Voda shutsdown Innovation unit

Voda announced on Friday they are to shut down their recently formed New Business and Innovation unit...

GooTube

So it's done. The rumours circulating for a while. Interesting that they (google) are keeping Goolge Video annd YouTube separate and branded independently.

If you can build a community in the space of 19 months around a decent service, you might get bough out for a large wad of cash by the internet giants. I'm impressed YouTube managed to scale ** so ** quickly...

We've got blogging communities, photo-sharing and video-communities, music-communities of course... what's next ?

New additions to Nokia family

Some interesting new handsets coming from Nokia announced today - N70, N73 and the N91 all get a music makeover edition in black, with the N91 getting an 8gb hard drive... plus the fabulous N95 is on it's way.

Luckily had the chance to view this device a couple of weeks ago and it seems impressive... I'm particularly interested to see if they have fixed the N73 photo software compression issues with this 5 megapixel device...plus how quick will HSDPA be in reality for functions like browsing...

There are some other announcements I'm sure Nokia will make at their annual consumer and business conference regards the latest devicesat the end of November.. watch this space.. Nokia's tagline for their announcement today was "Convergence without compromise"... can you see yourself using just one multimedia device for web browsing, music, imaging , self-locating and mapping ? If so the N95 and the Sony Ericsson P990 seem a first step towards that world...

Couple of Microsoft links

Microsoft jump on the video upload band wagon a la YouTube and VideoGoogle.


Been looking at mobile imaging recently in mobile. Imaging is such a huge area there's too much too cover in a single post... but one application I discovered on the way was Microsoft Max as their desktop imaging application equivalent to Google Picasa (presumably they will link it to Microsoft Live)... very Apple.
Microsoft Max

Chumby is on its way

Rumours in the blogosphere about an open,hackable wifi enabled portable device for accessing that interwebby thing ? (no not the Nokia 770 :)...


More details here :
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/announcing_the_birth_of_chumby.html

Web mashups - no programming required

A colleague of mine pointed me in the direction of Dapper.com , just launched, where it 's super easy to create your own web mashups, using point and click! Simple but powerful ...(also noted it was also on the homepage of Programmable Web)... Services that expose their platform API's (including mobile network enabler platforms) offer the chance for some really interesting new mobile/web mashups and tools like Dapper may make it easier than ever..

Storing your media and personal details online

I've been thinking about whether mobile consumers would be willing to store their personal details online with a "trusted provider" (what defines a trusted party is a whole other debate). From a mobile innovation perspective though all sorts of propositions and services could then be built that could be of real advantage to the user.

However I remember the total failure that was Microsoft's .net passport scheme a while back on the web... but maybe now times have moved on and the new c-generation are more willing to store personal details online across multiple "trusted" 3rd parties.

Today, Amazon has my credit card details hopefully safely locked away. Google has access to a vast amount of my e-mail and eBay is storing my reputation. All of these things are of value to me. Do I trust these companies ? I'm not 100% sure. However the benefits currently outweigh the costs of transacting through these companies to do what I want to do or get what I want to get.

If you can accept that maybe the c-gen ** will ** start storing more of their personal details online , it may not be so difficult to suggest that they also store a lot of media online (music / photots / videos) rather than in folders and filesystems on their PC. A lot of my media is now held either on my phone, desktop PC, laptop, but I'm moving more and more of it online (Google GDrive anyone?). My bookmarks are now held in del.ici.ous not my desktop browser application, my photos in flickr / picasa online and my mobile contacts with Shozu. It's only a matter of time until I'm sure I will end up storing most of music somewhere online as well.

There is an advantage of storing stuff online, in that you can have easy access to it pretty much anywhere / anytime without being tied to your PC... and that inlcudes access then via the mobile phone. Companies like Orb and Phling allow remote access to your PC via your mobile today ... whilst Yahoo with their mobile client (and I'm sure Google are working on one too) want you to store your media with them so it can easily be accessed from the mobile...also we are seeing phones with dedicated "MySpace" links or keys, where again the c-gen populate their profiles and web pages with lots of their personalised media.

I wonder if the c-gen will store ALL their media and personal details online...

Nokia N73

I've been using the Nokia N73 for a few months now and gotta say I think it's a great phone. It goes on release today alongside the N93.I've been playing with the imaging and camera functions for some work related stuff and they are generally stable and an improvement over S60 v2.0 equivalent apps.eg. the N70.

Plus there's dedicated hard keys for quick access to the image gallery and camera (as well as opening the slider)...

Whilst the screen resolution is not as high as the Nokia N80 (released a few months ago) if you can live without the W-Lan client, and like candybar phones with big screens then get down to your local mobile shop and take a look or check out various reviews on the web ...

Mobile Internet vs. Internet

Do you browse the web on your phone, (that is the real web) ? Why do people browse in the first place ? Are they browsing real web sites, filtered web sites for mobile, or just going to their web mail through the mobile browser - in which case it is it really web browsing ?
This is a debate I have regularly with my colleagues at one of the large UK mobile operators... The usual issues of screen size, battery life and poor input method, no address bar or navigation buttons at the top of mobile browsers, lack of plugin support such as active-x controls etc.. all not being present tend towards the mobile internet support argument (where mobile internet sites are tailored for mobile devices ... usually phones). However in each of these cases the issues are being addressed **slowly..**.

.mobi domains has brought these issues up as flavour of the month again.

Having used the Nokia OSS browser for the last 6 months on the E60, N80 and N73 I have noted my own behaviour .... I regularly "graze" - that is I am using the mobile browser to visit websites I normally would visit as if I were at my laptop to get information snack bites (these are real websites n ot mobile variants) ...it's more information gathering from my pre-selected websites than browsing. For example, if I have a few spare minutes at the airport I might catch up on some of my favourite Blog posters new entries .... or go to my Gmail / Hotmail/ Yahoo mail account via the mobile browser (there are much quicker easier ways to get your webmail on the phone - but I still find the web browser method acceptable). There seems to me at least a utility function of browsing in this way - I am after some specific ** persoanlised ** information , I know where and how to get it and the user experience is not great but it's ok and outweighs the "wait until I'm at my PC" issue... (ie. more importantly I can get it whenever I want and wherever I am)...

The scenario above is "Pull" based - I am actively going to get information via the mobile phone browser, pulling the information I'm hoping to get when I have some idle time (unless you are using some kind of Alerting via email service on the web eg. Google Alerts), then we get to "Push" -based services which opens up a whole other debate !... snacksize bits of personalised content being pushed to your phone seems to be one way in the interim to address some of the aforementioned mobile phone browsing issues ...

However, just as I like to know that I carry around ** my total support and social network ** (in my contacts/address book)... that it's with me at all times (until the battery runs out ;)..... I like the idea of having access to the **total web** (not just the mobile web) in my pocket as well...

Web/ mobile client evoultion continues

Motorola have done a deal to include preinstalled Yahoo Client on their handsets ...

So it's true ...

Apple talks of iPhone at last

Tezaa - wisdom of many website

Interesting website based on "No-one knows as much as Everbody" concept (re: Wisdom of Crowds book) and finding out what the crowds opinion is....

Widgets

Interesting link posted on a friend's blog today about Widsets - a supereasy way of creating and transfering widgets to your mobile phone. Impressive (more so in my opinion than Opera's widget platform).... I particualrly like how simple it is to sycnh new stuff to the the mobile. Took me less than a minute to create an Atom feed widget for this blog and put it on an N70.

First Post

Books I am reading currently are :




The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki
A very interesting book that has multiple documented examples of why group think/decision making is often more powerful than singular thinking...





The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
Great book for understanding how technology is impacting the world generally at a faster and faster rate and how boundaries / borders are falling to create new opportunities and businesses.








The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture - John Battelle
How Google evolved and marches onwards

The Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler
To be started !