The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘blackberry’

It took almost a year, but Xobni finally released its email app for the Blackberry. It works as a standalone app integrated with the email on your Blackberry, but similar to Xobni’s Outlook plugin, it ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.

Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni is introducing another product which may turn out to be more important in the long run. It is called Xobni One, and it syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. As Xobni rolls out more apps in the future, Xobni One should be able to sync contacts across those as well (very Mesh-like).

Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. And when you leave your job, your contacts stay with you. Xobni One isn’t free. It costs $4 a month or $40 a year, bundled with the Blackberry app. Keeping your contacts in sync is expensive. Doesn’t it seem that Google or Microsoft will eventually just do this for free?

Startup Seesmic has perfected the art of developing compelling Twitter clients on a variety of platforms. Seesmic offers a web client, an Adobe Air-powered desktop client, an Android app, a BlackBerry app, a brand friendly Twitter client and a native Windows desktop client. At developer conference MIX today, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur is announcing a new Silverlight-powered development platform and Seesmic for the Windows Phone.

The new desktop platform from Seesmic is built based off of Silverlight, which is a refreshing change from the buggy Adobe Air platform. The design itself is similar in look and feel to the Windows client, and includes functionality for integrating your Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin accounts. You can also personalize your background of the app. And the new platform works on both Macs and PCs.

But the most compelling feature of the new desktop platform is that it was designed with plugin features, which will now allows developers build features or integrate their services in Seesmic’s suite of Seesmic clients. One example of a plugin feature is a Bing mapping control plugin, which not only allows you to track geo-location but integrates trackable links at Bing.com

The Seesmic Desktop SDK includes an Extensibility layer as well as a set of utility classes, and the accompanying documentation. Seesmic is also launching a Twitter client app for Windows phones, similar to the BlackBerry app, that will integrated Bing maps and geo-location together.

Le Meur has told me in the past that he has invested in the Windows platform because 80 percent of Seesmic users use a PC. But with the new Silverlight-powered client, both Mac and PC users will be able to experience the client. I’m curious how the client will far against rival technology Adobe Air powered clients, which include Seesmic, and Tweetdeck. And Le Meur is wise to create an ecosystem around his applications, allowing developers to create plug-ins for Seesmic clients.

Disclaimer: Michael Arrington is an investor of Seesmic; I am not.

The bane of all mobile app developers is the need to rewrite the same app over and over again for different devices: the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Nokia, Windows Mobile. Adobe is positioning its Flash platform (which includes the Flash player, AIR, developer tools, and media servers) as the write-once, deploy-anywhere solution for both the mobile Web and apps. Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, it will announce plans to bring Adobe AIR to mobile devices, starting with Android and Blackberry phones.

AIR is currently used to create desktop applications, but it will soon be used to create Android and Blackberry apps as well. These mobile AIR apps will be able store data locally on the phone, access other data on the phones such as photos, and be distributed as regular apps in the Android and Blackberry app stores. Not only that, but the same apps created with Flash developer tools will be exportable as iPhone apps. Adobe wants developers to create their apps using its developer tools and then output them as AIR apps for Android and Blackberry phones, native iPhone apps, or Flash apps on the Web.

With the upcoming Flash 10.1 player—which Adobe is publicly saying will come out in the first half of the year via an over-the-air update, and privately telling developers to expect by the end of April—it will extend the Flash runtime to mobile browsers. The Flash 10.1 player will run consistently across both the desktop and many mobile browsers (except the iPhone). No more Flash Lite (except for Windows Mobile, which initially won’t support Flash 10.1 but is working on a mobile browser plug-in).

Flash 10.1 will be great for mobile video. Brightcove, for instance, is announcing support of Flash 10.1 in its video players, which makes possible all sorts of custom video player skins, advertising, analytics, and other features such as share buttons for Facebook and Twitter. (See the video below to see how Flash 10.1 will look in a Brightcove player on an Android phone).

Of course, the face-off with Apple continues over Flash on the iPhone, even though last December, 7 million iPhone users attempted to download the Flash player from adobe.com through their mobile browsers, up from 3 million requests in July, 2009. Apple might eventually have to cave if Flash becomes a standard feature of all other smartphones. Adobe execs cite numbers by Strategy Analytics which estimate more than half of all smartphones will support Flash by 2012 (click chart at right to enlarge).

Flash in mobile browsers seems like an inevitability. But whether apps built for Flash will be able to compete as standalone mobile apps outside the browser is still up in the AIR.

Foursquare is growing fast. Real fast. Traffic may be up as much as threefold over the past two months. But how are people actually using it?

The main Foursquare account tweeted out stats today that give a nice breakdown of usage. It’s just over a seven day span, but given that the service is now finally on platforms such as BlackBerry, is probably a good sample.

As you may expect, the iPhone still dominates, with 67% of usage. Coming in second with 13% is Android, which was the second native app Foursquare launched. In third is the just-launched BlackBerry version with 11%. In fourth is the mobile web, which has 7%. Palm is in fifth with 1.5%, and SMS comes in last with less than 1%.

A few interesting things to note: When the service launched just about a year ago at the SXSW festival, it was iPhone and mobile web only. Whoever wrote the tweet on the Foursquare account added “still?!?” when noting the mobile web’s 7% usage, so clearly they think there are better options out there. And with the just unveiled Windows Mobile client, there are now apps for all the big platforms except for Nokia (which is also in the works).

Also interesting is that SMS is in last place on this list with less than 1%. Foursquare is similar to co-founder Dennis Crowley’s last startup, Dodgeball, which sold to Google in 2006 — but the difference is that Dodgeball heavily relied on SMS. It’s interesting that Foursquare is seeing the growth it is in spite of this lack of SMS usage. SMS was a big reason why Twitter exploded, and it still is a major part of the service in other countries. That’s something Foursquare might want to consider as it continues to expand.

Last week, Microsoft invited seven BizSpark startups from around the world to a special event called the SharePoint 2010 SocialFest. Each company was invited to spend the week working in close collaboration with Microsoft SharePoint team members, as they tried to take their existing products and see how they could be used to leverage SharePoint. The event culminated in a demo day on Friday, when each startup showed off what they’d managed to put together in the preceding four days and a panel of judges chose the best one.

Here’s a video with Lynda Ting, Microsoft’s Director of Business Development, Emerging Business Team, explaining the goals of the program:

Cortex Intelligence
Cortex began as a text mining company, and spent the last five years perfecting its ability to automatically identify places, entities, companies, and other important pieces of text, making it easy to sift through large volumes of data. The company has also built sentiment analysis into its technology. For this competition, Cortex built tools that would allow a SharePoint user to automatically import tweets, blog posts, etc. based on their search criteria. For example, I could use the tool to run a persistent search on my company’s name and pull those results into SharePoint.

Calinda Software
Calinda looks to help companies more efficiently communicate by changing the way they use Email, looking to do away with the endless replies, CCs, and confusing chains of messages. To help, Calinda allows you to generate a map of these messages, allowing you to see at a glance who is sending what, and to whom. The company’s SharePoint integration allows you to pull these maps into your SharePoint hub. You don’t need to install any software to get this working with your email client.

Confer
Confer is a communications platform for companies that includes features like microblogging, status updates, and real time chat (some of this functionality can be seen in software like Campfire and Yammer). The company offers a click-to-call service, including audio recording of conversations and transcriptions, much as you’d find with Google Voice. For the SocialFest, Confer integrated much of this functionality into SharePoint.

Huddle
Huddle, which took the top prize at the competition, is designed to help companies collaborate with their partners — its mission is to be the “world’s best online B2B collaboration platform”. The service, which launched in 2007, allows companies to share files, organize meetings, and collaborate even when they are not operating within the same firewall. For its SharePoint integration, the company allows separate SharePoints to link together, bridging corporate firewalls while still maintaining the permissions and other rules that have been established by each company.

Leverage Software
Leverage Software builds social networks for the enterprise. This week, one of its goals was to build something to help companies collaborate, without forcing them to expend extra energy to use their collaboration platform. The product is called DesignSpaces, and it analyzes your Emails and extracts relevant data, like attachments and events, which it then organizes for you. In the future, coworkers can look through the workspace to find older attachments, message threads, and so on. The company has a number of Fortune 500 companies as customers, and around 1 million people using the platform.

Liaise
Liaise, which we’ve covered before, is a service that allows you to automatically extract meeting information, to-dos, events, and other key data from Emails with a minimal amount of effort on the user’s part. With its SharePoint integration, Liaise can feed this information into your SharePoint site so you don’t have to manually enter dates, commitments, and other information.

Loqu8
Loqu8 allows you to integrate immediate data lookup into your computing experience (it’s a bit like those integrated dictionary browser extensions). But it allows companies to build their own lexicons as reference, which makes it easier for employees to understand company-specific buzzwords and acronyms.  Using SharePoint, the service can pull in supporting data from databases, Excel spreadsheets, and other files.

Perhaps the main problem I have with Android is that the apps (aside from the excellent Google-built ones) are simply not as good as the apps on the iPhone. Nowhere is this more apparent then with Twitter apps, since there are so many for both platforms. On Android, Seesmic was clearly the best one, but it still paled in comparison to the top Twitter iPhone apps. But with an update today, it just got a lot closer.

The latest version brings a few new features, but none is bigger than multi-account support. Finally, if you have more than one Twitter account, you can set Seesmic to remember both, and easily switch between them. Perhaps more notably, you can also cross-post messages between different accounts at the same time. Even my favorite Twitter app, Tweetie for the iPhone, doesn’t allow you to do this. And if you’re worried that you’ll be bombarded by notifications, whatever account you set as your default one will be the one you just get notifications from, we’re told.

Another new feature allows Seesmic to remember where you were in your tweet stream when you exit or switch out of the app. That way, when you open it again, you can resume where you left off. Again, this is a feature that’s pretty standard on many Twitter iPhone app, but has been lacking on most of the Android ones.

Perhaps most impressive to me are two subtle changes though. The scroll speed of the tweet streams has been greatly increased and seems much more fluid. Also, Seesmic has added the ability to double-tap the top of the app to auto-scroll back to the top — again, another feature that’s pretty standard on iPhone Twitter apps.

Here are some other new features that have been added:

• Adding an Extra Large text size option
• Your profile information (avatar, number of following and followers,…) will now be updated automatically
• Changing your Twitter account password will now be handled by the application
• Composer now auto-corrects and auto-capitalize your words and sentences
• Notifications are now cleared when the application is accessed from Launcher
• Easily changing default account from the application’s Settings
• Can remove a Twitter account simply by pressing on it

Seesmic recently noted that it was a featured app alongside some Nexus One advertising by Google. Thanks to that, the app is closing in on 100,000 downloads founder Loic Le Meur says.

This update is scheduled to hit the Android Market any minute now. Watch more in the video below:

The Sirius XM application for BlackBerry is now available.

Originally posted here:
Sirius XM application now available for BlackBerry (no Howard Stern, but there’s Opie & Anthony and Ron & Fez)

File sharing and syncing service Dropbox is close to expanding its line of mobile products, which includes a mobile phone friendly website and an iPhone app, with custom apps for Android and Blackberry devices.

In an e-mail update sent out to its user base – over four million strong these days – the startup reminds people about the existence of its mobile website but ends the message with a couple of sentences that leave little to one’s imagination:

“Do you own a Blackberry or Android phone? Don’t worry! We’ve got plenty more mobile magic coming soon!”

Furthermore, in the latest post published on Dropbox’ company blog, engineer Will Stockwell notes his resolution for 2010 is “to release some crazy new features for the iPhone app” and to begin poking his head around “some other undisclosed projects.. coughANDROIDAPPcough”. The company seems pretty serious about its plans for servicing Google’s open mobile OS platform, as it’s also looking for an extra Android Developer according to its jobs page.

In case you’re not familiar with the service – unlikely given the fact that the startup has won a Crunchie for Best Internet Application at the most recent awards ceremony – Dropbox enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free (twice the storage Google offers), with add-on plans offering more storage and functionality for a fee.

Dropbox was founded by CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator soon after. The company went on to raise $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Amidzad Partners.

(Thanks to Erin Blaskie for the tip and the TwitPic image)

The check-in arms race continues to heat up. Foursquare has been working fast to secure its place on not only the iPhone, but also Android, Palm Pre, BlackBerry, and most recently, Windows Mobile. But rival Gowalla is working hard to get onto the other platforms as well. Recently, they launched a version that works on Android phones through the web browser — and a similar method is bringing it to BlackBerry phones as well.

While it’s not quite live yet, it will be “very soon,” founder Josh Williams tweeted today. He also noted that he’s currently using it, and it seems to work well. When it’s live, BlackBerry users will just have to direct their browser to m.gowalla.com.

The mobile web version that Android uses takes advantage of the HTML5 elements of WebKit built into Android’s browser, which includes the ability to access location information in certain smartphones. The BlackBerry implementation isn’t quite as seamless, and requires a newer model of the device, we’re told. For it to work, users have to turn on their location in the browser settings, apparently.

Gowalla has said that they’re working on a native application for all the major mobile platforms, but in the short term, this mobile web version makes sense. Perhaps third party developers can use their soon-to-be-released API to speed the process along.

Normally, it takes quite a bit of time before a startup gets any sort of mainstream spotlight. That’s not the case with Blippy.

Tonight, the controversial social credit card data aggregator was featured on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. As you might imagine, host Stephen Colbert ripped into the service’s ability to show everyday purchases at places such as Wendy’s.

Humor aside, this appearance is a huge win for Blippy, which recently raised its first round of funding, and is now signing deals with retailers.

Will Colbert Nation embrace Blippy? Sadly, YouTube is apparently smart enough to know that the Colbert Report is something they shouldn’t allow you to embed, so I’ll have to link to it — here.

Update: And YouTube has now completely removed the video. Wow, they’re good.