Born to be Wireless

Is Google poised to release an API for geo-location, based on it’s magical My Location feature in Google Maps for mobile? Could be.

Something called the “Geolocation API” has appeared on this list for Google Gears code. And code for geo-location has appeared here.

More on TechCrunch

Qualcomm's annual BREW developer conference starts today.

More info at conferences site: http://brew.qualcomm.com/brew/brew_2008/

Labels: Brew

Developer Hands-On Mobile has announced that Guitar Hero III Mobile set a new mobile game record with nearly 1 million downloads, including monthly subscriptions, across all wireless service providers. The studio also announced that the title was the number one selling mobile game on Verizon Wireless phones for Q1 2008.

Source: http://www.gamesondeck.com/

Labels: guitar hero, mobile games

According to Reuters, Eddie Wu, Microsoft's MD of OEM embedded devices on Asia, told that Microsoft expects to increase the sales of Windows Mobile up to 50% in the fiscal year of 2009.

The expectation is to sell 20 million units until the end of this fiscal year (Jun 2008).

Labels: microsoft, Windows mobile

BusinessWeek sorted through the financial results of 30,500 publicly traded companies and rank the tech players on four criteria: shareholder return, return on equity, total revenues, and revenue growth. The companies leading the list are those with the lowest aggregate ranking.

Company - Industry - Country
AMAZON.COM - NET - USA
APPLE - COMP - USA
RESEARCH IN MOTION - COMM - CANADA
NINTENDO - SOFT - JAPAN
WESTERN DIGITAL - COMP - USA
AMÉRICA MÓVIL - TELE - MEXICO
CHINA MOBILE - TELE - CHINA
NOKIA - COMM - FINLAND
ASUSTEK COMPUTER - COMP - TAIWAN
HIGH TECH COMPUTER - COMP - TAIWAN

Full list: http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/it100_2008/

Already launched:

• AT&T
• USA
• O2
• UK
• Ireland
• Orange
• France
• T-Mobile
• Germany
• Austria

Scheduled to launch:

• America Mobil
• Latin America
  
• Bharti Airtel
• India
  
• Mobistar
• Belgium
• Globe
• Philippines
• Optus
• Australia
  
• Orange
• Austria
• Dominican Republic
• Egypt
• Jordan
• Poland
• Portugal
• Romania
• Slovakia
• Switzerland
• Rogers
• Canada
• Singtel
• Singapore
• Swisscom
• Switzerland
• TeliaSonera
• Denmark
• Estonia
• Finland
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Norway
• Sweden
• TIM
• Italy
  
• Vodacom
• South
• Vodafone
• Australia
• Czech Republic
• Egypt
• Greece
• India
• Italy
• New Zealand
• Portugal
• Turkey

Labels: iphone

Widgets works in all Opera platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Mobiles and TVs



More info at dev.opera.com and download them at widgets.opera.com

Labels: Opera mini

Microsoft announced that will allow ads to be displayed on two of its mobile services: Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail.

Labels: microsoft, mobile ads

- More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March 2008. Those users generated more than 33 million MB of data for operators worldwide.

- 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.
- Full Web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic. Content on WAP and .mobi sites accounted for 23% of mobile Web traffic.

Top sites on USA:
1) www.myspace.com
2) www.google.com
3) www.mocospace.com

Top sites on UK:
1) www.facebook.com
2) www.google.co.uk
3) www.live.com

Full report: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report/

Labels: Opera mini

Rumors are around for a while about changes in United States Telecommunications market.

Last year, Korean SK Telecom has attempted to buy a stake in Sprint Nextel.
Some weeks ago, Deutsche Telekom was also willing to make a bid for Sprint Nextel control (as reported here).

Now, BusinessWeek has reported that SK Telecom is again trying to wider it customer base in USA telecom market (it already has 70% of Helio), but now it's on conversation with Virgin Mobile USA. Together, Virgin Mobile and Helio have 5.4 million subscribers.

In order to move on with the deal, SK Telecom needs a buy-in from Sprint Nextel, which owns a part of Virgin Mobile.

Labels: Deutsche Telekom, Helio, SK Telecom, sprint nextel, Virgin Mobile

Vodafone has agreed a deal to acquire 100% of ZYB, the privately-owned Danish company that operates a social networking and online management tool enabling mobile phone users to back-up and share their handsets’ contact and calendar information online. Vodafone Europe BV, a holding company of Vodafone Group is paying €31.5 million (£25 million) for the company.
Vodafone says the acquisition of ZYB is a further advance in the implementation of its ‘Total Communications’ strategy, which the company says is delivering new revenue growth around fixed broadband, mobile advertising and a rich set of Internet services that integrate the mobile and PC customer experience. Vodafone says that ZYB fits into this strategy by enhancing the range of communications services the network operator can provide to its customers.

ZYB is designed with the mobile device at its heart, allowing customers to share information and messages between their friends and colleagues who are held in their mobile phone’s address book.
ZYB enables users to send messages and images from their PC to multiple mobile devices in their mobile community, as well as taking advantage of the functionality of an instant messaging service.
ZYB will remain based in Denmark and upon acquisition, will be incorporated into Vodafone’s Internet Services Division.

Dada Entertainment and Sony BMG have signed a deal which will see full-length DRM-free MP3s made available to Dada’s subscribers. The service charges $9.99 a month for 15 tokens, each of which can be redeemed for a ringtone, game or other mobile content—the new deal will let people download full songs to their computer and transfer them to a mobile phone or digital music player. Dada wants other labels to join, and expects to offer over-the-air downloads in the coming months (to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Alltel, Virgin, Cellular One, Boost, Cricket, and Nextel). Dada is also repurposing its social network to focus on music, and changing its name to The Music Movement. Dada Entertainment is a JV between Dada and Sony, formed in July last year.

Source: MocoNews

Labels: dada, sony bmg

The Android team has announced the selection of the top 50 applications of the Android Developer Challenge. Each of the top 50 apps will receive $25,000 and is eligible to receive further recognition via ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards in the final judging round. A total of 1,788 total submissions were received.

While the team is working on a more detailed description of the top 50 apps, you can read a general summary of the apps on the Android Developer blog.

Brasil Telecom (who is in process of merging with Oi) has launched two unlimited plans for its clients.
The first one offers unlimited voice calls for R$ 99 (US$ 59).
The second offers unlimited voice calls, SMS, data and video-calls and the client also gets a Nokia N95. This all for R$ 199 (US$ 119).

It's pretty much what american carriers are charging for unlimited plan in the US (US$ 99).
I hope the others carriers in Brazil starts to do the same :-)

Labels: Brazil, BrT

Source: www.appleinsider.com

Labels: iphone black

Nokia Step Counter does what it says on the tin: it counts the number of steps you take by analyzing how you ’shake’ your phone. Since most people have their phone with them everywhere they go, it is natural to use the accelerometer in an S60 product to track your daily activity.

- dotMobi -- the company behind the .mobi internet domain name for mobile phones and the dev.mobi developer forum -- today announced it has acquired the intellectual property assets of Mowser, a San Mateo, Calif.-based mobile browsing company.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

dotMobi's acquisition of Mowser's technology, developed by Bay Area mobile pioneers Russell Beattie and Michael Rowehl, is another way for dotMobi to provide a complete range of mobile content creation solutions for businesses of all sizes.

James Pearce, dotMobi Vice President of Technology, said, "When Mowser's founders decided to make the assets available, dotMobi was first in line to acquire them. The work Russell and Mike put into making Mowser a 'best of breed' product is well-known throughout the industry. Being able to add that technology into dotMobi's product line is exciting because it will exponentially stimulate mobile content growth."

dotMobi plans to integrate Mowser technology into new business-grade and consumer-grade mobile development tools as well as include aspects of it into dotMobi's popular content creation tools like http://find.mobi, DeviceAtlas and http://ready.mobi, all of which help businesses more easily create device-aware mobile content.

For more information on dotMobi domains and registration information, visit http://dotmobi.mobi. Visit the dotMobi blog at http://blog.mobi.

Creating cross-platform mobile applications for consumers with more than 7000 different mobile handsets in their pockets is a daunting task. Mob4Hire’s crowdsourcing platform will solve this problem with its launch. Mob4Hire helps mobile developers crowdsource application testing by connecting them with an international community of testers: everyday people and professionals on a variety of handhelds and who are willing to test applications in exchange for incentives

Opera have just announced the first release of their upcoming developer tools suite. Dragonfly looks to be similar in form and functionality to the popular Firebug debugger on Firefox, with the added bonus of mobile integration, allowing you to remotely debug mobile devices. There’s a detailed overview and screenshots at Dev.Opera.

It’s only an alpha release at the moment, but it looks like a promising start — whether it will be enough to unseat Firefox as most developers’ browser of choice remains to be seen.

Labels: Opera

Vodafone has closed a deal with Apple to distribute iPhone in ten countries: Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

This means that Apple has broke the deal with TIM to sell the iPhone exclusively on Italy.

Source: Reuters

Labels: apple, iphone, Vodafone

North American company Hop-on is selling a disposable mobile phone on Europe. The mobile has no LCD screen and uses GSM network.

It will cost 10 pounds / 13 euros.

Labels: europe, hop-on

According to WSJ.com, Deutsche Telekom is weighing a bid to acquire Sprint Nextel. If this happen, the new company created by the merge of T-Mobile USA and Sprint Nextel will be the largest mobile carrier on United States.

Labels: Deutsche Telekom, sprint nextel, T-Mobile

Adobe Open Screen Project is willing to delivery rich Internet content into dozens of channels, including mobile operating system, televesions, pcs and others consumer eletrocnics. It has already a impressive list of supporters:
ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Verizon Wireless, BBC, MTV Networks and NBC Universal.

The goal is "enabling a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications" for any devices (mobile or not).

This includes:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees--making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Labels: adobe, air, flash, open screen

Nokia announced today that the Nokia Music Store in Singapore is now "live" at www.music.nokia.com.sg. Individual tracks cost 2.00 Singapore dollars (US$ 1.47) per track and most albums cost 16.00 Singapore dollars (US$ 11.79) each. It also offers unlimited PC streaming at 16.00 Singapore dollars per month.

The Nokia Music Store is available in the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, France and Singapore.

Labels: nokia, nokia music store

Google is launching the new Google home for iPhone and iPod Touch in 33 new markets and 16 new languages, from Argentina to New Zealand, from Swedish to Chinese.



Google on the iPhone is a great way to access your most used Google services. Some of its benefits include

• Fast and fluid search with one-tap access to News, image, local, or web results and search query suggestions when you start typing
• Automatic delivery of Gmail messages (no need to refresh your browser!), and auto-completion of email addresses when typing
• A combined month-and-current-day view of your always-in-sync Google Calendar, and the ability to share pictures with friends and family using Picasa Web Albums

Source: Google Mobile Blog

Labels: google mobile, iphone