Jason Ball's TechBytes

The Android Wars

I was lucky enough to unbox a G1 yesterday. Pretty neat phone, it doesn't outshine the iPhone in my opinion, but it's a great device. Definitely 100x better than any other phone out there (minus the iPhone).

But what makes the G1 great is the apps that take full advantage of *everything* the handset has to offer. Wikitude (worst name ever for the coolest app I've seen to date). Just watch the video.

It doesn't really give the same effect as standing on the 9th floor in a Qualcomm building looking out over the mountains towards Phoenix - seeing your field of view populate with POIs in the area for miles around, but it gives you a pretty good idea... More info/background on Wikitude is available here.

What's clear is that Android is going to be a serious contender- and is a fully functional Battleship.

The Web is winning (go figure)

Right after the mobile world congress this year, I posted that this was definitely the Year of the Browser. Opera have just released some pretty interesting stats on mobile web usage for Q1 2008 through the Opera mini browser:

Social networking stands supreme
Almost 40% of traffic worldwide is to social networks. In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic.

One Web will triumph over WAP content
Full Web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic. Content on WAP and .mobi sites accounted for 23% of mobile Web traffic. This share continues to decline as more consumers both use Opera Mini to access rich Web content and become more comfortable browsing the Web on their phones.

Data Consumed

As the content available to mobile phones improves, data consumption increases. Last month, those 11.9 million Opera Mini users generated more than 33 million MB of data for operators worldwide. This represents an almost 88% growth over the previous quarter.

88% Growth, and they're just talking about OPERA. Nevermind the iPhone, Series 60 phones or Blackberries...I've recently realized that I'm clocking in at circa 100MB of data monthly through my iPhone these days. 

The mobile web is definitely gaining momentum. Start your engines.

Geotag it

One of the areas I've been spending a lot of time looking at is All Things Geo. Three headlines caught my eye today:

Eye-fi Explore -auto geotags your photos before uploading automagically via wifi.

Sony Ericsson- have patented geotagging songs "Proposed technology for a "location dependent music search" would use GPS or a similar mapping method to determine the phone's location and promptly find music associated with the area, whether on the device or on an Internet server. The feature would let users cue songs they associate with favorite areas or download songs from local artists."

MIT Android Demos- a list of recent apps developed on Android- all of which incorporate geo/contextual awareness. My favorite was the last one: snap

It’s kind of like Digg on a map. People can tag certain places and then other users can vote that particular attraction up or down.

So if you’re in a new city, you can pull up your current location and find things around you that other people think are interesting.

If there’s a particular user that’s uploaded a bunch of cool stuff, you can subscribe to his or her stuff. Arrows on the map change color the more popular they get. Very cool

Any other cool geo-related apps out there you've seen? (btw, if anyone has a fire eagle invite, pls ping me)

Jajah on spamming spree... [updated]

[Update, April 9] Just had a call from the guys at Jajah. They were very apologetic and stressed that they had not begun spamming their user base. Some background investigation is currently underway to determine how/where this message got sent...(watch it be my fault)

Even if it did come from Jajah, a call to rectify definitely things puts it right in my book....Jajah is again my favorite voip service. :-)

--

What is it with tech companies these days? First Bebo go and spam everyone and now Jajah (my now ex-favorite voip service) goes spamming my contacts WITHOUT my consent:

Hi!

Do you want to talk to jason@emailaddressremoved for FREE?

Initiate a regular phone-to-phone call with JAJAH at www.jajah.com. Between registered JAJAH users telephone calls are free of charge. I am already registered, so effectively we can talk for FREE. Even before you register you get 5 free minutes. No download, no installation, no headset. Try it out now!

jason@emailaddressremoved also left this message for you:

Initiate a regular phone-to-phone call with JAJAH at www.jajah.com.
Between registered JAJAH users telephone calls are free of charge. I am already registered, so effectively we can talk for FREE. Even before you register you get 5 free minutes. No download, no installation, no headset. Try it out now!

Curious? Check out www.jajah.com, get 5 free minutes and register to talk JAJAH too!

Note: Your Email address was only used for this message.

Talk JAJAH! http://www.jajah.com/

WHAT?! I was floored when I got a response to this email. Very naughty Jajah...

 

Yahoo OnePlace- An Intelligent Mobile Agent?

Continuing with the theme of The Next Web, Yahoo has announced Yahoo OnePlace today:

Yahoo! onePlace brings together all your interests, passions and important information into a single location, creating a rich, highly personalized experience around it for you. Everything is instantly organized, dynamically kept up to date, and served up to you the way you want [to your mobile]...

...News feeds, websites, videos, images, emails, search queries, etc.—all can be linked into Yahoo! onePlace from anywhere across the Internet with a single click [and delivered to your mobile]....

and

...Yahoo! onePlace will list each of these for you as well provide a preview of the underlying content, which is continually refreshed throughout the day.

If they pull this off, this is going to be an exceptional service to bring the internet to the mobile. Before you dismiss Yahoo out of hand, pick up your iPhone and search for anything inside safari. Look at the google results. Then go to prefs and change to Yahoo as your search engine, and run the same search. Then, sit back and admire Yahoo's implementation of mobile search...

Google Gears on Mobile Devices

Google has announced Google Gears for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices.

Google Gears works in exactly the same way on a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 device as it does on a desktop PC. If you've already written an application that uses Google Gears, your application will also work on a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 device. Except, of course, only within the limitations of that device. This means you need to consider things such as small screen and limited ability to input text as well as the limitations of the Document Object Model and CSS APIs present on mobile devices.

If Google Gears is expanded to work on Safari (Desktop and iPhone), then Gears might provide an easier way to develop for an iPhone than even Apple's own SDK.

World Mobile Conference- The Year of the Browser

The number one thing that jumped out at me during the conference was Google's report that there are 50x more searches originating from the iPhone than any other mobile handset.

Just to put that in perspective there are 4 million iPhones in the wild compared to 3 billion other mobile devices. This goes hand in hand with O2's report that 60% of U.K. iPhone users are sending or receiving more than 25 MB of data a month- which is unheard of on other handsets.

Android was only available on a few booths- AMD, Qualcomm, etc. From the demo I saw, it's clear that Android will offer iPhone-like touchscreen functionality along with a tightly bundled suite of Google Apps and browser. It's important to highlight that Android is using WebKit- the same as Safari on the iPhone (and Mac OS X desktop).

Opera was demoing their latest 9.5 release- showing off Opera Desktop, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile and Opera Wii. They've created a browser for many, many other non-handset devices (Wii, Airplanes, Archos, etc.) They allow users to sync their profile, bookmarks, widgets, etc across all devices. (This is the exact same functionality that Apple should be offering.)

I didn't see Mozilla, but Firefox is coming soon.

Great browsers, combined with device specific site optimization (e.g. iPhone) or server-side optimization (e.g. Novarra) mean 2008 could finally be the Year of the Browser on mobiles.

Symbian Smartphoneshow

I heard from DoCoMo, Vodafone and Nokia this morning (but Sling Media stole the show in the early afternoon).

I wanted to highlight a few key points that jumped out at me:

Smartphones represent LESS than 10% of the market in every western country except Italy

Smartphones are primarily used by males, over 35 earning circa six figures (except Italy).

Smartphone use is going from "snacks" to "utilities" (no mention of Italy)

Wow.

The smartphone show as really packed- and they're all rushing for sub 10% market? Obviously, this is going to grow and obviously more services are going to become available, but today's conference has really reinforced how risky it is to be making early stage investments in the mobile application space (unless there's a solid web tie-in?). You definitely want to be selling the shovels, not digging for the gold...

Some of Tim O'Reilly's Address Book 2.0 thoughts came out, but on balance, I was pretty disapointed with what I heard... hopefully FOM will be much better.

Mobile Video Content

iTunes has released Star Wars "The Clone Wars" formatted for release on iTunes. The first series  consists of 20 three-minute episodes.

It's a great example of the right content for portable devices. I've been discussing with different companies providing video to mobile networks here in the UK what impact the iPod video, PSP, etc they expect to see on video sales/downloads to mobile phones. There are mixed opinions, but most believe that video downloads on mobile phones will be a long time coming.

I'm convinced that unless the consumer experience can equal that of iTunes, mobile video on phones will never really take off. If you have $10 to burn, I recommend you grab the Star Wars series and Channel Frederator (free) on iTunes.

50 UK Mobile Companies to Watch

160Characters lists 50 up-and-coming UK mobile companies here.

They've got Cognima on the list- I saw them at the Symbian Smartphone Show a few weeks back. I specifically remember them not having a business model though.