SIMYO MVNO launches in Germany

KPN have lanuched SIMYO MVNO in germany - similar pricing structure and offering to EasyMobile in the UK, and co-incidentally similar branding colours as well. Could this be a defensive move before Easy arrive in Germany?

G’zOne TYPE-R

This is a water-proof, shock-proof, everything proof phone just launched in Japan with stopwatch, torch, compass, buzzer etc.

Schwinn Electric Stingray

v cool

Oooh - open-source VOIP?!

go here (via the register)

Economist Innovation Summit - Nov 05

go here

new venture - Sonopia

Juha Christensen's (former head of MS Mobile) new stealth venture

Location-aware Media Networking Operators & Intercasting Corp

This is an extremely well articulated and insightful blog on the future of content, media and the concept of Location-aware Media Networking Operators (LMNO's). Given the current environment, shift in market dynamics and excitement and optimism around mobile, I believe is a very plausible vision of how things will evolve. The author Shawn Conahan, is CEO at Rabble. Wavemarket (crunkie) is in a similar product space.

Innovate Europe 05 - Zaragoza, Spain

go here

Google acquires DodgeBall

Dodgeball have been early pioneers of "location sensitive mobile social software" - essentially connecting you to your mates via your mobile, depending where you all are. Its more evidence of Google buying product innovation (rather than creating it in house), but also goes to show that theres some serious thinking going on about how to connect their (currently) disparate product offerings (search, blogger, adsense, picasa, orkut, gmail etc) together. I suspect that for Google, Dodgeball is one piece of a compicated strategic puzzle that they are working on.

Blogger Mobile

Yesterday the blogging population saw the announcement of Blogger Mobile - for US based mobile users, they can start blogging with minimal effort and set-up hassle. Just send a picture/text to go@blogger.com and you're up and running. The service sends the user a web link and a code which can be used to view/edit the blog. Bloggers who already maintain a blogspot can register existing blogs against their registration code.

This is an interesting development for a number of reasons:

1) It demonstrates how important the mobile phone is for the future of blogging. The mobile is the perfect tool for adding pictures/text to your blog. Most of us (!) spend a lot of time away from our PC's/laptops but the mobile stays with us.

2) It could mark the change from blogging being a niche activity to a mass market phenomenon. Simplicity is absolutely critical to running up the adoption curve and so many products remain niche because they havent managed to overcome provisioning complexity. This is the brilliance of what Four11 and Hotmail did with email. They turned email from a product that needed an ISP, modem, PC, pop3 address, smtp config etc into something that required 2 minutes of registration time in an interenet cafe or a friends PC. Blogger has reduced the provisioning complexity down to a couple of steps.

3) It suggests that Blogger has done some form of deal with US operators (not all of them). This is interesting for me because I think European operators might have a different attitude given their commitment to the upkeep and maintenance of their walled gardens.


Despite all the positive press, I still think there's room for improvement, because fundamentally the average mobile user is not familiar with sending with pictures or text to an email address. We send stuff to numbers.

BuddyBuzz

go here

Coming to a shop near you....(in the US)

Low-cost GSM/CDMA mobile handsets with a pre-paid amount, straight out the box from Hop-on!

Update - 30/06/05 - $34.50 GSM handset offered by hop-on for india

Zyb - global SMS from PC/web to mobile

Zyb provides global SMS from PC or web, to mobile. Theres a whiff of Skype branding/site feel about it

Skype 4 SmartPhone (!)

Get Beta here

Apple iPhones...

There has been quite a lot of press about Motorolas problems in convincing mobile carriers to order lots of phones with Apple iTunes. This is partly because they have conflicting attitudes on who should control music download, and how much they should charge.
Just a thought.....whats to stop Apple manufacturing a mobile/iPod and distributing it through their existing network of iPod resellers. Customer buys a pre-pay SIM and pops it in the back of the iPod. So maybe Apple could also be an MVNO?

'Intelligent' Bookmarks

Joshua Schachter, a rather clever chap of Memepool and GeoURL fame has just received funding (undisclosed but less than $5m) for his social bookmarking venture http://del.icio.us from Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young.

That’s quite a board and quite a network....!

It’s an old idea revamped though, riding on a new wave of VC investment in all things that leverage the communities and related intelligence around what we do on the web. "Social bookmarking" is close to my heart. Back in good old '98 when I was fresh out of Uni, I co-founded Skip2 Technologies, an Internet software co that enabled users to store, manage and share bookmarks via the web. The idea was good, but the business model and execution was poor. Despite a number of interested VC's we never raised any funding, but did sell the company to MyNet, my second start-up in 2000. So if you’re wondering what Social bookmarking is, let me try and explain....imagine in your browser you have a set of folders, lets call one "Holidays", and another "restaurants". As you chug along through life, you add links to your favourite hotels/holidays cottages, beaches etc in the "Holidays" folder. Likewise with "Restaurants". Now, connect that information to your social network (friends, family, colleagues etc) and you have a very powerful and socially relevant source of information on where to eat, where to stay etc. It’s powerful because you are more likely to visit somewhere that as been referred to you by a friend. Google ads are all very well, but the most accurate, trustworthy and relevant referral is from someone you know, who can provide feedback, experience, tips, other links and info.

Del.icio.us has quite a few features up and running already. Each user has a separate URL from which you can access your personal links via the web. You can see the number of other people who have listed the same link, and then see their link lists. You can also link to other people through interests or key "tag" words within the context of the link. So if I link to a site about "cornwall cottages" I can also see who else has tagged the same link, and others can search the links to see if there are any links that reference "cottages cornwall". The service doesn’t appear to have any privacy controls at the moment.

The Del.icio.us business model isnt clear yet. At Skip2, our plan was to mine the aggregate demographic information of the user base that visited a specific site which we then intended to sell to site owners to improve insight, advertising accuracy and experience. Another option was to enable users to sign-in to other sites using their Skip2 username/password - the .Net passport approach. Blink tried to do a similar thing. Del.icio.us faces competition from De.lirio.us (an open source copy), www.furl.com and www.spurl.com.

Del.icio.us is very basic and a bit geeky, but with the new influx of funding, Joshua and his team will be able to transform it into something more usable, consumer focused, and clever. Good luck to them...