Sometimes you can’t find the words to describe what you’re seeing. Watch this video about Dean Kamen’s latest invention.
Author: Jason Grigsby
German Interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt
Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with the Frantfurter Allgemeine (FAZ.net) to discuss things mobile and social networks among other things.
On mobile:
Just take the success of the iPhone: It has the first really powerful web browser on a mobile device – and many more are still coming. Nokia has one coming, Blackberry has one and Motorola has one. They are all supposed to be released this year. By these products, the advertising gets more targeted because phones are personal. So targeted ads are possible. And that means the value of the ads will grow. The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet.
On social networks:
MySpace did not monetize as well as we thought. We have a lot of traffic, a lot of page views, but it is harder than we thought to get our ad network to work with social networks. When you are in social network, it is not likely that you´ll buy a washing machine.
Some good stuff in there. I recommend the full article.
Test Multiple Versions of IE in One Application
Via Ajaxian today: A new, free tool that lets you test IE8, 7, 6, and 5.5 in the same application. It is called IETester and is from the gentleman who created the DegugBar for IE. Download it here.
Free Mobile Data Report
Via Russell Buckley: “Portio Reseach have just published a free downloadable PDF, which contains tons of market data on the state of mobile. It’s a taster for the whole report that they want you to buy (fair enough), but there’s loads of facts to get your mind around in the free version.”
links for 2008-05-29
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Includes numbers on mobile services adoption. Shows low adoption of location-based services
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Worldwide sales of mobile phones reached 294.3 million in the first quarter of 2008, a 13.6 percent increase over the first quarter of 2007, Gartner reported
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Radar coverage of my mobile presentation from web visions
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Response to NYT article questioning iPhone target of 10M for 2008. Author says, “Here’s the thing. I’ve stared at Apple’s iPhone sales figures repeatedly over the last few months, and I can’t see any reasonable way that the company can’t sell 10
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The video of street view combined with the compass is very cool.
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A survey of 50,000 U.S. households conducted by iSuppli Corp. in the fourth quarter of 2007 found that iPhone users spent just 46.5% of their time on the device making calls, compared to 71.7% for the typical cell phone user.
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“Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, the firm behind a $100 million venture capital for official iPhone application development, told iPhone Atlas that its managers have been been overwhelmed by the response and subsequent slew of applications submitted f
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“The presentations I’ve seen at Web 2.0 Expo and WebVisions are awesome. They’re basically photo slideshows with some minimal captions for emphasis. This makes for a very different experience than a typical bullet-fest.” Includes some kind words from
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This post theorizes that the iPhone 3G will be available without carrier lock in. Makes some decent point. Seems unlikely to me, but want to be able to come back to it if he turns out to be right.
iPhone Owners Spend More Time on Phone For Things Other Than Voice
“A survey of 50,000 U.S. households conducted by iSuppli Corp. in the fourth quarter of 2007 found that iPhone users spent just 46.5% of their time on the device making calls, compared to 71.7% for the typical cell phone user. The rest of the time, they were reading and sending e-mail, browsing the Web and checking out Google Maps, among other tasks.”
Via BtoBOnline.com
Safari on Samsung Phone?
According to Endgadget Mobile, Samsung’s newest phone says it includes Safari. Anyone want to put odds on the likelihood Samsung will be issuing a “we meant Webkit” retraction sometime soon?
Is there a mass market for location-based services?
Another day. Another thought-provoking post from Tomi Ahonen. This time he’s dissecting the latest “Asia-Pacific wide survey of 16,000 consumers in 29 countries by TNS Global.” Included in his analysis are troubling numbers for companies looking to build location-based services.
There’s a lot of positive information for mobile in the TNS Global survey, but before I talk about the positive stuff, let’s take a look at what Tomi says about the location-based services (LBS):
Bear in mind, that LBS services were launched around the same time as music, gaming and the mobile internet here in Asia; and even more alarmingly, LBS services were launched several years before cameraphones and MMS picture messaging. Yet LBS has found a total traction of 3 percent in this time, when other services get 30%, 40%, 50% even 70% usage levels.
I am serious that I truly do not believe in LBS as a mass market proposition. Don’t bet your company, product, brand or career on LBS, ha-ha..
This is pretty stunning for two reasons. First, the established pattern for mobile is that Asia is a year or two ahead of Europe and America is a year or two behind Europe. So location-based services have been there, done that, and not been adopted. Second, I highly value Tomi’s opinion and his doubts about location-based services even without the numbers would be enough to give me pause.
I’m not going to draw any conclusions now. I need to noodle on this a bit more.
Onto the good news.
| Percent | No. of People | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SMS | 88% | 1.23B | More than the total number of email (or IM Instant Messaging) on the internet worldwide |
| Games | 71% | 994M | So close to 1B |
| Camera | 61% | 854M | 98% of those who have a cameraphone, use the camera |
| MMS | 47% | 672M | Lots of recent discussion about whether or not MMS will finally take off. These numbers are encouraging. |
| Music | 43% | 602M | Only 150M or so iPods in the world. |
| Internet | 34% | 476M | This is better than I expected. Lots of room for growth. |
| TV/Video | 20% | 280M | Approximate population of U.S. |
Lots of good news there on what the mobile future might look like for Europe and America down the road. I’m particularly happy with the MMS and Camera numbers as they are two areas I have particular interest in.
Finally, all of this data is from Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore’s blog. If you’re into mobile and you’re not reading their blog, you’re missing out.
links for 2008-05-28
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Here you find a frequently updated collection of various web resources, built for folks who are building and designing and mobile applications and web sites.
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Web services implementation of WUFRL database. Free.
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Open Source WAP and SMS gateway
Slideshow of the Day
My Web Visions presentation has been selected as the “Slideshow of the Day” on Slideshare.net. You can view the presentation here. Or use the embedded version of it below.
As soon as the conference organizers post the audio recording of the presentation, I’ll link to that as well. Some of my slides require explanation.
Thanks to everyone who attended my session and to Slideshare.net for featuring my slides.