest study “From the monetary quarterly target to a motivating vision“. He explained why a vision is more motivating and helping you more through a crisis than setting a monetary quarterly target (e.g. vision: being an innovator in a specific branch versus target: reducing production costs by 10% in the next 3 months). His conclusion is that a vision keeps you flexible and motivated, because you can adjust your strategy when needed, while a monetary quarterly target makes you inflexible. Motivation is very important, especially during times of crisis.
During its first BlackBerry Developer Conference co-Founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion Mike Lazaridis unveiled plans for an online application store for its smart phones. The store will launch in March 2009 and will include both an online and on-device component giving 20 million BlackBerry users on all platforms the opportunity to find and download add-on applications for their specific phone models. RIM is working with PayPal to build the payment system for the store.
“A new online application storefront and a new on-device application center will help application developers and carriers reach millions of BlackBerry smartphone users worldwide and will provide consumers with greater choice, enhanced application discovery and an easy method for managing installation, upgrades, and purchases.” (source: press release of RIM)
In December this year developers can begin submitting their applications. The storefront will allow them to set their own prices for applications. Developers will get 80 percent of the revenue generated from their application.
In its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Sept. 27, Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones and has now sold more than 13 million iPhones this year (Apple’s sales goal was 10 million in 2008). Compared to Apple, RIM has sold 6.1 million Blackberry devices in the quarter ended August 30.
“RIM is a good company that makes good products and so it is surprising that after only 15 months in the market we could outsell them in any quarter,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during an analyst conference call following the release of the financial report.
Jobs also said that Apple was the third-ranked mobile phone supplier worldwide by revenue during the quarter.
O2 and Vodafone have launched their new payment service “mpass” in Germany. Through mpass mobile phone customers with any German provider now have access to secure online shopping on their mobile phone or PC.
mpass combines the direct debiting system (German: Lastschriftverfahren) with SMS payment confirmation through mobile phones (we blogged about this before). Some companies like Cinemaxx, Blume2000.de or Beate Uhse are already supporting the service.
As soon as Nintendo announced the next version of the hugely popular Nintendo DS gaming console, called the Nintendo DSi, I was curious if along with some hardware upgrades, such as 2 cameras, better screens and a SD card slot, there would be major changes to the OS and software included, especially if a decent web browser would be available or even included…and I was hoping for Opera. There is a video of the DSi presentation on YouTube.
Turns out there will be a web browser available (see above video from 01:45)…and it will be an Opera browser! In contrast to the current DS version, the DSi web browser will reside on the console’s flash memory meaning it will not come as a game-cartridge as the currently available Opera browser does.
This week I attended another Mobile Monday, the venue was provided by IIR who did their Converged Messaging Summit there as well.
It probably was the Mobile Monday with the lowest number of attendees I’ve ever been to. That’s mostly because the Oktoberfest takes place and everybody has to decide between having a few (liters of) beer and listening to powerpoint presentations during the evening…I decided for the latter ;)
The presentations were interesting. Taptu went first talking about their mobile search engine, enhanced by human edited results, social interaction and sharing of results with your friends. Apparently groupile.mobi is crawled as a desktop web page, which it is not, probably a header recognition issue.
Yesterday we attended the Webmontag at Optaros in Munich. Nice people, interesting event, relaxed atmosphere and you always meet new people, but also see familiar faces … like Claudia (CScout), Georg and Raju.
Before the networking part started, there were some presentations. Since we were a bit late, we only catched the rest of Hartmut’s presentation about WTF (World Tag Framework). Flash developers out there, please check out this stuff! BarCamp was presented by Nils - in general and especially the one in Munich and the one for women coming soon.
After this presentation Magdalena did a small introduction to Netvibes’ widgets. The last presentation held by our friend Raju from Optaros (formerly at OpenLaszlo) was about E-Commerce and WebTV. He gave us some insights about IPTV and how video and multimedia can improve and enhance e-commerce/online shopping.
We’ve been monitoring the mobile browser market pretty closely during the last couple of years, especially in regard to Mobile Ajax and how it could help to create new and powerful web applications for mobile phones.
Mobile Ajax is a lot of things and it always depends on the individual’s definition what is really meant, but one thing that is a pretty common aspect of Mobile Ajax is the ability that it might at some point be used as a gateway or API to connect the web browser on the phone with the device hardware, such as the GPS system thereby giving access to the device’s position within a mobile web application.
These things are in development at every mobile browser vendor today, that much is for sure, but what’s more interesting, because it’s hardly known, is that this functionality already exists on some BlackBerry Devices, namely those of the 8800 series! Now maybe we’ve been too busy developing our stuff lately to notice, maybe this time nobody really made a big buzz out of this, but personally I feel bad that I missed this until now, because I feel this might have a tremendous impact on mobile web application development:
Our Panda Route Travel Planner widget has made it to Nokia’s Ovi Store. The basic idea behind the widget is that you have all your important travel data with you while you are on the go. It works pretty easy: before you start your journey, you enter all the details of your upcoming trip that you need to remember (e.g. airline, flight times, hotel address, rental car reservation number etc.). Then the widget shows you the current step of your journey with all the needed information depending on the current time. On your Nokia N97 home screen this information will be shown too. So you have access to this information without interaction with the application and even when not connected to the Internet.
As soon as Nintendo announced the next version of the hugely popular Nintendo DS gaming console, called the 
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