State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Windows Mobile’s share of the global smart-phone operating-system market fell to 7.9% in the third quarter from 11.1% a year earlier, research firm Gartner estimates. Also losing ground was Nokia’s Symbian. In contrast, both Apple and BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion boosted their shares, while Android grabbed 3.5% from zero a year earlier. That will likely increase given the popularity of Motorola’s new Droid phone.

Here’s an interesting illustration of how Apple and Google are competing.

Illustration via WSJ.

Google officially released the next version of Android this week, bringing what appears to be some solid evolution to the mobile platform.

New features for Android 2.0 include useful-looking improvements to the way contacts can be accessed. Developers can play with the platform now, but the first device expected to have it is the Motorola Droid, which is slated for release in November.

Via Technology Review

Cross post from Basit Ali’s blog

Two more simple but useful add-ons to google maps + latitude are available now. Google latitude allows its users to share their current location from their mobile devices with his/her friends. So far, it was only possible to share your location with other latitude users. Latitude has gone beyond that point now.

Recently, Google has launched two add-ons to latitude service that allow users to:

1. Share their current location on their google talk (Google Talk Location Status (beta))
2. Share their current location with the whole world in form of an embeddable tag that users can use on blogs, discussion groups or put on their websites etc.(Google Public Location Badge)

Google Talk Location Status (Beta)

The simple tool changes your Google talk status to your current location. For that you have to:

1. Install and run Google Maps and Latitude on your mobile.
2. Login using your google account on latitude on your mobile
3. Go to the add-in’s site.
4. Enable sharing

That’s it, you are done.
Following video shows you exactly how to do that…

Google Public Location Badge

An interesting news from NetworkWorld.

SAN FRANCISCO – The Internet engineering community says its biggest mistake in developing IPv6 – a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol – is that it lacks backwards compatibility with the existing Internet Protocol, known as IPv4.

At a panel discussion held here Tuesday, leaders of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) admitted that they didn’t do a good enough job making sure native IPv6 devices and networks would be able to communicate with their IPv4-only counterparts when they designed the industry standard 13 years ago.

“The lack of real backwards compatibility for IPv4 was the single critical failure,” says Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society. “There were reasons at the time for doing that…But the reality is that nobody wants to go to IPv6 unless they think they’re friends are doing it, too.”

Originally, IPv6 developers envisioned a scenario where end-user devices and network backbones would operate IPv4 and IPv6 side-by-side in what’s called dual-stack mode.

However, they didn’t take into account that some IPv4 devices would never be upgraded to IPv6, and that some all-IPv6 networks would need to communicate with IPv4-only devices or content.

Read more »

Business Week has a story about the new mobile net and the wave of privacy invasion about to happen. Part of it starts from Facebook going on smart phones and the popularity of location based services will make it worse. Even though many users may not know or care, a lot of information is being collected about you and your behavior. Excerpts from the story below. I think that very soon there will be a backlash against all this invasion of privacy and lawsuits will erupt.

Imagine that your business had a complete log of your customers’ wanderings—every trip to the grocery store, every work commute, every walk with the dog. What could you learn about them? Armed with that knowledge, what sorts of goods and services might you try to sell them? Just as important, if you made your best pitch—relevant and timely, of course—would customers concerned about privacy tell you to get lost? This isn’t science fiction. A nascent industry extending from the laboratories of Google (GOOG) and Nokia (NOK) to a host of data-fueled startups is wrestling with these very questions.

The privacy implications are considerable. Is it O.K. for a boss to hand an employee a Latitude-loaded BlackBerry and then monitor her whereabouts? Companies that operate fleets of trucks have tracked employees for years. But similar technology in cell phones would potentially let all sorts of companies monitor and measure employee movements. Latitude does offer cloaking options. A user can hide from certain people or ask to be located by city, not by street.

Resistance to mobile ads is showing signs of breaking down, at least in some quarters. When surveys ask users if they’re interested in receiving the ads, nearly everyone says no, says Greg Sterling, a senior analyst at Opus Research. But when asked recently whether they would welcome messages only from local businesses they select, 43% say they’d be “very or somewhat interested.” That number, says Sterling, is higher among the data hounds who use the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other high-end phones.

Locale is a location based application which runs on Google’s Android OS. Its specialty is to change the phone’s (sound and other) settings based on your location. It runs in the background and ‘learns’ as you move around and change the phone settings. Locale was one of top 10 winner of Google’s mobile application competition. More about how Locale was created is at Technology Review. Locale can help those of us who forget to turn the ringer off in the Mosque.

For example, a phone might be set to change its ring to vibrate at the office but play a pop song when the user is at a favorite hangout. Not only does Locale control a phone’s standard settings, but it can be extended to govern settings for other third-party applications as well.

Google Latitude is a new feature in Google Maps mobile application to track people you know and to share your location information with them. It works on Google’s G1, most BlackBerrys, most Windows Mobile devices and some other smart phones. Google says it will soon work on the iPhone and Sony Ericsson phones. It is opt-in-only feature, so you have to sign up for it. A few major features:

• comes with privacy settings
• users can adjust the level of geographic information they’re willing to share with each person
• users can update their status on the map, can send text messages or call friends directly from this list
• users can opt to allow their location to automatically update every several minutes while they’re moving

This is not the first one but I think based on Google maps popularity, it is a big one. There are many location-based apps (like Loopt.com and Where.com) already which have the functionality to track people on a variety of mobile devices ranging from basic cellphones to iPhones. These apps get location information from three major sources: GPS satellites, Wi-Fi or cellular towers. Once these apps help you to find your favorite person they allow (or rather encourage) you to find nearby attractions, local information or social networks.

More from an article in WSJ (image also courtsey of WSJ):

Along with their locations, friends can share other information on Latitude by updating a status line or changing their picture, which appears as a tiny representative icon on a map. Changes to one’s status or picture will be reflected in Google Talk, Google’s instant-messaging tool, but this doesn’t integrate with other status-related social-networking programs like Facebook or Twitter, and thus may saddle people with another status entry to update.

It’s easy to find fault in Latitude since it often spots people inaccurately, including showing my sister in Boston’s Charles River, rather than in a neighborhood along the river. It’s worth noting that tracking technology in general, including GPS, can be inaccurate. But even with these inaccuracies, my friends and I liked finding one another on our respective maps and used this geographic information to send location-specific messages to each other: I joked with my boyfriend about not leaving his house on time for a dinner and commended my sister on getting up early for church on Sunday.

Usability issues aside, location-based services like Latitude can be just plain creepy, especially when a Big Brother like Google is tracking your whereabouts. So Google incorporated easy-to-change privacy settings so that locations can be automatically detected, manually entered or completely hidden from other people. Or people can sign out of Latitude altogether.

Location-based services like Latitude are great for keeping tabs on friends and could even come in handy in other situations — such as when parents want to know where their kids are or when elderly relatives want to let someone always know their whereabouts. But I wouldn’t want to depend on them in an emergency.

Google’s Zeitgeist was the site which had information about the search patterns, trends for Pakistan and other countries. I was always amused by the search terms and the variation of those over time. Now I hear that Zeitgeist is being replaced by other related products by Google, listed below.  It will be more interesting to see what people search from their phone and what search engines are used there. Yahoo and Google are likely to be the major search engines on mobile phones.

• Google Insights: http://www.google.com/insights/search/
• Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends
• Google Trends for Websites: http://trends.google.com/websites

Here is the last set of queries published by Google Zeitgeist, in summer of 2008. By now these terms must have been replaced with more current topics but still some of these are quite amusing, even hilarious. The one thing that has not changed: Katrina Kaif remains on the list of most popular searches in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Top Google Queries in Pakistan In June 2008

1. free chat
2. wedding rings
3. pretty girls
4. HBO
5. Maria Kanellis
6. Bank Alhabib
7. swimming pool
8. Pakistani
9. 123 greetings
10. earthquake
11. Samsung Pakistan
12. human anatomy
13. Urdu
14. Mozila Firefox
15. deer

Here’s another post by Tee Emm on this topic. Thanks to Badar Khusnood for sharing updated information.