According to a new report from tech research firm Forrester, the smartphone as a standout mobile category is a shaky paradigm with rapidly shifting parameters. The emergence of mobile operating systems, the ability to install and run third-party apps, and the wide availability of multimedia features (camera phones, video phones, and MP3-playing phones abound) have all been game-changing developments in the mobile field, but they are quickly becoming commonplace. According to a recent New York Times feature, around 50 percent of mobile devices will be "smart," multimedia-enabled gadgets within the next three to four years, and these devices could constitute a full 90 percent of the mobile market by 2015.
So, what defines a smartphone as all phones become smarter? What is the exact trajectory of the mobile learning curve?
Gmail Labs has done it once again. A new feature introduced today allows users to automatically translate emails into English and any other supported language. Sort of.
As with any non-human inter-linguistic interpretations, the messages suffer in translation. But thanks to this new feature, you'll be able to get the gist of the Cyrillic text in your spam folder with just the click of a text link.
Version 3.0 of the iPhone operating system is in beta testing among developers and if all the actual and rumored changes come to fruition, the iPhone user experience is likely to be very different soon.
In this post we'll take a brief look at three of the biggest changes being talked about: push notifications, background apps and bundled software. Some of these changes are much more likely than others. We've also got a few fantasies about what we wish was coming soon to the iPhone.
We have seen our fair share of doom and gloom this year, but, according to a report from Bloomberg.com, at least Pandora, the free online music discovery service, expects to be profitable next year. Pandora was founded in in 2000, and derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes. In the interview with Bloomberg, Pandora's founder Tim Westergreen also disclosed that the service is currently adding about 50,000 new users a day, and that the service's successful iPhone app is responsible for bringing in about 20,000 of these new users.
Is Google interested in searching the Real Time Web? Are they at all threatened by Twitter? Are Google spiders already so fast that this emergence of Real Time is old news to them? Further fodder for pondering these types of questions was offered by Google co-founder, Larry Page, today at the Google Zeitgeist conference in Hertfordshire, UK.
Page says that Twitter has demonstrated that real time search is essential. Loic Le Meur, founder of microblogging service Seesmic and European tech conference Le Web (where this year's topic is the real time web), asked Page today what he thought about Twitter. Page's response was interesting.
The iPhone is clearly making some inroads in the business world, and RoamBi, which launched today, is one of the many new companies that is trying to win over some of these business customers. RoamBi's mission is to make spreadsheets readable and browsable on the iPhone (iTunes link), and its designers have done a great job at turning dry and unreadable spreadsheets into highly useful interactive mini-apps. These 'apps' allow users to visualize their data on the small iPhone screen, where they would otherwise be squinting at columns full of unreadable numbers.
Visible Past is a location-aware learning environment being developed at Purdue University. It is based around the idea that data can be organized using space and time attributes. The team behind the project believes that Visible Past can be used as a learning tool in schools and museums.
Practically speaking, Visible Past is a mix of virtual reality, location-based data and a wiki approach. So users of the system not only receive information, but can contribute to it too. Features include social networking and content rating/review.
In New York City, on the 16th floor of the Roger Smith Hotel, we caught up with social media superhero Baratunde Thurston, web editor for The Onion.
Thurston started getting into this whole "Internet" thing in simpler times when the social web was called Usenet. He now carves out his niche at the overlap of the Venn diagram of comedy, politics, and tech. As an official Internet old-timer who makes it his business to stay relevant, Thurston has particularly useful insights on the business of curating applicable content with great efficiency and timeliness.
3Tera, a California-based cloud computing company, today announced the upcoming launch of their AppStore, a marketplace for cloud components where users can find production-ready, scalable components on a free, trial, or pay-per-use basis.
AppLogic, as we wrote in 2006, "allows Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser." The AppStore offers software stacks for AppLogic deployments, and its catalog spans all kinds of elements and applications, from networking and server components to storage solutions, as well as management and monitoring tools.
PhoneGap is a very interesting development platform for mobile applications that lets developers build apps that work for multiple devices, including the iPhone, using only HTML and Javascript. That means far more people are able to develop mobile applications.
Recently, though, Apple has been rejecting an unusual number of apps built with PhoneGap from its app store. The company's reasons don't seem clear and developers want to know what's going on. We discuss three possible explanations below, but ultimately the problem appears to come down to the tight control that Apple maintains over the app store and iPhone.
