Here at GigaOM we’ve pretty much decided that the femtocell market is dead. At the very least, it’s significantly smaller than what was forecast (GigaOM Pro, subscription required) when these tiny base stations for the home first started garnering attention last year. However, analysts at Deutsche Bank beg to differ, arguing in a new report that femtocells will be necessary to deliver fat data over mobile broadband networks. It comes just days after Atlas Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Pond Venture Partners put $20 million into PicoChip, a maker of femtocell silicon.

The report says that femtocells, which use a consumer’s home connection to provide a stronger cellular signal inside a home or office, are merely at the trough of the S-shaped technology hype curve. It goes on to speculate that the carriers listed below aren’t the only ones conducting femtocell trials as all carriers will have to use them in order to keep up with the demand for mobile broadband. From the report:

One of the dark secrets of mobile technologies is that we are nearing the physical limitations for the speeds we can pump out of mobile networks. Cellular standards manipulate the timing, frequency and amplitude of radio waves. As we move into LTE and its enhancements, we are starting to maximize all those manipulations. Companies like Qualcomm have talked about this publicly, highlighting that the next major wave of improvement of cellular network performance will have to come from in advances in what they call ‘topography’ – the physical planning of network elements. Translated that means a larger number of and more sophisticated base stations. A big part of these topography improvements will come from femtos or some form of in-building coverage.

I’m willing to be surprised by the femtocell market opportunity, but without a compelling business model and consumer price point, the industry won’t make it very far trying to improve carrier networks by using femtocells to ride over consumer’s broadband connections. And even if systems makers can build a cheap femtocell and carriers offer them for free, carriers are already using Wi-Fi to ease the strain on mobile networks, and consumers have already bought into using Wi-Fi as an alternative to 3G in their homes and other settings. The number of Wi-Fi phones rose 177 percent between 2007 and 2008, according to a recent report by In-Stat, a number that’s expected to continue to rise.

So while the carriers and the several companies like PicoChip are probably right with their assertion that some type of network offload will be necessary, the carriers will have to play a huge role in making femotcells acceptable to users. After all, consumers with WiFi-enabled phones are already boosting their in-home data coverage and taking a load off of carrier networks with their in-home Wi-Fi networks. So in order to be viewed as a worthy competitor to Wi-Fi, the femto industry needs to do two things: make a really complicated piece of telecommunications gear cheaply and find some way to sell it to consumers.

Right now, carriers are pretty much charging consumers the price of the base station and a monthly fee to improve the carrier network. But consumers — understandably — aren’t terribly jazzed about paying too make life easier for carriers, especially given some of the limitations on what the femto actually offers. The dark secret here may be that carriers are going to have to improve their networks in a way that doesn’t pass on the femtocell cost to consumers. Are they ready to do that?

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: Deutsche Bank, Femtocells, picoChip

Google today launched its popular Google Maps Navigation (beta) for older devices that use Android OS version 1.6 or higher. It debuted as a free feature on Android 2.0 (Droid) handsets a few weeks ago and was received with much enthusiasm. Now devices such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the G1 will be able to use the Internet-connected navigation system that offers voice-based guidance and automatic routing. “This release also includes the new Layers feature, which lets you overlay geographical information on the map. View My Maps, transit lines, Wikipedia articles about places, and more,” Google notes on its blog. Since I don’t drive, this system isn’t of much use to me. But I have seen some friends use it, and it’s pretty darn good — enough so to cause a long-term migraine for others in the dedicated GPS business. (Related post: “With Maps Navigation, Google Fires Another Shot at Carriers”)

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  2 Comments
Tags: Android, droid, google, GPS, Location Based Services, TomTom

AdMob, a mobile advertising network, which has been releasing mobile metrics for a while now and touting the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch metrics as headlines, is instead focusing on RIM, Symbian, Android and even Windows Mobile devices in its October 2009 mobile metrics report. I guess when you are soon going to be part of Google, why give arch-nemesis, Apple and its iPhone any airtime. AdMob is in the process of being acquired by Google for $750 million. The report has some interesting facts about Android and gives a rough breakdown on the success (or lack there of) of various different Android devices. As always, the data from AdMob which serves display and text ads on 15,000 mobile websites and applications, is limited in scope but is broad enough to be a barometer for the larger market trends.

• HTC has taken an early lead, thanks to availability of three different devices.
• Motorola Droid launched on November 6 already represented 24 percent of all Android requests in AdMob’s network worldwide even though the device is available only in the US.
• Worldwide requests from Android devices increased 5.8 times since April 2009 in the AdMob network.
• In the US, Android has 20 percent share of smartphone traffic versus 7 percent in April 2009.
• The Motorola CLIQ generated 6% of Android traffic worldwide as on November 18th 2009.
• Worldwide requests from RIM devices increased 44 percent over the last six months in the AdMob network.

Just to be sure, AdMob does include data about iPhone in its report. the iPhone and iPod Touch collectively accounted for about 33 percent of total requests up 6.9 percent for the month. In US, the total share of Apple is about 35 percent, up 7.5 percent for the month.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  6 Comments
Tags: AdMob, Android, Apple, google, RIM

TripIt, a travel aggregation service that is offered as an application on the iPhone and BlackBerry, is now available as a beta app for Google’s Android platform and can be downloaded from the Android Market. Just like us, our colleagues at jkOnTheRun, WebWorkerDaily and TheAppleBlog are all fans of TripIt, and the Android version will allow more people to use this fantastic service. TripIt recently launched an application programming interface for other developers to build their own web and mobile apps.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: Android, mobile apps, TripIt

Android is like a snowball rolling downhill — it won’t be long before it’s moving too fast for anything to stop it. That movement is surely going to spread from the smartphone sector, where Android has its roots, to that of smartbooks. Knowing this, ARM and the Android folks have put their heads together and formed the Solution Center for Android Alliance.

The sole aim of the group, which was unveiled this week, is to help make it easier to put Android on ARM-based devices, of which smartbooks are the emerging choice. The group of 35 companies will pool resources and make them available for developers to get Android systems going with the ARM chipset, which is particularly well-suited for the consumer electronics market.

In the meantime, the Verizon Droid, produced by Motorola, is the hottest Android phone on the market. But early adopters of the Droid were reporting that the auto-focus feature on the device’s powerful camera wasn’t working properly, resulting in lots of fuzzy images. This week, however, many Droid owners found the focusing difficulties to be a thing of the past, prompting suspicions that Verizon had pushed a secret fix over-the-air to the phones. There seemed to be no other explanation for how such a serious bug could suddenly disappear.

In fact, the auto-focus code that Android 2.0 uses reportedly has a bug that makes for fuzzy photos in 24.5-day cycles. The camera works poorly for 24.5 days, then works properly for the next 24.5 days. This is based on the improper use of a timestamp by the focusing code, a strange cause to be sure. Hopefully Verizon will have the formal fix for this bug before the 24.5-day “good” working cycle ends.

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Posted by James Kendrick on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: Android, ARM, droida, Solution Center for Android Alliance

You’ve gotta hand it to Google: The company is never shy about throwing the proverbial spaghetti against the wall to see if it will stick. Over the years, it’s introduced countless projects that have gone through long beta cycles only to fail miserably — or achieve a degree of success far below what was expected. Google Docs, for example, was supposed to topple Microsoft Office, and is still predicted to do so, but if that ever happened, I missed it.

Next year, Google will introduce one of its most ambitious projects yet: Chrome OS (GigaOM Pro, subscription req’d). There are quite a few misconceptions going around about the new operating system, among them that it’s aimed squarely at Microsoft’s operating system hegemony. It’s not. Chrome OS is targeting netbooks, not desktop and server systems. Still, the operating system includes some bold gambles from Google. Here are four of them.

Return of the thin client. Take a look at this CNet news story, which reports that  “Oracle’s Larry Ellison today resurrected the company that designs a scaled-down desktop system — known generically as the network computer — and announced plans to ship new models in the first quarter of next year.” But note the date: 1999, not 2009. Indeed, Ellison was championing thin clients — computers with few local hardware resources that would get applications and data out on a network — back in the late 1990s.

It was an idea that was subsequently tried many times, and failed. Yet fast-forward to today, and Google’s Chrome OS is placing the very same bet. As company officials noted yesterday: “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud.” Chrome OS netbooks will be thin clients.

All data in the cloud? Many of the smartest people predicting the future of cloud computing are noting that companies want to deploy hybrid public and private cloud applications, namely because they don’t want to have all of their data on a remote network, with little control over it and the potential for lock-in and losses. However, Google’s Chrome OS is a bet that consumer and business netbook buyers will be perfectly happy to trust everything to the cloud. There won’t even be hard disks on Chrome OS netbooks — only solid-state drives. Will users accept such an absolutist model?

Poof goes the OS. Chrome OS is architecturally very different from other operating systems, bypassing many types of boot processes and others in order to optimize performance. Additionally, however, the OS will actually reimage itself if malware is detected. If Google pulls this off, Chrome OS systems may be free of the guaranteed performance decay that Windows systems tend to have over time. Still, users may be wary about an operating system that’s ready to exit stage left at any given moment.

Drivers? Support? Fuhgeddaboudit. Have you ever called Google for Google Docs support? I haven’t either, even though I use the applications. When you release an operating system, though, if it reaches a large audience, that audience is going to want support. Just ask Microsoft, which spent years trying to effectively support and patch Windows Vista.

In addition to excellent support, which I don’t think of as Google’s specialty, users of Chrome OS are going to want their netbooks to work seamlessly and instantly with their printers, digital cameras, smartphones and more. Chrome OS isn’t being built from scratch. It’s Linux-based (the Ubuntu team at Canonical has been helping it take shape), so Google can get a headstart by incorporating existing driver libraries and the like.  But Microsoft spent years trying to catch up to Apple in terms of automatic hardware detection and installation with its Plug-and-Play initiative, and Apple users will tell you that it never quite succeeded. Is Google about to find out what a huge headache it can be to support an operating system? History argues that will be the case.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Chrome OS will be one of the most interesting tech stories to watch next year. In many ways, though, it’s a Hail Mary.

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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  35 Comments
Tags: chrome, chrome os, Cloud Computing, google, google docs, operating systems

Text messages and banners on the mobile web are the most noticeable kinds of wireless ads, according to new research from Parks Associates, but mobile video and click-to-call campaigns draw the best response from consumers. Such contradictions underscore why advertisers need to use a variety of tools as they deploy their mobile campaigns.

Text-only ads generated the highest recall rates of 11 types of mobile come-ons, with 49 percent of respondents saying they noticed such pitches all or some of the time, the market research firm said during a webcast today. Ads at the top of a mobile web page were the second-most noticeable, with 45 percent of users recalling them. Click-to-call ads fared worst, with 27 percent of people noticing them, and movie trailers were recalled by only 31 percent.

Fascinatingly, though, the least-noticed ads drew the highest response rates in Parks’ study. Movie trailers drew a 38 percent response rate, outperforming all other ad types, while 35 percent responded to click-to-call campaigns. Meanwhile, text-only ads managed to draw responses from only 26 percent of users, and ads atop web pages generated a 30 percent response rate.

Parks’ figures highlight why advertisers need to have a wide assortment of weapons in the mobile arsenal as they try to target users via their phones. Nearly every phone on the market supports text, allowing advertisers to potentially reach broad swaths of mainstream users via SMS (GigaOM Pro, sub. required), for instance, but advertisers also have a chance to engage tech-savvy consumers via mobile video and to encourage would-be customers to call them directly with click-to-call ads.

Mobile advertising has long underperformed amid excessive hype, and the space will continue to endure growing pains over the next several years. But Parks predicts the North American market is poised to take off as the economy recovers, exploding to $1.5 billion in 2013 from $208 million this year. For those figures to become reality, though, advertisers will need to employ a number of tactics — and pick the right ones based on what they’re trying to sell and who they’re trying to reach.

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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: Mobile Advertising, mobile marketing

Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications.” As for the reasons behind the development of the new platform, they pointed to rapid growth in the netbook market — where Chrome OS is aimed — and cloud computing.

Goals

With Chrome OS, Google had three goals, according to Pichai: speed, simplicity and security. ”Chrome on Chrome OS will be even faster than Chrome [the existing browser],” he noted. “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud. If a user loses a Chrome OS machine, the user should be able to log back into the cloud and retrieve cached data.” Pichai also demonstrated that Chrome OS loads in only a few seconds.

The demonstrations made clear that the OS relies heavily on “panels,” pop-up windows housing web-based applications that are similar to multiple open windows in a browser.  Papakipos, meanwhile, characterized the security model in Chrome OS as very much like the one in the Chrome browser, and unlike the one in standard operating systems: If malware is detected, all cached data is saved; Chrome OS is subsequently re-downloaded, then freshly imaged on a machine. If an application crashes in a tab, only that tab goes down.

Coming to Devices Next Year

The target date for delivery of Chrome OS machines is the end of next year. Google is working with hardware partners to bring Chrome OS to market, Pichai said, and doing so in unusual ways. Chrome OS is not aimed at hard disk-enabled machines, for example, but rather at systems with solid-state drives. Google is also working with hardware vendors on what Pichai described as “slightly larger netbooks,” with full-sized keyboards and large displays. All the open source code is available today, as are all the design documents, said Papakipos.  You can find the source code for the OS and other links here.

So does Chrome OS have a fighting chance in the hot netbook market that it’s squarely aimed at, given that it won’t make its debut on devices until late next year? Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM processors, which as jkOnTheRun has noted, will give it a broad spectrum of coverage on devices, and could make it a significant player in the emerging ARM-based smartbook hardware category. Still, the OS will significantly trail the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 7, which is also squarely aimed at netbooks.

Even though netbooks have already been exploring new low-priced territory for portable computers, Chrome OS-based netbooks could also take prices much lower. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in July that “we do not plan to charge for it, in an open source form,” but that “there may be other ways we can make money from it.” He added that:

“The rough argument is we do things that are strategic because they get people to ultimately use the Internet in a clever and new way. We know that if they use the Internet more, they search more, watch more on YouTube, and we then know that our advertising [will reach them]. We do not require each and every project to be completely profitable or not profitable — we look at them in a strategic context: are they making the web a better place?”

Could Google subsidize Chrome OS-based netbooks in an effort to attract users with low prices and feed them into its search-and-advertising ecosysytem? As is true for most of Google’s projects, feeding that lucrative ecosystem tends to be a high priority for the company. It will no doubt be one as Chrome OS makes its way into devices next year.

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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  9 Comments
Tags: chrome os, google, netbooks, operating systems, windows 7

Verizon Test

WiMAX Test

Sprint held a happy hour last night to show off the WiMAX launch in here Austin, Texas, so I wandered over for some BBQ and broadband. I want to love WiMAX, but I can’t get excited about the promise of upload speeds of some 400 kilobits per second, which are only a wee bit more than what my Verizon 3G connection delivers. However, on the download side things are decent for a wired network and awesome for a wireless one.

And before any WiMAX boosters despair, I was told that the local 4G network should continue to improve over the next few weeks, which is why I’m holding off on an all-out review. For a sneak peak, check out the experience in the video below. You can see some freezing in the Hulu video stream during the demo; John Taylor, the Sprint spokesman I interviewed, said the location we were in had only two bars of coverage, which may have been the problem. Given the paucity of devices on display for mobile use and the lackluster network quality so far, I’m still thinking the bet that Clearwire (which is powering the 4G part of the Sprint network) and Sprint made on WiMAX is a bad one, but I’m hoping to be proven wrong.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  10 Comments
Tags: CLearwire, CLWR, S, Sprint, WiMAX

The iPhone has not only changed the way people consume data on their mobile phones — thanks to its touchscreen, and the myriad of apps that make grabbing such info from the web on a small device easy — it’s changed assumptions as to which devices consume the most data on mobile networks. Bytemobile, a company that provides equipment for carriers to help deliver video and data to mobile devices using less bandwidth, issued a report today that shows the difference in data consumption by device among carriers that have the iPhone and carriers that don’t. It’s pretty significant.

Laptops are still consuming most of the data on carrier networks that don’t have iPhones on them, but once folks get a touch-based smartphone such as the iPhone (and right now it’s the most popular touch-based smartphone out there), the volume of data used by those devices far exceeds that of laptop usage. In other words, when it comes to the network and data consumption, the device does matter. The report also offers some self-serving data about video consumption on mobile devices that may help carriers save on bandwidth consumption. (GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

Cisco expects mobile data traffic to increase 63-fold over the next five years, driven in part by video. But while it’s clear that laptops and touch-based smartphones make video consumption easier, the rise may not be as steep as Cisco predicts. The report found that while the average video online is about 5 minutes in length, about half of the people only watch 60 seconds of a video, which means that sending the entire file to a user would be a waste of bytes and bandwidth. Only 31 percent of people watched all of a video, and 30 percent watched less than 10 percent. The rest of the viewers stopped watching somewhere in the middle. In addition to bandwidth consumption, such findings also could help determine where best to place ads. Although I for one hate getting pre-roll ads on my phone because that data consumed counts against my mobile bandwidth cap. But maybe I’m just super cheap.

Regardless, the problem with the iPhone is that it’s both a gateway drug for consumers, who’ve now tasted the mobile web and want more of it, as well as a canary in the coal mine, as it shows carriers what’s likely to happen as other touch-based smartphones become more popular on their own networks. Curtailing video, as suggested by the report, will solve some issues, but once you give folks a taste of broadband, they’re going to want more.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  7 Comments
Tags: ByteMobile, iPhones, smartphones

Telecom gear vendor ZTE will step up its game in the crowded smartphone space next year with an Android-based handset, and Google is rumored to be working on its own device. But as the smartphone market continues to heat up, manufacturers are learning the hard way that the key to success in mobile phones lies in the software — not the hardware.

Handset manufacturers are increasingly being elbowed out of the way as carriers embrace developers of operating systems and the apps that run on top of them. Motorola, for instance, is an afterthought in Verizon’s big-budget campaign in support of its Droid initiative, and HTC’s brand is nowhere to be found in T-Mobile’s recent commercial pushing the MyTouch 3G. Meanwhile, Nokia continues to fare poorly in the U.S. due largely to its unwillingness to capitulate to American carriers, and smaller manufacturers like Sony Ericsson are becoming irrelevant as they lose market share.

Two phone makers are bucking the trend, though, and they’re doing it by churning out handsets based on their own operating systems. Apple’s iPhone has become an iconic device thanks largely to its intuitive user interface and knockout browser, while Research In Motion continues to gain traction — and mind share — with its BlackBerry, an enterprise-focused handset with software that stresses functionality over fun. Both Apple and RIM are backing their hardware with ad campaigns that put the manufacturer — not the carrier — in front of consumers.

HTC is fighting back with its impressive “You” television commercials, which tout the phone’s Sense user interface and promotes the device’s personalization features. That’s a strategy that will pay dividends as manufacturers become marginalized in mobile, and as software increasingly becomes a key differentiator in the minds of consumers.

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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: google, mobile carriers, Motorola, phone manufacturers, smartphone OSes, smartphones, ZTE

The Asia-Pacific region is getting ever-closer to faster mobile broadband, with network operators in Japan, Singapore, Australia and Indonesia readying their Long Term Evolution networks. Today NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile operator, affirmed its plans to deploy LTE in 2010; it also said it would shut off its 2G network in March 2011 since most subscribers now have 3G phones. NTT DoCoMo had previously said it would keep the 2G network running until December 2012. Speaking at the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress 2009, Ryuji Yamada, president and CEO of NTT DoCoMo, said LTE data cards will be ready in 2010 and handsets will be ready in 2011.

Singapore Telecommunications, the largest carrier in Singapore with operations in Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines, also disclosed plans for LTE trials. SingTel has chosen Alcatel-Lucent as its equipment vendor for the trials, which will begin in the first half of 2010 and take anywhere from six to nine months. The network operator hopes the trial will help it and its regional associates and joint ventures better understand LTE and determine the best approach and strategy for its adoption in their respective local markets. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we await Verizon’s and MetroPCS’ 2010 deployments, with netbooks and smartphones in hand.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: LTE, MetroPCS, NTT DoCoMo, PCS, SingTel, Verizon, VZ

Subsidies for high-end smartphones can be a Faustian bargain for mobile operators, but there are riches in the coming wave of connected devices, according to figures released today from In-Stat. More than 60 percent of all netbooks and other Internet-enabled mobile devices will be sold through operators and their partners by 2013 as more services are bundled for multiple gadgets, the market research firm predicts.

Those devices are increasingly likely to be sold with 3G and 4G data contracts, In-Stat said, resulting in recurring monthly revenues for carriers. The percentage of netbooks and smartbooks sold with a mobile contract will increase to 49.5 percent in 2013 from 31.5 percent this year. And while subsidies for superphones like the iPhone can exceed $300, the business model for subsidized mobile Internet devices can be a very attractive one for carriers, according to In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor:

“In the U.S., carriers are charging up to $60 per month for a two-year contract with the subsidized purchase of a netbook,” McGregor said in a statement. “While the subsidy costs the carrier $50–$100, it generates $1,440 or more in service fees over the life of the contract.”

Success with netbooks is encouraging U.S. carriers to venture into the notebook space, In-Stat said, following the lead of some Asian operators. Providing connectivity to all those gadgets is likely to be a crucial way to shore up the bottom line as voice revenues continue to decline.

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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: mobile carriers, mobile Internet devices

With of an infrastructure of social location information just starting to coagulate, the monetization side is raring to go. Since real-time mobile advertising is inherently somewhat invasive (and by extension, somewhat creepy), these products end up less groundbreaking than they could be. (Which is OK by me.)

A new offering from a San Francisco-based company called 1020 Placecast — which is announcing today that it’s raised a $5 million Series B — will be trialed with three retailers over the holidays; it uses a double-opt-in relationship built directly between users and their favorite shops. Once users sign up to receive alerts on a phone that has persistent location information (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android), they get pinged with marketing messages from that brand every time they enter a “geo-fence” targeted area, as small as a single city block.

Another way to geo-target users is to advertise to them when they’ve checked into a known venue — say, a baseball stadium for a game. Startups like mDialog are trying to make this work. To me, that makes a little more sense than waiting for a previously identified customer to wander onto your block.

1020 Placecast raised the Series B round from Quatrex Capital, Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital; it brings total investment in the 3.5-year-old company to about $10 million. The company makes money by charging brands a set-up fee and then a monthly fee based on number of users. It says its technology is ready and it just needs the cash for marketing and biz dev.

Though 1020 Placecast is really more of a mobile marketing company, any startup involved in advertising or mobile is pretty psyched about what Google’s bid-up $750 million AdMob buy does to its valuation.

For more on the promise and worry of push-based location-aware mobile advertising, see this panel writeup from our Mobilize conference a couple months ago.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: 1020 Placecast

Paltalk, an online video chat firm, announced today that it has acquired Vumber, a virtual phone service, in an effort to capture additional revenues by offering virtual phone numbers to existing subscribers. The deal could provide Paltalk with additional features to bolster its existing video conferencing product, and give it a leg up against services like Skype in an industry that’s becoming increasingly competitive.

Like Google Voice, Vumber was created to allow users to create virtual phone numbers that link to their mobile or home numbers, adding an extra layer of privacy and security to consumers who don’t want to share their personal contact information. But despite having a paid subscription model, Vumber, which was founded in 2006, was never able to realize the revenue it needed to support its expenses.

The acquisition builds on an existing relationship between Paltalk and Vumber. The companies entered into a partnership and a revenue-sharing agreement in early 2008, when Paltalk made disposable phone numbers from Vumber available to its video conferencing customers. Knowing that its partner was having financial troubles, Paltalk  made an offer to pick up the Vumber assets and integrate them into its own service.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Paltalk CEO Jason Katz said in an interview that four Vumber employees have joined the Paltalk staff. In addition to personnel, Paltalk gained all of Vumber’s hardware, two trademarks, and one patent on anonymous calling that is pending approval.

There will be no interruption in service to existing Vumber users. Paltalk hopes to bring more functionality to the Vumber platform, such as offering PC-to-phone calls out, as well as PC-to-phone calls in. “It’s a matter of making some of our features available [to Vumber], and making some of their features available on Paltalk without losing the brands for either one,” Katz said.

Paltalk, which offers a video social-networking service that allows multiple users to chat in real time, has been profitable since 2004. The company was founded in 1998, and introduced a subscription service to its users in 2001. Katz wouldn’t disclose how many of Paltalk’s 4 million active users are subscribers, but said that 85 percent of the company’s revenue comes from subscriptions.

In addition to acquiring Vumber’s assets, being profitable enabled Paltalk to buy out venture capital firm Softbank Capital Partners’ stake in it earlier this year. Softbank paid $6 million for 20 percent of Paltalk in 2004, but Katz said his company was able to buy back that stake at a solid profit to the VCs. And now, with a profitable video conferencing business and new virtual phone features, Paltalk has even more artillery against competitors.

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Windows Mobile vs. Android: WinMo Is Better Than You Think jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Here’s Our NewTeeVee Wish List, What’s on Yours? NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; The Party Line — Phone Buzz of the Day jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; New iPhone Ads From Apple Jab at Verizon TheAppleBlog – by Darrell Etherington ";

Posted by Ryan Lawler on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: acquisition, merger, Paltalk, Vumber

Adobe today released developer betas of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 and said it plans to extend full Flash support to mobile devices next year. It’s a move that could go a long way toward improving the user experience on the wireless web.

Flash 10.1, which was unveiled last month, is designed to run on platforms including Google’s Android, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Nokia’s Symbian and Palm’s webOS. Today’s beta releases are limited to devices running Windows, Mac or Linux operating systems, however. Flash 10.1 is expected to be available “across a broad spectrum of smartphones” and other connected devices next year, the company said.

“With the beta availability of Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 today, we are taking an important step toward realizing the Open Screen Project vision to enable rich Internet experiences across any device, anywhere,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “Content creators will provide multi-screen experiences with uncompromised Web browsing and standalone applications across desktops and netbooks, and in the near future across a wide range of mobile devices.”

While Apple’s iPhone was once again conspicuously absent from Adobe’s announcement, Adobe has consistently said it has a working relationship with the Cupertino company and would like to bring Flash to the iPhone. (Both of Adobe’s new beta releases support multi-touch input.)

Flash is the centerpiece of Adobe’s Open Screen Project, an 18-month-old initiative aimed at bridging the substantial gaps that remain between the “PC web” and other platforms such as mobile and consumer devices. The lack of support for Flash on mobile devices has been a substantial problem on the wireless web, leading to user experiences on phones that can be vastly different — and oftentimes inferior — from traditional computers. Bringing the technology to a wide variety of mobile phones would be a big step toward the “one web” that today is just a dream for most wireless users.

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Windows Mobile vs. Android: WinMo Is Better Than You Think jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Here’s Our NewTeeVee Wish List, What’s on Yours? NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; The Party Line — Phone Buzz of the Day jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; New iPhone Ads From Apple Jab at Verizon TheAppleBlog – by Darrell Etherington ";

Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: Adobe, Mobile Internet, Mobile Web, smartphones