Mobile Strategist Rudy De Waele (mTrends) held a presentation on Mobile 2.0 last week at the Plugg Conference in Brussels. If you were - just like me - not able to attend read the slides. They are worth a read and give a great intro to Mobile 2.0.
Archive for March, 2008
Did you ever wonder what is going on in the mobile startup scene in Germany?
I crawled through the German web and - besides noticing and wondering how many new mom&dad, sport and pet communities we have - collected a decent list of mobile startups.
If you know a company that is missing please add it in the comments. I will keep an eye on any new startups and follow up on this in the future.
| Mobile Content | |
|---|---|
| dailyme.tv | Application to automatically grab videos to your phone. Nokia only so far. |
| hiogi | Text any question when you are on the go to a short code number and the community will reply with an answer. |
| itsmy | Mobile content community. Site looks like Jamba TV ads. |
| ViiF | Stream yourself with video telephony function of your phone and view videos. See the detailed report. |
| yasssu | Reformat content to mobile. For media companies. |
| Mobile Gaming | |
|---|---|
| ewave | Provider of mobile multiplayer games. |
| Mobile Services | |
|---|---|
| Beem it up Scotty | Send any file over the web to your mobile device. |
| cellity | Application for your phone to make cheap phone calls |
| indyphone | Create wallpapers for your mobile phone. |
| Mobile Social Networks | |
|---|---|
| aka-aki | Creative and promising startup. Uses Bluetooth technology to connect with people around you. |
| KWICK! | German social network with new large mobile website. |
| Plazes | Create activities to let your friends know what you are doing where. See recent coverage. |
| peperonity | Mobile community. Did they do this retro-design on purpose? |
| plexme | Connect with people in your region. SMS-based. |
| qeep | Nice design. Cheap messages to other devices. |
| Qiro | Promising application for your phone. Similar to loopt. |
| Rock-It-Mobile | Create your own groups and chat with SMS. |
| scaanoo | Mobile messenger community. Do they think the design of the logo brings success? |
| TownKings | Explore your city. |
| Townster | See above. |
| Youni-mobile | Community and virtual network operator. |
| Microblogging | |
|---|---|
| 1you | Seems like Twitter for dating. Did the designers actually look at the rendered page? |
| baluu | Basis microblogging. Only a few posts a day on the system. |
| brabblr | Broadcasts messages to various microblogging platforms (Twitter, Jaiku, tumblr, …) |
| dasbeep | Another Twitter-clone |
| dukudu | Good looking clone. Not much going on anymore. |
| Frazr | Most active German microblogging service. |
| niimo | Former texteln.de. Quite active. |
| Slogr | *Yawn* |
| Wamadu | Number for each mobile operator so most folks can use their included messages. |
| Was geht bei dir? | *Yawn* again… |
| Mobile Tagging | |
|---|---|
| BeeTag | Mobile Tagging system (Switzerland) |
| KAYWA | Provides mobile blogs and QR reader + other services. (Switzerland) |
| kooaba | Make a picture of the real-world object and easily get further information. (Switzerland) |
| TagYourCity | Post stickers with encoded information in your city. (Austria) |
A new version of WordPress is frequently released to plug holes and to fix bugs. Due to security considerations most web applications cannot update themselves as easily as desktop applications can. I was afraid this means I have to go download each new version and move all custom files such as themes, plugins and configuration options.
Fortunately there is an easier solution! If you are having command line access to your web server and a Subversion client installed you can just checkout the latest version of WordPress from the Automattic repository in seconds. Subversion knowledge helps but is not necessarily required. Detailed instructions can be found in the Wordpress Documentation.
The leap to a new updated WordPress is shorter now and I don’t mind if new versions are released weekly!
T9 - Text on 9 Keys - our friend that makes entering text into phones less painful by predicting words you want to write still has many issues. The folks at MobHappy just resent T9 in a recent post for not having a proper dictionary of common words that are used in spoken language.
I am having a different problem. T9 provides multi language support but it seems that nobody has thought about users that communicate in more than one language.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.
To me it seems to be clear - sorry guys - that Nuance, the company that is licensing T9 to the mobile device makers such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG and others must be an American company because it doesn’t appear as if they have thought about such problems at all.
The so-called predictive text cannot even predict the language I want to write in. In 9 out of 10 times I reply to an SMS that has been sent to me or I select the recipient first, and afterwards that I want to send a text message. Hence, my mobile phone should know with whom I want to communicate and the language I want to use based on previous conversations. Each time I send a message to Twitter or a friend abroad I have to switch the language from German to English and back again. In this case I am incredibly happy in that I forgot all the French I learned in school and therefore only have to cope with two languages.
This could be so much easier. The phone could remember the language I use for each of my contacts. Additionally, when writing a message to a new unknown phone number a prediction of the language based on the country code could make sense. If I am texting to the U.S. (+1) or UK (+44), why not quickly ask me if I want to write in English?
T9 is incredibly bad in this regard.
But apologies to Nuance because fortunately somebody is thinking about such problems. They claim that in their latest predictive text system XT9 it is, besides other improvements, possible to easily switch languages while writing. Two dictionaries can be used at the same time, which should help most people like me that are writing in two languages.
XT9 has been introduced on the 3GSM World Congress in 2006 and in 2007 it has been announced that XT9 is going mainstream and not only Windows Mobile devices are supported anymore. However, adoption seems to be low and I didn’t find many current devices supporting XT9.
I am happy a solution is on the way but it will take more time until XT9 is broadly available.
Can I look forward to have this in my next device? Is it really better than T9? If somebody tried XT9 already it would be great if you could provide some details in the comments.
German Facebook clone StudiVZ is now getting serious competition in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Facebook just launched a localized German version of their social network. Today all Germans have to learn English in school, but most - even college students - prefer to do everything in their primary language.
Many successful international startups do not have the resources to localize right away and focus on the U.S. market first, which gave the various German Web 2.0 clones like StudiVZ a chance to grow. StudiVZ launched in fall 2005 and claims that they are having about 4.9 Million users today. Facebook, with about 700,000 members in Germany, only has a fraction of the users but the user base is expected to raise significantly now that the app is localized.
The German translation is still far from perfect but students and others will begin to see that the Facebook platform is way superior to the poorly copied StudiVZ. StudiVZ basically looks the same as Facebook did several years ago (besides the colors) and doesn’t provide applications, an activity stream or a mobile version.
Although StudiVZ has better connections to German media partners I do not think they can compete against the well-funded giant Facebook. In the end Facebook’s rumored cooperation with Nokia, where all Nokia devices might come with a pre-installed Facebook client, and similar deals will break StudiVZ’s neck. Only the people that have spent hours on StudiVZ collecting friends will have doubts to switch and stay loyal first. However, when more and more of their friends have left StudiVZ they will also embrace the change and join Facebook.
It will be exciting to watch the social networking war and Facebook’s launch will hopefully help to boost the German Web 2.0. You can count that I will keep an eye on this and in particular the usage of the already localized mobile version of Facebook here in Germany.
Kudos to zweinull.cc for pointing the German release out.
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