PavingWays

As I was reading an older issue (#7 in 2008 from 17.03.2008, current one is 9) of Germany’s premier computer magazine c’t I spotted a mentioning of Frost, our open source Ajax library for mobile browsers.

The issue’s title topic was “The web in your hand” and the article starting on page 112 was about “Webdesign for Mobile Devices”. On page 114 Frost is mentioned in one sentence. Yay!

“Event the first JavaScript library for mobile browsers, that are getting increasingly mightier, has been released; Frost is supposed to make simple Ajax manipulations possible.” the article reads (translated from German).

Just a small clarification here: we’re still trying to get the first real release out of the door, shame especially on myself for not bringing up enough time to get this thing done. Anyways good to know we’re on the radar, stuff like this certainly encourages further developments, but time always is an enemy.

If you wanna know more, check out Frost here.

T-Mobile criticized Nokia’s strategy
T-Mobile ain’t very happy with Nokia’s strategy offering more and more own services. Last summer Nokia announced Ovi, a paid internet portal for music downloads and navigation. So Nokia breaks into a part of the value-added chain, which T-Mobile occupied until yet. T-Mobile boss Hamid Akhavan emphasized that Nokia’s solo attempt will lead to conflicts.
Source: http://www.heise.de

Vodafone deepens partnership with RIM
Vodafone announced to deepen the partnership with Research in Motion (RIM). Within this partnership Vodafone wants to develop own consumer services for the Blackberry platform. Until now they mostly eyed business customers. Unlike in Europe, Blackberry enjoys great popularity by average consumers in the US.
Source: http://www.heise.de

Nokia navigates pedestrians
Last week Nokia introduced Walk, a pedestrian navigation software. Downloads are now available from Nokia Beta Labs, but the software is still in Beta.
Source: http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/maps

Ericsson will be FIFA partner
In 2009 and 2010 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association)
will use Ericsson’s technical infrastructure for the distribution of mobile multimedia services. The center of the agreement is the World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Ericsson will provide content management and service delivery platforms for transferring FIFA products (such as informations services, TV and video) to mobile devices.
Source: http://www.heise.de

T-Mobile cuts prices for mobile internet abroad
Last week T-Mobile announced 2 - still volume based - new tariffs which apply for all 27 EU-States:

• 1 MB data traffic for 2 EUR
• 50 MB day package for 15 EUR

It will be irrelevant, in which foreign network a T-Mobile customer has signed in. Well, mobile surfing gets cheaper in Europe, but it is still very expensive. The new T-Mobile Roaming tariffs will become available in mid-2008.
Source: http://www.heise.de

MSN Direct
Last week at the Mobile World Congress Microsoft introduced a new mobile client called MSN Direct. It is a free application and runs on Windows Mobile 6 powered smart phones. With MSN Direct you can assemble your own news service, such as top news stories, weather, stock reports, sports or entertainment news. The content from the MSN portal updates automatically and is displayed on the phone’s idle screen.
Source: http://phone.msndirect.com

T-Mobile integrates Yahoo’s Onesearch and IM
Starting at the end of March all web enabled T-Mobile devices will exclusively support Yahoo’s mobile search service Onesearch. Users will have access to news, weather, flickr as well as related pages for mobile clients.
This year T-Mobile also wants to introduce mobile Instant Messaging and will therefore support Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Up to now T-Mobile prohibits the usage of Instant Messaging services with its Web’n'Walk tariffs.
Source: http://www.zdnet.de

Ericsson develops mobile multimedia platform
Ericsson has unveiled a new hardware platform for mobile devices in order to help manufacturers develop multimedia devices with multitasking capabilities.
“The U500 is a powerful multimedia platform with performance, graphics and usability, more resembling a mobile computer than today’s mobile phones,” said Robert Puskaric, head of Ericsson’s mobile platforms business. “With the U500 platform Ericsson will keep its world leading position within the multimedia mass market for years to come”.
The U500 platform integrates three ARM11 CPUs (high performance microprocessors) as well as hardware accelerators. The Ericsson U500 will launch early 2009 and can offer highly advanced features like support for WVGA displays (800×480 pixels), high-quality camcorder, 12-megapixel camera, high-resolution video for mobile TV and superior audio performance.
Sources: http://news.softpedia.com, http://www.mobilewhack.com, http://www.zdnet.de

Nokia starts mobile advertising network
Nokia starts with Nokia Media Network its own advertising network for mobile websites. The company not only markets its own mobile services, but also from other (70) provider, such as AccuWeather, Discovery, Hearst, Reuters and Sprint.
Nokia promises its clients click rates at an average of 10% in some areas.
The company relies on the Enpocket technology, which the company bought in October 2007. Enpocket’s analysis helps optimizing campaigns in order to increase click and conversion rates.
Source: http://www.golem.de

AOL announces Open Mobile Platform
Last week AOL announced the “Open Mobile Platform“, which can be used to develop applications for a wide variety of mobile phone and smart phone platforms. The platform will support platform systems like Brew, Blackberry, Linux, Symbian, Windows Mobile as well as mobile phones with Java. The integration of AOL services will be possible, too.
Developers can create application using a XML-based markup language, a client to be installed on the device and an application server. The platform is to be released as Open Source Software in summer 2008.
Source: http://www.golem.de

- YouTube revised their mobile website m.youtube.com. Now, there is a wider range of videos available (millions of videos). You can also access your YouTube account, your Favorites, your own uploaded videos, your favorite Channels via your mobile phone, and you can share, rate or comment other user´s clips. Uploaded videos (from your mobile phone via email/mms) will appear on m.youtube.com as well as on www.youtube.com.
Last but not least, YouTube for Mobile went international. It is also now available for the UK, Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand, Germany, and Russia.
For more info (including a video) check out: YouTube Blog

- The German student social network StudiVZ prepares itself against the market entry of his US competitor Facebook. StudiVZ plans to provide APIs for developers. They are also thinking about joining Google’s initiative OpenSocial.

- Mig33 announced closing a Series B funding of $13.5 million led by DCM with participation from existing Series A investors Accel, Redpoint and TVP. Mig33 is a downloadable mobile social networking application. They currently have over 9 million users across more than 200 countries. Mig33 will use the money to continue expansion of the company in the U.S. and internationally.

- The mobile social network MocoSpace has raised $4 million in its second round of funding, drawing from existing investors General Catalyst, Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and former eBay exec Michael Dearing reports TechCrunch. The Boston-based company already raised $3 million in the first round in January 2007. MocoSpace has 2 million members and 1 billion pageviews/month from mobile phones.

- Motorola considers an elimination of his weak mobile devices department. The goal would be to regain lost market shares. But the consideration is not final. Greg Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer: “We are exploring ways in which our Mobile Devices Business can accelerate its recovery and retain and attract talent while enabling our shareholders to realize the value of this great franchise.”

- Opera announced the commercial release of the latest mobile Web browser Opera Mobile 9.5 at the Mobile World Congress (MWC, once 3GSM) in Barcelona. “the Opera Mobile 9.5 desktop-like browsing experience has been enhanced with innovations such as zooming and panning that make it easier to navigate, load pages quicker and get users closer to the Web content and entertainment they want. With Opera Mobile 9.5, users can experience the real Web and interact with content exactly as they do on their PC.” (Source: http://www.opera.com/pressreleases).
Watch the Opera Mobile 9.5 Guided Tour (video) here.

- At the Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona Microsoft will unveil version 6.1 of its Windows Mobile OS. Amongst a new application (”One Note Mobile”) there are an improved Internet Explorer as well as a Chat view for text messages. One Note Mobile includes voice messages, notepad and drawings. Find more info here: golem.de and msmobiles.com

Sources:
StudiVZ: golem.de
Mig33: themobiblog.com, personalbee.com
MocoSpace: techcrunch.com
Motorola: motorola.com, heise.de

Nokia acquires the Norwegian company Trolltech for $153 Million (€104 Million). Trolltech’s Qt Technology is a cross-platform GUI framework that’s used in applications such as KDE and Skype.

“The acquisition of Trolltech will enable Nokia to accelerate the cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and to develop its Internet services business. Nokia plans to continue to develop Trolltech’s products and continue to drive sales to new and existing customers” (press release of Trolltech).

With the open source technology Qt, Nokia plans to support developers creating applications that run on smartphones as well as PC’s. The acquisition of Trolltech could be Nokia’s answer to Google’s Android.

Sources:
http://trolltech.com
http://mashable.com
http://www.golem.de

O2 and Vodafone are launching a new billing service in Germany this spring. The service will be accessible to every mobile phone user.

The new payment system combines the direct debiting system (German: Lastschriftverfahren) with SMS payment confirmation through mobile phones. That means:

1. you order a product on a mobile portal or web shop
2. then you type in your mobile phone number and password
3. following you will receive a text message (SMS), which you have to confirm in order to debit the amount from your bank account via direct debiting system.

Prepaid customers and customers with cell phones provided by their company as well as customers of other carriers need to register once and for free for this online payment system.

Due to the handling of payments via two independent communication media, the payment security will be clearly increased according to Vodafone and O2. A prior registration giving bank account details and credit card numbers does not apply.

The whole payment service sounds very easy and promising. I am very curious about testing it.

Sources:
zdnet.de
golem.de

Last week, NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier with nearly 53 million subscribers, and Google announced their partnership that includes providing search services and search-related advertisement. The service is scheduled to be launching in spring 2008.
Besides, other Google services will be made available for i-mode users, such as a pre-installed application of Google Maps on i-mode handsets.

In the near future GMail, YouTube and Picasa will be also accessible through i-mode. In addition, in all upcoming NTT DoCoMo handsets with a capable HTML browser, Google will be set as starting page.

NTT DoCoMo may also introduce handsets that will use Google’s “Android” mobile software package in Japan - probably in the second half of this year. Not very surprising since NTT DoCoMo is a part of Android’s Open Handset Alliance.

This partnership will give Google a better access not only to the mobile market, but also to the search engine market in Japan, where Google lags behind Yahoo.

Mobile service subscriptions exceeded 100 million in Japan as of the end of 2007, with almost 70 million users accessing the Internet through their mobile phones.

Sources:
businessweek.com
efluxmedia.com
internetcommunications.tmcnet.com

According to paidcontent.org Nokia is in talks with Facebook about a potential partnership and investment.

Nokia and Facebook are in negotiations about porting Facebook on the home screen of several Nokia handsets. This deal could be huge, since Nokia is the world’s largest maker of mobile phones. Nokia already tartgeted some mobile services for their devices:

• Ovi (mobile web service)
• Mosh (mobile social network)
• Navteq (location based services)
• Universal (music)
• Avvenu (file sharing)
• Twango (media sharing)
• Enpocket (mobile advertising)

This deal could help Facebook expand in the European market. Nokia is also looking into purchasing a stake of Facebook.

Talks are still very early. A senior Nokia executive declined to go into details: “There is talk of a partnership in the works… it’s safe to say we’re testing the waters and things still have to be worked out.”

So no specific details have been released yet, but maybe mobilemag.com is right with “The giant just got bigger”.

Sources:
mobilemag.com
paidcontent.org

- Mobile TV via DVB-H will start in Germany on June 1, 2008 - just in time for the European Championship in Soccer. There is still a lack of content which has to be adapted for the small screen sizes. It will be interesting to see if this version of mobile TV will be successful.

- China Mobile, China’s largest mobile operator, called off iPhone launch negotiations with Apple. Supposedly the negotiations were cancelled due to disputes about Apple’s share in downloads and other content sales.

- Nokia is to close its German plant. The closure of the Bochum facilities is planned for the middle of this year. The production will be shifted to more competitive locations (such as Romania and Hungary).

- Google has got the approval by the FCC (Federal Communications Commision) and is now one of the 214 qualified bidders for the 700Mhz frequency spectrum auction starting on Jan. 24, 2008.

Sources:
http://www.golem.de/0801/57045.html (Mobile TV),
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/101733 (iPhone),
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/01/china-mobile-an.html (iPhone),
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/101797 (Nokia),
http://www.golem.de/0801/57012.html (Nokia),
http://www.engadgetmobile.com (Nokia),
http://www.ft.com (Nokia),
http://www.informationweek.com (Google/FCC),
http://www.golem.de/0801/57029.html (Google, FCC)

- Vodafone sued T-Mobile in Germany over its exclusive contract with Apple. That’s why Vodafone had issued a “restraining order” against T-Mobile for offering the iPhone exclusively. Another German carrier Debitel had also complained to the German telecommunications regulators about the exclusive deal (which ties the iPhone to a single carrier).
T-Mobile announced yesterday that they will now also sell the iPhone in Germany without the 24-month contract as well as without SIM lock. T-Mobile’s unlocked iPhones (without a contract) will cost 999 EUR (1473 USD).
Customers who sign up for a 2-year T-Mobile contract get the device for 399 EUR (588 USD) plus (at least) 49.99 EUR/month.

- The new version of the mobile Opera browser - Opera Mini 4 - was released on Nov. 7th and had already had over 1 Mio. downloads in the first ten days. Incredible! Congratulations to the Opera team!
Download Opera Mini 4 here: http://www.operamini.com/download/

Sources:
http://www.betanews.com
http://business.timesonline.co.uk
http://www.heise.de

Not the latest, but still some quite interesting news:

• Apple plans to release an SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch in February 2008. The company wants to create “a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for (their) users”

• Orange will sell the iPhone in France without SIM-Lock, because the French consumer rights forces Orange to offer the iPhone also without contract and without SIM-Lock

• Google bought Jaiku

Sources:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/97556/from/rss09
http://www.jaiku.com
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/97537/from/rss09

Last week 3jam and Virgin Mobile announced their partnership. That’s really amazing news! Virgin Mobile is promoting that deal heavily, e.g. on their homepage and via messages to subscribers.

What is 3jam?
In 2005 Andy Jagoe and Enlai Chu started developing a new way of text messaging communication. Let’s name it SMS 2.0. It improves the basic text messaging by allowing friends and family to stay connected with group communication. The 3jam service is free, only SMS charges may apply. But the cool thing is that each text message you send or receive through 3jam is counted as 1 standard text message, even when your message may be received by multiple recipients in the 3jam conversation.

How does the 3jam service via Virgin Mobile works?
The Virgin Mobile customers have first to sign up on the menu of Virgin Mobile’s WAP deck or at www.3jam.com/virgin.Then they can start sending SMS to any number of friends simultaneously. The receipients of the SMS can reply to all at once.

How big is the market for SMS?
For this year Informa analysts suggest the value of global SMS traffic at 60 Billion USD; Gartner forcasts 1.8 Trillion USD by 2010.

In the US we already talked to some carriers and most of them are pretty interested in partnerships with service developers, since they can help them to attract more customers and also increase their ARPU.

Currently, 3jam is building a global service for transiting, billing and clearing multi-party SMS messages. They are also working on some new features. Rocco already met the 3jam Andy and Enlai. Way to go 3jam!

Sources:
us.blognation.com
3jam.com
virginmobile.com

If you can’t hear words like “Facebook”, “social”, “networking”, “friends” or “community” anymore, then maybe you should have a look at the antisocial networking site Bugroff.

This “website” has launched by Gray Dring - the person behind the Clever Little Pod comedy podcast. No wonder why Bugroff is nothing more than a spoof service :)

Source: http://uk.blognation.com

It has been a busy month and our last post was already a long while ago. So here’s a quick heads-up …

Our Ajax library, Frost, is still in development, but we already received some good response and many requests for more info ranging from freelancers to people from well-known companies. There is a lot of interest out there and we try to get the initial library online within the next couple of weeks. There’s also a definite plan how users will be able to contribute by extending the library and by testing browsers. Let us know if you want to help either building the lib or the community pages around this (based on WordPress)!

For now we have a video on YouTube that shows how the demo page of the Frost library works and looks like on the iPhone (we actually found a bug in Safari), so check it out!

Meanwhile we moved to San Francisco, at least for the next few months. Our goals are to get in touch with like-minded people from the Bay Area, build-up some interesting contacts and cooperations and introduce Frost and our upcoming mobile service to as many people as we can. So, if you are also in the Bay Area, please let us know!

There are a lot of events happening and we gonna write about it and let you know what’s happening.

We’re currently looking for a space in an office (for 2 people) - we talked to Chris from CitizenSpace in downtown SF and might end up working there, but if you have a better idea or even a little space in your office, please let us know!

As previously mentioned I wrote an article about Mobile Ajax for UK’s .net magazine earlier this year.

The article got postponed but now finally appeared in the July issue of the magazine. Thanks go out to Oliver Lindberg and the rest of the .net staff.

Make sure you buy a copy of issue 164 and check out pages 106/107.

There are some interesting news from the CeBIT in Hannover, Germany (15.- 21. March 2007). The CeBIT is a leading business event for the digital world, and the mobile industry is an important part of the CeBIT. Especially this year is a lot of going on mobile + internet. Here are some facts:

T-Mobile:

T-Mobile has dramatically dropped their prices for mobile surfing. Here are the prices for their time- and volume-based rates.

time-based rates:
The time-based rate is called “web’n'walk“. You only pay 0.09 EUR/minute for the “web’n'walk Starter” rate. There is neither a basic fee nor a volume limit. In August 2007 T-Mobile plans to offer the “web’n'walk Surfer” rate with 120 minutes for 5.00 EUR, which means 0.04 EUR/minute.

volume-based rates:
T-Mobile has also dropped the prices for their volume-based rates:
“web’n'walk BASIC“: 200 MByte for 20.00 EUR/month
“web’n'walk MEDIUM“: 400 MByte for 35.00 EUR/month
“web’n'walk LARGE“: 5 GByte for 50.00 EUR/month

(more…)

I am speaking at this year’s Xtech conference, on the 17th of May in Paris, France.

The Xtech, Europe’s premier web technology conference, will take place 15 - 18 May 2007. The speakers include some famous people and I am looking forward to meeting some people and friends I met during other conferences before, especially Håkon, Mike and Jeremy.

My presentation will be about “AJAX on mobile devices - making mobile web apps ubiquitous“.

During my presentation I will try to show that AJAX can be used to improve the usability of mobile web applications and to solve some other problems, e.g. concerning bandwidth. Another point will be that due to the varying degree of browser support it is rather difficult to develop a universal application that runs on all the different devices out there. Some best practices will be explored and new approaches to JS frameworks paired with browser detection algorithms will presented using real-life mobile web applications.

If you are attending or speaking at Xtech too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

See you there, Rocco

As of February 1st there have been massive price drops amongst some of Germany’s pay-as-you-go / prepaid offers such as blau.de, Symio and Aldi talk. Aldi talk even offers UMTS / 3G SIM cards, so users can profit from the new cheap rates while using fast connections. All these discount MVNOs are using the network and infrastructure of E-Plus. Apparently E-Plus has dramatically lowered the reseller tariffs for data traffic.

(more…)

Today Steve Jobs unveiled the long-anticipated iPhone to the public. We gotta say this thing is amazing! Featuring a new input method called “Multi-touch”, which allows you to use several fingers at once to input “gestures”, the phone also features Wi-Fi (and EDGE) along with a version of Apple’s web browser Safari - this is possible, because the phone’s operating system is MAC OS X!

(more…)

Today we received an interesting newsletter from 1&1 Internet AG, a German ISP. 1&1 now offers a Pocket Web Flat for 9.99 EUR per month (powered by Vodafone). There are no time or volume limitations and no additional basic fee, the offer is valid until 30 September 2006.

The service comes with a mobile handset that lacks the ability to make regular phonecalls, except if you are using a bluetooth headset (and pay from 0.29 EUR/Minute) and can therefore be best described as a PDA with phone abilities. However it supports push E-Mail and sports a webbrowser which is “optimized for the mobile internet”. It also has a calendar and a contact manager installed. There are no further information available about the platform or the software, so we will probably have to buy one of these to get more info.

Probably this whole offer is Vodafone’s way to get real-life data about people using the mobile internet and to figure out if they could offer a mobile flatrate within their own data plans. At the moment what you get from Vodafone for 9.95 a month is 30MB and that’s not a lot and quite a difference to a real flatrate or other offers - BASE offers a mobile flatrate for 25.00 EUR / month, but only if you are a BASE customer which makes another 25.00 EUR / month for  the voice service (also flat).

So let’s hope the test works well and we’ll see the mobile flatrate available as regular data plans soon.
For more information see http://pocketweb.1und1.de

What is the current level of usage and consumer interest for data services?

What is important to consumers, both for mobile and voice services?

What implications can be drawn from usage differences between segments, geographies or even between the distinct customer bases of operators and device manufacturers?

These questions were examined in the 2005 A.T.Kearney Mobinet study, which is an assessment of global consumer trends in mobile usage. By interviewing mobile users in 21 countries the company researched the degree to which consumers are adopting mobile data services.

Mobile phones - only for making phone calls?

Nearly 60% of the customers expect to use their mobile phone to make the majority of their calls over the next year. Only 4% of consumers expect to use VoIP for the majority of their calls next year. Alarmingly a significant number of consumers are not convinced that their mobile operator should offer anything more than basic voice service. The majority (80%) of the 65-year olds (or older) reject data services compared to 25% of the under 24-year olds. Probably one reason for this is, that older people are more afraid of new technologies/services.
Another important aspect is the price. 70% of mobile phone users see the price as the primary factor in choosing operator.

What is the current level of usage and consumer interest for data services?

Because the penetration of data-enabled, multimedia phones has increased to 53%, more consumers across all age groups are adopting mobile data services. Most of them (56%) use it (more…)