Forrester made some waves in the IT world Thursday morning when it released a report strongly urging large enterprise companies to let their employees use Macs at work. It’s also something mobile IT folks already figured out: employees are more productive using devices they choose. Read more »
Earlier this week, we held our two-day Mobilize 2011 event, which was jam packed with interviews, discussion panels and fireside chats all revolving around the mobile industry. This morning, Rob Woodbridge hosted me on a video summary of Mobilize, which distills the event’s high level themes. Read more »
If one thing became clear at this year’s GigaOM Mobilize conference, it’s that all the buzz about mobile technology is completely warranted. Since numbers speak louder than words, here are some of the most interesting stats that surfaced on stage at Mobilize 2011. Read more »
The mobile apps and services founders speaking at Mobilize 2011 this week gave some great advice for startups to follow. We picked out some of the best tips from Pandora, Flipboard, Instagram, Hipmunk, Formspring and Grey Area. Read more »
Much like everyone has some product or strategy to optimize on “the cloud,” momentum is already gathering around the next big technology trend to drive buzzzwords — big data. VMware is no exception, so I spoke with Steve Herrod, the company’s CTO to find out more. Read more »
Developers can be difficult to come by, which is why it helps to build communities of app makers as a way to share expertise and skills. But execs in the field suggested that communities need to provide rewards and incentives to the top users. Read more »
Individual seed investors have been an increasingly powerful force in Silicon Valley’s startup funding landscape. But some venture capital heavyweights say that while the VC industry has been shaken up by the increase of seed backers, the current environment will likely lead to a fall. Read more »
People have been asking to bring iPads, iPhones and Android phones to work for a few years now, but this is the year that IT departments everywhere are actually embracing it. Every enterprise will deploy smartphones and tablets to their workers over the next year. Read more »
At the Tuesday afternoon Mobilize panel on how to keep people coming back to your mobile app, panelists from a variety of services like Hipmunk, Formspring, ngmoco and Yahoo agreed that there were three things you should avoid doing if you want to create high-engagement apps. Read more »
Many of us still access Facebook through our web browsers, but it is increasingly becoming a mobile powerhouse. At GigaOM Mobilize, Erick Tseng, Head of Mobile Products for Facebook, said it may soon be more of a mobile company than one which develops for the web. Read more »
It seems like the concept of “the connected home” has been a hot topic forever. For most of us, it has remained in the realm of our imaginations. But according to Qualcomm Atheros’ Craig Barratt, connectedness everywhere is closer than ever to becoming a reality. Read more »
Grey Area co-founder and CEO Ville Vesterinen, at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 on Tuesday, discussed a growing trend: location-based gaming. One of the company’s most significant discoveries about mobile games has to do with how little they seem to actually be played on the run. Read more »
The WebOS technology is now up for sale, and its future is uncertain to say the least. But there are still a few good lessons that can be learned from WebOS’ journey, says Michael Abbott, the former Palm executive who led the development of WebOS. Read more »
Web-enabling all manner of non-computery things — parking meters, pill bottles, umbrellas — means that people can be reminded to do something: feed the meter, take the meds, grab the bumbershoot. But designing the alerts — in addition to the devices themselves — is a key consideration. Read more »
It may be difficult to describe what exactly the phrase “an internet of things” means, but the pieces of the puzzle that are required for that to develop are all here today, ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco. Read more »
It’s shaping up to be a busy autumn for Twitter. The service will be integrated into the next version of Apple’s iOS operating system, which is set to roll out in October. So is Twitter in complete panic mode preparing for the coming onslaught of traffic? Read more »
At Mobilize, VMware CTO Steve Herrod laid out a mobile plan that reeks of success on par with what VMware has achieved in server virtualization. The trick to accomplishing that might be VMware’s quest to make its hypervisor technology a part of the core Android kernel. Read more »
While developers working on business apps agree that HTML5 is coming along, they’re not ready to abandon native applications. At Mobilize 2011 the theme was hybrid, where executives from Salesforce, Rhomobile and MeLLmo talked about not making a commitment to one or the other yet. Read more »
Less than a year after it launched its photo-sharing app, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference that new users are signing up at a rate of 78 per minute, and 26 photos are being uploaded to the service every second. Read more »
Employees love using their own devices to do corporate work, but the practice, known as consumerization, is rife with security risks. Speaking today at Mobilize, Cisco’s Tom Gillis said consumerization is causing a fundamental rearchitecture of how networks look that requires a reimagining of security solutions. Read more »
Forget the latest iPhone or Android handset, and watch how people are using mobile phones in Central Africa instead: Jana CEO Nathan Eagle has built technology to reach more than two billion consumers in the developing world, where airtime is money and mobile is the future. Read more »
It’s still too early to say when they Year of Mobile payments will happen. But the important lesson is that mobile payments can’t rely on payments alone to sell itself; it will take a lot of new valuable services to convince consumers and merchants. Read more »
Flipboard was created out of a desire to reinvent media consumption for a digital and tablet age, but that doesn’t mean it can’t help existing publications repair their damaged business models, editorial director Josh Quittner told attendees at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco on Monday. Read more »
The COO of mobile payment startup Square, Keith Rabois, thinks that the mobile payment technology Near Field Communications (NFC) has no value proposition for consumers and merchants, he said at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference on Monday. Read more »
Forget Google and the other web giants. What content delivery specialists like Appcelerator, Cotendo and Urban Airship really worry about is the growing fragmentation of the web software stack they work with and potentially crippling patent litigation that makes everyone nervous. Read more »
As the third place carrier in the U.S., Sprint — trailing AT&T and Verizon — can’t really compete on scale. Instead it’s got to embrace new technology, it’s so-called “dumb pipe” status (as Stacey Higginbotham described it), and partnerships, explained Sprint CTO Stephen Bye at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference. Read more »
For fancy, new-fangled 4G mobile apps to really take off in a world with very few unlimited data plans, service providers need advanced yield management and the ability to bundle requisite bandwidth up with the applications themselves. Read more »
When asked Monday at our Mobilize conference whether or not they’re going to be selling the next iPhone, representatives from Sprint and T-Mobile gave two different answers. The responses give us good indicators of what to expect next month when the refresh arrives. Read more »
Patent acquisitions and litigation dominated the wireless industry in 2011, and it looks like we should expect more of the same going forward. If anything, experts seem to think it’s only going to get worse for anyone wanting to be taken seriously as a mobile player. Read more »
T-Mobile is still waiting for a phone call from Apple, which means that the iPhone 5 definitely won’t be available on the carrier’s network when it’s expected to launch in October. However, T-Mobile is making good business with Android phones, including the new Galaxy S II. Read more »
Voice is in the process of transitioning from providing the bulk of phone companies’ profits to becoming just another part of a data service that can be provided by web players, explained execs from voice-focused startups at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco on Monday. Read more »
Mobile advertising is a different beast than any advertising that came before, and the opportunities to measure engagement and even conversion may also influence advertising elsewhere. Read more »
The only constant in the hot tablet and smartphone market remains change. The top 50 Android apps take up to 65 percent of users’ time but eleven of the top 50 swapped out in the past three months, Neilsen’s Jonathan Carson told Mobilize 2011 attendees. Read more »
Pandora jailbroke an iPhone to get an early start on development for Apple’s iOS platform, the company’s CTO Tom Conrad revealed at Mobilize 2011 on Monday. These days, Conrad is equally excited about HTML5 and the impact it will have on connected devices. Read more »
On Monday at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 event, Fjord CEO Olof Schybergson discussed the thin line between love and hate that smart services tread when dealing with a customer’s personal data. How much shared info is too much, and how can we change where that line lies? Read more »
Our annual mobile internet event, Mobilize, is happening Monday, September 26, and Tuesday, September 27. Watch the livestream here to find out what industry leaders think about the state of the app economy, HTML5, mobile payments, networks and more. The livestream starts at 8:25 Monday. Read more »
We are hosting the fourth edition of our Mobilize: The Internet Conference in San Francisco next week. I will be chatting with folks from Twitter, Instagram, Flipboard, Pandora, Square and T-Mobile USA. We are talking about “what’s next” for mobile. Hope to see you there. Read more »
In the mobile ecosystem with so much changing so rapidly, it’s tough to figure out what to pay attention to. So we’ve gathered up some of the hottest startups in the mobile space to compete in our Mobilize 2011 LaunchPad competition. Check them out. Read more »
