Talk about coincidence. Just earlier this week, in a post on Facebook and the possibility of buying web browsing company Opera and facial recognition company Face.com, we highlighted how a new version of Opera Mini would feature much stronger social integration — specifically aimed at the feature phone segment — both key points for Facebook. Today, Opera came good with a full release of that Opera Mini browser, Opera Mini 7 (but still has no official comment on those acquisition reports).
As expected, the new browser is aimed not at Apple and Android-based smartphones but more “basic” devices — specifically those built on Java ME, Nokia’s S60 and BlackBerry (yes, Opera categorizes RIM’s smartphone as basic). Opera is using the release to incorporate some new, key social features on a new Smart Page to increase the time spent by users on its own pages and in its browser. → Read More
Javascript Web app framework provider Sencha is today announcing the public beta launch of Sencha.io, its new HTML5 mobile cloud service. The service will allow Sencha app developers to build “shared experiences” in the browser, without having to write server code or manage hosting.
At launch, Sencha.io will provide a set of cloud services, including Sencha.io Data, Sencha.io Messages, Sencha.io Login and Sencha.io Development. Combined, the new services let developers use just a few lines of Javascript code to store data, send messages to users, listen for messages, deploy apps or login users via Facebook or Twitter. → Read More
Ever since I started contributing to the TechCrunch empire, my inbox has received a pretty steady stream of pitches for new (and not-so-new) products and services. Some of them merit a post, but the overwhelming majority of these emails are skimmed and then deleted. Sometimes, though, I’ll engage the sender in a discussion about the product or service they’re pitching, asking about details excluded from the pitch. A couple such discussions have taken place lately, and they’re sufficiently similar that they got me thinking about the bigger picture. → Read More
Small businesses often have trouble developing and maintaining traditional websites, so it should be no surprise that adding a mobile-friendly website is a cost that many SMBs simply won’t be able to justify. The folks behind the .mobi domain are trying to remedy that with their new GoMobi initiative. They’re rolling out a setup assistant and hosting deals with a few select registrar partners, allowing anyone to easily setup a mobile website. → Read More
Taptu, the company indexing mobile touch friendly content, announces today that they’re opening an office in the U.S. to drive business development, marketing and product management in response to rapid growth in the North American audience. The new office, to be located in Denver, Colorado will be lead by Mitch Lazar, formerly of Yahoo! Mobile Europe. → Read More
While the iPad may be too confusing for the British, that’s not stopping UK retailer Marks and Spencer from rolling out a mobile version of their website. I guess if you’re the kind of person who shops at Marks and Spencer this might be good news for you. And while m.marksandspencer.com is not a particularly mobile-friendly URL to key in, the site does helpfully explain upon your first visit how to make a home screen icon from Mobile Safari by pressing the + icon. → Read More
The proliferation of mobile content has caught Taptu (and a lot of other people) by surprise. Perhaps unsurprisingly the number of mobile applications has also increased rather dramatically. There’s an interesting balance to be struck for content producers between device-specific applications and app stores, and the general availability, but reduced functionality, of a mobile web site. Taptu’s latest report explores these details. → Read More
The iPad hasn’t landed in Japan yet, giving domestic competitors some room for their own announcements for tablet PCs. Sharp, for example, today unveiled [JP] the NetWalker PC-T1, which looks like a tablet variant of the PC-Z1 the company introduced last year. Both models look pretty similar, it’s just that the older device lost the keyboard to become the T1. → Read More
As smartphones like the iPhone and Android take over the mobile Web, the amount of data traffic going over cellular networks is expected to grow 40-fold over the next five years. UK firm Coda Research Consultancy forecasts that in the U.S. alone mobile handset data traffic will grow from 8 terabytes/month this year to 327 terabytes/month in 2015. That amounts to a 117 percent compound annual growth rate.
A lot of that data will come in the form of mobile Web browsing, with the biggest contributor expected to be mobile video. By 2015, mobile video will account for 68.5 percent of all mobile data usage in the U.S. (or 224 terabytes/month). Coda estimates that 95 million mobile handset subscribers in the U.S. will be watching video on their phones in five years out of a total of 158 million mobile internet users. → Read More
Taptu, the mobile search solution, has been keeping an eye on the mobile web — specifically what they’re calling the mobile touch web, which I guess is slightly different from the non-touch mobile web — and has produced a fairly comprehensive report of their findings. Of particular interest is the fact that “there are a higher proportion of shopping and services sites on the mobile touch Web (20%) compared to Apple’s App Store (3.6%).” According to Taptu, this is because “the mobile touch Web provides the opportunity for direct-to-consumer billing.” → Read More
For all of you waiting for mobile data networks to catch up to broadband speeds on cable and DSL, the first 4G/LTE network has arrived . . . in Sweden (and Norway too). The Scandinavians get everything first when it comes to mobile, except the iPhone. TeliaSonera launched the first two cities of its 4G network, which promises wireless download speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (yeah, right) using equipment from Ericsson and Huawei.
So if you live in Oslo or Stockholm, you get to try it out. Everyone else is out of luck. TeliaSonera says it will roll out the 4G service to 25 cities in Sweden and Norway in 2010. But you know how these things go. The full rollout may take longer because they are still trying to follow the instructions on how to put it together. They are pretty sure they are missing some bolts. → Read More
National Public Radio has the fourth most popular news app in the iTunes store in the U.S., but now it is taking some of that Appalicious goodness to the mobile browser. Today it launched a new version of its mobile website at http://m.npr.org/ which looks like a stripped down version of the iPhone app but doesn’t require a download.
The redesigned NPR mobile site shows top stories and lets you browse by programs or stations. When you click on the “Listen now” button it starts streaming a podcast via the Quicktime player on the iPhone. You can also add a program to your playlist. And if you want to listen to live radio, you can also search for stations by call letter, city or zip code and then it starts streaming that station. → Read More
Earlier this week, I was in Kunshan, China, to attend the 3G Industry Summit [CN], a four-day event that has attracted a few dozen speakers and an audience of over 200 people, making it one of the biggest of its kind in this country. The annual event is organized by the Kunshan government and Mobile 2.0 Forum, a communication platform with more than 1,500 members, almost single-handedly run by industry veteran Leo Wang.
The summit reassured me of one thing: The Chinese market for mobile hardware, software and contents is big already and it’s bound to become huge in the very near future.
Information and stats on China’s mobile web sector and profiles of 16 Chinese mobile startups after the jump. → Read More
Vodafone today launched Vodafone 360 (its replacement for Vodafone Live) which brings together mobile phone contacts, social networking accounts, email, IM, etc. so they can be accessed seamlessly on phone or PC. It currently covers Facebook, Live Messenger and Google Talk. Twitter will be added soon. Vodafone has also added a range of new apps, games, music and mapping services as part of the launch and a 360 shop where content and apps can be purchased. 360 will be downloadable to 100 different mobile phones in Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK as well as being pre-installed on a some new 360 handsets from Samsung to be launched by the end of the year. Finally, 360 will be available to non-Vodafone customers as long as they have a suitable phone. → Read More
I was out for my evening constitutional last night, enjoying the sight of “For Sale” signs on homes throughout my neighborhood, when I spied with my little eye something new and novel. I’ve seen URLs on For Sale signs a couple of times, and always thought that that was a fine way to attract eyeballs to your property. Let’s face it: trawling though MLS listings sucks, so going directly to a property’s URL is a time saver! What I saw last night, though, was even better: a URL specifically geared for mobile phones. “Mobile users, go to prtmobile.com/1908″. → Read More
The mobile content service which Yahoo previewed at Mobile World Congress in February launched today across eight countries, available both as an iPhone app and a mobile content site optimised for 300 devices ‘with HTML-enabled mobile browsers’. Yahoo Mobile, available at http://new.m.yahoo.com or from the App Store, combines what you’d expect from Yahoo’s services — search, news, social networks and email — with other web content which users can select to personalise their experience. The ordering of that list of services, taken from the official press release, is a clear indication of Yahoo’s priorities. The service and app launched in the UK, Germany, France, the US, Canada, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, with additional localised versions expected to launch over the next several months. Yahoo says the launch, which comes a scant eight months after Google launched its iPhone app in the UK, is all about continuing the company’s mobile leadership and capitalising on its market potential, which it plans to do through rich media display advertising that will encourage user engagement, so for example, allowing users to send ads to a friend or click to call the advertiser directly. So far the app’s received a lukewarm response on the App Store, garnering a mere 1.5 star rating (though of course, only six people have rated so far) and complaints about the speed of the app over GPRS and loads of ‘page not available’ error messages. → Read More
Here’s something from the department of Quelle Surprise: Bango (AIM: BGO) reckons the iPhone lags behind the top 20 mobile handsets most used in browsing and buying on the mobile web. The Bango Top 20 handset list, based on Bango’s February statistics, puts the Nokia 3110c on top, followed by the Samsung M800 in 2nd and the Nokia 6300 in 3rd place. On the whole, smartphones account for 30% of handsets in the top 20. Bango detected a total of 1,811 different types of handsets accessing the mobile web in just one month. The iPhone appears as 24th on the list, leading Bango to conclude that brands trying to reach the mass market on the mobile web need to look beyond that rarefied group of iPhone users whose buying is restricted to the Apple App Store. The company’s stats are based on its own metrics from Bango Analytics, monitoring the activities of major brands and businesses as their consumers browse to mobile websites, and the number of sales of mobile content and services handled by Bango Payment. While it’s not a comprehensive or comparative study, the stats and Bango CEO Raymond Anderson’s blog analysis will still make interesting reading for businesses that monetize their mobile content and services across a wide demographic. Anderson’s point that companies that haven’t optimised their sites for mobile browsing or transactions are missing out is on the money, but this situation is not likely to remain constant. Come June, when new iPhones are launched, it’s likely to be at different pricepoints more suitable for the mass market. CrunchBase Information Bango Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Google may be the leader in the worldwide search engine market, but in Nippon, it has some catching up to do: In 2007, Yahoo Japan saw a whopping 76% of the nearly 350 billion search engine and portal-related pageviews registered in the country, clearly outperforming Google (second with 5.4%, according to Nielsen Japan). More recently, ComScore shows that in July, Yahoo Japan had ten times as many monthly pageviews (21.9 billion versus 2.2 billion for Google) and nearly twice as many monthly unique Japanese visitors (46 million versus 26 million).
The Japanese web market is just too big to be shrugged off: The country boasts one of the highest Internet penetrations worldwide (74%, compared to 70% in the USA), a $5.7 billion online advertising market (out if one estimated to be worth $45 billion globally) and is ranked No. 3 in terms of total web population (94 million, about as many as Germany and the UK combined).
So how does Google challenge Yahoo’s position as the hub of the Japanese Internet? → Read More
Disney embarked on a cellular phone business in the US as early as June 2006 but pulled the plug at the end of last year, citing delays in the spread of 3G networks as the major reason. In March this year, Disney carried out another attempt, but this time in Japan, where the brand has been super-popular for decades now. Disney Japan teamed up with local telecom conglomerate SoftBank to become the country’s first mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) offering both voice and data services. In Japan, Disney strategically about-faced by pursuing an OEM-like strategy: They leave back-end operations (distribution, price planning, sales, billing, etc.) to their partner and focus on bringing content, design know-how and brand value into the partnership. Japanese customers can sign up for Disney Mobile at over 2,000 SoftBank stores and buy jointly designed handsets featuring various Disney characters. Subscribers are able to download Disney cartoons, games or ringtones, jump to exclusive Disney web sites by pressing a dedicated button on their phones and use @disney.ne.jp as their mobile mail address. Another accommodation to local peculiarities: The main target customers in Japan aren’t kids but women in their 20s and 30s. So far, the change in strategy seems to have worked out well. For example, Disney Mobile just recently reached agreements with mobile giants Mobage-town and Mixi Mobile (the cell phone version of Japan’s biggest social network), which now feature Disney characters on their sites. → Read More
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