TechScape

ShoZu to support geotagging for Flickr, YouTube and others

2007-02-16T12:39:22Z

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)

3GSM 2007: Clicmobile on why mobile social networking is going niche

2007-02-16T10:01:29Z

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.

]]> Since then, Clicmobile has signed two more deals. One’s with Nokia to create a professional community around mobile advertising, tying in with the latter’s Nokia Ad Service venture, and the other is with an unnamed Hollywood firm to create a social network for professional actors.

“We’re not really targeting the big MySpace type communities,” says Alex Kummermann, Clicmobile’s CEO. “Our platform is more about segments and niches, each with their own specific approaches.”

It’s also about cross-platform communities, rather than mobile-only. Kummermann claims that although mobile-only communities do exist, none have really made a breakthrough anywhere outside Japan and South Korea, and it’s difficult to market them.

“We really believe there are some ways you’re going to interact with other people that are much more convenient on the Web,” he says.

“To create a profile and add a lot of content with your mobile phone is time-consuming, whereas online it’s easy and more efficient. But mobile is an enhancement, another way to get more benefits out of it. We work to look at how it is really useful, what value you can add when you are using your mobile phone to make it fit the end user in the best way.”

Clicmobile’s social networks might not be competing directly with MySpace, but the fact that the latter is getting into mobile through deals like its recent one with Vodafone is clearly relevant. Kummermann is watching MySpace’s actions closely, not least because a year and a half ago, Clicmobile pitched the idea of extending MySpace to phones, only to be rebuffed.

Kummermann thinks the company needs to move swiftly and intelligently now, though. “Big social networks are like mushrooms,” he says. “They grow very fast, but they die very fast too. MySpace is not as attractive as it was one year ago - some users have moved to Facebook or whatever. The challenge for MySpace is to keep the user base from moving to other websites. A good mobile strategy can help in that, but if they miss the mobile move, they might die quite fast.”

Quite. I was really interested in Clicmobile’s use of location-based technology in its social networking services, but Kummermann seems quite downbeat on the tech hassles of getting this to work reliably. He points out that using Cell ID (tracking your phone by its position according to your operator’s masts) isn’t accurate enough for pinpoint detection, while GPS is much better, but doesn’t work indoors.

“Combining the two worlds, in what we call Assisted GPS, is one solution, but it’s still not ready to be marketed in an easy way, because most phones don’t have it,” he says. “Right now, location-based features are more to give contextual information about what could be available nearby, rather than saying ‘turn left, walk five metres and I can meet you’. It’s not accurate enough, and won’t be for another couple of years.”

For that reason, it’s not easy to tie in location to social networking services on mobile, at least not yet. Clicmobile started one project in 2005 focused on location, but later stopped it due to the above problems, as well as the fact that users tend to be reluctant to share their location with others.

Kummermann is more optimistic about the likely impact of advertising, particularly if it provides users with clear benefits in reducing the cost of buying mobile content or accessing their social networks. However, he makes the sensible point that data tariffs are a real problem here: if you’re paying for every kilobyte of data that you download to your phone, you won’t put up with ads swelling that total.

“Mobile advertising will cover some of the costs related to the Web on mobile experience,” he says. “When we reach this point, mobile advertising will be a big success. 2007 is the starting point. There are some companies investing a lot in this area - for example Nokia is going to be a big player in this sphere.”

3 finally brings social networking into X-Series

2007-02-16T09:49:36Z

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...

Nokia to enter mobile advertising market with Nokia Ad Service

2007-02-15T19:09:30Z

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.

]]> He's the head of sales, marketing and user experience at Nokia Ad Service, and was previously head of business development at Nokia Ventures Organisation (and before that was biz dev director at Bertelsmann AG).

It'll be interesting to see how this develops, anyway. Everyone wants a piece of the mobile advertising pie, from operators and web players (Google, Yahoo) through to the mobile agencies who've been trying to fulfil this middleman role.

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

2007-02-15T15:17:38Z

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.”

]]> In other words, it’s like Am I Hot Or Not? crossed with the profile elements of MySpace. Users pay a monthly subscription fee for membership, which lets them post a profile and vote on others for free, but then can pay extra micro-payments for premium features, including commenting on friends’ profiles, posting their profile link on the FunkySexyCool homepage, and SMS alerts to receive messages while offline.

I met the founders of FunkySexyCool briefly at 3GSM, and I’m going to have a chat with them soon to find out more about its popularity in Australia. The voting element should be really powerful in getting people to use the service regularly: it’s taking that MySpace friend-collecting impulse, but giving actual rewards for it.

FunkySexyCool previously partnered with a different mobile company called Mobile Streams to launch in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, but Hands-On is now taking over the reins for the UK and other European countries.

Meanwhile, Hands-On was also showing its new Phame TV service at 3GSM, which on the face of it seems to be identical to what Yospace does – a video-sharing service that lets people upload clips, and then get paid a cut when other users pay 20p to download one of their videos.

Interesting features include advanced search, the ability to tag favourite videos, and a director profile area, as well as voting and comments. Hands-On has announced the service as Phame, but it looks like they’ll try and do deals with brands (for example reality TV shows, so viewers can upload their responses) and mobile operators.

“We’re offering complete moderation,” says Hobson. “We’ll moderate every piece of content before it goes up. YouTube is a giant litigation snowball, and none of the mobile operators want to get involved with that. Well, apart from Vodafone of course...”

I would say that Phame TV runs the risk of Yospace having got there first, but now Yospace is owned by media group Emap, it stands to reason that other media brands will probably want to work with a different provider – which is an opportunity for Hands-On.

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

2007-02-15T12:39:38Z

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."

]]> "Potentially, what's in YouTube's interests is very different to what's in Vodafone's interest. YouTube would love all the operators to be just pipes, whereas the operators want to own the whole service. There's an interesting friction there. We prefer to work with the operators without stepping on their feet unnecessarily."

It's true that See Me TV and Look At Me are clearly mobile services, focused on short video clips, and navigation that's suited to a mobile's small screen. Springall points out that users spend much less time browsing for content on something like See Me TV than they would on the full YouTube website. Naturally, this requires a different approach.

"Instant gratification is a really important thing with mobile," he says. "You need to get what you want from the service very quickly. We pre-moderate and vet the content before it goes up, and categorise it in a way that allows users to jump into a category, download a few clips and jump out again. Networking through tagging and things, as you would online, doesn't work on mobile due to the small screen, limited bandwidth and the cost you'd incur in downloading lots of clips."
Yospace's video-sharing services also have another major differentiator to the YouTubes of the online world: users pay to download the videos. It's small amounts, partly because it's user-generated content rather than 'premium' videos, and also to encourage a wide user base of downloaders. The people who originally uploaded the videos can then be paid a percentage of these revenues as a reward.
So is Emap's acquisition of Yospace another example of Big Media 'getting' the potential of user-generated content (you could also include News Corporation and MySpace, for example)? Springall says yes.

"The publishers need to embrace user-generated content rather than simply be scared by it, and Emap's move is a suggestion that they're embracing it rather than running away," he says. "UGC isn't a replacement for the traditional publishing model. It's an augmentation, allowing people to effectively express themselves."

In Emap's case, there's huge potential to build communities around, say, magazines like Heat and Q, or indeed any property that's got a particular interest or affinity. "Publishers have to embrace this, or they will lose out," he says.
3GSM is overwhelmingly a technology show, so what advances are going to drive mobile UGC in the future? Springall says certain developments can be taken for granted – better cameras, nicer screens and so on on mobile phones. He also cites voice-to-text technologies of the sort offered by SpinVox, which was showing off its voice blogging software at 3GSM this year.

"All these things will make the whole contribution and consumption process much easier," he says. "But the biggest thing is the creativity tools that people will have in their hand to produce great content. Look at Nokia announcing video-editing capabilities on their handsets. Right now, we're talking about 30-second video clips that you upload from our phone, but once you can start putting together five-minute videos, intercut and overdubbed with music or whatever, then it's going to change mobile AND the Web."
There's a problem though: operator restrictions and data charges. Your phone might be able to shoot a five-minute hi-res video, but how do you upload it to a UGC service if you don't want to transfer it to your PC first?

"There's no way an operator can allow you to get that off your phone reliably or cost-effectively," agrees Springall. "To get a 5MB video off your handset over the air might cost you £12 in data charges! The operators need to get on top of this. It needs to be addressed, but I'm sure it will be."

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

2007-02-14T22:27:28Z

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.

]]> TechCrunch looks at Tinbag, a service that charges people for asking a question and then paying a proportion of that amount to the person who answers it. Though TC observe that Google axed Answers last year, it's not impossible for another service to succeed.

More widgets, anyone? TechCrunch reports that the RSS ad network Pheedo is launching advertising widgets. "It’s a gamble, but it could prove a very smart one if the advertising world picks up the pace on producing compelling social media content."

Ajax Magazine has been trying out DoodleBoard, a new service that currently looks like a free-for-all online whiteboard that could be a virtual graffiti artist's dream. It's just a single demo at present, though looks like it could have great potential.

Read/Write Web asks if location matters in web innovation: "This week's poll relates to a somewhat controversial NY Times article over the weekend, which suggested that Silicon Valley is more likely to create innovative and successful tech products than elsewhere in the world. Obviously Silicon Valley has a lot going for it - it's a hub for smart Web technologists, it's swimming in VC money right now, the universities there provide a steady supply of talent, and of course the history and 'myth' of Silicon Valley is well known. So yes, the chances for success are higher for a web startup living in Silicon Valley. But does that make Silicon Valley startups inherently more innovative? This article says yes, and what's more claims that "where you live often trumps who you are.""

Bad news for the UK, or laying down the gauntlet? Who are the New York Times to talk about startups anyway...

3GSM 2007: Motorola’s mobile blogging ambitions

2007-02-14T08:56:14Z

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.

]]> “You can do everything that we’re showing you already, but it’ll take seven to nine steps,” said Motorola’s product manager (ahem, name to come later). “No consumer’s going to do that. We’re developing these applications to do it in one or two clicks, and working with some of these online communities to preconfigure the handsets, so consumers have a couple of options for photo, video and audio blogging out of the box.”

Apparently contracts are still at the signing stages, so Motorola isn’t saying which sites it’s working with – but the fact that the company was demoing Flickr on the stand indicates that may be one of them. You’ll also be able to enter settings for unsupported sites so your Moto phone can post to them too.

The application will start appearing in Motorola handsets throughout the course of this year. At the moment, it sends photos and video via MMS, which for video isn’t great in terms of size and quality. Will this change to using a phone’s regular data connection at some point? Thankfully, yes.

“Some online community sites are developing http APIs, so as they start doing that, we’ll also start supporting it,” she said. “With MMS, 300KB isn’t enough to send much video! So we see the video sites and maybe the photo sites that do printing will go for that, while others may be happy with MMS. We’ll support all of it.”

The fact that Motorola’s application supports various sites makes it interesting – and more flexible than, say, Nokia’s strategy of preloading individual apps for, say, Flickr and Vox on its handsets. Let’s see if it sparks an upsurge in mobile blogging as and when it makes it into Moto’s phones later this year.

3GSM 2007: Cerkle mobile social networking service

2007-02-13T09:22:28Z

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...”

]]> Cerkle is certainly easy to use: the signup process involves registering, and then through forms creating a simple mobile internet site with information and pics. You then invite friends to join, and through the service can send each other messages. It all works through the mobile internet, although Cerkle also works in a limited fashion for people with older phones too, at least with the messaging aspects.

“There’s no application to download, which means we’ve got a very big base of people who can use it immediately,” says Cox. “We haven’t got to roll anything out. Although we have the service running now, we’re also looking to sell it to operators to run their own communities. It might be used by clubs, societies or other groups of some kind, or even small businesses that want an easier way of communicating.”

Cerkle also supports advertising within the mobile sites, and Cox says some brands may wish to create Cerkles for their audiences/readers/viewers. Safety also appears to be a big feature, as Cerkle uses your phone number as your unique identifier, asking you to sign in with a username and password if it doesn’t recognise it. Operators will also be able to restrict usage by under-18s if they want.

Cox says this focus on ‘safe’ communities gives Cerkle an advantage over the web-based social networking services. “They all start as free-for-alls, and while there’s a lot of enthusiasts out there like that, the big picture is that’s not what people want. They want safety and control, so we’re trying to address that as well.”

Cerkle website

Mobio: the coolest Mobile 2.0 company yet?

2007-02-09T16:21:50Z

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

3GSM 2007: Enquire's Mobile 2.0 video-calling applications

2007-02-09T16:14:20Z

Next week, I'll be sprinting around the 3GSM show in Barcelona, catching up with the latest mobile innovations. Some press releases are already dribbling out before the show gets underway, including one from Enquire.
The technology sounds good though. Enquire will be showing off a suite of 'participation products' at 3GSM, which all use video-calling for some entertaining user generated content applications, including karaoke and dating.
]]> The most bonkers (and I mean that in a good way) is FORYOOO Video Karaoke, which lets you sing along to pop choons and have your video posted onto a portal. Meanwhile, SOOOSHI Video Speed Dating lets you post a profile, and rate the video profiles of other people.

Other apps include TRIBOOO Video Blogging, a GOOOL Video Shout Portal – this involves football fans commentating on live games, apparently – OOONIQUE Video Classifieds, VOOOTE Participation TV, and a MOOOSIQ Video Store.
I'm not sure about all those Os, but the technology itself sounds interesting. Enquire is showing it all off at 3GSM, and is also running a competition for attendees to blog "their funniest moments on or off the exhibition grounds".

3G video-calling has been famously slow to take off, but these sorts of entertainment applications could drive more usage.

Interview: LaNetro Zed on its new Mobile 2.0 service

2007-02-09T16:01:25Z

Seeing as one of the main subjects for Techscape is Web 2.0 going mobile, we were bound to prick up our ears at LaNetro Zed's announcement that, yes, it's taking Web 2.0 mobile.

The company runs the Club Zed mobile subscription service here in the UK, which has traditionally involved users paying £3 a week for unlimited games, ringtone and wallpaper downloads. However, LaNetro Zed has now introduced user generated content, social networking and communication features into the mix.

I caught up with president and CEO Javier Perez Dolset to find out more. "We're trying to fully integrate the mobile device as a new machine to have full access to the internet, and everything Web 2.0 can offer," he says.

]]> Members of the new community will be able to chat, instant message, send emails, post blog entries and upload their own content from their phones, as well as downloading Zed's existing mobile content. The service works through the Zed website and WAP site, but also through a downloadable application called statiOn which comes in PC and mobile versions.

Dolset says it's taken 250 people 17 months to put the service together – which he says shows why the big Web 2.0 companies have been slow to move to mobile. For now, the Zed community will be funded by subscriptions, rather than advertising.

"People on the mobile prefer to pay a little money rather than have an advertising-driven model," he says. "Mobile privacy is something that people appreciate a lot, so they're happy to pay a little money and have no advertisements."
That said, he's sure advertising will make an impact at some point, if handled with care to ensure people don't see it as intrusive. "It's not something I can see becoming a substantial business in the short-term, but we are carrying out surveys on the issue almost every quarter, and so far the result is always the same."

The interesting thing about Zed's new focus towards Web 2.0 services is the fact that they've been created with a strong mobile angle from the start, which may make them slicker than some of the big guns trying to bolt mobile features onto existing websites.

Then again, the Zed brand is nowhere near as well-known as, say, MySpace, so there's a considerable marketing job to be done to ensure consumers get to hear about the new community and what it can offer them.

Vodafone makes YouTube Mobile its latest Web 2.0 deal

2007-02-09T12:25:19Z

It's been quite a week for Vodafone, which is making a strong play to show 3 that more than one operator can play this Mobile 2.0 game. Having signed deals with MySpace and eBay earlier in the week, now it's announced a deal to launch YouTube Mobile.

Full unmediated access to the video-sharing site? Not quite. The press release carefully describes it as "a YouTube experience" that lets customers access "a version of the popular YouTube service directly from Vodafone live!".

]]> Customers will be able to watch new videos daily, upload their own content, and forward recommendations to friends. It's launching in the UK initially, before rolling out across other European countries.

Vodafone and YouTube say they'll be exploring ways to enhance the offering in the coming months. I'm wondering if the wording of the announcement means this'll be a walled-garden YouTube just for Vodafone users, along the lines of 3's See Me TV, or whether it'll just include the most popular videos from YouTube proper, augmented by Voda users' own clips.

In the long-term, you'd expect YouTube to sign deals with all the mobile operators. But by being the first in the UK to put pen to paper, Vodafone is staking out its Mobile 2.0 credentials alongside 3. What will O2, T-Mobile and Orange do in response?

Web 2.0 news: Movers 2.0, Mosoto, Yahoo! Pipes, Iqons, Formatpixel

2007-02-09T11:52:47Z

TechCrunch reports on Movers 2.0, "a simple website for tracking 'Web 2.0' traffic trends. The website uses Alexa data."

Also Mosoto, an application that works on top of Facebook and allows chat and file sharing.

TechCrunch also write about Yahoo! Pipes, a service that lets you combine and 'pipe' data from different sources such as RSS feeds, Yahoo, Google Base, and web pages. Sounds like an application with a lot of potential: "The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes."

]]> Mashable writes about

TechCrunch has been playing with Formatpixel, a WYSIWYG online app that lets you publish presentations in a virtual magazine format.

The Daily Mirror goes Web 2.0... with teething problems

2007-02-08T17:41:33Z

First the Sunday Times, now the Mirror has revamped its website, with claims of new Web 2.0 features. Except in this case, it meets more of your expectations from that phrase.

The site, which went live today, has more video, a higher priority for user-generated content, plus forums and blogs around entertainment, fashion, science and technology, and the environment.

]]> It sounds like it hasn't been an entirely smooth launch. On the Blogs page, the Mirror's Steve Purcell has posted: "Our techie team have been busy beavering away today to address some of the teething problems which have surfaced. And, let’s be fair, everybody is going to have them when you undertake a major website redesign."

Apparently this includes problems with Safari and Firefox browsers, but Purcell says the Mirror is working on a solution. So what sort of content can we expect to find on the all-new blogs? This post is possibly an exception, starting "You're a c**t, I told him..."