The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘smartphone’

Acer recently announced its growing presence in the Android realm and Rogers was quick to snap up the manufacturer’s latest device – the Liquid e . If you can get past the drug-related name, the handset doesn’t seem to sound so bad on paper

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Acer Liquid e comes to North America by way of Rogers Wireless

Sometimes I’m assigned stories and I’m like, “Really? If you insist, boss.” This is one of those stories.

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Walking and jumping and generating energy, oh my

Unlike most other smartphone platforms, Windows Mobile doesn’t come with a mapping application pre-installed by default. While this may very well change with the soon-to-be-announced Windows Mobile 7, it has thus far been up to the handset manufacturer to throw in a map app if they so choose.

Later this week, messaging/location technology providers TCS will announce that Sony Ericsson has chosen their turn-by-turn application, Gokivo, to be pre-loaded onto future Sony Ericsson-made Windows Mobile handsets.

The first Sony Ericsson handset to come with Gokivo out of the box will be the Aspen, which was just announced last week.

This is pretty big news for TCS; they just acquired the company behind Gokivo, Networks In Motion, back in December, and this is the first time any manufacturer has chosen to pre-install the app at the factory.

The flagship features, according to TCS:

• Local Search
• Traffic and Weather
• Location Sharing

While it’s great news for TCS, I have to wonder: with Nokia and Google’s recent moves toward making turn-by-turn navigation a standard feature on S60 and Android, how much longer will smartphone consumers be willing to cough up a subscription fee?

Here’s a good virtual parlor game. Pick any two or three Twitter users, and Twiangulate which friends or followers they have in common. Twiangulate is a site that shows the overlap between your social graph and any tow other people on Twitter. It shows the resulting names as a list or an interactive social map.

For instance, if you click on the image at right, you will see an enlarged version of a map I made to see who I follow in common with @fredwilson and @anildash. Fred Wilson follows 463 people, Anil follows 573, and I follow 315. Yet according to Twiangulate, we have 81 common “friends,” which perhaps says something about how insular the world of Web startups and social media can be. In contrast, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and I only have 15 common “friends.”

So who are some of the people Fred, Anil, and I all listen to on Twitter? Some of the common people we follow include Josh Kopelman, Chris Dixon, John Borthwick, Dennis Crowley, Doc Searls, Steve Case, Joshua Schachter, Danny Sullivan, Bradley Horowitz, Michael Arrington, and Jeff Jarvis.

Are we listening to the right people or do we suffer from groupthink? Who do you overlap with the most on Twitter?

ST-Ericsson, a 50/50 joint venture by STMicroelectronics and Ericsson, this morning announced its latest HSDPA platform built on the Linux OS. Dubbed U6715, the platform aims to aid handset manufacturers produce smartphones powered by Android – or other Linux-based operating systems – with a wholesale price of less than €100 ($138).

ST-Ericsson says it anticipates manufacturers to launch the first commercial products based on its U6715 chip platform in the first half of 2010.

The company claims the platform can support all the essentials of the smartphone experience, including navigation, web browsing, video streaming, email, WiFi, a five megapixel camera, a touch screen and more. A multimedia engine integrated into the hardware architecture of the U6715 frees most of the platform’s microprocessor subsystem to run applications.

At the same time, ST-Ericsson says the U6715 platform allows manufacturers to significantly drive down the cost of device production and thus make highly capable smartphones less of a niche play and more of a mass-market product.

The U6715 platform comes with an HSPA modem capable of delivering downlink speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps, and the company also boasts about its power efficiency. Equipped with a 1000mA battery, smartphones based on the platform are said to be capable of playing music for up to 40 hours and provide a talk time of up to 7 hours on a 3G network on a single battery charge.

More details are available in this document (PDF).

Some people are suggesting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have just created a Facebook profile for himself, after signing up for Twitter in early December 2009 and right on the heels of Microsoft founder Bill Gates setting up an account on the wildly popular social networking service.

Evidently, we can’t be 100% sure that this is his real account at this point – unlike Twitter, there’s no ‘verified account’ stamp for Facebook profiles and the man has yet to confirm our friendship (I forgive him, since it’s the middle of the night in the United States).

The information that is viewable is mostly restricted to his Facebook friends, as it shows only a profile picture, his sex (Male!), a website (Google.com!) and his location (Mountain View, CA!).

Nevertheless, my esteemed colleague MG Siegler says the mutual friends they have on the social network are all Googlers, so it is likely Schmidt (unless of course the Google employees were tricked into befriending a faker).

Update: further proof that it is him – the person who created the profile linked the email address EricSchmidt1@yahoo.com to the account, and that happens to be Schmidt’s personal email address too. (thanks, Stephen!)

One thing is for sure: unlike on Twitter, Schmidt did not obtain a nice vanity URL for himself (facebook.com/ericschmidt has already been taken by someone else) and his profile picture paints a picture of a soft-spoken man in casual clothing rather than that of a bad-ass.

So do you think this is legit or not? And more importantly, are you going to try and befriend him so you can poke him all day?

(Thanks to @RomilPatel for the tip)

In less than six months, online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has seated an additional one million diners via its mobile apps. In late October, OpenTable had reached the milestone of seating one million diners via its mobile offerings, a year after its iPhone app launched. It took only four and a half months to seat another million diners. Additionally, the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable claims that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $100 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

The company also reported strong earnings this afternoon, with Q4 2009 revenue coming in at $19.2 million, representing a a 32% increase over Q4 2008 revenue, which was $14.5 million. OpenTable’s total revenues for 2009 were $68.6 million, up 23% over 2008 revenues of $55.8 million. In 2009, OpenTable increased its number of participating restaurants in North America by 17%, with a total of 10,850 partners by the end of 2009. The number of international partners also increased, rising by 44% to 1501 participating establishments. Total number of diners in North American were 11.8 million, a 39% increase from Q4 2008.

Last year, OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

Motricity, a Washington-based company that develops a software platform for mobile phones, has filed for an IPO of up to $250 million.

Motricity’s core product is the ‘mCore Platform’, which offers a mobile search engine, storefront, and channels that allow carriers to deliver content to their customers. The company often acts as “the brand behind the brand” as it builds mobile software. Motricity’s carrier clients include AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Virgin Mobile. Enterprise clients include TBS, Showtime, Vogue, and Yahoo.

The company generated $88M in revenue in the first 9 months of 2009, but has not reached profitability. On its S-1 filed today, the company says its growth strategies include:

• Focus our efforts on expanding the breadth of our solutions with industry leading participants, leveraging our strong relationships with the top five wireless carriers in the U.S.;
• Expand our business into developed and emerging international markets, such as those in Southeast Asia, India and Latin America, by applying our expertise gained from the U.S. market and fully leveraging the capabilities and scale of the mCore platform;
• Advance our technological leadership through the enhancement of the mCore platform, and the introduction of new solutions that increase the total value we provide to our carrier and enterprise customers;
• Leverage our core competencies, technologies, and existing market position to broaden our offerings and customer base and advance into new market segments;
• Gain additional scale and technology through opportunistic acquisitions that expand our total market opportunity, provide complementary technologies and solutions, and aid our international expansion efforts; and
• Enhance our smartphone solutions to fully capitalize on the extensive capabilities of these devices and their significant market adoption.

Appolicious, a comprehensive iPhone and Android app directory with a social twist, has launched a compelling new feature today: the ability for users to create curated lists of iPhone apps and Android apps. The new feature, which is similar in some ways to Twitter’s list functionality, allows anyone to create lists of their favorite apps by category and lists are limited to five apps. Appolicious has also launched an iPhone App Developer Directory that aims to connect businesses with app developers.

Appolicious, which just raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app, tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store and the 16,000 apps on the Android Market, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more. Via its technology, the application will scan your iTunes directory for your downloaded app and will integrate them into your Appolicious library. It’s similar in some ways to oneforty, an app directory for Twitter. The ability to create lists is a sure to be popular amongst users of the platform and could be a useful resource for consumers looking to get both user and expert opinions on apps in certain categories. Curators of lists can list apps, the reason and rationale behind their choice, any related links or tweets, and why they’re qualified to make that selection.

Founded in May of this year by former Yahoo VP, Alan Warms, Appolicious is hoping to expand its platform to include Android, Blackberry and other smartphone apps. Warms is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Buzztracker to Yahoo in 2007. Warms is enthusiastic about the new iPhone app business directory, which he hopes will become a defacto resource for businesses, brands, retailers and developers. The directory will launch with several thousand profiles of various app developers.

The startup faces competition from Appsfire, 16 Apps, mPlayit, and others.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

In the end, Google and Android will own the smartphone market. It won’t happen this year and it may not even happen in 2012 but the day is coming when the de facto standard for smartphones.

Multiple manufacturers have reported that Android phones are on the way including up to five from Motorola this quarter and a number from Samsung this year. Google also has a number of handsets in for testing and should be rolling them out after the Nexus One.