Entries Tagged 'Mobile Services' ↓

While the iPhone is clearly the media darling of mobile devices in the US, there's no denying that Nokia's handsets have saturated the global market. As part of that global strategy, the company just announced free walk and drive navigation for 74 countries in 46 languages. Today's release of the third iteration of Ovi Maps is similar to Google's maps for Android in that the service offers free turn-by-turn voice guidance. Nevertheless, there's one important catch - maps are cached offline for future use. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Nokia's VP of Product and Location, Christof Hellmis, for a look at how the company is saving device owners precious battery life.

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Since 2008 Nokia has acquired at least 12 companies including location-based services like Plazes, Dopplr and Navteq. Hellmis explains that the Navteq acquisition allows Nokia to utilize hybrid vector map technology rather than the more data intensive bitmaps used by other providers.

Says Hellmis, "That's one of the advantages of developing from a mobile device background. We're aware of the consumer's resources. You don't wait to download your maps on a wireless connection and you don't need a sim card. You've got the entire world in your pocket rather than on a server."This sort of functionality is particularly useful for those who travel frequently and are used to suffering from high data connection costs and unstable network coverage. The service also includes information on safety cameras, speed warnings and pedestrian shortcuts, in addition to 6000 3D landmarks.

Ovi Maps' voice navigation is immediately available for download on 10 handsets including the Nokia N97 mini, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia E72 at nokia.com/maps. Additional phones will be added in the coming months. The fact that Nokia's handsets account for 51% (83 million) of the total number of GPS-enabled devices shipped last year, means that the company may quickly be the world's largest navigation services provider.

After AT&T and Verizon announced new mobile rates this past weekend, many users were happy to hear that the cost of voice calls would be reduced for two major American carriers.

Today, the restructured mobile plans and packages went into effect, but the costs, benefits and corporate revenues aren't as simple as a few saved dollars for cell phone calls. In a word, what all gadget geeks, tech-heads and mobile users know is that data is one of the more costly - and ever more popular - aspects of any user's mobile plan. As smartphone adoption increases, how do major carriers' plans stack up to one another?

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Our good friend (and startup BillShrink rep) Tony Adam wrote today in a blog post, "The real truth behind the story is that the profits are in the data: Verizon's revenue is now up 24% (they reported $15.8 billion in Q309), with 17% coming from data services."

To put it bluntly, we're all texting, emailing, tweeting and updating constantly - who even has time for a phone call these days? The laws of supply and demand state that as demand for voice services wanes and the public consumption of mobile data services rises, corporations will realize that it's worth their while to create a false economic incentive for voice packages while maintaining and increasing rates for data packages.

The tricky part, then, becomes stripping away the marketing-ese, the convoluted packaging structures and the hard-pitch sales routines that go along with them to determine how users can get the best, most fitting data and voice plans.

Thanks to BillShrink's unwavering focus (and they said the process behind this achievement was "painful... the carriers didn't make it easy"), we have a concise, clear infographic on how mobile plans and rates from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile all measure up to one another. Or at least we have a start: Based on data they collected, the BillShrink folks estimate there are now 10 million ways to structure a cell phone plan.

To see the full-size, fully detailed infographic, check out BillShrink's large version.

For example, Verizon and Sprint are currently asking $119 for unlimited voice, text and smartphone data plans, while T-Mobile and Sprint's equivalents ring in at $20 less per month. In fact, just about all the plans frmo these four carriers are identical until you start to factor in text messaging and mobile web browsing, at which point Verizon and AT&T start to charge more than their competitors.

As smartphones and "superphones" take over the market, do you think we'll see more network-agnostic devices? And with more network-agnostic smartphones sucking up more mobile 3G bandwidth, do you think all carriers will raise their pricing for data and text packages?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Business review service Yelp will update its mobile apps soon to include a feature called "check-ins," a feature similar to one that several smaller location-based social networks have built their businesses around. This according to several other blogs that were given early access to the feature - blogs that, co-incidentally, are less likely to mention complaints about Yelp, like that it is hated by many business owners, is believed by some to be full of extortionists, and is believed by many to be filled with self-absorbed, chronically snide hipsters.

Those common criticisms aside, Yelp is pretty awesome and the addition of check-ins could make it even more awesome still. Or it could be really annoying. It's hard to say for sure, but it's definitely going to be a big deal.

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Only Apple knows for sure when the update will be live for the Yelp iPhone app but when it is, here's what it will look like:

• You'll be able to click a button to check in when you're physically present at a location listed on Yelp.


• You'll get a badge marking you as a regular when you check in regularly from one location and your review will reflect that status.


• You'll be able to get an iPhone push notification when a friend of yours from the site checks in someplace.


• Check-in data will eventually be available on the website in addition to the mobile application
.

What does this mean? It means that many more people around the world will be able to enjoy the very cool ideas that smart little services like Foursquare and Gowalla have come up with but have had limited userbases with which to score network effects outside of a few large cities

It means you'll want to launch the Yelp iPhone app more often and that the app will be pestering you with friends' check-ins, reminding you to pay attention to Yelp. It means you'll be more likely to make friends on Yelp. It means you'll be walking down the street in your town, find out a friend is nearby and you'll change your plans in order to go hang out with them.

If implemented well, it's probably going to be a whole lot of fun. A good implementation might include shut-off times for push notifications and intelligent integration of your friends, favorite places and other information.

What are the smaller companies in this space going to do? That's a tough call. Most social networking activities are a lot more enjoyable if a larger number of people - and a larger number of your friends in particular - are participating. That means Yelp.

There may be important cultural differences, though, that leave space in a larger market for smaller players. Yelp may remain dominated by a certain crowd that's considered distasteful (perhaps so tasteful it's distasteful) by enough other people to make alternatives economically viable.

We've got different TV and radio networks for people with different tastes today, might we not have different location-based social networks for people with different tastes tomorrow?

We're about to find out, because leveraging location data on the mobile phone is about to become a much more common thing to do.

According to Mplayit CEO Michael Powers, the size of a mobile platform's app store is now mostly irrelevant. Facebook-based mobile app store Mplayit took a close look at the most popular apps for Android, BlackBerry and the iPhone and found that the most popular apps on all three platforms tend to be very similar. As the popular app stores continue to grow, users on all the major platforms also drift towards the same known brands and hits like EverNote and Pandora.

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Mplayit also found that one of the fastest growing app categories across all the major platforms are barcode scanners. Apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser have clearly hit upon an unfulfilled need.

Size Doesn't Matter

According to Powers, asking how many apps exist for a given platform is now a moot question. All the major platforms now offer more than enough apps and as long as people can find the apps they are looking for - and as long as these apps are good - most consumers will be happy. Most users simply don't need 50 different apps to write their grocery lists.

Looking at Mplayit's list of the most popular apps across the top platforms, it also becomes clear that quite a few of these categories are being dominated by known brands like Shazam, Pandora, Evernote and Facebook. Mplayit, of course, is in the business of giving app recommendations across platforms and doesn't fail to note that it's own store is a good alternative for finding apps outside of the standard top 20 charts.

Or Does It?

To some degree, Powers' comments about the size of today's app stores rings true. Maybe it really doesn't matter that the Android store only features about 20,000 apps and that the Apple App Store now holds more than 100,000. Maybe it is true that consumers tend to gravitate towards the same brands on all platforms.

At the same time, though, having more apps in the store also means that there is a more active developer ecosystem around a given platform. While iPhone developers rightly gripe about Apple's approval process, we've seen a lot more innovative apps for the iPhone than for Android.

Is the size of the Android market holding you back from making the switch? Do you think Android has enough good apps that make up for the smaller app store? Do you think the quality of today's BlackBerry apps is good enough? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released.

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight's years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there's no search and the app doesn't make use of the iPhone's push capabilities. It's not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples' day-to-day lives.

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Asked about push notifications, Josh Ruihley, Sunlight's Technical Program Officer told us. "It's definitely on the road map. Currently, every document, hearing and floor update you see in the app is tagged by the piece of legislation it is related to. Our next phase is to actually represent those relationships in the UI."

The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December's stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption.

In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests while stats for HTC Magic devices remained static and those for HTC's Dream model actually decreased. In terms of consumer use of the network and acceleration of device popularity, it seems we have a winner.

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Having been compared extensively with the iPhone, the Droid stands up solidly even under extensive scrutiny. And in terms of 3G network access, we've personally seen fewer issues than with any other mobile carrier we've tried to date. (Note: I'm a Droid owner and a former iPhone user. I've also suffered through my share of BlackBerries, Palms and their ilk.) If any device is to become the iPhone killer, it will be the Droid or something very close to it (here's looking at you, Nexus One).

AdMob's numbers show that requests from all Android-driven devices increased by 97 percent between October to December in 2009, totaling more than 1 billion requests in December alone.

The open platform has also seen a refreshing diversity of devices and manufacturers. AdMob shows that in December, 56 percent of requests were from HTC devices, 39 percent were from Motorola devices and 5 percent were manufactured by from Samsung. And in December, seven devices generated more than three percent of requests each: the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris and the Samsung Moment. This stat represents a significant increase from just three devices in October (HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero).

Already, the Motorola Droid is the leading Android device on AdMob's radar, generating a third of all the network's requests in December. Released just under two months ago, it's already the top-selling Android device on the market, a title it's held since a scant fortnight after its launch.

Granted, AdMob's metrics show a small slice of mobile device usage. But they've consistently been reliable in showing what mobile users use and need and in predicting trends. We are internally excited about what Android-powered devices will do in the market in the months to come, and I am personally quite optimistic about Droid adoption specifically.

Let us know what you think in the comments, particularly if you're a fanboy or fangirl of a particular device!

Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.

The new app looks a lot like a less elegant, less customizable version of the Facebook iPhone app. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company's mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social-media-messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you're looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post. Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it's a work in progress and will improve soon.

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What's The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs!

For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken - not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase "contact X has updated their profile." They have? How did they update it? It's maddening.

LinkedIn says it's working on solving this problem, but it doesn't seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn's strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world - not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages.

Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary

Perhaps LinkedIn isn't to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts' info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you've got someone's name and phone number on your phone already - it's a headache to pull in a person's LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually.

Of course your phone number isn't an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you're unable to call. You won't even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone's contact list - peoples' LinkedIn profile page URLs aren't included in the contact info that gets imported.

There's No Push Notifications

This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone - shouldn't it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example - you know they'd like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too.

Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she's founded a new company called Shwowp. I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don't know about it until a month later because I didn't want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara's news, and I didn't want to click through three screens starting with the bland "Tara Hunt has updated her profile" in order to see if she's happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page.

When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn't seem like too much to ask, and that's when I'll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life.

Update: LinkedIn's Adam Nash, author of the company's announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: "we've discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue...Rest assured, we wouldn't have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn't have big plans for it. :)"

App downloads on the iPhone and iPod Touch saw a huge spike this Christmas, especially on the Touch. I know I downloaded more games this weekend than I've ever used in my life, just to entertain kids I was visiting.

With all this app downloading going on, though, which apps will prove to have staying power? What can you download today and expect to keep using throughout the next year? Below is my collection of the downloaded apps I used the most in 2009. I'd love to compare lists, so let me know in comments about any hidden gems that you've come back to again and again throughout the year.

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See also: The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars

The app sharing widget above is from AppsFire, my favorite way to share single or groups of apps with other people by widget or email, and one of 5 app recommendation services we compared feature-by-feature last month.

Ford is making a serious bid for geeks' business. Scott Monty, the auto company's Internet-famous social media head, wrote to us tonight with some of the most exciting car-related news an Internet-dependent nerd could wish for.

The next generation of Ford's SYNC-enabled vehicles will not only be rolling communications and entertainment systems. They'll also be rolling WiFi hotspots. Passengers will be able to connect to the Internet anywhere, anytime. Our crystal ball is showing a lot more Ford-enabled conference roadtrips.

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The way it works is a lot like many devices available from wireless networks. For example, Sprint's MiFi, which we tested earlier this year, allows for multiple devices to connect to the Internet from a small, card-shaped device without a physical connection to any hardware. Other devices we've tested allow for single- and multi-device connections via USB.

Ford's solution is allowing for USB modems connecting to the vehicle's SYNC system and enabling Internet connectivity for multiple devices. These vehicles can also connect to other USB devices. In essence, the user's vehicle becomes one with the user's hardware.

The WiFi signal is broadcast throughout the vehicle, and password protection will guard against piggybacking.

Currently, SYNC vehicles feature hands-free calling, navigation systems, emergency assistance, music searches, news and weather feeds, business search, traffic data and audible text messages.

Without built-in hardware, it's a lot like many other devices we've seen. Users will have to work with their carriers to get the hardware and network coverage to make the magic happen.

Nevertheless, Internet connectivity in a moving vehicle is something we've waited a long time to see, and we're glad to see Ford recognizing that need.

Just over a year ago, we were excited to report on a new website for programmers. StackOverflow was the brainchild of coders/rockstars Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, and it was a social Q&A channel that promised to give programmers solutions for even the most obscure bugs.

Apparently, that approach to developer support was a solid one. These days, the site gets well over half a million unique visitors a month and has served as a prototype for white-label Q&A sites for companies, too. The site's latest merit badge is an official nod from the Android team, which has announced StackOverflow as the official home of Android developer Q&A support.

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Android rep Roman Nurik wrote in a blog post, "We're working with StackOverflow to improve developer support, especially for developers new to Android. In essence, the Android tag on Stack Overflow will become an official Android app development Q&A medium."

Nurik further noted that StackOverflow's format was particularly helpful for beginners new to the Android platform. However, he did state, "It's also important to point out that we don't plan to change the android-developers group, so intermediate and expert users should still feel free to post there."

The StackOverflow "Digg for developers" model has worked well for all kinds of programmers, clearly. The models has also been successfully applied to such diverse topics as mathematics, parenting and even World of Warcraft - all built on the company's StackExchange white-label platform.