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A report from Forrester out today highlighting the rise of “mobile wannabes” in the work force is a bit over-the-top in its assertion that up to 25 percent of the 2012 workforce will be folks who don’t need mobile access to company information but will want it. The report cites the example of employees angling for mobiles to complete work on their commutes. I hope these mobile wannabes are taking the train or bus to work, because I don’t want some 25-year-old admin in the highway lane next to me filing a report for her boss.

However, the report correctly identifies Millennials as the catalyst for this trend. Millenials are the under-30 generation that grew up with the web and mobile technology, and as such they expect and want mobile access in order to do their jobs — not because they want to work more, but because they expect to be able to do their jobs while taking care of routine tasks outside of the office. Companies should support them, rather than lock down IT policies.

While I was at DEMO last month, I saw one or two startups attempting to offer secure access to enterprise data from cell phones, including SkyData. Also in the security space are companies such as CoreTrace, which manage applications on a employee desktop by creating a whitelist of approved file types and refuting those that don’t match. That approach would help with younger workers’ habits of downloading random Web applications onto company computers.

As the economy worsens, giving mobile wannabes a mobile lifeline back to the office could also give employers the flexibility to offer lower salaries — after all, surveys consistently show that flexible scheduling is of far more interest to employees than more pay. Investing in products to make workers more productive and keep data secure seems like a win-win.

Updated. In the same way that mobile access to Wikipedia has transformed stupid arguments, mobile song recognition apps are truly neat when you need to name that tune. While they’ve been around for a while (though they didn’t always work so well and sometimes they cost money), the interface of the iPhone and the prominence of Apple’s App Store has given them a big boost. Today, Shazam (where you can hold your phone up to a speaker to analyze what song is playing) and Midomi (where you can do the same, but you can even sing the song yourself and listen to other users’ renditions as well) are No. 27 and 71, respectively, in Apple’s most-downloaded free apps. And now Midomi’s parent company, San Jose, Calif.-based Melodis, says it has raised $7 million in Series B funding.

The funds were provided by TransLink Capital, JAIC America and Global Catalyst Partners, and will be used to distribute and monetize the company’s music search products. Melodis has now raised a total of $12 million.

In my extensive tests (which were not so extensive, because I don’t own an iPhone — but were more extensive than you might think, because I’ve convinced many people to download Midomi), the app works really well for most pop music (but not at all for classical). It’s an awesome party trick. However, some reviewers have found Shazam to be more accurate.

Update: Shazam has raised nearly $20 million in funding, but it hasn’t taken new funding in four years, the company told us Tuesday morning. also recently raised funding — some $6.6 million from IDG Ventures Europe, Lynx Capital Ventures, and Soft Park — though we don’t know how much it’s raised in total.

Mobile Internet adoption is still rather slow. According to Forrester Research, only 21 percent of U.S. adult mobile phone owners use the mobile Internet, and only 7 percent do so at least once a week. One of the main reasons for this is that browsing the Internet through a mobile phone is kind of like eating soup with a fork – that is, using the wrong instrument to get the job done.

To provide an adequate mobile Internet browsing experience, it’s not enough to shrink the web page into a size that fits on a mobile phone screen. A web site designed for the mobile Internet should consider the different keyboard, the lack of a mouse-like pointing device and the different context; if it can wait until a user gets home, it probably will. So, how do we make the mobile Internet work well on different handsets with different screen sizes and different operating systems?

One solution is offered by Israeli startup Moblica. Founded in December 2007 with a seed investment of $700,000 from angels, Moblica aims to bridge the gap between the richness of Internet services and the limitations of mobile devices to offer an iPhone-like experience on Java-enabled mobiles. Moblica takes relevant web sites and redesigns them to give customers a better mobile user experience.

After downloading the Moblica application, users are presented with an iPhone-like desktop that contains different mini applications, such as weather forecasts, RSS feeds, Picasa pictures and more. Navigating is easily done using the keys, and pages load very quickly. Currently only Picasa and RSS are available, but Moblica says many more are set to launch by the end of the September, along with a consumer web site. Moblica says it can work with content providers to develop a mini-application version of their site in one to two weeks. The downside is that the Moblica solution currently only works on Java-enabled phones. Still, seeing these efforts to improve the mobile web experience leaves me eager to throw away my fork.

Moblica’s competitors include WidSets by Nokia, which also provides a downloadable application that contains different mini applications. While WidSets currently offers many more sites, after seeing both applications in action, I can say that I definitely had a better user experience with Moblica. An additional competitor is Volantis, which provides automatic content adaptation services for mobile operators.

If this story interests you, check out our upcoming conference:
Mobilize — The Next Generation Mobile Conference

My Chicago-based startup, The Point, helps people start campaigns for collective actions of all kinds, from organizing a poker game to boycotting a multinational corporation. We’ve been fortunate so far, enjoying steady growth, happy users, and money in the bank. (In February, we raised a $4.8 million round of venture funding from New Enterprise Associates). But hindsight is 20/20 and any entrepreneur, given the chance, would do some things differently.

In our case, we spent nine months developing extra features to accommodate our grand vision instead of focusing on what our users would really need. This cost us precious time, delaying our launch, originally planned for June 2007, to November of that year. Even after launch, the costs lingered — maintaining the extraneous features was a time-consuming distraction from improving the parts of The Point that people were actually using.

Thankfully, we caught on to what I call the curse of “vision overload” — when you put your vision ahead of your users — and quickly reversed course.

This month we’re delivering a major upgrade to The Point, our first release in months, and we’ve actually cut more features than we’ve added. While arguably less grand, it adheres to the critical success maxim of KISS, or “Keep it Simple, Stupid!” All founders face an inherent conflict between their most ambitious visions and the practicalities of execution. Below I explain how The Point addressed this uncomfortable compromise, and how you can learn to KISS, too.

Why didn’t we adhere to simplicity the first time around? We were certainly aware of the KISS principle — in fact, it was uttered frequently around our office — but we didn’t know how to measure simplicity. Obviously a site needs some core features, but where do you draw the line on value added? Our vision was to build a 21st century framework for collective action. This was novel, so how do you determine what is core vs. an enhancement?

The complexity occurred when we allowed vision to drive our feature set. Six months on, we’ve developed a few rules for determining what to leave in and what to leave out at launch.

1. If you don’t mention it in your 2-minute product demo, you don’t need it.

Whether demoing to colleagues or potential investors, we found ourselves glossing over certain features to keep from overwhelming our audience. In the end, the features we skipped over were the same features that went unused. If you can’t fit it into a presentation to a captive audience, then it’s almost guaranteed not to be a factor in the seven seconds the average web user takes to decide whether they’re interested in what you’re doing.

2. Don’t build a race car for foot runners.

Campaigns on The Point don’t go “live” until engagement reaches a critical mass (e.g. 100 participants), so everyone can be assured the campaign will have an impact. So to help organizers determine the tipping point for a boycott, we built a database of 150,000 companies that maps the financial vulnerabilities of boycott candidates like The Gap or Exxon Mobil. Users, however, were efficiently identifying potential targets through simple discussion forums. They didn’t need the fancy tools we had created.

3. Let users problem-solve with the basics first. Then offer the glitz.

We assumed that some campaign creators would want multiple administrators so they could share the responsibilities of management and promotion. Our vision for The Point included group governance, so we spent weeks building a system for proposing and voting on campaign developments. As soon as we launched, we realized that campaign creators managed this task just fine by sharing access to single accounts. The lesson? Sometimes it’s better to let users actually have a problem before you try and fix it; their solution is often simpler.

4. Proselytize your vision in your blog, not your product set.

There are better ways to promote your vision than etching it into your product with features that are unlikely to be used. Write about it on your blog! Speak with community groups on the purpose and potential of the site. Or make a video of yourself in the future talking about how your site changed the world.

Users care about whether you are meeting their needs, not your vision for the company. Save your vision for your investors. Had we focused on the factors that affect whether someone will become a user, we would have had a product out the door months earlier.

Andrew Mason is a blogger and founder of The Point. It is his first startup.

Mippin (formerly Refresh Mobile), whose browser-based site presents content specially designed for mobile consumption, says it has named a new CEO and reached a milestone of 500,000 users. But I question its ability to survive.

The London-based startup’s service also learns what users like and recommends stories based on their previous interests. I call it a mobile portal analogous to Yahoo, MSN, Netvibes or PageFlakes, but Judy Gibbons, the new CEO, has a different definition. She says it’s a mobile media services company, in that it optimizes PC content for consumption on a mobile device. “We believe there is only one Internet - there is not a separate mobile one,” Gibbons told me via email. “But mobile presents different challenges and opportunities and there is real user value to having all this content in one place in the same consistent format with a great fast user experience.”

Whatever you call it, Mippin needs to gain wide adoption in a crowded area to support its advertising-based revenue model. The market includes efforts by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, and according to ad network AdMob — which does business with Mippin — the number of mobile portals is steadily rising (see graph). Obviously the mobile world cannot support 500 varying portals. Even in the PC web world, portals have problems.

Despite impressive growth from its October 2007 launch, averaging 110 page views per user and advertising click-through rates of 3 percent and 15 percent for contextual ads, (way better than the .5 percent rates on other mobile sites), I’m not sure Mippin will deliver the audience advertisers need given the amount of competition fighting for consumers’ eyes. It’s a nice service, but unfortunately that doesn’t always win out.

The move to 4G will not be cheap. Carriers must consider network upgrade costs and a refresh of their handsets, not to mention the issue of backhaul. Will they attempt wireless backhaul? Wait for fiber? One way or another, by 2013 carriers worldwide will invest some $163.5 billion in capital expenditures, with much of that going to 4G data services, according to data out today from ABI Research.

In the meantime, carriers in developing countries will be spending about $131 billion on 2G and 3G upgrades this year, while carriers in mature markets will start throwing their money at 4G in 2009. By 2013, carriers will spend about 28 percent for voice, 67 percent for data, and 5 percent for mobile TV.

Israeli chip startup DesignArt hopes to cut those costs with a line of base station chips for carriers that, when used in a clustered network, can essentially create their own backhaul. The other innovative aspect of the firm’s chip design is the fact that everything from radios to backhaul is on one chip. That system-on-a-chip design can cut both costs and the form factor of a base station, enabling equipment makers to use the chip in pico cells to base stations. It does this using 3 watts of power.

The company is currently sampling a WiMAX version of its chip, which will go into production next month; it plans to offer an LTE version later on. Motorola is checking out the chip and is also an investor.

Two things struck me about DesigArt’s chip: The first is that the time it will take them to bring it from idea to production is a mere 18 months, incredibly fast for the chip industry, where that time frame can run two years or more. The second is that, with so many functions on it, this single chip could prove a challenge to many of its competitors.

Joachim Hallwachs, VP of marketing for DesignArt, said the use of ARM cores, Tenscilica-embedded processors and its own customized RISC-based core all contributed to shorten the time needed for both design and integration. As for the competition, the firm will take on Intel, Texas Instruments, Freescale, Sequans, picoChip and Wintegra with its various components. The spending on 4G is just beginning, but if equipment makers buy into DesignArts’ semiconductors, the company may end up displacing a lot of chip makers.

I’ve been in Tel Aviv for almost two days and I still haven’t been able to shake off the jet lag, mostly because I’ve been so busy catching up with old friends, making new ones, and learning all I can about what’s going on in this tiny country, which has the highest number of startups outside of Silicon Valley. Here, working for a tech company is as much a part of life as being a member of the Israel Defense Forces.

I typically write about a startup after hearing about it from many different sources. It doesn’t matter if the chatter is positive or negative; if people make mention of a company, unprompted, in casual conversation, there’s almost always a good story behind it. These days Israelis are talking about Modu.

According to the chatter that I’ve heard while sitting in cafes and bars here, Modu, which was started by M-Systems founder Dov Moran (who sold that company to SanDisk for $1.6 billion), may already have or is close to raising a whopping $100 million from investors including some of its partners. The Kfar-Saba, Israel-based company has backing and relationships with SanDisk, Texas Instruments, Telecom Italia, BeeLine (VimpelCom) of Russia and Cellcom of Israel.

When I asked Guy Horowitz, director of strategy for Modu, about the funding, he declined to comment. Regardless, the chatter isn’t focused on how much money the company might be raising (it’s already raised $20 million from investors including Gemini Israel Partners and Genesis Partners). Modu is the first Israeli startup aiming to hit a home run in consumer electronics.

Modu has developed a tiny, 2.5G mobile phone — about the size of a cigarette lighter — that uses a Texas Instrument chips to pack in features including music playback, FM radio, GPS and of course, tons of memory.It is a mobile phone module that can be inserted into a sleeve. And depending on which sleeve it’s inserted into, its feature focus will change.

A sleeve with a focus on music can turn the phone into a music player. A sleeve with a Qwerty keyboard can turn it into a messaging device. What makes it possible is a tiny connector port hidden at the bottom of the device that interfaces with these sleeves.

“We are taking our cues from the fashion industry,” says Horowitz. Indeed, just like fashion changes every season, people can swap and change their sleeves but keep the basic innards of the phone — with all information, such as address book and music, intact. With each different sleeve, while basic functionality remains the same, the focus shifts to another function. And in the same way that you buy shirts from, say, Banana Republic or Faconnable, Mobu hopes that one day you’ll be able to buy these sleeves not just from them but also from retail stores, carriers and even small, specialized designers who will come-up with sleeves.

“Today it takes about 12 to 18 months to bring a phone to market,” says Horowitz. “And phone companies need to sell millions of units to recoup profits.” Modu, in comparison, can build and bring sleeves to market in less than a quarter — and they only need to sell some 100,000 of them to make money. From that perspective, their plan seems quite logical.

But Modu still has lots of work to do. After launching at Mobile World Congress in February, it has yet to deliver a product. It plans to launch its phone sometime this year, but it will only be a 2.5G version. A 3G version won’t be ready until 2009.

I think the lack of a 3G device is going to prevent Modu from getting any meaningful traction. Apple, while a newcomer to the mobile market, was able to buy time for a 3G version, mostly because it had a strong brand and a loyal cadre of fanboys (and gals.)

The lack of a well-known brand will prove a challenge for Modu, especially since the company is aiming for fashion-conscious users. While these consumers can afford to buy new sleeves to “show off” their expensive toys, this same group is almost perversely married to “brands” and would pay a premium for them. Carrier-branded phones, on the other hand, might not hold as much appeal. As a result, Modu needs to get a lot of “brand names” to develop “sleeves.” And in order to do that, it needs to spends tens of millions of dollars.

Horowitz said the company’s carrier partners are going to be spending millions to promote Modu devices because it would allow them to push mobile brands into the background. I wouldn’t hold my breath, for carriers’ loyalties are worse than the fidelity of a free agent in baseball.

Finally, Modu is going up against entrenched players with deep pockets, who can use discounts as a way to destroy the company’s plans. And a desperate handset maker, like Motorola, could always copy Modu’s idea.

But at least it makes sense why this company needs more than $100 million in VC backing. In fact, I get the feeling that it won’t be enough. Still, the fact that they’re doing something this audacious makes their story one worth following.

How Modu Works:

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In a mobile world, the conversation opener is less likely to be, “How are you?” and more likely to be, “Where are you?” Since the goal of social networking technology seems to be to get us to speak less and look at screens more (all hail the mighty text ad), Nokia’s purchase of Plazes makes all the sense in the world. In fact by buying the social mapping service, the handset maker is merely continuing efforts that began with its $8.1 billion NavTeq acquisition, which should close soon.

Nokia’s efforts, along with the iPhone’s new GPS chip, are a sign that location-based services are becoming a reality after years of hype. Previously a dearth of true Internet access paired with high-priced GPS plans made LBS more of a wish than reality, but the iPhone and unlimited pricing plans are changing that. Aside from picking up a cool LBS tool, the Plazes purchase drives home the message that Nokia is spreading its attention across multiple devices, something it signaled a serious interest in when it offered to buy TrollTech.

Plazes had only been available on the PC and Mac until earlier this year (with SMS texting tools too), when it launched an iPhone application. The crossing of the PC-to-mobile chasm may have been what triggered Nokia’s interest, as the handset maker has been busy thinking across all screens. As carriers lose their ability to control Internet access on phones and users have the true Internet available, companies who can offers people seamless applications on PCs and mobiles will thrive. Nokia is pretty close to carriers despite the grumblings over its latest handset offerings, so I look at this deal as validation for both LBS and a true-Internet experience on mobiles.

Moblyng, which was formerly known as Fliptrack, just raised $5.7 million to translate Flash content from the Web into videos or stills that can be viewed on most cell phones. As a transcoding junkie, I thought this was cool — until I realized that the company will use its translation prowess to allow you to scrape your “photo bling” from MySpace, Friendster and Facebook (only via the Moblyng Mobile slide show Facebook app) and render it fit for viewing on a WAP page on a cell phone.

This seemed silly to me. And then I realized I am old and hopelessly outdated.

As CEO Stewart Putney said, this way someone can post a video or photos and share them with everyone at the same time. This fits with my ever-present wish to upload content once and share with everyone. I just don’t see many of my recipients being so jazzed about my photos that they need to flip open their mobile to see them RIGHT NOW. But if they are, using Moblyng they can.

Putney also said that after the beta Moblyng might expand the technology beyond social sites, and possibly to devices such as televisions. That fits with another of my technological dreams — seamless content transfer across all three screens. I suppose shopping on Etsy via my mobile will just have to wait.

Motorola Ventures today put an undisclosed amount of money into Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup VirtualLogix, which aims to do for communications equipment and mobile devices what VMware has done for the server. I’m pretty leery of companies throwing around the v-word, but with its take on virtualization, VirtualLogix is actually creating value.

For proof, check out the plans for a sub-$100 multimedia 3G phone developed by Purple Labs using NXP chips running VirtualLogix’s software. The software allows a processor to run a rich operating system on the same chip that controls the baseband access. (In a typical smartphone — depending on the applications and radios needed — this takes two or more chips.) The end result is a high-end feature on a low-end phone using fewer chips. That’s excellent for device makers, but VirtualLogix counts among its investors TI and Intel, two companies that want to sell more chips.

VirtualLogix CEO Peter Richards explained this contrast away by saying the chip vendors just want to make customers happier. But while that may be true, what’s really behind the chip firms’ interest is VirtualLogix’s ability to take software written for single-core chips and run it on multicore chips by virtualizing the multicore hardware. Multicore chips aren’t in phones right now, but given how much we want our handheld devices to do, they will be.

The other beneficiary of virtualizing a communications device is the gear market, where VirtualLogix customers such as Alcatel-Lucent are using the software to combine multiple products, like call routing servers, call management servers, etc., into one box rather than four or five. Virtualization as offered by VMware and Xen is creating a lot of savings by allowing companies to reduce the number of servers they use in data centers, so it stands to reason that it can do the same in the telecommunications world.

One of the most important calls I make during the week is the one to my mother, followed by another one to my baby brother. These are international long distance calls, and for the first 15 years of my American life, those calls went over AT&T’s wired or wirel