sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged with mobile + Web2.0
Japan’s Kao Chekki (Face Check) Proves That Vanity Apps Know No Boundaries
On Facebook, there is no shortage of apps that tell you what celebrity you look like based on your photo (FaceDouble is the most popular), but in Japan we like our vanity apps on our mobile phones. After all, the camera is built in. Take the case of Kao Chekki (Face Check) by J-Magic, a web company that was totally unknown until the end of April 2007, when it caused a Japan-wide frenzy with its free Kao Chekki service. By June 2007, the mobile site had registered an incredible 20 million requests, and continues to be popular to this day.
The service is quite simple and cleverly plays with human vanity: People submit their photograph from their cell phones to check which (Japanese and international) celebrities they resemble the most. Kao Chekki scans the pictures and emails back the top three celebrity matches, including percentage match, a few moments later.
Kao Chekki works very well with Japanese faces (trustme on that one), but seems to have slight problems with foreigners. Michael and Erick really don’t resemble Gori-san and Kiyokiba-san, respectively, do they? Although, Gori-san is known as a cut-up.
The site’s overwhelming success spawned a number of copycats, including a rather bizarre service called Koe Chekki (Voice Check): Here, users call a phone number, leave a short message and are then emailed back to their cell phones with a list of celebrities with similar voices. Okay, maybe that one won’t translate overseas.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Sharemo: How Japanese people share used stuff using their cell phones
Swapping sites are nothing new (see Dig N’ Swap), but in Japan we like to trade our junk via our mobile phones. That is what the Japanese social sharing service Sharemo is all about. The site’s ambitious idea is to contribute to overcoming Japan’s throwaway society.
This is how it works: Users can offer any item they don’t need anymore (DVDs, comics and clothes are especially popular) on Sharemo. If the item is useful to another member, it can be rented, used and then relisted. This procedure is repeated until one Sharemo user decides to keep the item. The system keeps track of all actions and allocates points to active members, which can be donated or redeemed to rent items.
Sharemo’s crucial point is the complete absence of money and the reliance on trust among the members. In Japan at least, the concept pans out as expected: Although the mobile site isn’’t actively being promoted yet, Sharemo it already racks up 400,000 page views monthly.
Sharemo is operated by Enigmo, a company setting itself apart from other Japanese web companies by an international mindset. Their promotion networks rollmio and pressblog are successful outside Japan already, and Sharemo is set to follow suit in the mobile space. Will this concept work outside of Japan?
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Mobage-town: Japan’s Biggest Mobile-Only Social Network
There is a lot of hype and hope in the U.S. around taking social networks mobile, but mobile social networking is still in the fledgling stages in the West. In Japan, it is already a reality. One company in particular, DeNA, has taken Japan by storm with its mobile SNS/virtual world/gaming platform Mobage-town. DeNA opened a US office in San Mateo earlier this year, with plans to offer an English version of Mobage-town this fall.
Subscribers can exchange messages, chat in communities, share music, read pocket novels, and blog, among other things. The site’s “killer feature”, however, is the vast selection of free games that makes most users register in the first place.
Each of the 11 million Mobage-town members is represented by an avatar “living” in a virtual room. Both the characters and rooms can be pimped out with new clothes and wallpaper, for example. In order to do that, users must acquire “Moba Gold”, a virtual currency established by DeNA, by clicking on ads, signing up for affiliate services and inviting new members.
The circular business model has paid off for the company, which is listed on the Tokyo stock exchange (market cap: $2.3 billion). Mobage-town alone raked in $46 million in sales in the first quarter of this year and saw nearly 15 billion page views in June. And yes, this is Japan- and mobile-only.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Are App Stores Coming to a Carrier Near You?
There's an interesting discussion going around about the possibility of T-Mobile taking some cues from Apple with an app store of their own. Instead of offering it to a specific phone, T-Mobile wants to take things one step further and open up a platform for all of their mobile devices. Who can blame them? Their current mobile store is equivalent to a mess when compared with Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. However what is it that makes the App Store so appealing and will more carriers follow suit?
Buying Mobile Apps for Your Phone
The user experience of downloading an app from Apple's App Store is something to speak on. It's by far the best mobile user experience I've ever had. However, I've never been interested in purchasing and downloading apps from Microsoft or Verizon when it comes to my Motorola Q9c. Instead, I've headed straight to the developer's site or simply didn't bother. I don't think I'm alone in this situation. I've seen family members purchase ringtones and ringback tones galore, yet not one of them has ever bothered to purchase an application. There are three reasons why they may not have have never purchased an app from their respective carriers:
- The costs are ridiculous
- The offerings are not interesting
- They don't know what they're doing
If You're Going to do it, do it Right
Apple has offered resolutions for the aforementioned three reasons. The developers set the cost, not the carrier. A gang of great applications exist in Apple's App Store to please a variety of users with varying interests. However, these are not only great games, but the graphics and user interfaces are usually superior to applications on other mobile platforms.
On the other hand, most iPhone users are tech savvy. While it's simple enough for mainstream users to use, it's marketed to early adopters and geeks across the globe. You can bet your bottom dollar they know what they're doing. In turn, the App Store is a reflection of the iPhone userbase. This is a formula that T-Mobile and others would be wise to implement if they plan to pursue their own App Store.
Japan’s super-advanced mobile web: Too unique to serve as a global blueprint?
Over one billion cell phones have been sold worldwide in the last year, but in the US or Europe, the mobile Internet is still catching on relatively slowly. There even was a heated debate in the blogosphere just recently whether the mobile web has a future at all.
However, this has never been a question in one specific region of the world: In Japan, since 2006 more people have been accessing the web through cell phones than through PCs. Is this a picture of things to come in other countries?
Not necessarily. The interplay of five specific factors paved the way for the success of the mobile web in Japan (where I live) and largely explains why it hasn’t taken off yet elsewhere:
- the ubiquity of advanced cell phones combined with a vast selection of tailor-made services
- tech-savvy customers who often had their first web experience on a cell phone
- a reliable technical infrastructure
- symbiotic business relations between carriers and content providers
- relatively sound regulatory policy
Three catalysts for growth: superior phones, a lot of content and demanding customers
Japan’s image as a high-speed testbed for the world’s most advanced mobile technology is well-deserved. A staggering 90 million 3G handsets are currently in circulation. Over 70% of people in this nation of 127 million are subscribed to mobile web data plans. By way of comparison: The 3G penetration rate stands at 23.8% in the US (where 52 million 3G handsets are on the market) and at 11.1% in Europe. 15.6% of American mobile subscribers use the mobile web.
The country’s three main carriers (SoftBank, KDDI au and market leader NTT Docomo) are churning out around 100 different Internet-enabled 3G handsets per year, each equipped with a whole array of flashy functions (the iPhone made its debut in this country only last month). Japanese people use their “Keitai” for over-the-counter payments (e-wallet), as a commuter pass in public transportation, 2D barcode reader, health control terminal, dictionary, karaoke player, digital TV, music player, e-book, and much more.
Some handsets even feature video transfer from Blu-ray recorders, alarm buzzers with direct connection to the nearest police station or voice-to-text translation. In June, Docomo introduced a home service for owners of Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones to access mobile web sites at a maximum of 54 Mbps.
The availability of cutting-edge phones is one reason why many Japanese people don’t own a PC but would rather browse the web exclusively on mobile devices. And it’s not just for short bursts. They never write SMS either but rather thumb-text push-mails, often containing little icons, emoticons and coded youth slang acronyms. Booking flights online, ordering clothes, auctioning off used stuff, gaming, paying for movie tickets via direct debit: all of this has been possible on Japanese mobile phones for years now.
Semi-walled gardens in a flawless technical environment
Japanese companies never tried to duplicate the wired Internet experience but rather developed unique mobile ecosystems specifically for deployment on cell phones. Docomo’s i-mode kicked off the boom when it launched in early 1999 and was quickly followed by proprietary web systems established by competitors.
Today, the mobile web in Japan is fast, sophisticated, technically stable, and easy-to-use. Users press one dedicated button on the phone and are online within seconds, usually starting to navigate via menus predetermined in the carrier’s landing page. Alternatively users can type in URLs directly to get to mobile web sites, which can then be conveniently browsed by using one-key shortcuts.
Accessing the fixed Internet is also possible. Docomo, for example, uses a mix between a modified version of HTML and several i-mode-only protocols. This means that au’s EZweb subscribers are fenced out of Docomo’s web system (and vice versa). By the way: WAP never gained a foothold in this country.
But even in Japan’s mobile industry all is not well: Developers frequently deplore insufficient CSS, a lack of cookie and scripting support and restrictions imposed by operators and the Japanese government, i.e. especially with content regarded as harmful to children.
Powerful trio: Forward-looking politicians, carriers and content providers
Next to charging end consumers for their services, Japan’s mobile web operators generate revenue by making sites and content providers pay considerable fees for prominent positions in their default menus. Carriers also double as centralized billing institutions, significantly facilitating transactions conducted on cell phones. If a user downloads a game from an i-mode site, for example, Docomo keeps about 10% of the fee for itself. The content provider gets the rest, while the user conveniently pays the total via the monthly phone bill.
This means the business of operators and content providers alike is based on a 3-pillar kiosk model.
Carriers provide:
- stable connectivity and technical infrastructure
- system of timely and correct payment flows (for subscribers and content providers)
- willingness to share revenues
This framework motivates content providers to ensure:
- development of compelling content
- advertising of their services
- willingness to pay billing fees to carriers
This development was spurred by the Japanese government: To politically boost 3G adoption, carriers never had to pay a single Yen for mobile phone bandwidth. By way of comparison: In 2000 and 2001, the 3G licences in the UK and Germany were given out for $58 billion and $78 billion, respectively. In Japan, government policy was aimed at kick-starting a market, not to filling its own coffers. And it worked.
The country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications says business carried out through cell phones in Japan was worth $106 billion in 2007 (up 23% from 2006), with m-commerce accounting for $67 billion and the mobile content market for $39 billion. Just one example: Cell phone owners downloaded music worth $10.2 billion, 42% more than in 2006.
Japan quickly managed to transform into a super-mobile society and this development might be hard to replicate, at least in the same way. What will be interesting to see is whether the mobile web emerging in the U.S. and elsewhere can leapfrog Japan by embracing more open standards and doing away with walled gardens. The jury is still out on that one.
In the meantime, Japan wouldn’t be Japan if it wasn’t thinking even further ahead. Think next-generation mobile networks: In March already, Docomo successfully transmitted 250Mbps packets in an experimental Super 3G system, planning to end preparations for the eventual launch by 2009.
(Photo by Matsuyuki).
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Android Is For The Masses, iPhone For The Rich
Our network blog last100 has an interesting interview with Nicolas Gramlich, founder of anddev.org - an online community for Android developers. As editor Steve O'Hear notes in his intro, there have been issues with Google's mobile OS of late - an incomplete and buggy SDK, favoritism towards select developers, lack of transparency, and concerns that the platform could become fragmented and that Google has ceded too much control to carriers. But all those problems may fade into the ether if, as Gramlich claims in the last100 interview, "Android is for the masses, iPhone for the rich".
Android is Google's mobile operating system and competes with the likes of Apple's OSX for iPhone and Nokia's Symbian open source OS. Gramlich told Steve O'Hear that "there will be a great variety of Android devices all over the world, where there will always be just the iPhone." He also dismissed the threat of Nokia and its recent acquired controlling interest of open source mobile OS, Symbian. "I think Android will win over Symbian", said Gramlich, "as there are so many companies behind the Open Handset Alliance."
So what draws developers like Nicolas Gramlich to Android? Gramlich says that "Android's main attraction is its simplicity" and that this enables the rapid development of "feature-rich applications".
Asked by Steve O'Hear what kind of apps we can expect from Android, Gramlich replied that "we will definitely see a lot of location-aware and social-networking applications, that will try to be the social app for Android. I've seen so many that I cannot even count them." He noted that integration with Google Maps is especially tight, which he says doesn't currently exist on other mobile platforms. Indeed his own Android app is a free navigation app called AndNav! (screenshot below).
Despite all the positive attributes of Android, currently it is vaporware (no commercial phones running Android yet exist) and there has also been developer unrest because the SDK hasn't been updated for some time. Gramlich admits that "the next SDK has to be overwhelming to get Android back on track".
For the full interview, hop over to last100. Also see last100's recent interview with the zintin CEO talking iPhone, Android and mobile future.
Strands Brings Recommendation Technology to Banking
Strands, the recommendation and lifestreaming service we've written about here before, announced a much anticipated deal this morning that will put it in the driver's seat for financial recommendations served up to millions of online banking customers around the world. The company's recommendation test-case in music is no longer all they will be known for around the world.
Customers of Spanish bank BBVA will now be offered recommended products and services, individual and anonymized aggregate analytics and personalized goal setting and alert services, all based on their banking activities.
BBVA sees more than 1.3 billion online transactions from 40 countries annually. Will their customers appreciate these services? We think they probably will.
What's Interesting About This Deal?
Using the Strands Social Recommender technology, BBVA will be able to offer intelligent observations and suggestions for personal finance. A demo of the product shows, for example, that users of the system might be given interesting statistics about the financial activities of people in a particular demographic group, then asked whether they belong to that group. It's like having a private, personal, math-powered financial adviser available for your use on demand.
With interfaces for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia phones - analytics and recommendations will also be available outside of the desktop web browser. This is the kind of heavyweight application to see coming from online recommendation services.
Privacy Concerns
How will bank customers feel about having their personal and financial details thrown into the collective pot for analysis of recommendations to other customers? We think it may take some getting used to, but that kind of information is undoubtedly being aggregated inside of banks already. The prospect of allowing users to benefit directly from their collective data is an appealing one.
Will the recommendations offered all point crudely toward buying more services from the bank? Given the huge war chest that Strands commands and the caliber of hires they've made over the last year, we hope that the company's banking recommendations and observations will prove truly useful and engaging for customers and not just for the bank's bottom line.
Only time will tell, but we've said for some time that in a world drowning in data - powerful recommendation technologies that help point towards personally meaningful information have huge potential. Financial services are the next frontier for these experimental technologies and we hope that Strands will disclose statistics in time demonstrating the impact their service had on the financial lives of users around Europe.
Disclosure: Strands is a RWW sponsor.
Twitter Feature Requests
Besides more stability and uptime in the Twitter service, these are some of the features that I _REALLY_ need built into Twitter:
- Web interface to “track” option. This would make it much easier to manage sms notifications to my phone.
- Increased API access limit. 20 per hour is way too low. I would probably be satisfied with 30-60 per hour. 60 would be best.
- Ability to Mass-block people from the web interface.
- Historical Direct messages sent or threading of direct message conversations.
- Shorter URL service. TinyURL is great, but I’ve seen shorter.
I do not think the above requests would alter the way Twitter functions as a whole, but would enhance its overall functionality. What features or enhancements would you like to see added added to Twitter?
TSheets Lets You Clock-in To Work From Your iPhone
iphone: deli.cio.us/tags/iphone
Web
Web2.0
mobile
projectmanagement
timetracking
iphone
system:has:for
Mobile Web To Get Standards
A group of mobile operators have just unveiled a new initiative they're calling "BONDI" whose goal is to encourage development of new mobile web applications while not compromising customers' security. BONDI was created by members of the OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform), an industry group that includes participants from all parts of the mobile world and whose members include operators like AT&T, Hutchison 3G, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor, T-Mobile and Vodafone.
With BONDI, named for the popular Australian beach, OMTP wants customers to know "it's safe to surf!" In order to move mobile web development forward, OMTP wants to fix the current problem we have today where a mobile app written for one phone has to be rewritten again and again to work on all devices. This effort is costly, inefficient, confusing for the end user, and slows down the time to market.
So instead, via the BONDI initiative, OMTP will define what interfaces developers need to access when writing apps that tap into more sensitive functions on the mobile device. BONDI will expose those handset features to the developers while also protecting the users from any fraudulent or malicious activity.
In addition, the web services that result from the BONDI initiative will incorporate the various open and proprietary work currently in progress in this area of mobile development so as not to cause more fragmentation.
As today's mobile phones become more like mini-computers, the need for standards and security is paramount. The members of OMTP agree. Having standards will "encourage more developers to create unique, exciting applications for mobile web 2.0," says Arnd Gallmann SVP Terminal Technology at T-Mobile.
We couldn't agree more and are now eagerly awaiting the plethora of services that are sure to result from this move.
Microsoft to Acquire Mobicomp: Watch for These Cool Mobile Features
Microsoft announced this morning that it plans to acquire Portugese mobile application company Mobicomp, makers of some very cool mobile tools that we're excited to get our hands on. Microsoft watchdogs Liveside saw the news first and have a good description of the Mobicomp offerings, which we'll discuss below.
One thing's for sure, though - the iPhone is not the only mobile game in town. We continue to see things that Windows Mobile phones can do that iPhones cannot and we expect that to continue after the launch of the iPhone app store. Check out what Mobicomp offers, presumably a feature set that will be included in all Windows Mobile phones in the future.
The Features
- Automatic backup and recovery
- Social web integration
MobiComp's MobileKeeper™ Backup & Restore is an 'over the air' mobile backup and restore service that can store any kind of content held on a mobile device, including contacts, calendars, text messages, photos, videos, music, bookmarks,
ring tones and applications to business files like Microsoft Word and Excel. Backup to the web happens automatically and the web interface also allows for management of the contents of the mobile device. This reminds us of SugarSync, among other things.
The MobileKeeper™ Sharing & Communities features include both read and write capabilities for blogging and participation in various social networking sites. Here at RWW we're big fans of Facebook Mobile, Netvibes Mobile and FriendFeed to Go - and we believe that mobile social networking in general is going to be very big.
- News ticker
The company's Active mTicker™ is an RSS-based news ticker that delivers a wide variety of content types while the phone is in idle mode. Sounds like a great idea, if a battery suck. We love the Adobe AIR desktop news ticker Snackr and we like the idea of a high quality, customizable mobile news ticker. Right now the news ticker doesn't appear to be personalizable - it's almost like an ad platform for customers. We would love to see users able to access this functionality directly.
In other words, this is an exciting acquisition for Microsoft to make. We hope that Mobicomp's features can be integrated quickly.