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Nimbuzz, a little-known mobile VoIP company out of the Netherlands, has released a mobile client that not only allows users to conduct VoIP calls, but to engage in IM conversations and share media such as photos, music and video. Nimbuzz, which claims to have received an undisclosed amount of funding from Skype’s original investors, Mangrove Capital Partners, seeks to utilize cellular data networks and provide users with an inclusive application for mobile IM and SMS communication.

With this service, Nimbuzz enters a market already dominated by established mobile VoIP clients Fring and TruPhone. Fring, like Nimbuzz, incorporates IM capability with multiple IM networks and VoIP calls. TruPhone allows you to make VoIP calls to TruPhone users and traditional phones, without the IM features of Fring and Nimbuzz. Back in January of 2007, we covered Nimbuzz and criticized the service for offering cumbersome (although cheap) VoIP-on-mobile minutes. With the addition of the desktop clients, social widgets and IM, however, Nimbuzz is a much more features-packed option. Continue Reading

No one knows exactly how big the market for mobile Internet devices will be, but the major chip makers are betting it will be huge (it’s one of the reasons they’re making chips for mobile devices at 45 nanometers.) We’ve covered efforts by Intel, Qualcomm, and Via Technologies to get their chips into devices sized somewhere between a smartphone and a PC, but Texas Instruments wants to play, too.

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For the past few days, I’ve been buried under a flurry of press releases coming out of O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, currently under way just south of San Francisco. Many of the ideas/apps/startups are boring, a few are interesting, and a couple are, well, pretty good. I’ll write about them after I’ve had a chance to use them.

Meanwhile, one app that looks particularly interesting is the iPhone Plazer, from London-based social mapping startup Plazes, a company whose products I occasionally use. The app, which will be downloadable from the iPhone, will take coordinates from the “location library” and automatically “plaze” you, which is just a company-branded way of saying that it will geo-tag your location via the mobile device. So far, Plazer software has been available only on PCs and Mac.

Founder Felix Peterson has promised an early preview of the app once the iPhone opens up. I will update the post later; in the meantime, check out the screenshots.

Anyone questioning the need for more fiber or wireless backhaul, or even 4G wireless broadband, need only look at a recent survey from IDC that finds that a constant connection is becoming the expected norm for almost a fifth of the world’s population. Sure, the study was funded by Nortel Networks, a telecommunications gear maker, but I don’t doubt the general theme of hyperconnectivity at all.

Some findings include:

• 16 percent of the global workforce is hyperconnected today, a number that will grow to 40 percent in five years.
• 64 percent of the workforce in Latin America is either hyperconnected or increasingly connected, compared to 59 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, 50 percent in Europe, and 44 percent in North America
• Hyperconnectivity varies by industry, from 9 percent in health care to 25 percent in high tech and 21 percent in finance industries

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