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We’re going to Barcelona!

Once again we’re taking the trip to Barcelona to attend Mobile World Congress. This is absolutely the biggest event of the year for the mobile industry, and the place to be for anyone who is interested in the new developments and products that are coming out.

This year we have an excellent show planned. We’ll have a stand where we will be showing our products, doing demos and having fun. These four days in Barcelona are always hectic, but are also incredibly cool, and if you have the chance to drop by our booth, do so.

Our stand will be in Hall 2, Stand 2C76.

We’ll be showing off our latest Opera Mobile 9.5 and, of’course, Opera Mini running on lots of cool phones. There will also be some widget demos, and a Nintendo Wii for you to play browse with :).
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Discovered a new crappy iPhone clone while watching a TV informersial. Its a clear case of design and trademark infringement and guess what its all taking place on national TV. Its a sub-par quality knock-off iPhone clone and it was branded as My Phone.

It looks like an iPhone at first glance. It has a touchscreen but phone is noticeably thicker, has a iPhone look-alike User interface and comes with look-alike Apple logo on the back. In fact this little crappy device comes with a few additional features not available on the real iPhone.

You can shake the phone to pick up the call and it even comes with an add-on solar charger to recharge the phone battery in the event if you cant find any powerpoint. Guess what all this with a bluetooth headset thrown in for the price of $160 including shipping to your address within China. I wonder whats the real cost of the phone as I m sure it needs to be low enough to have a massive profit margin to cover the cost of advertising on national TV.

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Even when we are not working the Opera Mini 4 servers, thanks to all of you, our users, are providing valuable performance statistics (and a few error reports). We are continously using this data to find bottlenecks and ways to improve our service.

We just released a server upgrade of the Mini 4 servers, which includes some quite significant performance improvements in many areas. Some typical numbers that we are seeing are an overall speed boost of 70% (see diagram), and the average time to transcode a page has almost been halved.More: continued here

Reading about the future of mobile VoIP on VoIPPlanet triggered my thought process about the interesting possibilities for mobile firms. Given the advantages of 3G, 3G VoIP drawing more users than VoIP on Wi-Fi is a no-brainer. But this offers interesting opportunities for mobile firms, which are worried about losing revenues to VoIP.

Mobile firms need to accept that voice would not be the major revenue earner for them, it would be data. With unlimited voice plans and Google making its intentions clear about the voice space, this may happen in not a very distant future. What the telcos have is the (almost) unlimited reach and the penetration, which is difficult to replicate in a short period of time. The use of VoIP is inevitable and hence instead of trying to stop it, it would instead make more sense for the telcos to find ways to make the best of it.

One option would be to enable and promote VoIP on the 3G networks so that users can leverage that to make more VoIP calls and thus increase the data usage for the mobile companies. Common sense suggests that the VoIP route would be taken for expensive (read international) calls. Even today most of these expensive calls are made using calling cards or computers, thus preventing the mobile firms to benefit from this opportunity. By offering VoIP on their networks, the mobile firms would also be able to compete effectively with new technologies like WiMax as then the users would not have a strong enough reason to switch.

This is the classic example of marketing myopia, where firms take actions to maximize their short term gains and define their markets very narrowly. The mobile companies need to define their business as mobile communication and not only communication using mobiles. If the mobile companies continue to charge those obnoxious rates for voice or define their markets as only, users would find alternate solutions to make those calls and thus prevent any earnings for the mobile companies.

original post on http://voipguides.blogspot.com/2008/01/future-of-mobile-voip.html

Today I’m going to share with you my top 5 Twitter tips, to make the system more productive and comfortable to use. I hope you find them useful.

1. Use the @ Symbol to Reply to Other Users

Simple one but it’s worth keeping in mind that you can even do this to users who are not following you.

2. Keep on Top of Replies

You can check your replies page to see who has sent a message directly to you, i.e. to @yourusername. This is more useful than scanning through the lists but you can still miss time sensitive messages, so take a couple of minutes to set up an alert on these. Try one or more of the following methods.

* Set up free email alerts on replies at Twittermail
* Go to Terraminds and do a search on @yourusername in ‘search in updates’. You can then click the custom RSS link on the results page and put this into your RSS reader.
* Add @yourusername to your GoogleAlert subscription

3. Get a Reader for Twitter Updates.

Twitter can be overwhelming, especially when you have a lot of contacts. You soon realise refreshing the page isn’t an option. Luckily a huge number of third party applications and solutions have come onto the scene to take advantage of the Twitter API.

I’ve tried quite a few of these now. My first attempt was to filter Twitter through my Skype account, resulting in a flashing orange alert every minute. I then tried OutTwit, a plugin for Outlook which flooded my inbox. I then realised the mistake with these methods, they assumed I wanted to read every message.

twitter-bird.pngTwitter isn’t email or instant messaging, it’s Microjournalism. Not every message needs your attention or is even aimed at you. It’s unproductive and distracting to feel you need to read every update to your Twitter feed. Picture it as a news ticker running in the background of your screen.

With that new insight, I went looking for an application that would simply show updates without disturbing my work. MadTwitter did the job but Twhirl won out in the end, as it also highlighted replies to my username. Make sure you turn off the sound and pop-up alerts though.

4. Promote Your Material Responsibly

It’s not normal Twitter etiquette to promote your own blog postings. As Adam Lasnik wailed, “For the love of RSS, if I wanted to be notified of your *every* post, I’d subscribe to your feed.” However the marketing niche seems more receptive to requests for Sphinn or Digg links than Adam. The key here though is bringing value to the community, not just vote begging.

As Tamar twittered, “So far a lot of my new twitter followers are only self-promoting their blogs. That’s nice and all, but twitter is a conversation too. Use it“

5. Keep it Interesting For Your Followers

I don’t agree with Adam regarding blog posts but his other points are sound. Activity updates, such as “Going to bed” or “Reading my email” have zero interest for me. It’s also important to avoid getting too personal on your updates. If every reply is directed at (@) someone it can be rather boring for those outside the conversation. Try to send out general updates or links to give people a reason to follow you.

Original post on http://www.e3internet.com/greenhouse/nick/21/01/2008/5-tips-to-make-you-a-better-twitter-user/

This post is for those who think Google is still a search engine and wonder why news sites constantly talk about new Google features while Google’s homepage still looks the same. Here’s a list of my favorite Google updates from this year that should be useful even if you don’t use Gmail, Google Docs and you don’t have a Google account.

1. Play videos from Google Search
Google lets you play videos from YouTube and Google Video directly from the search results pages. That means you can search for a song, an artist, a TV show and play videos just by clicking on “watch video”. E.g.: Mika.

2. Better translations
This year, Google moved to its own statistical translation system, which provides better translations, improves faster and it’s easier to scale to new languages. You can access the service if you click on “Language tools” at google.com, from translate.google.com or if you translate search results from foreign languages.

3. More recent web pages
Google indexes web pages faster so you can find them minutes after they’re published. If you want to restrict your search to recent pages, there are more options in the advanced search that let you find pages first seen by Google in the past 24 hour, past week and other intervals.

4. Find geographical information
Google Maps is more than a search engine that finds local businesses, shows maps and directions. It’s also useful to find content related to a certain place through mapplets or directly from the search box. Find photos, videos, books and maps from the web.

5. Free 411 in the US
GOOG-411 lets you find a local business and connect to it by calling to 1-800-GOOG-411. The service is free and doesn’t have human operators.

6. Trends in search results
If you wonder what are the most interesting searches at the moment, try Google Hot Trends. The data is updated every hour and shows the queries that had the most spectacular evolution. For now, Google Hot Trends is only available for the US English version of Google.

7. Explore the sky
Google Earth 4.2 lets you switch to the sky mode and explore stars, constellations, galaxies, find information and high-resolution images.

8. Find faces in Google Image Search
You can restrict image results to faces by going to advanced search and selecting “faces” in the content types section. Google’s face detection is really good and you can use this new option when searching for people.

9. Go mobile
Most Google’s services have a mobile version and they should be available by going to google.com on your mobile phone (or google.com/m on your computer). There’s an unified interface for iPhone, a great mobile version of Google Maps that finds your location even if you don’t have GPS and a mobile YouTube.

10. Download StarOffice for free
Of course, you can always get OpenOffice, but Google lets you download for free a more business-oriented version that normally costs $70. The price is that you need to install Google Pack, collection of applications recommended by Google. You can still choose the software you want to install and it’s easy to uninstall Google Pack while still keeping StarOffice.

Original post on http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/best-new-google-features-that-dont.html

Mobile technology: Crossing mobile phones with social-networking sites would help people find friends, and potential friends, nearby

IMAGINE you are a woman at a party who spots a good-looking fellow standing alone in a corner. Before working up the courage to talk to him, you whip out your mobile phone. A few clicks reveal his age and profession, links to his latest blog posts and a plethora of other personal information. To many, this sounds like a nightmare. But to those building so-called “mobile” social networks, it is nirvana: linking virtual communities such as Facebook or MySpace with the real world. The idea is not new, but so far such services have not gained much traction. They have to be able to pinpoint people in order to work, but satellite positioning does not work indoors. More importantly, it is hard for such a service to gain critical mass: why join, if it does not already have many users?

A new generation of mobile social networks may have found ways to overcome these barriers. One is Aka-Aki, a start-up based in Berlin. Users of its service download a small program onto their mobile phone. The software then uses Bluetooth, the short-range radio technology built into many mobile phones, to check whether any friends or other members with similar interests are within 20 metres. If so, the program pulls down the person’s picture and whatever information he or she is willing to reveal from the firm’s website.

This works because each Bluetooth radio chip has a unique identifying code that can be used to look up a person’s information. To overcome the chicken-and-egg problem, Aka-Aki has made its software work on most phones and offers what amounts to free text-messaging between members in order to encourage take-up. In addition, Aka-Aki is also a web-based social network with a twist: to express their interests, members can create virtual stickers and share them with others, which then makes mobile matching easier.

Aka-Aki is still testing its service, which currently has only about a thousand members. How it will make money is unclear. But it does not take much imagination to see how the Aka-Aki approach could lend itself to advertising. Billboards or shops, for instance, could in effect become members of the network, and beam special offers or messages to other members as they pass by. (Already, Facebook’s advertising model allows companies to set up profiles for their products, which can then become “friends” with other members.)

If mobile social networks do take off, they are likely to do so first in Europe, rather than tech-happy California or mobile-crazy Japan. This is, perhaps surprisingly, thanks to regulators. European operators are required to keep mobile phones more open to software downloads, with the result that they can run programs such as Aka-Aki’s. (Google is pushing for more open handsets based on its new Android platform, but the first phones will not appear until the second half of 2008.) Many mobile phones in Europe also come with Bluetooth, because drivers there need it for their wireless headsets: talking directly on a mobile phone while driving will earn you a hefty fine in most countries.

Then again, Europe’s predilection for privacy could still emerge as a big barrier. Aka-Aki, for instance, has so far refrained from adding one feature that might cause quite a stir: the unique Bluetooth identifier could also be used to tag people, for instance, with unflattering comments. This would even work with non-members, as long as their handsets had Bluetooth switched on. Those wanting to remain incognito in this brave new world might soon have to turn off their mobile phones when arriving at a party.

Original post on http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10202690