Recently a few readers and friends have asked about the google maps feature on mobile phones called find me (aka blue dot). This is a feature from google maps for mobile phones which shows your approximiate location on a web enabled mobile phone. GPS is not required. People love it! See this official google page for details on how it works, including a video.
The question was: how does google know my location in Pakistan? There are 2 pieces of local information needed: the tower location data and other is the map data. There are companies which sell such kind of data so expect this feature to be available at more and more places. Rest of the algorithm uses the signal information and the application is able to locate you within a certain degree of accuracy, therefore the term blue dot.
So go ahead, use your web-enabled phone and download google maps in case you don’t have it. And if you use this feature often please share where and how or better yet, send us pictures.
Recently I stumbled upon Mobile Marketing Association website. I found the information there to be quite useful. One of the report on their site was about consumer guideline and best practices for marketing to consumers. The context is US market but the principles mentioned in the report are applicable anywhere. I hope that the designers and implementers of mobile marketing programs in Pakistan and Asia pay attention to these. Otherwise mobile advertising may be looked upon as another form of annoyance.
A number of competing services are available for providing information and answers to questions on a mobile phone (Telenor Ask in Pakistan, Google’s sms and voice, Microsoft TellMe). ChaCha enters this crowded market with a free, human powered offering. I wonder if the premium service from Telenor Ask is a hit with users in Pakistan?
ChaCha is avaialble in US via SMS (242242) and Voice (800-2chacha). An excerpt from Mossberg’s review:
The service works by routing your questions to one of 10,000 hired “guides” — students, stay-at-home parents, retirees and others — who look up the questions on the Web and reply. They get paid 20 cents per answer.
Naturally, these guides vary as to their speed and accuracy. If you don’t like the answers they give you, or you want related information, you can call back or reply to the text message with a follow-up question. For instance, after learning which pitcher had won for Boston, I asked who lost the game for New York. I was quickly informed it was Phil Hughes.
Overall, I liked ChaCha. In most cases, I received fast, accurate, useful answers. But it has two weaknesses. One is that the low-paid, part-time guides can provide inconsistent service. When I asked for the best Mexican restaurant in D.C., for example, ChaCha came up with a choice that few locals would cite.
The other is that, unlike many other cellphone information services, ChaCha doesn’t automatically know your location. So, unless you include a location in your query, it’s clueless about questions such as “Where’s the nearest drugstore?”
Here is a very interesting post about mobile video from Brough Turner, whose blog I close follow. Brough makes a very good point that mobile video on demand is what makes sense for most cases - not live TV. It also provides one more reason why mobile TV offering from Telenor did not take off (in addition to the fact that it was pricey).
I have an article, Going Mobile TV(pdf), that’s recently been published by MobileIN, a wireless and mobile information site. In it I basically argue that major investments in mobile TV broadcast capability are less likely to pay off than investments mobile video-on-demand.
The biggest trend in commercial television viewing is personal video recorders like TiVo. People want to watch TV content when they want, not when broadcasters schedule it. The only exception is major sports events (the Superbowl or World Cup matches). Even the evening news is frequently rescheduled for later in the evening.
The second relevant trend is growth in YouTube and similar web-based video content. Broadcast TV went from 2-3 channels in the 1950s to hundreds of channels on a typical cable system today. But consumers are also interested in the long tail of millions of videos that can only be served over the Internet today and, potentially, over the mobile Internet in the future.
Finally, survey’s of early adopters of mobile video show music videos, movie trailers, weather, sports action clips, comedy videos, cartoons and amateur video shorts – typically a few minutes long at most – are the most popular content. In addition, it appears 85 percent of mobile video viewers watched viral videos (content sent or pointed out by others) rather than content they found themselves.
All and all, mobile consumers are looking for video -on-demand, not pre-scheduled broadcast TV.
So what’s the logic for massive investments in spectrum, followed by even more money in new wireless infrastructure, followed by the need to sell everyone new handsets that can receive the new broadcast mobile TV channels?
CTIA Wireless 2008 is one of the largest wireless events in the US. Among its various programs is the Emerging Technology Awards which claims to highlight the most innovative products and applications representing all facets of the mobile lifestyle in wireless”. It is a good place to see some promising gadgets, applications and products.
Take a look at this report. Do you think these were truly worthy of awards?
Consumer Applications - Messaging (SMS/MMS)/Mobile Marketing
1st place - Cellfire 3.0
2nd place - Reply with Jott for BlackBerry
3rd place - SnapNow Mobile Visual Search
Consumer Applications - Mobile Entertainment/Social Networking
1st place - Ontela’s PicDeckâ„¢
2nd place - WidSets
3rd place - Yahoo! Go 3.0
Mobile Widgets - Consumer
1st place - Zumobi
2nd place - Fusion Voicemail Plus by PhoneFusion
3rd place - JACKED Mobile SportsTop
Here’s a peek at some of the interesting upcoming mobile phone technologies. These include next generation voice-recognition which allows you real hands-free control of phone, 3D maps, sending streaming video to cell phones, games (mobile second life), digital storage of documents for mobiles, surveillance, social applications which allow you to locate buddies using GPS and location-aware apps which provide personalized suggestions about attractions like restaurants as you’re walking around the neighborhood.
This post coincides with one of the biggest wireless event: CTIA, which opens today. Many of new mobile and wireless technologies are announced there. I’ll cover that soon.
Video courtesy of Wall Street Journal. Let me know if you are interested in the full article.
Here’s another sign that ICT industry in Pakistan is maturing. The first Mobile Commerce conference is being held in Karachi on April 2 2008. The event has a star-studded guest list which includes PTA Chief, mobile companies Mobilink, Warid and Telenor (CEOs will attend), mobile commerce companies such as Amaana, Inov8, senior management from banks (both commercial and State Bank) and a few foreign company executives. Full details are available in this pdf brochure. You can also take a quick look at the image to see participating companies.
The sessions are well planned and include topics such as environment for mobile commerce, role of telcos, micro-finance, security and risk management, new trends and challenges. I expect it to be a very interesting and useful event.
I am looking for feedback about this conference and would appreciate if anyone can share observations and thoughts.
It is inevitable that more and more kids (say ages 8-16) will own a mobile phone. The very qualities which make a mobile phone very useful (personal, connected and media capable) can also make it a cause for concern for parents. How can parents know if their kids are using the phones appropriately? Previously we have talked about some issues but there’s a lot more to discuss about the generation gap, content which ends up on the phone (whether it is live content or from removable media) and the vulnerabilities to which kids can be exposed to.
Results of a recent AT&T survey revealed that 84 percent of consumers believe parental controls and safety tools are extremely or very important in keeping children safe while they use today’s entertainment and communications technologies. Nearly one-third (31 percent) of those adults do not feel that they have adequate knowledge of how to use those tools to protect children from today’s threats.
There was a recent article in New York Times about the generation gap caused by mobile phones in US. It quotes a social psychologist Sherry Turkle (a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied the social impact of mobile communications) saying that these trends are likely to continue as cellphones morph into mini hand-held computers, social networking devices and pint-size movie screens. The point made by the story is that parents need to learn about how kids are using new technology. Obviously the situation varies from culture to culture but the trend is the same.
There have been attempts by a few companies to design services which allow parents control over how their kids use mobile phones and services. But there’s only so much that a parent can control and the personal nature of mobile phone makes it very difficult to monitor its usage. As many would argue, it is a social matter which should not be tried to solve using technology. However there is still a case to be made for putting controls over how the phone is used if you are the one paying the bill.
The NYT article adds: Marketers and cellphone makers are only too happy to fill the newest generation gap. Last fall, Firefly Mobile introduced the glowPhone for the preschool set; it has a small keypad with two speed-dial buttons depicting an image of a mother and a father.
Towards this AT&T has Smart Limits which allows parents to set account thresholds and to filter out content. See a flash demo here and keep in mind that it is not a complete solution by any means. Hit the link below to see details about this from AT&T website:
Osama Hashmi at Green & White on the relationship of startups and Telcos. Telcos are always looking for interesting value-added services to drive up their ARPU and will partner with anyone who can offer such mobile apps. Of course telcos are also known for their control obsession over content & partners.
This is part of a conversation that started in a Startup Insiders session - should a young fledgling firm with a good idea think about building products around the mobile telecom space?
If you have a nice brilliant consumer-focused idea today, you’ll also have a number of options available to implement it. You could realize your idea as a web-2.0 implementation, as a widget, as a facebook / open-social application, as a web-M solution (mobile-focus website), as a handset-only application, or as a specialized value-added service built and offered in close partnership with a telecom operator.
The question is - where and why would you want to work with a telco, when some of the other options (particularly facebook) can offer a much higher potential audience-base and much lower total development costs.
The answer, according to Adnan, lies not in what telecos in general are doing with service vendors, but in what they could do in terms of pricing of the service.
Mobile technology blogs have been reporting about the upcoming version 6.1 of Windows Mobile, likely to be unveiled at CTIA conference next week. In true Microsoft fashion, windows mobile has evolved from a flaky OS with frequent crashes and poor user interface to a more widely accepted OS. Microsoft is working hard to improve the interface and features of windows mobile. iPhone is one of the reasons that windows mobile makeover got accelerated.
I see more and more prototypes being developed on Windows Mobile perhaps because integration with development tools such as visual studio makes it easy to work with. As and end user however, the more important are features and usability.
To that point voice recognition technology from Microsoft has finally improved to a point where its actually usable. I recently tested msn voice search and the performance was reasonable. This remains a hot area for research, obviously. As an example of technology convergence, Microsoft has launched voice-activated SYNC technology for cars which allows you to play a song from your mp3 player collection by saying the name of song and singer. You can also make hands-free calls (no big deal by itself).
As far as Windows Mobile 7.0 goes, there are no leaked screen shots as of yet, but big changes are afoot. Microsoft plans to completely redo applications such as Internet Explorer, bringing the mobile browser up to par with Apple’s Mobile Safari. The e-mail and SMS applications are also scheduled for complete rewrites. Microsoft plans to make the user interface even more consumer-friendly.
Technology often impacts society in many ways. Some times new technologies such as mobile phones come with unintended consequences. Regardless of whether you like that or not, you need to understand and deal with the change. Ignorance and avoidance is not an option.
Take Bluetooth as one example. The anonymous messaging capabilities using Bluetooth has created a new form of interaction between boys and girls in conservative Middle East. See this story from Marketplace.org’s special report from Middle East. I assume this is valid for Pakistan to some degree as well.
This is a topic with many aspects and view points will vary. However the fact remains that the youth of today have grown up with a whole new set of gadgets. The new modes of communication are part of their lifestyle. There will be applications to capture their attention, advertising to entice them. At the same time rest of the society has to adapt to this change and provide guidance to youth. The parental controls of the past will no longer work.
Jehan Ara wrote an interesting post about her successful but stressful struggle to activate her personal iPhone and then taking it to Telenor to realize that “Telenor Smart Mail did not support the iPhone”. That led me to the question which I pose to all of iPhone fans in Pakistan: which mobile company is best for iPhone users in Pakistan?
Till recently iPhone did not support the corporate email but here’s a video which shows that Apple has aggressively addressed this shortcoming and also added some other missing but highly in-demand features such as calendar, address books. Watch the game demo too. And hey, there’s the $100 million dollar fund to create some more cool apps. BlackBerry - watch out!
CTIA Wireless 2008 is one of the largest wireless events in the US. Among its various programs is the 
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