So the public can officially start buying “dot mobi” domain names for wireless Internet sites today. . . Not excited? You mean you haven’t been anxiously waiting for this day for weeks? Continue »
Archive for September, 2006
Wallop Shows Up to Party
At this point, social networks that don’t offer something dramatically new are having trouble. Remember TagWorld? It’s a MySpace clone but way better designed. It came late to the game, but was rallied on by people like me who were sick of MySpace hurting their eyes. Well, the site has stalled out at 2 million users, while MySpace has sped on past 100 million registrations. Continue »
Nokia Bets Big On N95
New York — At the Nokia Open Studio conference in New York this morning, Om got the first news of Nokia’s much talked about N95 phone, which the company says will revolutionize mobile computing. The company has been building its portfolio of N-series “multi-media computers” and says it has already sold 10 million N-Series phones so far. Continue »
The Latest Salvos in the Console Wars
Wii serves a million in its first month; Sony admits defeat and sells its game division to… Microsoft? I’m writing this from the old town square of Warsaw, Poland, where the cobblestone courtyard puts you in mind of a World War II movie — and the throughput on the wireless hotspot nearby is better than decent. I’m still debating the social value of always being connected, even from a former communist country so recently impoverished. Still, it does let me track the latest developments in the battle to become the next generation console of choice — and by default, the dominant broadband interface for the world’s living rooms. Continue »
TeliaSonera Taps Kineto for WiFi-Cellular
As various wireless broadband options become available, a few cellular carriers have been trying to figure out the best way to offer a combined WiFi-cellular phone service to their customers. Recently more and more carriers are turning to UMA — unlicenced mobile access — to solve this problem, given it can offer carriers an element of control over the handoff between WiFi and cellular networks. Continue »
Veeker Buys ThumbJive, & Other Mobile Deals
Recently we’ve been noticing more friends using video messaging via cell phones — a three-second video message sent to party-goers trying to find a beach bonfire, or a midmorning clip snapped in a cubicle to say “I’m bored.” Of course mobile video messages aren’t half as popular as photo-messaging, which only less than 13% of U.S. cell phone subscribers use today according to M:Metrics. But now that carriers are readily offering multimedia messaging packages, and the latest phones are often embedding video cameras, its easier than ever for startups to start building services over a standardized mobile video sharing platform. Continue »
VoIP Loves Small Business
Last year small and medium sized businesses spent nearly $2.1 billion on telephone service, about half the amount spent by large corporations, reports the Wall Street Journal. Continue »
VideoEgg Lays on Ad Network, Funding
Update: financing details added to end of Monday’s post. Continue »
The Financial Case for SF WiFi
While Mountain View residents have been living under Google’s city-wide wireless for more than a month now, San Francisco is the next (if it happens) city that will go wireless via Google. In partnership with Earthlink, the duo plan to unwire SF with a free slow service and a faster fee-based plan. But the team has been facing a series of obstacles and opposition since it was chosen by the city earlier this year. Continue »
Ring in the GrandCentral
Our digital lives are getting too complicated. We have multiple email accounts, IM accounts and ever increasing number of voice lines (cellular, landline, and VoIP) — all to stay connected. While tools like Adium help us aggregate our IM accounts, and email clients can serve as catch-all for multiple email accounts, that ability to aggregate has eluded us in the voice world. Continue »
