TechScape

It's not even close to being massmarket yet, but geotagging is one of the technologies I'm personally most interested in, especially if it gets automated enough that the people using it don't even need to know what geotagging is to make use of it.

ShoZu's announcement this week that it's including geotagging in its Share-It mobile application is a step on the road. Users with GPS-enabled phones will be able to automatically attach location information to photos and videos when they're captured, and then have this uploaded along with the content to whatever sharing service they're using.

Currently supported are Flickr and YouTube, along with Buzznet, Pikeo, Dada.net, moblogUK and Textamerica. For Flickr, images will automatically be added to the user's Flickr map.

Now all I have to do is get myself a GPS phone. Anyone got any Nokia N95s going spare? ;o)

Another firm I was pleased to catch up with at 3GSM was Clicmobile. The company builds cross-platform communities with social networking and user-generated content elements for clients.

As an example, Clicmobile powers Yootribe, a French social networking service aimed at a “young and playful” audience.

The online part includes profiles, videos, music and links to friends, but from day one it’s also had mobile elements, including text alerts and invitations, and location-based features letting users track friends who are nearby.

Continue reading "3GSM 2007: Clicmobile on why mobile social networking is going niche" »

When 3 launched its X-Series service, the buzz was all about putting the big Web 2.0 sites on your phone. Conspicuous by their absence were any deals with social networking providers however.

That's starting to change, indirectly. 3 has signed a deal with Intercasting, a social networking "gateway provider", to make it easier for the operator's subscribers to access social networking sites including LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and BlackPlanet.

A single interface will provide access to all the sites, to make it easy for users. It's good, but it's still not MySpace, Bebo, Facebook...

A Nokia venture called Nokia Ad Service indicates that Nokia believes it has a big role to play in the mobile advertising market. It is apparently "bringing to market a solution that connects global advertising with mobile publishers".

It's hard to be sure, but I don't think this has been reported before. I heard about it during an interview with mobile firm Clicmobile at 3GSM this week, as they're creating an online/mobile social networking community for Nokia Ad Service.

I'd never heard of it, so I Googled, and got absolutely nothing. So I tried 'Nokia Advertising Service' and got one result: a LinkedIn profile for Minh Tran. And he has a public LinkedIn profile (i.e. one that non-members can read), which provided the quote above.

Continue reading "Nokia to enter mobile advertising market with Nokia Ad Service" »

Many people know Hands-On Mobile for its mobile games - the company has sold millions of downloads of its World Poker Tour game, and has also released a stream of games based on Marvel superhero characters.

However, the company is now diversifying into mobile user-generated content and social networking, with two new services announced at 3GSM this week. The first is a distribution deal for an existing service called FunkySexyCool, which started in Australia, and bills itself as a “mobile nightclub community”.

“It’s a bit like a game in many ways,” Hands-On Mobile’s Eric Hobson told me at 3GSM. “In essence it’s a flirting service where you vote on people online, and have to work your way to the top in terms of votes. And then there’s lots of ‘money can’t buy...’ prizes on offer too. It’s been really big in Australia, they’ve got 200,000 members there now.”

Continue reading "3GSM 2007: FunkySexyCool mobile community mixes MySpace with Am I Hot Or Not?" »

Yospace could be described as the poster child for the mobile user-generated-content brigade. The company's video-sharing services for 3 (See Me TV) and O2 (Look At Me) have been hugely successful, while recently Yospace was bought by Emap as part of a strategy to work UGC around its magazine and radio brands. More of that later.

But as a firm that's been doing mobile video-sharing for a while now, Yospace has a good perspective on the implications of YouTube's mobile deal with Vodafone, which was announced last week. I asked Yospace CTO David Springall for his views at 3GSM.

"The trouble with the big internet players is they don't understand mobile very well," he says. "It's considered simply as a technical issue of getting content onto the phone, but it's far more than that. Also, these big guys have a different view on what the business model is for mobile, as opposed to the operators."

Continue reading "3GSM 2007: Yospace on mobile YouTube - "The big internet players don't understand mobile very well"" »

TechCrunch reports that Aniboom, a "cartoons meets YouTube" site, has raised $4.5m of funding.

Mashable writes about Who's On My Page, a MySpace tracker that will log other users' visits to a page. They claim that they can circumvent MySpace's attempts to block their code by instead using a Firefox plugin.

Continue reading "Web 2.0 news: Aniboom, Who's on my Page, Tinbag, Pheedo ad widgets, DoodleBoard, web 2.0 innovation" »

Mobile blogging isn't going to be about text. Instead, it’s going to be about photos and video that you upload semi-automatically from your phone as you take them, with the bare minimum of words required. Of course, you might go in later and write some proper captions from your PC, but for the most part, moblogging will be visual. Which answers those questions about why anyone would blog from their phone.

That was certainly the message on the Motorola stand, where the company was showing off its mobile blogging application which basically makes it quick and easy to post pics and videos to a range of online file-sharing services. It’s nothing that the ShoZu application doesn’t do already, but since it’ll be on Motorola handsets out of the box, it’ll find a wide audience.

Continue reading "3GSM 2007: Motorola’s mobile blogging ambitions" »

You can’t swing a cat at 3GSM this year without hitting 17 mobile social networking companies, all claiming to be the next MySpace, and all claiming to be unique. Time will tell. Cerkle is one of the more interesting examples however, offering a social networking service that works from your PC and your mobile phone.

“Our belief is that social networking is evolving, and people are resolving themselves down into smaller groups,” says Paul Cox of Roundpoint, the company behind Cerkle.

“If you look at the statistics, most people use social networking more to contact people they already know and arrange to do things. They’re not going out and looking for new friends. So we’re not really trying to do the MySpace thing, as we don’t think that’s what people want in the mobile environment. And besides, you can’t deal with 700 friends on your mobile. You can deal with 10...”

Continue reading "3GSM 2007: Cerkle mobile social networking service" »

It was only a matter of time before someone came out with a working model of mobile mash-ups of some description.

Mobio Networks did it at the DEMO 07 show, and there's a good video online showing how its platform pulls in different widgets and mashes them up with maps and data. It's not embeddable, so click the link below to have a gander.

Mobio DEMO 07 presentation