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Vlingo’s new software for BlackBerrys (the link goes live at 5 a.m. PT), which gives me the ability to navigate my phone entirely by voice, has me feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. I press a button on my Pearl, wait for a chime, simply say, “Web search, weather San Francisco,” and the browser opens and delivers me the weather in San Francisco. I can also use it to text and send emails to my contacts, though admittedly without the benefit of typing, punctuation is a problem.

As Om has pointed out, voice makes navigating phones easier, but the Vlingo application does eat up bandwidth. Regardless, the Vlingo software for BlackBerry devices is powered by the same speech recognition engine behind Yahoo’s oneSearch, the voice-enabled web search software that had me so excited I downloaded it in the middle of the keynote speech introducing it.

With the ability to text and email by voice, the Vlingo software has more features than oneSearch, but in return I’ve given Vlingo voice control of my entire phone. And that poses a problem for Nuance Communication, the leader of speech recognition software for dictation and for mobile phones. Nuance powers my BlackBerry’s voice dial feature — or at least it did until I downloaded the Vlingo client. (Device-wise, for now the software is only available for BlackBerrys.)

Both Nuance and Vlingo are going after deals with carriers because that’s where the money and reach are. Vlingo hopes to sign deals with partners to make them the default option for voice-powered commands such as web search or directory services. It’s popularity so far may be one of the reasons Nuance earlier this month filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Vlingo.

Vlngo’s CEO Dave Grannan says the suit is without merit; he also recently raised a $20 million round of funding, which he says he’s willing to use to fight the infringement case. However, infringement suits are a messy business and have long been used as a blunt instrument to fend off competition. Vlingo’s technology is good, but as a startup going up against Nuance, which has sued everyone from Yahoo to TellMe, it’s going up against a practiced plaintiff.

Mobile search, despite the presence of giants such as Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) and AOL (TWX), is wide open. Any startup has as good a chance as any of the the big boys, just as long as they have cutting-edge technology and enough business acumen to capitalize on it. One such startup that is getting a lot of buzz is Boopsie -– yes, you read that right — Boopsie.

The company quietly launched at the recent Mobile 2.0 conference, but went largely unnoticed. And that’s a shame, for I ended up downloading Boopsie’s mobile search application to my Nokia N95, and I was impressed. The app supports all platforms, including the iPhone. After talking to the company — I am typing this while sitting in the airport in Las Vegas, waiting to get home — I like their approach. (It is not clear where the company is based, and their website offers no information.) They’ve basically created channels of content that might be useful.

The search query on Boopsie gets rolling with a “smart prefix” — which means that instead of typing out the whole word, you only need to type the word’s first few letters. Start typing “Caltrain,” for example, and you get a list of options to choose from, including the Caltrain schedule. I will get more details about Boopsie when I get back, but I am told that their technology has impressed many — Yahoo wanted to buy them, apparently — but right now the company is looking to raise Series A funding.

If the team is smart, they should try and position it as a solution for the wireless carriers, who I am sure aren’t too thrilled about Google’s mobile plans.

Folks if you try it out, please let me know what you think about this little mobile app.

Related:

• AOL launches Mobile Search
• Is Google flubbing mobile search?

A $350 million buyout of Zimbra by Yahoo (YHOO), Thunderbird being spun out as an independent entity by Mozilla, and the impressive launch of San Francisco-based Xobni: Email, the most socialist of all web apps, is back on the front burner. As old as the contemporary Internet itself, it remains a constant source of pain and pleasure for all of us.

Every morning starts with a groan at the sight of dozens of unanswered emails. And yet somewhere in there is a note from mom, sister or another loved one that brings a smile to our faces. There is no denying the fact that as an application it has most, if not all, of our attention.

Given its critical role in our digital lives, I wonder if email could be the underpinning of a social environment — much less a social network and more a “relationship and interaction manager that aggregates various social web services” — that doesn’t require rewiring our brains and changing our behavior.

The new generation of Internet users tends to rely more on social networks for communication, but for the rest of us, email is still the hub of our daily lives. (According to one study, there are about 1.2 billion email users and 1.8 billion active email accounts worldwide.)

The demographic dissonance aside, email for a substantial portion of the population can be a good starting point for a networked experience. It has all the elements needed for a social ecosystem, namely the address book. And if you’re like most people, your address book is organized by friends, family, work, and acquaintances.

In other words, the relationship buckets (and the level of intimacy) are already predefined and have relevance. From there, all communication-related information — mobile numbers, geo-location data, instant messaging identities and of course, email addresses — are just a click away. So what’s missing? Discovery and presence, and synchronicity. The good news is that a lot of these issues are being worked on by two San Francisco-based startups, Xoopit and Xobni, the latter having just launched.

First lets look at Xobni (which would have been my pick for the coolest company at TechCrunch 40) and what they have built. They have an adjunct application for Microsoft Outlook, which scans through the entire email database and quickly establishes relationships among the people you email, and ranks them according to frequencies and relevance.

The best feature of this application is that it can tell you when a specific person is most likely to reply to you and how quickly. It is not discovery and presence in the purist sense, but it’s close enough. Future versions of Xobni’s software will bring together various web services — everything from Flickr photos to Twitter. I like the idea of a quick query that matches a name with a photo from Flickr or Photobucket. Similarly, it would be great to find a way to integrate Twitter messages into the same client and not deal with a separate application. (I wrote about this Universal Communication Client for Business 2.0 back in July.) (If you want to try Xobni, use invite code GigaOM — only the first 100 people are going to get the beta downloads.)

While Xobni is focusing on Microsoft Outlook, startup Xoopit is focusing on the web mail universe. By combining some of its own proprietary technologies, among them a unique file system and search and messaging protocols including RSS, Xoopit has come up with such a unique user experience that it made me think: This is what Gmail should have been.

The company is co-founded by Bijan Marashi and Jonathan Katzman, formerly of Inktomi and TellMe Networks, respectively. Xoopit is very early in its development cycle but is still very impressive. (You can sign up for their beta here.)

The entire system is built to bring all types of web services right into the inbox. You go to the Xoopit web site, sign up, and input either your POP3 or IMAP mail server information. The messages immediately start getting pulled into your Xoopit account. If you have an IMAP server, then the messages reconcile with your original inbox. From here on Xoopit lets you view your inbox (and your attachments) in many different ways.

Take photos, for example. Most of us end up emailing photos (or links to photos) to each other. Links of photos are used to access them, while attachments are used to get a “preview.” The Xoopit GUI makes it easy to see photos on a grid, much like you would on, say, an iPhoto. On social networks photos are shared via some sort of a photo (or slideshow) widget. In this case, the email environment becomes the place where you can experience photos and videos. The next obvious step for Xoopit is to bring in Twitter and other such services into their playground.

In many ways, Yahoo might have taken the wrong approach to its new social networking experiment, Mash. Instead of starting as a network, it should have started from within Yahoo’s email service, which has some 250 million subscribers. Regardless of what Yahoo does, the fact of the matter is that “email” is finally getting some sorely needed attention, and let’s just hope it leads to something better, something that doesn’t make us all groan every time we open our inbox.

While visiting China to speak at an arts festival last month, I also filed a GigaOM story on HiPiHi, a start-up founded by one of the country’s top Internet entrepreneurs. Thanks to Om’s reputation, the article is easily the highest profile coverage yet for the upcoming “Chinese Second Life”, sure to be of great interest to investors and tech executives, most especially in China.

After it ran, however, I noticed one small problem with the piece. It can’t even be accessed in China.

I first noticed this in the business office of a hotel atop the legendary Huangshan Mountains. The story, along with all of GigaOM, was being blocked by The Great Firewall. Not only GigaOM, as it turns out, but apparently every Wordpress-driven blog has been banned in China starting in 2005. So if you’re in Shanghai, you can’t read Scobleizer. You can’t even visit I Can Has Cheezburger, for God’s sake. (Im in ur Interwebs, censoring ur LOLcats.)

Since I couldn’t post in China, I had to e-mail the article out of the country as a Word doc so Om and Carolyn could publish it — an extra hit to GigaOM’s resources directly attributable to the Chinese government. But even if I wrote the HiPiHi story on a non-prohibited blog system (I could access TypePad from China just fine) it would have gotten blocked anyhow, because it briefly mentioned the Falun Gong, China’s brutally repressed meditation sect.

I was expecting some level of political censorship when I went there, of course. At times, it’s pathetically obvious and inept. While watching a hotel broadcast of CNN International, for example, the anchorwoman mentioned an upcoming story on a Chinese dissident — and seconds later, the channel went black. The next night, CNN and all other Western channels had been replaced by CCTV (China State TV) programming. Other times, it’s more insidious. While reading Yahoo! News in the lobby of our Beijing hotel, my girlfriend Jennifer noticed that one of Yahoo’s top stories was about AIDS activists in China. But before she could even click on the link, the page auto-refreshed, and after it reloaded, the story was gone.

But the thing is, when interviewing HiPiHi’s execs, I didn’t even pursue the subject of Falun Gong for political reasons. It was first broached by Jen, who was there to take photos, but I was already planning to pose the question as an essential part of my business coverage. Since HiPiHi is competing with Second Life and other upcoming user-created metaverses, the issue of just what opinions its users can express is a basic matter of market distinction. And so now, a couple dozen high-tech/venture funding blogs are discussing the GigaOM article — but none, as far as I can tell, are based in China. Thanks to their own government, which claims to promote the nation’s burgeoning technology sector, the Chinese digerati are simply kept out of that conversation.

Much has been written about how Internet censorship, actively abetted by Yahoo! (YHOO), Google (GOOG), and other top companies in the tech industry, is bad for the Chinese people. Less has been said about how it’s bad for the tech industry itself. As my HiPiHi experience suggests, it prevents investors and executives in the country from getting the full range of information they need to discuss and make good decisions in a transparent and timely matter. (A couple Net-savvy Chinese friends were able to read the article, they told me later — but only after they’d run it through the EFF’s indispensable firewall breaker. And would they have even found it, had they not already known what to look for?) As a consequence, China’s participation in the global high tech economy is crippled and incomplete, and in any partnership with the free world, threatens to hobble us all.

At the same time, this also gives me great optimism that the Great Firewall is ultimately doomed. (Even if the government exploits U.S. accusations of hacking as a “national security” rationale to thicken it even further.) China continues to be rocked by disastrous trade scandals that might have been prevented, had their corporations and investors gotten fuller access to outside reports of internal corruption and mismanagement. For all the heroic efforts of Chinese free speech dissidents (ably reported by Rebecca MacKinnon and others), it may be China’s business people who push forward the final, irresistible demand: To make our country the global power it’s destined to be, the Wall must finally come down.

Photo of author on actual Great Wall by Jennifer Schlegel