According to the investment firm Morgan Stanley the mobile Internet has grown significantly faster than its desktop equivalent. The Mobile Internet Report predicts that more people will choose to access the Internet through their smartphones than their desktops at home, as mobile Internet usage will still continue to grow over the next five years. It suggests that we are in the “early innings of mobile Internet development” at the moment. This development is happening at rates faster than earlier tech advancements, such as the progress of the desktop PC era. A lot of people quickly adapted to smartphones, including the Apple iPhone and other mobile devices powered by Google’s Android mobile OS.

Another research firm, Research & Markets (R&M), observed that in the United States alone, the mobile market is growing rapidly with more than fifty percent of all mobile devices expected to be categorized as smartphones by 2011. These devices have transformed into mobile PCs, where users can experience a wide range of services. Smartphones are now built with more powerful hardware such as expanded memory and fast processors and better features like video, music, Internet and a lot more mobile apps –– all of which are becoming a standard.

According from Ovum, an independent telecoms analyst, indicators have shown that there has been an increasing dependence towards mobile markets, with the mobile landscape becoming more saturated every year. For instance, forecasts show that Google Android, a major player in the smartphone market, will widen its market share from 5% to 18% in the next five years. Moreover, the mobile app market has shown impressive growth rates over the recent years. It will continue to grow across the world at a staggering rate of 41% every year for the next five years, with Apple leading the way in mobile app downloads.

Mobile Search

With these developments in mind, it is safe to say the online search companies will also compete amongst themselves for the best mobile search experience. Mobile net growth is a worldwide phenomenon, and one of the tech trends that would surely converge to spur this growth is mobile search. With the whole world at its disposal, local search companies are taking initiatives to refine search engine experience by testing what kind of search results mobile users will look for and which sites are the most mobile-compatible. Most mobile users prefer sites that are very simple, easy to navigate, and fast loading.

Mobile Friendly Sites
Right now, having a mobile site will not be much significant to outrank big companies for keywords. But we can expect that having a mobile friendly site will develop into a crucial factor to become easily visible in search engines done from mobile devices in the coming years, enough to beat the competition.

To create a mobile friendly version of your website, you must give it a unique domain name first to give it a “mobile identity.” There are a lot of ways to do it, like using a m.domain.com format, or creating a subdirectory for the mobile version (www.domain.com/m/). There are also others that use a mobile.domain.com format, and a few ones use more unique URLs. You have the freedom to choose the way a mobile URL is written. However, remember that mobile users have to deal with smaller devices that are sometimes difficult to type in, thus a short and simple mobile URL is always good.

Dealing with Duplicate Content Issues
Having a mobile site can pose issues with regards to duplicate content, that is, having your primary site and its mobile version use the same content. If you are familiar with SEO, remember how having duplicate content can cause issues and penalties from search engines that cannot figure out the two versions are unique from one another and do not really share the same content? Creating a mobile-specific domain for your site, as discussed above, does not entirely eliminate duplicate content. To avoid duplicate content issues, you have to include a mobile server header in your server (like this one: application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml) so your mobile site sends a signal to search engines like Google telling it that it’s indexing mobile content. Another way is to create a mobile site map, such as this one:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″

xmlns:mobile=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0″>

<url>
<loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
</urlset>

The key to avoid duplicate content is to create a canonical tag to point the preferred URL you want to get indexed if you do have a lot of URLs sharing the same content and same content type header.

Using Redirects

To make further distinction between your primary site and your mobile site, you have to redirect users to the right destination, i.e. redirect mobile users to your mobile domain. To do this, you have to run a script in your mobile site that detects mobile users. The script should use a USER_AGENT detection to see if the site is being access through a mobile device. Lastly, you have to establish a 301 redirect that leads a mobile user to your mobile site properly.

An alternative to this, especially if you can’t run the script, is to create a standard link in your primary site that leads to the mobile version. When users access your site, they can just click on it, just make sure that the link is largely visible and preferably on top of your page.

Another approach would be to use a single domain for both desktop and mobile versions by using CSS that will restructure your site to suit the device people use to access the site. You can use Wordpress for this; it has a WpTouch plug-in that recognizes mobile devices automatically and restructures your site template accordingly. You can also do this without Wordpress by using a dynamically generated CSS page in your page header that looks like this one:

<noscript>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”handheld.css” media=”handheld”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”desktop.css” media=”screen”>
</noscript>
<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>
if(screen.height > 320) {

document.write(‘<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”desktop.css” media=”Screen” />’);
} else {
document.write(‘<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”handheld.css” />’);
}
</script>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”iphone.css” media=”only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print”>

<!–[if IE 6]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”ie6.css” type=”text/css”>
<![endif]–>

The World at our Fingertips
As we witness the dawn of the mobile age, people have increasingly involved their lives through their mobile devices. More and more people buy smartphones that now act as a passport to the whole world. These small devices allow us to connect to the world, from anywhere, anytime. As smartphones become increasingly affordable and more apps are downloaded for consumption, we can expect the mobile boom to create a greater impact as the years pass. This is the best time to take the opportunity of bringing your presence and business to the mobile world. Stay alert with the changing online market, tap your mobile web potential and act swiftly. If you get ahead of the competition, you will be successful in no time.

Comments

The app contains a number of attractive features, including email caching. This works perfect for the underground or in-air traveler who wants to read mail while on the go. It’s definitely one of those batch processes I like to reserve for time when I’m not sitting in front of my computer, if possible. It also contains a search function which, again, can be used even when you’re out of network range.

Yahoo! also brags a bit about its use of HTML5, which it claims enables the app to run even faster. It’s not slow, I’ll give it that, but I wouldn’t exactly call it fast. I noticed a little lag when running it, but nothing serious. A few Market commenters noted that it crashed a few times for them and that it ran particularly slow. To the latter claim I’m not sure what we can make of it because different people have different standards for speed. It does sometimes take a bit for mailboxes to load, I will say. To the former, I’ve browsed through the app for a while and haven’t experienced a crash yet. But just watch, it’ll go just after I publish this.

The app does contain plenty of email usage features that should probably be included in all external mail apps. The main screen contains all of your folders, both smart folders and user-created ones. You can also add a folder, empty the trash, or empty spam under the More tab. It appears, though, that once I’ve clicked the More tab, that menu appears every time I return to the main Mail screen after viewing my Inbox.

In terms of composing, the interface is intuitive enough. Thankfully, you can add recipients not only from your Yahoo contacts, but also from your Android contacts. There are rich text options, mostly the basics like font face and color, bold, italics, and underline. Uploading files is pretty easy, and you can even take a picture right from your camera and attach it.

It’s not perfect, but it will do. You can grab the Yahoo! Mail client — as well as Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Search — from the Market. The QR codes are below.

Update: No sooner after I publish this do I get a new email to my Yahoo! Mail account. It made my phone vibrate, the trackball glow, and an annoying tone to sound. If you don’t like this, I suggest going into Options and unchecking the Notifications box. Unfortunately, this seems like an all-or-nothing proposition. Thankfully, the app closes when you back out of it, so you can use it just to check your mail, rather than receive it in real time.

Comments

The IT versus Telephony divide:
IT and telephony departments are often separate departments, if not fiefdoms, within an enterprise. This historical separation has resulted in markedly different views surrounding open source usage. I was told of this reality when we launched the WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Communications Enabled Applications (CEA), and have since seen this reality play out.

Open source telephony solutions are not new. However, for enterprise telephony buyers, the risk of any downtime is too great to consider open source alternatives to Cisco, Avaya, Siemens or other well established telephony solutions. One can hardly blame enterprise telephony buyers. We don’t think twice about having to refresh a web browser if a web application crashes. But what if a conference call crashes or a call between a customer and a contact center representative is terminated abruptly?

One may sympathize with enterprise telephony buyers, but their decisions are impacting the seed at which IT departments can respond to end user demands for innovative applications.

Next generation mobile applications demand communications enablement:
As mobile web application usage grows, the first step will be to delivering today’s desktop browser application on a mobile browser. Forward thinking IT departments and enterprises will look instead to deliver a class of applications beyond those available on desktop browsers today. In time, the majority of enterprises will follow suit.

These mobile applications will be communications enabled from the start.

A mobile CRM application that lets a sales executive review a sales lead, and within the application itself, call one of her direct reports, based on presence availability and personalization information, and jointly co-browsing through the sales lead data online while speaking over the phone will become standard practice.

A mobile retailer application that lets buyers co-shop online using desktop or mobile devices, and if required, call the 1-800 number and be routed to the appropriate contact center representative, based on browsing history, without having to traverse automated call menus, will become standard practice.

The challenge for IT is that these and similar applications require IT and telephony groups to work more closely together. More importantly, these applications will require a degree of telephony flexibility that enterprise telephony buyers aren’t likely to be comfortable delivering based on their risk adverse nature.

So what’s an IT department to do?

Open source and cloud telephone to the rescue:
An interesting solution is being offered by open source Twillo Cloud Communications. Twillo recently announced OpenVBX, an open source telephony in the cloud solution. OpenVBX offers virtual telephone numbers, voice transcription, voice collaboration amongst users and a drag and drop approach to building call flows and menus.

OpenVBX is offered as a hosted solution so IT departments don’t have to trouble themselves with keeping a telephony infrastructure up and running.

Most importantly, OpenVBX can route calls to existing phone numbers. This means IT can build innovative new applications that rely on the enterprise’s existing telephony infrastructure without actually having to involve the telephony department in the application development process.

I am not proposing that IT circumvent the telephony department in the long run. However, I’m simply suggesting IT departments consider applying the lessons of grassroots open source adoption. It’s much easier to convince decision makers to use open source when the organization has already been using open source.

Neither am I suggesting that telephony departments should migrate away from their existing enterprise telephony solutions. That would be a fool’s errand. I am however suggesting that telephony departments should evaluate how open source and cloud offerings can augment the existing enterprise telephony environment to deliver end user application innovation.

A mobile communications enabled application generating revenue for the enterprise will go a long way toward convincing telephony departments to augment their telephony infrastructures with open source and cloud offerings.

As an end user, I can hardly wait.

Comments

Unlimited mobile data has long been considered an unsustainable model by some analysts, and it is believed that other cell services will also set limits. That’s not good news for a growing list of companies delivering data heavy music services like downloads and video or music streaming to smartphones.

Perhaps the best hope for many of these music tech startups is the expansion of offline playlist caching already available with Spotify, Slacker and the new Rdio service announced today. When a few thousand favorite songs can be stored and updated on a users smarthphone, the need for a constant and increasingly expensive connection becomes less critical

Details Of New AT&T Data Plans:

DataPlus. Provides 200 megabytes (MB) of data – for example, enough to send/receive 1,000 emails (no attachments), plus send/receive 150 emails with attachments, plus view 400 Web pages, plus post 50 photos on social media sites, plus watch 20 minutes of streaming video – for just $15 per month.**  This plan, which can save customers up to 50 percent off their wireless data charges, is designed for people who primarily like to surf the web, send email and use social networking apps. If customers exceed 200 MB in a monthly billing cycle, they will receive an additional 200 MB of data usage for $15 for use in the cycle.  Currently, 65 percent of AT&T smartphone customers use less than 200 MB of data per month on average.

DataPro. Provides 2 gigabytes (GB) of data – for example, enough to send/receive 10,000 emails (no attachments), plus send/receive 1,500 emails with attachments, plus view 4,000 Web pages, plus post 500 photos to social media sites, plus watch 200 minutes of streaming video – for $25 per month.**  Should a customer exceed 2 GB during a billing cycle, they will receive an additional 1 GB of data for $10 for use in the cycle.  Currently, 98 percent of AT&T smartphone customers use less than 2 GB of data a month on average.

Tethering. Smartphone customers – including iPhone customers – who choose the DataPro plan have the option to add tethering for an additional $20 per month.  Tethering lets customers use their tethering-enabled smartphones as a modem to provide a broadband connection for laptop computers, netbooks or other computing devices. Tethering for iPhones will be available when Apple releases iPhone OS 4 this summer.

Comments

A very different question probably wouldn’t have crossed my mind back then: Is all mobile social? More specifically, is all mobile media inherently shareable through digital social channels, and should that be the case?

The thought came up this week amidst successive meetings with two very different companies: InMobi, a mobile ad network, and SCVNGR, a mobile gaming platform (see a recent blog post I wrote for more on the latter). The ad network’s executives highlighted a case study for Reebok that included virtual gifting via mobile media. The whole paradigm of mobile media is quickly coming around to what it seems it was meant to be, like Jack on “Lost” having his moment of awakening and fulfilling his purpose.

It wasn’t long ago when almost all of the conversations I had with mobile vendors were entirely media-focused. These conversations would revolve around ad specs, file sizes, targeting capabilities, CPM prices, and other media minutiae. All of that’s fine, but it quickly commoditizes mobile media. I don’t think that’s what these vendors want, but they should know that’s why it’s so hard for some of them to get a second meeting. They can send their one-page media kit PDFs instead.

A funny thing is happening on the way to the rapid commoditization and devaluation of the vast majority of mobile media. Marketers are starting to get a sense of what these devices can really do. There’s Apple’s iAd, which may well be the Jesus ad to accompany its Jesus phone and Jesus tablet. There’s Google’s Android, which makes it easy to share content from mobile devices. There’s BlackBerry Messenger, perhaps the only social application on U.S. handsets that directly contributes to sales of those devices. Then there’s Twitter with its heavy usage from mobile devices, Foursquare popularizing the concept of check-in apps, and Facebook with more than 100 million mobile users.

None of that tells the whole story, though. The bigger story is the device itself.

Mobile devices are designed to facilitate communication with anyone anywhere at any time. Text messaging became the most streamlined way to do this through data services. Cameras on phones became useful once photos could be shared with others directly from the devices. While mainstream news, sports, and weather sites were the first to gain multimillion-user audiences for mobile web content, social properties have accounted for the most pageviews in recent months. In some ways, smartphones now resemble personal computers, but Steve Jobs had to pioneer a new hybrid category to better capitalize on portable computing. The mobile phone is something else — it’s a social computer.

Mobile phones connect people to each other, they connect people to locations, and they are increasingly powerful for connecting people to each other within given locations. It’s taken the devices a while to get there, but their form factor is lending to increasingly social behavior. Camera phones are a great illustration — they were of limited value until you could seamlessly broadcast those photos or share them with others via email or MMS (multimedia messaging service).

Clearly all mobile media isn’t social yet. It doesn’t all need to be. Yet so much of what will work in mobile will either benefit from amplification as consumers share it with others directly from the handset (via email, text messaging, or social media), or use it to connect with others in proximity to where they are.

Just as it will bring consumers together, it will bring marketers’ and agencies’ internal organizations closer together. Mobile vendors, meanwhile, will get more people in the room, as it won’t just be the media or mobile or social teams. If mobile can do that — and it’s still an “if” today — then its social potential is truly limitless.

Comments

Strong sales of the Droid, Droid Eris, and Blackberry Curve encouraged by special promotions helped keep Verizon Wireless’s smartphone sales almost on par with AT&T in Q1.  AT&T comprised nearly a third of the smartphone market (32%) followed closely by Verizon Wireless (30%), T-Mobile (17%) and Sprint (15%).

The continued popularity of messaging phones and smartphones resulted in slightly higher prices for all mobile phones, despite an overall drop in the number of mobile phones purchased in the first quarter. The average selling price for all mobile phones in Q1 reached $88, which is a 5 percent increase from Q1 2009. Smartphone unit prices, by comparison, averaged $151 in Q1 2010, which is a 3 percent decrease over the previous year.

Methodology: The NPD Group compiles and analyzes mobile device sales data based on more than 150,000 completed online consumer research surveys each month. Surveys are based on a nationally balanced and demographically-representative sample, and results are projected to represent the entire population of U.S. consumers. Note: Sales figures do not include corporate/enterprise mobile phone sales.

Comments

Dave’s Answer:

I bumped into the very same problem and it’s a weird one. There’s something about the range of Bluetooth or the mechanism by which things pair, because what I did was pair my Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard (which I love!) to my my Mac Mini, then to my wi-fi iPad. It worked fine, but when I went back to pair it with my iPad a second time, instead of just turning on and being recognized, the iPad got cranky and didn’t want to pair it as it saw the keyboard was already hooked up to a device.

Now figuring that out took quite a bit of work and a fair amount of time on Google, searching for “problems pairing bluetooth keyboard ipad”, for which there are a lot of questions, but not a lot of answers. So I experimented and figured it out!

I encountered what I believe were two problems. First off, that bluetooth keyboard has a pretty astonishing range, so even two rooms away when I turned it on, it automatically paired with my Mac Mini. I thought Bluetooth was supposed to work for about 7-10 feet, so I was pretty amazed. The second issue was that the keyboard was marked as already paired to another device. Why that didn’t affect things when I first paired them, I don’t understand, but unpairing it from the Mac Mini certainly solved the problem.

Here’s what I was seeing, to start out. This is on the iPad:

It would spin and spin and spin. Sometimes it’d show the keyboard info for long enough to confirm that the keyboard wasn’t completely dead:

Try as I might, I couldn’t get past this point. Back and forth, frustrating as heck! Why this can’t show “keyboard (paired to another device)” is beyond me, but it doesn’t.

To solve the problem, I switched to my Mac Mini, the device that already had paired with the keyboard. There I went to System Preferences and choose “Bluetooth”. Here’s what I saw:

Yup, even two offices away it could pair and connect. Incredible! But it was blocking me progressing with the iPad. So I needed to decouple the two. At first I thought I could just disconnect the keyboard from the computer:

Experimentation demonstrated that was insufficient, so instead I needed to click on the “Paired” status on the screen, then click on the “-” sign:

Am I sure? Ayup, I am:

Not more than a second or two later, this popped up on the iPad (not the Mac):

That’s more like it! I type in the numeric sequence, press Return on the Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard and almost instantly I see:

Phew! That solved it for me. Try this sequence, let us know if it works for you too.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to check out the extensive iPad help we have on this site too. Got a question about the Apple iPad (or iPad 3G) that we haven’t answered? Then let us know!

Comments

The newspaper’s report cites the example of an innocent couple in Scotland who received threatening lawyers’ letters accusing them of allowing illegal peer-to-peer file downloading from their internet account, and what it took for them to resolve it.

One aspect of the Guardian’s report caught my attention as it’s something I notice all the time – unprotected wireless networks that anyone can hop onto and use, often without you even knowing about it.

The paper quotes Andrew Heaney, director of regulation at service provider Talk Talk (which has stated it will not abide by the new law):

[…] “The essential flaw is always the same: copyright holders can link piracy to IP addresses, and these can be matched to a household’s internet account. But there could be tens of people using an IP address – members of your family, visitors, neighbours, or somebody more unscrupulous.”

He says the most determined pirates – the criminals – will cover their tracks, hijacking other people’s internet connections if they can.

If you run a wireless network, whether at home or work, and you haven’t securely set it up with even baseline security like user passwords, you’re now asking for real trouble, maybe of the type the Guardian’s story highlights. Relying only on your operating system or router firewall to protect you isn’t enough.

So do yourself a favour – check that your wifi is secure. Best to check the user manual or website of your router manufacturer for a product-specific guide.

A good summary of the Bill (now Act) from PaidContent UK: Digital Economy Bill: Quick Guide To All 45 Measures.

And if you have strong views about the Act, add your voice to Digital Economy Bill Ideas.

Comments

If the report turns out to be accurate, the iPhone would be available on the entire CDMA network. This is the network which houses both Verizon and Sprint. So theoretically, it could be both Sprint and Verizon who receive iPhone support.

AT&T and Apple have had an exclusive agreement regarding the iPhone since 2007. Therefore, AT&T has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 2-3 years. In that span of time, Apple has introduced all sorts of new models of the iPhone, and they’re prepping one for this summer. So, this begs the question - If Verizon does receive iPhone support, what model will they feature?

Apple provided an answer to the question of Verizon support, which didn’t give a conclusive answer, “There has been lots of incorrect speculation on CDMA iPhones for a long time. We haven’t seen one yet and only Apple knows when that might occur.”

It’s not a surprise that Verizon leaped in shares today, as the potential of revenue growth from the iPhone is substantial. The company already supports 91 million customers, and with the iPhone who has around 25 million users, could receive substantial growth. Not counting the current customers who will renew their contracts to get the iPhone at a discount.

Along with the announcement, we have a time table which would see the Verizon iPhone releasing late this year. This information comes from reports that Pegatron, the supposed manufacturers are scheduled to begin mass iPhone production in September 2010. As with all the other information, don’t take this to heart.

The rumors concerning Verizon and the iPhone have been circulating for a while now, though this is the most credible source yet. 2010 is certainly shaping up to be one interesting year with the induction of the Google Phone. And now we will more than likely see the expansion of the iPhone; it feels like it couldn’t get a higher adoption rate. However, this is only the beginning.

- First Windows PDA (1998)

- First Windows Phone (June 2002)

- First 3G CDMA EVDO smartphone (October 2005)

- First gesture-based smartphone (June 2007)

- First Google Android smartphone (October 2008)

- First 4G WIMAX smartphone (November 2008)

Peter Chou, CEO of HTC stakes his claim against Apple’s suit, “HTC disagrees with Apple’s actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible.”

“From day one, HTC has focused on creating cutting-edge innovations that deliver unique value for people looking for a smartphone. In 1999 we started designing the XDA[i] and T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition[ii], our first touch-screen smartphones, and they both shipped in 2002 with more than 50 additional HTC smartphone models shipping since then.”

Apple’s lawsuit calls for the prohibition of HTC to sell, market, or distribute handsets which violate their patents.This includes the HTC Nexus One, Hero, Dream, and myTouch. One of the patentsApple is suing over is the two-finger screen recognition.

It’s too early in the proceedings to tell what will happen. There’s always a chance this will settle out of court. But with HTC’s long record of innovative mobile technologies, they might end up fighting this out. One thing is for sure, the fight for the mobile world just got more interesting. There has yet to be word of Google’s involvement in all of this. One would think they have a stake in this considering HTC develops the phones their platform runs on.