Posts Tagged ‘wireless’

Mobile Monday Silicon Valley rocked

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
May 4, 2009
6:31 pm to 10:31 pm

Mobile Monday Silicon Valley was fantastic this evening. There was a huge turnout on an uncharacteristically rainy San Francisco evening for the Location-Aware app demo evening.

Skyhook Wireless kindly underwrote the bar and gave a pitch at the beginning of the series of presentations, outlining their rather excellent range of location services available to mobile developers. I managed to catch Skyhook’s Director of Marketing, Kate Imbach, on camera discussing the merits of their offering. Suffice to say if you’re a developer and you’d like to integrate location based services (e.g. Find Me) into your app, definitely, definitely talk to Skyhook.

Here are the companies who presented:

  • Crazymenu.com – Launched their iPhone (lunchtime) online restaurant discovery and ordering facility. I really liked their concept. I’m going to look for it in the iPhone app store.
  • Cristdrive – Their application, Voilà, will simply and elegantly tell any of your online services where you are, right now. $0.99 in the app store.
  • Retronyms – Couldn’t make it for some reason so Kate from Skyhook did her best with their presentation. They’ve got a rather interesting GPS game by the name of Seek ‘n Spell going live. Check their site.
  • Wertago – Showed off their app offering city nightlife in the palm of your hand. Nice!
  • Geoterrestrial – GPSToday, a comprehensive Windows Mobile application offering an array of GPS related services. If you’re into location services, definitely check out what they’ve created — amongst other features, it’ll sit in the background and continually tell folk where you are.
  • HearPlanet – Dale Larson’s audio city guides deliver location information that really speaks to you. You can, as the site puts it, ‘leave those bulky tour books behind and let HearPlanet (iPhone) show you the way. Get it on the App Store. It’s the #2 rated Travel app at the moment and they’ve had almost 500k downloads so far.
  • Life360 – Trades on fear. But in a good way. Their mobile (and desktop) services deliver you instant safety, security and peace of mind. I’m going to get this for my wife and I. Google Latitude helps show where we both are.. but I want more than that. I particularly like their ‘find your family in an emergency’ facilities.
  • Carrrmatey by Lionebra –> Brought the house down. So much so that I filmed their pitch. I think the audience were really taken with the pirate theme. It’s a really smart utility that records where you left your car, reminds you to return at appointed times (for meters) and guides you back to your car — rather useful if you keep on forgetting where you parked.

I managed to get some good video interviews tonight — I was going to hold them back until we’ve launched with the nice new look and feel, but it’s al about content, right? I’m going to aim to get the first lot of videos up tomorrow morning.

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Originally published on Mobile Developer TV and automatically republished here on Mobile Industry Review. View the original post.

Heading to MobileTron on Thursday

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
May 7, 2009
6:00 pm to 10:00 pm

Mobile Tron is Matthew Bennett’s inaugural mobile event for San Francisco and it’s taking place this Thursday at a rather swish design gallery art space (”Receiver Design”). The Facebook event is here and you’re welcome to come along if you’re into mobile and you’ve got something to say.

I’m taking the camera equipment along so if you’d like to get on camera for Mobile Developer TV (the launch is coming shortly), come along.

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Originally published on Mobile Developer TV and automatically republished here on Mobile Industry Review. View the original post.

RCR Wireless — intelligence on all things wireless — closed today

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Goodness me.

I was about to write a shocking you-will-not-believe-it piece about the RCR Wireless coverage of SpinVox. I got their newsletter this afternoon and saw red when they took their hatchet to the voicemail-to-text service. I think the fundamentally misunderstood the point of SpinVox, commenting that it often spells transcribed words incorrectly and isn’t that good with ‘3 minute messages’. You can see the vid and accompanying piece here.

But that’s not relevant any more. RCR Wireless has ceased trading!

Dear me.

I haven’t really come across RCR much — apart from seeing their Show Daily at CTIA, if memory serves. RCR are — were — very much US-focused from what I could make of it.

But that’s it. Here’s a screenshot of the announcement:

It reads:

RCR Wireless News has suspended publication of its print and online products immediately and is closing operations. Unfortunately, the market for RCR’s products has been hit particularly hard by the global financial meltdown.

“RCR Wireless News was passionately run by first-class people and it pains us to make this move but the economy gives us no other choice,” said Crain Communications Chairman Keith E. Crain. To contact Crain, e-mail Colleen Robar at crobar@crain.com

Here’s the link to the announcement.

It looks to me like this was a bit of a surprise. For example, I was reading about the controlled-demise of the Rocky Mountain News last week — they announced it in advance, set a date for closure and so on.

This note from RCR looks like it might have come as a shock.

Deary me. Every success in the future to those associated with the company.

Marketplace: SmartCam – uses bluetooth to turn mobiles into wireless webcams

Monday, January 12th, 2009

The inaugural marketplace entry is from Ionut, a regular Mobile Industry Review reader who’s a big fan of our MIR Shows. We’ll have more for you soon Ionut.

Ionut is looking to monetise the mobile application he developed. It’s called SmartCam and it turns a mobile phone with wifi/bluetooth and camera into a wireless PC webcam.

The project is open source and available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartcam.

Here’s a screenshot:

Although there’s a GPL license available for SmartCam, Ionut is keen to hear from operators, handset manufacturers or any one else interested in doing business with him.

SmartCam is available for Symbian and J2ME/Java — along with Linux and Windows clients.

If this triggers a thought in your mind and you’d like to talk with Ionut, drop me a note — ewan@mobileindustryreview.com — and I’ll connect you.

Mobile broadband wireless routers come to T-Mobile

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

Hitting the stores this week is T-Mobile’s answer to 3’s wireless broadband mobile router, the mouth full that is the Mobile Broadband Share Dock

It works the same way as 3’s Huawei D100 Router, only with a less catchy name. The Share Dock plugs into their mobile broadband dongle, then enables surrounding devices to have ‘net access over its WIFI signal.

Seeing as the T-mobile HSDPA network is shared by 3, you’d have thought this product would have been out there first. The D100 has now had over a month or so advantage to gain its foothold in the marketplace.

How they both balance against each other in costs is of an interest. The T-Mobile offering arrives free on an 18 month contract, at £20 per month for connectivity.

On the 3 offering you have to buy the router at £69.99. On top of that still having to get the mobile broadband dongle plus whatever contract suits your needs. T-mobile bundles in with the Mobile Broadband Share Dock their dongle, creating a more rounded package.

The other consideration to take into mind is their fair usage policy. T-mobile has stipulated it will only be a 3GB data allowance, where 3 have a 5GB on a £15 18 month contract to match their D100.

All told over that 18 month period 3’s deal would come to £340, whereas T-mobiles package would be £360. With 3 of course there would have been an extra 36GB possible data allowance all totalled up.

Seeing as they are both using the same network, the clear winner has to come down to the numbers at the end of the day.

Google’s wireless vision

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Interesting to read about Google’s wireless vision. They see an open wireless future where your mobile device or smartphone will use the best available wireless connection, based on a combination of price and availability. Devices will no longer be tethered to one network. This would include 3G, GSM, WiFi, WIMAX, LTE and anything else that comes along. So at home my smartphone would use WiFi (actually I’m doing that now with Truphone), when I’m mobile 3G (got that now on 3), when 3G isn’t available GSM (doing that as well). So it is starting but there’s a long way to go until we have seamless roaming across all wireless technologies and networks. Devicescape, DeFi and Truphone are starting to build aspects of that seamless layer so it is coming.

Are operators blocking free US mobile broadband?

Friday, August 15th, 2008

Over in the US, there’s an interesting plan brewing. The Federal Communications Commission is planning to auction a piece of spectrum off under the proviso that the winner of the auction has to offer a free wireless internet service with part of the spectrum.

Operators, it seems, have been dragging their feet and causing delays, saying they need to do technical testing to make sure the new service won’t cause any interference with the mobile services already out there.

From the New York TImes:

Representatives Anna Eshoo and Edward Markey suggested the operators might have other motives. “We are concerned that incumbent wireless carriers are seeking unnecessary and unprecedented testing delays to prevent new innovative competitors from entering the market,” they wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin

How many times have we seen this sort of scenario? Operators see something coming that’s inexorable yet they reckon it will hurt their bottom line, so they drag their feet for as long as they can rather than thinking up new ways to make sure they stay ahead of the competition. Fingers crossed we see this free wireless service as soon as possible.

LTE networks hit 250Mbps

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

NTT DoCoMo has been pushing ahead with boosting network speeds: the Japanese operator says it has notched up a downlink transmission rate of 250Mbps over an outdoor LTE test network.

DoCoMo is now working on testing handover from one base station to another, and how LTE performs in both indoor and outdoor environments, carrying out the trials near its R&D labs in Yokosuka.

It’s great to see companies making bigger and bigger leaps in bandwidth – good news for efficiency as much as anything. The only downside? DoCoMo expects it won’t finish testing the technology til 2009, so we’re still years away from actually getting our hands on devices and networks that can deliver this speed. Why do operators keep teasing us like this?!


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