TechScape

I've seen the future, and it's monkeys reading the news. Honest. I saw it on FreeBeTV, a new mobile TV service from ROK which launched last week. Monkey News Network (MNN for short) is one of the five launch channels on the service – the others have less monkeys but more extreme sports, comedy, cartoons and movies.It capped a busy period for ROK, which launched its Viper mobile Voice-over-IP service the week before, taking aim at operator call charges by allowing people to make internet calls if they're in range of a computer with Bluetooth.

ROK's marketing director Bruce Renny has plenty to say on both subjects, so I'm splitting the interview into two parts. Today deals with the mobile TV side, while on Friday I'll follow up with the VoIP area.

Okay, so this is up there with bears being catholic and popes defecating in the woods, as far as surprises go, but it's still good to have some figures backing up the widely-held assumption.

Mobile research firm M:Metrics says 70% of 13-17 year-olds are "engaging in social networking or otherwise creating content" using their mobile phones. Their definition includes photo messaging, video messaging, instant messaging, chat, dating and user-generated content

That said, the fact that this data doesn't include what many people consider to be true social networking – MySpace, Bebo etc – leaves room for speculation. MySpace has launched a limited mobile service in the US, and is negotiating with mobile operators over here in Europe, but it's yet to be seen whether teens (or indeed anyone else) will heavily use these services on mobile, and if so, what they'll want to do with them.

There’s been a lot of talk about the coming together of Web 2.0 and mobile. But a lot of it’s just that: talk. It seems logical that people will want to do similar things on their mobiles that they will on Web 2.0 services, albeit with extra elements of location and/or search thrown in to take advantage of the mobile phone.

But in a less high-profile corner of Nokia, the Emerging Business Unit, they’ve already created one application that’s attacking this convergance head-on. It’s called WidSets, and its nearest parallel is the Dashboard widgets on Mac computers, in that it pulls down information from websites to your phone, via RSS feeds, into the WidSets Java application.

You can pull down news stories, blog posts, Flickr photo streams, emails and weather forecasts, to name a few examples. Okay, so it might just be a slick RSS reader with a graphical user interface, but it’s easy enough to use that it could appeal beyond the tech-head community. I talked to Nokia’s Kaj Haggman to find out more.

A survey from RarePlay claims that just 8% of the top 1,000 US brands have websites that are compatible with mobile web browsers, taking into account their limited bandwidth and small screens.

The industries that score best include Internet & ISPs (23%), travel (18%) and entertainment (17%), with sectors like pharmaceutical, retail and education scoring less than 1%. RarePlay – which it has to be said earns its money from making web applications for firms which ARE cross-platform – cites BMW, Red Bull and T.G.I. Friday's as three brands that have commissioned mobile-friendly sites.

Following last week's iPhone announcement, mobile phone operators have been falling over themselves to improve their mobile internet services, Mobile Marketing Magazine reports. The latest such development stems from the partnership between 3 Group and Yahoo!, who joined forces in June 2006, and will now work together to provide 3 Group customers in Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, and the UK with Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0. Irish 3 Group customers will also get access to Yahoo! Search.

The Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 services on offer will include Yahoo! Go 2.0, “an innovative new application that redefines the mobile Internet experience for consumers through a unique product design, ability to personalize with content from the entire Internet and a reinvention of mobile search”, Yahoo! oneSearch, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Messenger.

The collaboration is not set to end with Europe, however - 3 Group is also looking to expand its existing services within Asia and Australia.

There's not enough cutting edge web/mobile development focused around The Booze, so I'm quite interested in the news that WineZap.com has launched a mobile site that lets you check wine prices and availability in real time - even if it is US-only for the moment.

The site has you enter a vintage and wine name, and are then shown pricing info and contact details for retailers selling it. You can narrow that down by postcode too, and certain handsets will be able to call the retailer by clicking on a link. The theory is that people will use the app while shopping for wine, to check if they're getting a good price - and if not, where they can get a better one.

True mobile 2.0 is here at last, or so say Juice Wireless. The authors of JuiceCaster 4.0 claim that their baby is the first application which will allow users to create and share rich media between mobile phones and the internet, Mobile Marketing Magazine reports. In addition to the expected shared and accessible content, JuiceCaster 4.0 will allow real-time distribution of pictures and videos.

Media can be created using either mobile phones or computers, and can then be shared with a range of devices, and is compatible with the majority of cameraphones available in the UK, the US, Finland, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain.

Juicecaster 4.0 is free via the JuiceCaster website, and registration includes a MediaBox, an internet storage device which automatically stores pictures and videos taken with your chosen mobile device. Furthering the whole community social-networking web 2.0 ethos is the MediaBox's shareability: content is easily shared with Xanga, MySpace, Friendster, and Blogger, among other sites. Similar to YouTube, the JuiceCaster MediaBox also features channels for other users to subscribe to; channel content can be displayed on mobile phones, iPods, and computers.

It was a busy week at CES for Yahoo, which made a bunch of announcements. Among them was news of a new mobile search service called oneSearch, which is currently part of Yahoo's beta Go for Mobile 2.0 application, but will be introduced to its mobile web and SMS services by the end of January.

"Today's mobile search is horribly terribly broken," says Ojas Rege, senior director of mobile products at Yahoo, who I caught up with at the show.

"What happens so often is that companies take things that work on the PC and bring them to the mobile phone. So what works on a PC, when I enter a search term and want a bunch of links back to do research, doesn't work on a mobile phone. Those links break, or take me to sites that don't work very well, which take 10 seconds to reach."

While 3G has been occupying the majority of non-iPhone mobile news, 2.5G handsets have been silently improving, with ROK's push to deliver TV services to the phones, Mobile Marketing Magazine reports. In addition to the existing ROK TV and FreeBe services currently available to 2.5G handsets in the UK, the US, Turkey, China, and Thailand, ROK has launched 'Monkey Sports News', a live sports news channel.

What's newsworthy about Monkey Sports News, however, is the way it's put together. ROK combined speech recognition software with a live text feed of sports news, creating a channel where the news is 'read' by CG animals. The technology is patent-pending, and uses mass-market 2.5G GPRS to stream video.

Frequent travellers on UK operator 3 will be cheering today's news that the network is slashing its roaming charges if they're in Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Hong Kong or Australia (all of which are countries where 3 has a local operator too).

Of course, it's no consolation to anyone who's getting stung while roaming on other networks. And having spent the last week in Las Vegas trying desperately hard not to think about how much every call / text / data surf was costing me, I think further roaming cuts are going to be essential if Mobile 2.0 services are going to take off.

If you're interested in mobile data strategies and have a few grand burning a hole in your pocket, you could do worse than to invest in a copy of Portio Research's "Strategies for Creating End-User Demand for Mobile Data Services". The 160-page PDF will set you back £1,495 for a licence that covers up to five people, £1,995 for a licence that extends to medium-sized companies, or £2,995 for a corporate licence. All prices exclude VAT, which puts them out of reach of the average home user.

According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, the report covers ways in which mobile operators can increase their revenues from data services, and examines "mobile portals, mobile music downloads, mobile video downloads (and uploads), ringback tones, mobile commerce, mobile games, mobile video calling, SMS and MMS, plus a section looking at Web 2.0."

In addition to services offered, Portio examines market conditions in specific country markets around the world, and highlights "industry-leading examples" from the UK, the US, and a number of those lucky, lucky Asian countries whose mobile countries are light years ahead of our own, especially Japan and South Korea, where I would not be surprised to discover phones capable of independent space travel.

For a free overview brochure of the report, click here.

Another interesting partnership from CES was Nokia and Six Apart, after the handset maker agreed to preload SA's Vox Mobile application on its new N93i handset, and other Nseries phones going forward.

As a hardened Vox user, this is good news, but it makes me wonder what Nokia's approach to moblogging is from now on. Does this mean its focus has shifted away from its own Lifeblog application? Or will Nokia sign similar deals with other blogging companies, to have a suite of applications sitting on its handsets when users get them out of the box?

I'm a big fan of Vox Mobile, and the demo I saw of it running on the N93i last week was slick and effective. It'll be interesting to see how other blogging firms and handset manufacturers roll out similar partnerships in the coming months - Sony Ericsson already tied up with Blogger last year, but hasn't shouted about it much since then.

Mobile social networking on both sides of the pond is dominated by MySpace and Windows Live Spaces, new research from Telephia has found. Brits uploading mobile phone content onto the web are most likely to use MySpace, Windows Live Spaces, and YouTube, while in America YouTube is replaced with the college students' favourite, Facebook.

Telephia's statistics, reported by Mobile Marketing Magazine, shows that 21% of British mobile social networkers are devoted to MySpace, 18% are enamoured with Windows Live Spaces, 9% are dedicated YouTubers, and a further 9% love Bebo. While PCs are still used to upload media onto the internet, Telephia points to the recent rise in mobile social networking as a sign that 2007 will be the year in which the medium begins to benefit from its staggering growth potential.

The majority of mobile social networkers are in their teens and early twenties, with twice as many UK mobile social networkers coming from the 15-17 age group as from the population as a whole.

In the US MySpace has effectively cornered the market in mobile social networking in the 15-17 market, with 69% of that age group using it as their primary host of photos and videos. Mobile social networkers as a whole also prefer to use MySpace, which was the top choice of 32% of mobile social networkers. Facebook has a 13% share, and Windows Live Spaces 11%.

Mobile firm Hands On Mobile has signed a deal with 3H Group, to bring the latter's MeeGos avatars to mobile. They're the animated graphics that can be used within Windows Live Messenger IM conversations, and are used by over 24 million people (just under 9% of the total Messenger users).

What I want to know is how they'll be used in mobile. Hands On says it'll develop a "broad range" of MeeGos mobile products, encompassing "games, personalisation and lifestyle". Which hopefully means something more ambitious than just wallpapers and animated ringtones.

At least, that's the conclusion to be drawn from this Telecoms.com story claiming that since Virgin Mobile launched its mobile TV service last October, less than 7,000 subscribers have signed up.

It currently offers live streams of BBC1, ITV, Channel 4, E4, ITN News and 50 digital radio stations, which are all received using DAB rather than a 3G network. So is this curtains for mobile TV? I don't think so, but if the figures are true, there are certainly some conclusions to be drawn.

Hurrah for January, the time when experts everywhere can make their predictions for the year ahead, safe in the knowledge that in 12 months time, they'll have been forgotten, ready for the next round of futuregazing.

Deloitte's Technology, Media and Telecoms industry group has just unveiled its predictions for 2007. The most relevant (to this blog at least) are:

The evolution of social networking. Including improvements in identification, and making it quicker and easier for services to remove copyrighted material quickly. I'm wondering if 2007 could also some lawsuits being flung around in this area, likely aimed at the few user-generated content services that are actually making money.

It can't be easy launching a new photo-sharing site. After all, once you've uploaded hundreds of your pics to one place online, it's a real faff when you then have to upload them all again if you switch loyalties to another service.

Nevertheless, plenty of firms want Flickr's crown, and the latest is Pikeo, which has been launched by Orange. As you'd expect, mobile is strongly tied in, with the site providing a link to the ShoZu mobile application, which allows users to upload photos directly from their phones.

Presumably, Orange will be preloading the app on handsets sold through its retail stores if the community takes off.

As more and more companies enter the emerging Mobile 2.0 space (I'm not sure if that term has caught on yet, or if someone can sue my arse for using it...) there's a pressing need for categorisation, to make it easier to figure out who's doing what, how they're doing it, and why they think it'll be bought by Google change the world.

Well, kudos to Rudy De Waele, who's created a wiki space for Mobile 2.0 companies. You can find it here, and there's already a bunch of pages up and running there. He's hoping companies will keep the site updated with news, pitches, presentations etc.

(via m-trends)

Forget short films. South African film-maker Aryan Kaganof has made a full-length flick using just a pair of Sony Ericsson W900i phones. It's called SMS Sugar Man, and is due out in May, when it'll be distributed in cinemas, but also on DVD, over the internet and, yes, on mobile phones.

The distribution is the interesting thing for me here. It's unclear how involved Sony Ericsson was with the project – a trailer for SMS Sugar Man will be preloaded on the W900i when it actually goes on sale in South Africa, which implies they had a hand in it.

2007 is going to see a helluva lot of market research into how The Kids (and The Grown Ups) are using mobile phones. US firm comScore Networks is the latest to release a survey, which splits consumers into three age groups: The Cellular Generation (18-24), Transitioners (25-34) and Adult Adopters (35+).

The youngsters are the most interesting group, who predictably are more likely to personalise their phones with ringtones and colour schemes, are keen on text messaging, cameras and MP3 playing capabilities. Apparently they're less likely to use the mobile Internet than Transitioners though.

The survey (well, the press release anyway) doesn't talk much about Mobile 2.0 activities, such as uploading photos and videos to UGC sites, or blogging on the go. I'd love to see someone conduct some in-depth research into that.

MySpace hasn't yet signed any operator deals here in the UK, and until it does, we can only speculate about how it'll work, and whether we'll have to pay for it. Over in the US, they have rolled out with Helio and Cingular.

Darla Mack has a review of Cingular's MySpace application, which quickly turns into a list of ways you can access MySpace from your phone without paying the $2.99 monthly subscription charge for the official app. Interesting stuff though: I'd not heard of T9space before, for example.

Yell has launched a new mobile application and mobile internet site, in an effort to ramp up its presence on mobile in the face of competition from the likes of Google and Yahoo.

The application provides full access to Yell's listings, while also keeping track of regular requests, providing an auto-suggest function, and letting users 'click to call' businesses. It also provides zoomable maps, and lets users save info to their Contacts, or send it to friends via SMS.

This afternoon, Yell held an online webchat to give more info on the new service. "This is our first serious push into mobile," said Martin Wilson, head of mobile marketing at Yell.com.

Mobile search firm mobilePeople says the total number of mobile search queries increased tenfold during 2006. Meanwhile, around Christmas, the most popular category was taxis, followed by takeaways, restaurants, supermarkets and consumer electronics.

Other things in the Top 20 included banks, hotels, garage services, car parts, hairdressers, medical services, shoe shops, cinemas, furniture outlets, toy retailers, department stores, pubs and coffee shops.

I would've expected to see 'murdering the in-laws' in there over Christmas, but clearly we're a tolerant nation. More seriously, is nobody searching for filth using their mobiles? I thought the adult industry was supposed to drive all new developments in consumer technology anywhere...

Bear with me on this one: it's a bit blue-sky *makes wavey convergence guru hand shapes*

US research firm Knowledge Networks has been talking about the results of an instant poll it conducted for CBS News, just after President Bush's State Of The Union address this week.

The poll found that 82% of people who watched the speech live approved of Dubya's proposals, but that 68% said they doubt he'll be able to accomplish all of his goals. Figures for those who spent the broadcast shouting "Resign you incompetent idiot!" at the TV are as-yet unrevealed.

MailSting, which launches today, is billing itself as a 'communications and content portal', which offers a mix of email, file sharing, social networking and blogging features, with a strong mobile angle.

Initially free, users get 100MB of email space, 100MB of storage for media files, and their own SMS/MMS mobile inbox. The service claims to work with PDAs and PSPs, as well as mobile phones.

Historically, one of the problems of location-based mobile services is that punters haven't been willing to pay for them. Pay your operator 50p to get directions to somewhere? Not likely.

The theory that advertising could solve this problem isn't new, but it's only just being tested in real services. For example, LocatioNet Systems' newly-launched amAze service, which offers free mobile mapping, navigation and local search features in a downloadable Java application.

There's a really interesting article on The Register that kicks off by explaining how the iPhone's Safari browser supports Ajax, so will be Web 2.0-friendly, before moving on to suggest that Nokia could also give mobile Ajax a boost in the next year.

I'd been sitting here thinking Apple was missing a trick by making the iPhone such a closed ecosystem in terms of allowing developers to create applications for the handset (well, NOT allowing them...). Yet if the browser is powerful enough, they won't need to.

Maybe. Well, it's more food for thought while we wait to actually get our hands on the thing, anyway.

Just as I was playing around with a mobile RSS reader called Smaato News this morning, I spotted this opinion piece by IT Week's Kelvyn Taylor, talking about how feature creep is in danger of making RSS too complex at exactly the point it starts to get mainstream users.

"RSS is in total chaos from a user’s point of view. Some sites just give me the headline and a one-line summary, others give a longer extract. Some even give me the entire story, with pictures, web hotlinks and even embedded YouTube videos. There are multimedia RSS feeds that direct your reader to a file rather than a web page, and how these are handled depends on the reader software. And, inevitably, adverts are starting to sneak their way in as well."

It's true, and it's worrying for anyone hoping mobile RSS is going to be big too. Will the current generation of mobile readers be able to cope with these different types of feeds? Will users end up selling their houses to cope with the ensuing data charges?

Taylor's suggestion that the problems could be solved by services asking users what they want and then giving it to them is eminently sensible (i.e. unlikely to happen), but it certainly needs to be sorted if mobile RSS is going to take off in any meaningful way.

Not sure about Smaato News yet, by the way. It's installed on my Vario II, but seems to be having some kind of connectivity problem sucking the feeds down. I'm persevering though. Any recommendations on other mobile RSS readers would be more than welcome too, while I'm at it.

It's weird, I was just wishing for this the other day (while late for an appointment with no idea what street number the building was). GooSync is a mobile application that synchronises with your Google Calendar, including all-day and recurring appointments in the free version.

There's also an Advanced option that lets you tweak the synchonisation settings and sync multiple calendars, which costs £19.99 for a year. There's a big range of supported mobiles on the site too, it's not just smartphones.

It sounds great, although I've got a sneaking suspicion that sooner rather than later Google will launch a Yahoo Go-style application combining Gmail, Calendar, search and maybe access to your Google Docs. Whether GooSync will still appeal then remains to be seen.
(via the::unwired)

More mobile Googlejoy, except unlike the earlier GooSync story, this time it's Google itself doing the mobilising. The company's mobile Google Maps application is now available for Windows Mobile smartphones, and very spiffing it looks too.

Downloaded by pointing your mobile browser to www.google.com/gmm, the application includes directions, integrated search results, scrolling maps and satellite imagery.

Sorry, didn't write this up on Friday. Emap Consumer Media has bought mobile firm Yospace for £8.7 million, plus up to a further £5.7 million depending on Yospace's operating performance in the next three years.

Yospace is the company behind 3 UK's See Me TV service, which lets users upload video clips from their cameraphones, and then get paid when other users download them. Emap hasn't said much about its plans for the company, other than it'll sit within its Emap Performance division.

After months of speculation – one rumour suggested MySpace was demanding a seven-figure upfront fee from mobile operators to partner with it – the social networking site has signed an exclusive deal with Vodafone in Europe.

It involves a MySpace Mobile app being preloaded on the operator's handsets (you'll be able to download it over the air too), giving access to profiles, friends, blogs and messaging. It's launching first in the UK.

But hang on. Without wishing to be rude, what's this exclusivity about? A globally popular social networking community, available online to all internet users regardless of their ISP, is now only going to be available on mobile in Europe to Vodafone subscribers? Surely that's a rubbish idea? Even if it does follow MySpace's strategy in the US, where it kicked off with Helio.
Maybe Vodafone paid MySpace a ton of cash to make it worth their while, and it's unclear how long this exclusivity period lasts. But the idea of restricting any social networking service to a single operator just seems counterproductive.

Photography firm Schneider Kreuznach has surveyed 1,000 users in Germany, China, India and the US about their usage patterns for digital cameras and mobile phones.
One in four people said that in future they'll only use their mobile to take photos, as long as it's up to the quality of today's six-megapixel digital cameras. However, in India and China, this rose to 79% of respondants. If you're still tempted to laugh at the thought of mobile blogging, think what might happen in those markets.

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!".

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.

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.

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

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...”