Category: Mobile

DeviceAtlas

Every year there 1 single event that every company in the mobile space wait for. New services are announced, hardware vendors easily announce 5 to 10 new devices each and journalists eagerly look for some groundbreaking news. It’s the Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM).

Well, we want to do the same and I think we are going to make it big. It’s going to be that kind of service that if you’re a developer and you’ve been pulling your hair because you can’t get something going for a mobile device, you will be very happy to get.
dotMobi has been keen on providing great tools for developers to make sure they would make their life easier. Well DeviceAtlas is no less!

Stay tuned because it’s coming and it’s running fast!

Can you guess the URL?

Yahoo! Mobile also local BETA

I took a look at the Beta version of the new mobile version of Yahoo!. I tested on an iPhone and I have to say that I really like the design and functionality. When you’re logged in with your account you get e-mails, your selected news and so on. Pretty good.

I searched for information about Dublin where I was at the moment of the test:

What i liked is that as soon as I specified my location (the default location was set to San Francisco, USA) it provided a number of links for local services. That was really good. I love movies, so I checked for the local cinemas to see if I should go watch any newly released movie:

Too bad that when checking for cinemas it “moved” my location to Dublin, Ohio!! I’ve never been to Ohio, but I’m sure Dublin must be a nice town, just not where I was.
It’s OK, it’s a Beta, you don’t expect everything to be perfect. I was positively surprised it recognized Dublin in Ireland in the first place, so I expected it to support any location.

I really look forward for the worldwide release of the new mobile site, looks very promising. The interface was clearly very optimized for the iPhone, using the style to show buttons on top of the page and so on. I’ll need to test on some other mobile device, maybe lower end.

Viral Marketing in mobile

Last week I received an e-mail from Michael of Mocondi that forwarded me an update about the status of their service. I can’t say I have known Michael for a long time, in fact I have never met him, but since the news is about mobile, it got me thinking.

The information is about their product called MeYou that, from what I understood, is a program in which you can buy mobile content and services and you can suggest the same contents to your friends in your network. When you suggest something or perform other actions you earn points. This is nothing new, of course. According to their numbers, their service is very successful especially in Italy (not a surprise, again, as Italians buy a lot of ringtones and contents in general).

What really got me thinking, was actually how they created the service. Reading from the website the service is available in Italy only to customers of 3 and Vodafone (I’m a TIM customer), users should download a Java application to get started. Users can browse a selection of contents available for their device and then can purchase. Billing happens via the operator.

The numbers that Mocondi reports are good, such as 1.6M recommendations sent and 24% subsequent purchases. What I just don’t understand is why you need the hassle of a Java application. It’s hard to download and sometimes will fail to install. You use it to browse and send messages to your network of friends. I suppose you will also be able to manage your network.
When I think about this application, I think the browser would be the perfect fit. Browsing is just what it’s made for, for a start! Managing your network is something you could do via specific pages. Messaging… Well, you have SMS and MMS and if Mocondi already has agreements with mobile operators I do not see problems delivering messages and tracking users. Settings should already be in place so no problems installing the application or downloading the catalogs. Also, I suppose that users will not get notifications if they do not start the application while with SMS and MMS you get them in any case and the browser can be started automatically (read wappush).

I really think that mobile devices are the perfect target for viral marketing and I like the idea. I just think that the browser would have been a better choice. Do you read me Mocondi? Check out Refresh Mobile or Flirtomatic and how they left the Java platform for the browser. There are things that are better in Java (games, etc) and other things that are better in a browser.

Mobile World Congress 2008

I will be in Barcelona for the next Mobile World Congress and I see that many of the regulars of the mobile web will be there.
I plan to be there for the full week and lots of mettings are getting arranged, it’s going to be a very intense week. Luckily I won’t be in the booth all the time!

If you plan to be there and want to meet, please contact me.

t.wurfl.com is gone welcome logme.mobi

It looks like there has been a change in the DNS for wurfl.com and t.wurfl.com went lost with it.

I think t.wurfl.com was a great resource and I’ve seen a lot of hits without much publicity.

I’ve decided to keep it up and register a new domain for it. Some of the names I would have wanted to use were taken, already so I’ve gone for logme.mobi. Hit it with your mobile and you’ll get everything you used to get with the old t.wurfl.com. logme.mobi/query is still there, of course.

Let me know if you see any issues, I quickly fixed the URL’s, but maybe some links are not fixed, yet. Allow a few hours for the DNS to propagate.

iPhysics for the iPhone

Christmas holidays were long enough to spend some reasonable time with the family, short traveling (Tuscany is always beautiful) and even resting and playing with the iPhone.

I tried quite a few iPhone “native” applications, many seem to me to be mostly useless, but some are quite nice. iSMS is the extension to the Apple SMS client that we all wanted (the UI is OK and takes advantage of the UIKit, of course you don’t get the iChat-like layout). iPhysics is a great game, inspired by Crayon Physics, it takes advantage of the touch screen perfectly, it uses the accelerometer when needed and is also a fun game. Reminds me a lot of The Incredible Machine, but with a spin. If you have an iPhone, I strongly suggest it, there are already plenty of custom levels.

iPhone SDK updates

According to this article on Electronista Apple has started delivering iPhone SDK’s to some selected partners.
It seems like the SDK is not a full SDK, but a way to produce applications in a contained programming environment. Sounds like Apple did not get it and the fact that lots of developers wanted to hack and build their own fully native apps was not enough of a signal.

Also, can you imagine how many developers you could bring to the Mac once they have developed something for the trendy iPhone?

It’s a missed opportunity to me. The whole “signed application” process is a bit of a pain (Symbian developers can probably tell you something about this), but reasonable (especially if you want to create a “walled garden 2.0” in iTunes), but not allowing developers to create at all is a misake.