The wireless capabilities that people enjoy with Bluetooth, might have a successor come next year with Wi-Fi Direct. This technology has been announced by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Wi-Fi Direct would allow for easier connection, and provide a means for Wi-Fi enabled to devices to connect to one another without a joining a hotspot network. (more…)
Google is determined to make sure it doesn’t miss out on the “Year of the Mobile.” Like the rest of us, the search engine doesn’t know when that year will actually start, but if it has anything to do with it, 2009 might just be the top candidate.
As of today, publishers can now drop smart phone optimized AdSense ads inside their mobile content.
Back in February, Google premiered Google Sync, which coordinated participating phones (all those with the SyncML standar) with Google Calendar, Contacts and Gmail.
However, in the first iteration of the product, the Gmail sync left a little to be desired. Rather than popping up with new messages, you had to manually check your email from your mobile. (The horror! The horror!) But that stone age interface has finally passed—Google has unveiled push Gmail for Google Sync now.
The Orchard has entered into a marketing and licensing partnership with Chinese mobile infrastructure and services provider, ZTEMT. Utilizing The Orchard’s top one hundred thousand songs, ZTEMT will program an English language genre section of China Telecom’s newly updated iMusic. According to The Orchard, this deal makes them the first international digital music distributor to introduce such a large selection of western music to China’s 388 million net and mobile users.
According to Bango, over 20% of people visiting web sites to purchase content using their mobile phones are now connecting via WiFi. This presents a major challenge to both content providers and operators as these mobile visitors are unrecognized by the networks, making it difficult to sell and market mobile services to them and significantly impacting mobile content revenues. (more…)
Today, mobile phones have become inevitable in one’s life. We’ve seen it grow from a mere luxury to now a necessity. The transformation in the lifestyle of we, the people is a major reason for this change. What started with a several bucks for incoming call has moved on to a plethora of plans which have free outgoing calls today.
The crushing dominance of the iPhone is broken—at least for now—having given way to the BlackBerry Curve. This just-released report has come in from the NPD Group (www.npd.com), a prestigious consumer research agency. After months of topping the charts, the iPhone acquiesces to what consumers have pegged as their number one choice—the BlackBerry Curve. (more…)
A few random updates of interest from last week’s CTIA Wireless event… CTIA was as interesting and busy as ever, although I would guess that the numbers were likely way down this year for obvious reasons… on the up-side, Vegas is pretty much giving away hotel rooms due to high vacancy rates so if you need to go there for a business trip you’ll be able to do so on the cheap very easily (airfares are also very reasonable). I caught wind of some amazing technologies in the mobile space while there, many providing data sharing solutions using mobile technology that take advantage of the cloud so you can easily share documents with colleagues, interact with your docs via mobile and even communicate and access remote computers at home of office from your phone! If mobile media is important in your job you’ll be pleased to know that some great solutions are coming enabling you to do much more and likely wow your colleagues at the same time.
Yes you have seen this idea before…
Shades of the nearly-forgotten barcode scanning CueCat, and Japanese business cards, add up to a old yet new strategy for Google. This latest AdWords initiative has to be a 20 percent project at Google.
We picture some techie cleaning out a closet at home, finding a card from a hostess bar in Osaka stuck under a CueCat in a box, and being suddenly struck by a bowling ball falling from an unbalanced shelf.
Tra-la-la! Wait, that’s Captain Underpants. Eureka! That’s more appropriate for California.
We’ll give credit to Joel On Software for making the CueCat connection too. Yes, play spot the oldies, kids, it’s easy and fun!
Google intends to drop square barcodes onto print ads.
With a camera phone and the right software, a person can scan the ad, and the phone’s onboard web browser will bring up additional information related to it.
“2D barcodes have been common in Japan for a number of years,” Google said in its barcode help page. “In fact, Japanese business cards often feature barcodes containing contact information.”
The first ads containing these barcodes appeared in newspapers, and connected to jewelry retailer Blue Nile.
Google promoted these, and other barcode ads, as a way to quickly deliver more information about an advertiser to a consumer.
It’s far too soon to guess at how successful barcoding may be, for Google or anyone else opting to use the technology.
We will make one guess: Google’s Android mobile software will include a barcode reader when it launches.
Google has released their AdSense for Mobile program for a couple of countries now after testing it for some while*. (more…)
