I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the value of social media monitoring tools in brand and marketing campaign management.  Having now demoed a number of social media monitoring solutions, I’ve realized that while there are a lot of great tools out there, there is still a lot of opportunity for product improvement – especially around mobilization and social media response. (more…)

UPDATED 7/31/09: Below, you’ll find a list I compiled of mobile developer relations professionals on Twitter.  It’s interesting to see how many mobile companies are starting to use Twitter to engage with their developer communities.  The most prolific developer relations tweeps seem to be from Windows Mobile (which lists Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as communications channels on its site), the  Symbian Foundation (which has devoted a whole page on its website to list its Twitterers), and Motorola’s MOTODEV (which also runs communities on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn).  Twitter is rapidly becoming a great way for developers to aggregate the latest news and information about the various developer programs they participate in, without having to separately check in with each mobile developer community site. (more…)

These days, for every inspiring story that I hear about a mobile independent software vendor (ISV) / developer that’s “raking in loads of cash” through Apples’ App store, I hear a handful of stories from mobile ISVs that are trying to dig themselves out of the red.  While the press is focused on the “iPhone Gold Rush,” I’m hearing of a disturbing number of mobile ISVs that are struggling…badly.  Over the last couple of months, I’ve had conversations with an increased number of mobile start-up execs who by day are attempting to dig their ISV out financial crisis and by night are pinging their social networks, quietly looking for a new job and complaining that the mobile industry is “broken”. (more…)

EnStream LP (a mobile commerce joint venture owned by three of Canada’s three largest mobile operators – Bell Canada, Rogers and TELUS) recently launched Zoompass, Canada’s first wide-reaching mobile payment service.  With it, Canadians can securely request money from friends, solicit money for joint gifts, pay for goods and services and more – all from their mobile phones, using a pre-paid account, which can be linked to a credit card or bank account.  What’s so cool about this service is that it creates a common standard for mobile money transfers and interoperability across all major mobile phones running on Canada’s major mobile networks including Bell, Rogers, Telus, Fido, PC Mobile and Solo Mobile. (more…)

TechCrunch recently announced the nominees for The Europas, the awards ceremony celebrating technology innovation in European companies, to be held in London on July 9th.  I was excited to learn that one of my clients, ShoZu, was nominated for the Best Mobile Application in EMEA (shameless plug: you can vote for them in this category here).

While browsing the list of The Europas nominees, I noticed TechCrunch doesn’t provide company descriptions or links to each company’s website or page on CrunchBase.  I can’t imagine anyone besides the guys from TechCrunch and maybe a few VCs being intimately familiar with all of these companies (and I can’t imagine anyone besides me being interested enough to research such a long list).  So, to help you make a semi-informed decision before voting, I’ve done some company research for you.  Below you’ll find URLs, descriptions and CrunchBase listings for The Europas tech company nominees (Note: I have not included descriptions for the VC or founder awards). (more…)

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…)

It’s Friday, and that means it’s “Follow Friday” on Twitter (users recommend the twitterers they find interesting). I haven’t participated much in Follow Friday in the past- not because I don’t follow great people – just the opposite. I follow so many interesting people that I can’t fit them all into a single tweet.  I’m currently following 535 people, and I either know them or want to know them because I think they’ve said something interesting.  In honor of Follow Friday, I thought I’d share some of the most interesting and prolific “tweeps” I follow that tweet regularly on mobile topics.  (more…)

Today at The WallStreet Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s executive chairman, and Roger McNamee, Palm’s director and co-founder of Elevation Partners announced some brand, spanking new features for Palm’s new webOS, the operating system that will power the Palm Pre when it launches on Sprint in the US on June 6.  So, will it be THAT good?  Here’s the scoop: (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.

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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…)