GigaOM » mobile phones

Why retailers should forget showrooming and turn to in-store Wi-Fi

laurielamberth — Mon, 06 May 2013 06:55:36 +0000

Showrooming. Everybody’s heard of it by now — conniving shoppers checking out a product in a retail store, then buying it online later for less. But today it makes more sense for retailers to shift their focus away from this practice and focus on harnessing the shopper’s in-store wireless experience for themselves and their brands. In addition to making mobile-data-hungry customers happy, customer-facing in-store Wi-Fi networks will bring the retailers themselves much value.

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Gigwalk’s mobile workforce nabs $6M, expands Microsoft relationship

Ryan Kim — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:00:57 +0000

Gigwalk demonstrated how a legion of iPhone-wielding users can become an on-demand mobile workforce for companies willing to pony up some money. Now, it’s getting $6 million to expand on its vision of matching the right mobile workers with companies like Microsoft, which are turning to Gigwalk more and more for quick mobile jobs.

Gigwalk’s Series A includes funding from new investor August Capital with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners, Harrison Metal, SoftTech VC, Founder Collective, and AdMob founder Omar Hamoui. The new money, which brings funding total for the company to $7.7 million will be used to help Gigwalk build out its marketplace and improve its matching technology.

Gigwalk is also going through some changes at the top with founder Ariel Seidman stepping aside as CEO. He’ll be replaced by former VP of Business Development Bob Bahramipour, who will focus on helping the company scale up its operations. Seidman is staying on as an advisor to Gigwalk.

Gigwalk lets companies set up jobs for workers, who use their smartphones to collect data and send back their work. Since launching in May of 2011, Gigwalkers have completed more than 270,000 gigs. Early on, it might have been used by mapping companies looking to confirm information or fix errors. But more companies are finding different uses for Gigwalk.

Microsoft last year hired tens of thousands of Gigwalkers to take panoramic 3-D pictures of businesses and restaurants for Bing Maps in ten cities. Now Microsoft is expanding its relationship with Gigwalk and will hire for 100,000 new gigs in 3,500 cities.

While Gigs often involve taking a picture, many clients now send Gigwalkers to engage with consumers and ask them questions during or after they shop. That’s putting more pressure on Gigwalk to match the right employees to customers, who need skilled workers to pull off more complicated gigs. That’s what Gigwalk prides itself in: building up a smart service that takes in a lot of data from workers and matches Gigwalkers to the right job and employer. Bahramipour said 72 percent of clients are repeat customers of Gigwalk.

“We’re coming at it from Google perspective. We have data and matching technology and we’ll find you that needle in the haystack,” said Bahramipour.

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How emerging technologies will influence collaboration

David Coleman — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:55:35 +0000

Workplaces are changing because of trends like BYOD and gamification. But other emerging technologies are also altering not only what our work and space look like but also how we collaborate on that work. This piece delves into the different types of collaboration to provide a baseline of concepts. It then examines how emerging technologies like driverless cars, brain science, and 3D printers are being used to further collaboration in the near and far future. These advancements will not only support more and better types of collaboration in the workplace but will also impact where we work, what a workspace is, what we work on (literally), and how we share our work.

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Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 06:55:26 +0000

It’s all too easy to pile on to the Research In Motion–bashing bandwagon. The company’s decline is the stuff of water-cooler chatter, and RIM will doubtless end up as the subject of dozens of business-school case studies. But technology markets are always a little uncertain, so for now let’s get beyond the finger-pointing. RIM is a different firm today than it was in 2007. It has new management, a full awareness of the gravity of the situation, restless investors, an upcoming OS release and a number of lingering advantages that can still be leveraged. What might the future hold for RIM? CEO Thorsten Heins has said he plans to surprise critics with RIM’s transformation. But in case you don’t like surprises, here’s a brief look at the most likely scenarios for RIM going forward and their probability of occurring.

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Analyzing the wearable computing market

Jody Ranck — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 06:55:25 +0000

What do Google’s Project Glass, Zephyr Technology and the Hug Shirt have in common? All are examples of wearables: computing devices that are always on, always accessible and easily worn on the body. With the growth of sensors and microelectronics, the potential uses of wearable-computing technologies now reach to health and fitness, gaming, fashion, disabilities and augmented reality. Most importantly, the widespread adoption of wearables will drive the form function and market for mobiles in vital ways. This report provides a historical background, an overview of the technologies in the wearables market and possible future trends as the market expands.

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Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

Thu, 31 May 2012 06:55:44 +0000

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Nokia loses mobile top spot. What does it have left?

Bobbie Johnson — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 07:58:16 +0000

Fourteen years after it became the world’s most popular handset maker, Nokia has finally been eclipsed — pushed down into second place by Korean rival Samsung.

According to data from iSuppli, the Finnish shipped 83 million mobile phones around the world in the last three months — nine million fewer than Samsung, which managed to ship 92 million units.

But this change in leadership is not because Samsung is doing particularly well — although it’s making a ton of profit, in fact, worldwide shipments from the Korean company were down 13 percent in the last three months. The crown was passed along because Nokia is doing significantly worse than everybody else — dropping 27 percent from the last quarter of 2011.

As you can see from this iSuppli chart, every manufacturer took a hit in the last three months, thanks to the post-Christmas lull. But while Apple managed to mitigate much of that fall, dropping just 5 percent of sales from the end of 2011, the rest of the market took a much larger hit.

But things were particularly bad for Nokia in smartphones, where it recently said it had to act with “urgency”, where volumes dropped by 39 percent quarter-on-quarter. And that’s with a range of new handsets which, despite the lack of sales, are actually pretty good.

So what does this really mean?

The big question is whether any company that loses so much momentum can ever regain it — or even bolster its position to remain afloat. The shine has been coming off Nokia for a few years now, but the one thing it could rely on — its size and penetration — seems to be deserting it too.

In an interview with CNet UK earlier this week, former Nokia and Symbian executive Lee Williams was very critical of chief Stephen Elop, and pinpointed a part of his strategy that he feels is particularly weak.

“There’s no overarching vision for this company. That to me is akin to stepping completely out of the leadership role and running behind the bus now… Before Elop, Nokia would never give up that leadership position and role in the marketplace, would always talk about the future.”

“When I was at Nokia and we shipped a Symbian product and it was bad, in its worst incarnation we knew that if we just flipped the switch, we could move 2.5 to three million units — overnight, no matter how bad the product,” he tells me. “That was Nokia. That was Nokia’s brand, we knew we could count on that.

This has been characterized as a disinterest in creating good products, but what it really says is that Nokia used to have industry-beating penetration. It can’t say that any more, and with a relatively tiny number of smartphones sold and weakening power in emerging markets, it can’t coast.

While some critics of Elop — many of them former Nokia employees — suggest that he started the boat sinking without any lifeboats, that’s an assertion that is impossible to back up.

But what is clear is that the name Nokia meant something to people: a mixture of ubiquity, simplicity and reliability, depending on who you were and what you looked for. But these were all really a function of size: its products were everywhere, had to market themselves to everybody, and even if they weren’t more reliable than competitor prpducts, they were so common as to be easily replaced.

So if it’s not the biggest any more, then what does Nokia really stand for?

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E-books for smart kids on ‘dumb’ phones

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:23:58 +0000

Worldreader has already distributed over 75,000 e-books to students in sub-Saharan Africa. Now the literary nonprofit is launching an e-reading app designed for basic mobile phones.

In many African countries, 80 percent of the population owns a cell phone. Up to now, Worldreader has focused on distributing Kindles to classrooms (the organization’s founder is former Amazon exec , but by making e-books available via cell phones the organization can reach a much wider group of readers.

Worldreader’s app, now in beta, was developed by Sydney-based startup biNu. The Bookseller explains that the app uses “cloud-based data compression technology to enable any Java-enabled ‘feature’ phone (non-smartphone) to download e-books and access news websites and Facebook over an ordinary mobile signal.”

In this video, Worldreader director of digital publishing Elizabeth Wood explains how the app works.

Worldreader partners with international and local African publishers to make e-books available for its e-reader program and for the app. It also offers public-domain books. In some cases, Worldreader digitizes African publishers’ books for the first time. Here’s a list of the books the company offers for free or at a very low cost.

The Worldreader app

The ultimate goal is to have “thousands” of e-books available on the app, Worldreader’s director of digital publishing Elizabeth Wood told The Bookseller: “Yes, this is a leap of faith for publishers, giving away some of their content for free. But once you give these kids in the developing world the tools and hook these kids on books, they will become book buyers.”

A new classroom tablet from Intel?

Separately, Digitimes reports today that Intel will release an educational 10-inch tablet, the “StudyBook,” into emerging markets and regular retail channels this fall. The company has already released a basic laptop, the Classmate PC. The report says the StudyBook would target China and Brazil — countries more prosperous than those in Africa.

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New challenges for the IT organization

Dow Brook Advisory Services — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:38:23 +0000

Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are combining to create another force that is overwhelming many IT departments: complexity. This report, the second in a three-part series, examines several types of complexity in the business IT environment, including complexity of devices and applications, physical and virtual computing environments, and the related challenges for IT staff.

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The new IT manager, part 1

Dow Brook Advisory Services — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:55:53 +0000

The days of IT departments dictating which computing assets would be used and how are numbered, in large part because of three trends that are converging on organizations and their IT departments: cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT. This first section of our three-part report describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore.

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