I’d been looking forward to Apple’s announcement of a new iPhone for a long time, and while the iPhone 3G S (announced earlier in the week) looks marginally better than its predecessor, there are a handful of important features I’d hoped to see in this release that just aren’t there (more…)
Nokia’s new Ovi Store officially launched today. It represents a step in the right direction for the diversification of the mobile content market in general, but there are substantial kinks to address. There are enough blogs and tweets out there that rehash the high and low points (highlights for me include: Terence Eden’s post, All About Symbian’s Post, Mobile Industry Review, and TechCrunch). In this post, I’m going to focus on the lessons Nokia and others can learn from this launch:
#1: Call your first launch a Beta, and give users a chance to contribute to its success.
Last Thursday, the Windows Mobile Developer Team (@wmdev) announced via Twitter that Windows Mobile 6.5 is done:
“For the record, Windows Mobile 6.5 is DONE… complete… looks really good IOHO and every bit functional. ping us if u want to know more.”
I’m excited to hear about this Windows Mobile release. Though, I switched to a Nokia E71 last week (largely for the form factor), until then, I’d been using Windows Mobile phones as my primary mobile devices since I started working on the first Windows Mobile Palm Treo in 2005. Windows Mobile is a robust OS, though from a usability perspective, in previous versions, it’s had some oddities, which took getting used to.
In Windows Mobile 6.5 Microsoft seems to have addressed several of these usability issues by introducing a new, friendlier user interface, gesturing capabilities, and these cool features: (more…)
I’m a big fan of the Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe. If you’re unfamiliar with this work of genius, it’s a computer in a pen. It allows you to record what’s being said as you take notes and links the two together, which makes it much easier to listen to everything someone is saying rather than struggling to write it down in your notes as they’re saying it. (more…)
Ahhh… It’s a new day, and there’s yet another 3rd party developer jumping on the Twitter train…
TwitPub is a 3rd party developer that is leveraging Twitter’s infrastructure to monetize tweets through subscriptions. TwitPub is run by AdExcel Online Networks Sdn. Bhd., which is based out of Malaysia. TwitPub operates a bit like a premium SMS subscription (though not on your mobile) – users pay to subscribe to the private tweets of content owners/ publishers. The idea is that content publishers sell access to their private tweets, which can contain information about any number of topics (daily horoscope, finance alerts, music news, etc… anything – you get the idea). (more…)
Fox Interactive Media (FIM) recently soft launched Twitgoo, a new media hosting site that makes it easy to post text, images, and video to Twitter. Twitgoo was incubated inside of Photobucket, and unlike many of it’s competitors, it was built to scale, leveraging the same core infrastructure as Photobucket and Tinypic (which process more than 10 million uploads a day and more than 5 billion image requests daily). (more…)
If you’re a Facebook user in the US with a pre-paid mobile phone, there’s a new app called “Embee Mobile Minute Wallet” that can help you earn, buy, redeem, share, and manage top-up minutes – all through Facebook. (more…)
Last week at CTIA in Las Vegas, I met someone from “Billing Revolution“, a company that is trying to make mobile payments easier…a lot easier….and cheaper. If you’ve ever tried selling something from a mobile phone, you know how much of a hassle it usually is. Arranging sales through premium SMS or integrated carrier billing is a nightmare, and in the case of premium SMS, the experience for the consumer is equally bad. Billing Revolution seems to be changing mobile billing for the better. (more…)
In January, at CES, Palm said it would launch its new phone, the Palm Pre, on Sprint in the first half of 2009. The press was a twitter with praise for what looked to be an amazing device, though no one from the public or press (that I’m aware of) was allowed to touch the device. Palm rightfully explained that the device wasn’t quite ready for primetime, and the press seemed content in assuming that good things are worth the wait. Today, at CTIA, several months after Palm’s presentation at CES, the natives are growing increasingly restless. While Palm is allowing demo staff to show the device in action, they’re not letting the press play with it. (more…)
Today, I’m excited to launch SocializeMobilize.com. On it, I’ll be publishing articles about social media, web 2.0, mobile, and mobile and web convergence. You’ll also find all of the legacy content from my former blog, socialmedia.vox.com, which I started in 2006. Under “services” tab, you’ll find more information about me and the consulting practice I’ve been running since 2003.
Why did I start a new blog when I already had one?
In 2006, I started a blog about social media and mobile on Vox, a community powered, free blogging platform run by SixApart. I originally started blogging as an online experiment, prompted by conversations I had with colleagues at SplashData, who I met while consulting at Palm, Inc. SplashData made a mobile blogging platform that was acquired by SixApart, and they encouraged me to try Vox, which had just launched. Interested in the socialization of the web, and curious about blogging, I used Vox as a way to express my thoughts and start conversations about web 2.0 and, occasionally, mobile convergence. (more…)
