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Archive for the ‘Applications’ Category

Vodafone’s hiring an Apps Business Developer: Oh dear

Friday, October 16th, 2009

I’ve got a ton of keywords that Google hunts for me — and this morning, this page showed up.

It might be useful for some Mobile Industry Review readers looking for a new role. I thought it was rather insightful too.

Have a read:

One of the world’s leading telecommunications companies are currently looking for an Apps Business Developer

This project is aimed at the development and initial implementation of an outreach programme engaging with well known brands and persuading them to invest time and other resources to develop our apps. Also we will be mobilising the small developer’s cottage industry to contribute to the growing apps pipeline.

The successful candidate will be delivering a strategy for the generation of new apps business which aligns with the wider Global approach, and takes in all potential apps developers from the big high street brands to individual programmers working in their bedrooms.

Knowledge:
Deep knowledge of Internet, telecommunications and Hi-tech industries, with established relationships across these sectors.
Exposure to the software development benefits/barriers of mobile widgets & applications, across handset technologies and international markets
Awareness of roles of relevant industry bodies and standardisation initiatives
Strong grasp of developer management tools and widget SDKs Skills
Strong stakeholder management ability

It’s a 6-month contract with one of the ‘world’s leading telecommunications companies’ based in Newbury. It can only be Vodafone.

What I found interesting in the text was this paragraph:

This project is aimed at the development and initial implementation of an outreach programme engaging with well known brands and persuading them to invest time and other resources to develop our apps

Doesn’t this highlight everything that’s wrong in the mobile operator approach?

If there’s a market, companies will gravitate to it, provided you make the tools easily available. Apple has demonstrated this. Apple don’t have to walk about persuading companies to invest time and ‘other resources’ to make applications.

It’s patently obvious to companies whether they should or should not do it. All you should need to do is facilitate.

I wonder if this points to a future catastrophic failure at Vodafone, in the context of applications and application development.

If you have to PERSUADE companies, I think you’ve got a problem. A big problem.

And if you’re describing the applications that companies develop as ‘our apps’ — i.e. ‘Vodafone’s apps’… no, that’s entirely the wrong attitude.

It’ll be interesting to see the results in 6 months.

The Job Serve role is here.

Posted in Applications, Mobile Development, Vodafone | Comments

Start your car with your iPhone thanks to Viper SmartStart

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Yes.

There is an app for that.

It is flippin’ genius.

Here’s how it works.

It’s 7am and you’ve just been woken up by some gentle harp strumming from your iPhone.

You have a look at your email.

You check out Twitter.

You put your iPhone down and you head off for a shower then get dressed.

[You live somewhere crazily cold -- somewhere in Mid-America, right?]

You look outside and see it’s a gloomy, ‘orrible, flippin’ cold day.

As you put your bread in the toaster, you reach for your iPhone and bring up Viper SmartStart.

Here’s what the app looks like:

Yup. It’s connected to your car.

COME ON.

You tap the START button on the application.

Outside you can hear the roar of your Range Rover as it starts up, gently humming.

You butter your toast and have a look at the news on the Telegraph iPhone app.

You pick up your briefcase, iPhone and car keys (just.. you know, for the fun of it) and you head out to the car.

Your car, having been humming away for 5 minutes, is beautifully warm, de-iced and ready to rock.

You smile.

Love it.

Absolutely LOVE it.

You can, as you’ll have seen from the app itself, control the trunk (or ‘boot’ as we say in the UK), along with the car’s central locking (LOVE IT!) and the always-useful panic mode.

And of course, you can control *multiple* cars from one iPhone.

All you need is a car that has a compatible ‘remote start’ function. If you’ve got that, then you need to pony up $299 for the extra module and — bish bash bosh — you’ll be able to control your car from your iPhone with the free app.

If, like me, you don’t have remote start on your car, then you’ll need to get the $499 option. Fair enough.

You’ll also have to pay the $29.99/year service charge (the first year is included in both options).

You’ll probably also want to get somebody to professionally install the system.

If you’re in the States, pop over to your local Best Buy for more details.

And if you’re not in the States… tough. Although I’m sure this will go international shortly.

Check out the site for more details: http://www.viper.com/SmartStart/

I think this has shot straight into my top ten brilliant iPhone applications.

Provided you’re in the mood for a very ‘American’ introductory video, check out the Viper SmartStart product video here (“iPhone… check!!!”):

Cheesiness aside, this is brilliant. Just brilliant.

Posted in Applications, Mobile Services | Comments

The Biconic Eye iPhone app rocks!

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Heh… check out this Youtube video from the chaps behind iPhone augmented-reality app, Bionic App:

Some features:

- Vertical position: 360-degree view of all POI nearby your location, updated in real time as you walk in the streets.

- Horizontal position: List of all nearest POI. When a POI is selected, a blue arrow (compass) is displayed to show the direction and the distance to that POI.

- The application is fully compatible with Google Map. It is possible to locate the nearest POI from your position on Google Map within the application. Works on all iPhone models

It’s £0.59 in the App Store:

Bionic Eye : http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=330043513&mt=8
Bionic Eye UK : http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=331369472&mt=8
Bionic Eye France : http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=330044722&mt=8
Bionic Eye Tokyo : http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=331370416&mt=8

Posted in Applications | Comments

23,000 developers on Mobango already!

Friday, August 21st, 2009

DO you remember the post I published last week on Mobango? I was very interested to see that they’ve launched a mobile applications section — so I was delighted to get this email from Mobango’s Chief Operating Officer, Vittorio Maffei, with a little more detail on their recent operations. Have a read!

Hi Ewan

Thanks for stopping by Mobango last week and writing about your experience. We really appreciate the feedback. I just thought I’d get in touch with you to talk a little more about what we’ve been building at Mobango and explain a little more about our application and developer side.

I’m glad that our applications caught your eye. We’ve got over 20,000 registered developers, publishing over 42,000 applications and games files available for our users to download, all for free. We support across Java/J2ME, Symbian, RIM, Android, Flash Lite, Palm and Windows Mobile platforms.

Our community is the lifeblood of our service. Our members provide our developers with quick feedback on their apps, helping them tweak things, creating a better overall experience for everyone. The developers are happy because of the feedback, the members are happy with the experience and content available to them and all of this of course, makes us happy! Our community is constantly educating us. From what kind of content is trending at the moment, to what kind of things people really want to see on their phone.

Here are a few stats for you:

· Registered developers: 23,245
· Registered users: 4,925,000
· Supported Devices: 2,661
· Total Game/Application Files: 42,000
· Downloads W/C 27th July 2009: 2,970,400

It’s important we make it as quick and easy for content consumers and developers to sign up as possible.

With this in mind, we’ve got the sign up time down to about 50 seconds for members and developers can get their apps online and ready to download in under 5 minutes. Straight-forward and quick, making sure it’s easy for anyone to sign up.

We offer developers the opportunity to dramatically and quickly improve the distribution of their apps, thanks to a propietary distribution platform based on a bid mechanism that increases the visibility of the highest bidder. We get paid only if and when our community or vistors decide to download such apps.

We’d love the chance to talk more to you on MobileDeveloper.tv, about some of the work we’re doing and what we think the future holds for app stores.

Thanks

Vittorio

Thank you for taking the time to write Vittorio. I’ll see what we can do to get you on camera soon!

Posted in Applications, Letter to the Editor, Mobile Services | Comments

GPush app pushes your Gmail to your Apple iPhone

Monday, August 17th, 2009

I just had a note in from the chaps at Tiverias Apps to tell me about their latest addition to the iPhone App Store — ‘GPush’.

It does what it says on the tin. Making use of the relatively new Apple push-update function, GPush prompts you with the subject and sender of mail sent to your Gmail account.

You’ll therefore get notification of new emails immediately, instead of having to wait for the rather unpredictable iPhone email client to prompt you.

The GPush icon helpfully shows the number of unread messages outstanding, (which in the case of my account, would number in the thousands).

The app also offers notification controls including having the iPhone vibrate/ring.

GPush is an absolute genius concept for anyone with a Gmail account. Indeed for your average iPhone/Gmail user, I think GPush will quickly ascend to the top five most-used applications on their device. I really like the fact you only have to open the app once, set it — and then forget it — it’ll sit in the background working away.

The nature of Mobile Industry Review means that I receive hundreds of emails in a given day so in some cases, I wouldn’t want to get a notification every-single-time. But today I went for a long walk — and I took my iPhone with me, leaving my Blackberry at home. Thus I would really have appreciated being updated when new mail arrives instead of having to continually click the ‘mail’ icon and wait for the device to do it’s thing.

Indeed, using email in this poke-the-icon-and-wait manner is positively neolithic.

If you’re even half interested in getting swift Gmail notifications on your iPhone, definitely take a look at GPush.

You’ll find it for $0.99 in the App Store — that should probably be £0.59 pounds.

Good work chaps!

Here’s what an GPush alert looks like:

GPush iTunes store link: GPush

Posted in Apple, Applications, Mobile Applications | Comments

Mobango has delivered half a billion content downloads

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

It’s been a little while since I last stopped by Mobango.

Last night at the MIR Mobile Mixer event in London, somebody mentioned them in conversation and I thought I should take a closer look.

Mobango, in case you need a refresher, is all about mobile content. They’ve done a ton of work to make it as easy as possible to get mobile content on your phone, share it and also store it online (with 1GB of free storage for every member).

The counter on their frontpage is pretty impressive:

I remember back in the day when Mobango launched and the average mobile user was plodding about the place with a rubbish, rubbish ‘feature phone’ Nokia that could do next to nothing. Playing with mobile content was a bit of a challenge then.

So half a billion downloads so far. Impressive. They’ve also got over 700,000 imags, 60,000 videos, 115,000 tunes, 3,500 games and 8,000 themes for people to sample. A big database.

What really caught my attention was their all new section. At least, new to me.

Applications.

They’ve got a directory of 8,334 mobile applications ready to download. Clearly this is going to be a rather big area for the company. On the frontpage they’re featuring Nokia’s Ovi Store, Pocket Express EU and Vopium for Symbian.

They’ve also launched a developers area offering application developers the opportunity to publish and promote their wares. I’m going to see if I can find out more about this. Perhaps I can get someone from Mobango on camera for Mobile Developer TV to talk on this.

Posted in Applications, Mobile Applications | Comments

Nimbuzz hits Android marketplace

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Nimbuzz is a simply brilliant instant messaging service for multiple platforms — and it’s now available for the growing legions of Android users.

Instant messaging is nicely integrated into the operating system with Google Talk — but, not everyone’s on that… indeed, if you’re anything like me you’ve got friends on each of the major services that aren’t going to budget any time soon.

So a multi-network compatible IM client is rather useful.

The Nimbuzz team are rather proud of the fact their service offers some rather unique points on Android:

Only Nimbuzz intergrates Skype IM and local social networks such as Hyves in the Netherlands, StudiVZ from Germany, Gagu Gadu from Poland, and Giovani from Italy.

StudiVZ support doesn’t mean much to me, being British. But for the millions of German users, it’s a boon.

Speaking of millions, Nimbuzz are adding a million unique users a month at the moment. Good news if you’re an investor. My favourite feature of Nimbuzz? I love that I appear online in Facebook and can use Facebook chat from the client.

I’ll need to download it for my Android handset…

Posted in Applications, android | Comments

Dazamo offers real-time football results via java app

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

If football is your game (and I’m not talking about the pansy-arsed American Football — Rugby is a sport for real men), then you’ll be wanting to stay bang-up-to-date with results as they happen.

Take a look at Dazamo. It’s a java mobile application, free for a limited period, that offers you an array of football stats at your fingertips.

Dazamo works with almost every java-enabled Nokia handset and, theoretically, any other java-enabled handset (see supported devices). Ideal for the legions of Europeans sporting decent Nokias and wanting this kind of experience via an application.

You can download it at http://m.dazamo.mobi.

Posted in Applications | Comments