TMCnet has a new Mobile World Congress news site which is worth bookmarking if you want to keep up with the latest happenings at the show. Hope you enjoy it.
February 2009 Archives
Is it just me or does it scare you to know satellites which can obviously return to earth for a variety of reasons can at times have onboard nuclear reactors. This is an important point as you may have heard an Iridium Satellite recently collided with a Russian military one.
And that is the good news. The bad - the Russian satellite could be nuclear.
And this it seems is how the world's top scientists design things. How does the conversation in the lab go? Let's hurl this two ton nuclear-powered object into space and hope it doesn't hit anything else?
Truly amazing.
I don't mean to make light of Smule's accomplishments, after all a number of my readers told me I had to download the Ocarina app from the company for my iPhone so I could turn it into a flute - and yes, when you blow into your iPhone it plays music. I am consistently amazed at how simple the application is while being powerful. I can choose to play my own tune or listen to someone else playing elsewhere in the world.
Zephyr in the Wild
The company followed up with an applications called Zephyr which is best described at what a talented programmer might design while experimenting with mind-altering substances and watching Rudolf The Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Just kidding - sort of. The program allows you to design very cool-looking graphics with snowflakes and sound and like the Ocarina, you can put it in a mode where you get to experience the snowflake designs of others.
I am impressed with the company's accomplishments and the $3.9 million investment from Granite Ventures, Bessemer Ventures and others makes sense as Smule has established themselves as a company making truly innovative iPhone apps.
Two questions are now worth asking. Can this company design an interesting business app for the iPhone and how do I get in on the next investment round? Just kidding - sort of.
The goal of this post is not to make a political statement but rather a financial one.
The law of unintended consequences seems to have a way of really stinging those of us in the tech space. For example, in the late nineties Napster was a single place where the world shared music illegally. The record companies closed down Napster as an illegal file sharing company and as a result a number of music sharing networks took off which became impossible or near-impossible to control.
The effects of the US embargo on Cuba are similar. The country has difficulty getting access to Microsoft products so it is focusing its resources on building its own OS based on Linux called Nova. The concern US taxpayers should have is what if this project turns out to be good and becomes accepted by more Spanish-speaking countries? This could erode Microsoft's revenues and with the spending our politicians have been doing this past year, we need as much revenue as possible so that taxes can start to pay this debt down.
Of greater concern is the potential loss of US tech dominance. Sure, open source is continually eroding Microsoft's share but do we want the US government setting up policies which hamper US corporations and moreover cost US jobs and increase our deficit?
Putting on my citizen hat, I say that as long as there are no national security implications, I don't want the US government doing anything that hampers the financial future of my fellow citizens and their descendants.
I used to think Boingo was a singular network but since I have gotten the account installed the dead easy Boingo software on my laptop I have found Boingo is like the master key to WiFi networks nationwide. More and more often, I tentatively search for a WiFi network in a hotel or airport - not knowing if it is a paid network or set up back hackers. Who knows these days? Many times the Boingo software wakes up on its own and allows me to login with my saved credentials. To be honest I forgot the software is even installed on my laptop. It just activates when needed.
No passwords to remember, no muss or fuss. You just get online fast. I really recommend this service.
I wonder how many other people think of Boingo as a singular WiFi provider.
I remember walking the halls of CES the year XM and Sirius Satellite radio was launched. These companies were going to change the world we heard and in many cases they did. But with talk of bankruptcy of the now-combined company, many such as Gary Kim are asking what went wrong. iPods are an obvious culprit but I also blame internet radio and services like Pandora and to some extent Slacker.
I pay for satellite radio and I pay extra to stream it in HD over the net. But lately I use Pandora and sometimes Slacker and just find Sirius less interesting. The ability to skip stations is huge for me.
This of course begs the question why one of these satellite companies didn't buy Pandora to leverage the large and viral audience the service is building. I can't make sense of it really but it seems clear to me that traditional television networks are in jeopardy as the ability to select what you watch grows. Sure, there is TiVo but a free-form TV station which suggests programs the way Pandora suggest songs is the obvious path to the video future IMHO.
The sooner the TV stations figure this out, the better off they will be. And one imagines Pandora has a video version in the works.
For those old-timers like Yours Truly who still depend on e-mail for much of my communications, a new service from a company called Trackle makes it easy for me to subscribe to a number of services which can be pushed to me in a number of different ways.
For example, I signed up for alerts which include news from the New York Times, job postings from craigslist, crime news near my house and the most depressing of all - an alert which tells me when my house loses at least one percent of its value.
There are many categories to choose from such as travel, shopping, social, weather, videos, events, finance, fun stuff and more.
Trackle hooks into other services nicely and just makes life more easy for the person who just can't get enough information.
Yesterday I signed up for the service and so far I received one alert from the company and was happy with the results. It is worth a try and is free. Room for improvement includes hooks into many more data services and an RSS/XML feed.
For all the talk of devices and the consumer electronics angle on smartphones, the one company who has the end-to-end solutions which allow it to really differentiate itself is RIM... a company which enables smartphones to be truly government-approved secure endpoints on wireless networks. At a recent press conference in Manhattan, the company announced Blackberry Enterprise Server 5.0, what the company says is the simplest upgrade ever and available next quarter.
The benefits of BES 5.0 are a redefined administration console which boosts productivity of support personnel and users. Features like a web-based admin screen and tools to roll out upgrades at off-hours will make support teams happy because they will not be forced to come into the office on weekends to upgrade. And when you consider a number of single companies are bumping up against the 100,000 Blackberry user threshold, you can see these admins need any assistance they can get.
This is why 5.0 has better group and policy support allowing settings changes to cascade throughout the enterprise. There is also an application repository allowing corporations to determine which users can download which apps and more importantly, which are mandatory and/or optional.
A few other new benefits include over-the-air upgrades meaning RIM gadgets never have to see a cable besides the one that connects to power. In addition, admins no longer need to physically handle the devices.
Users too will see benefits like being able to easily download documents from shared servers, the ability to have more control over email folders and niceties like storing files on an SD card and opening attachments in calendar invites.
There will also be enhanced telephony integration making the Blackberry a much more seamless part of a corporation's voice/data unified communications (UC) network.
In short, the focus on devices is where the sizzle is but for the enterprise market, Blackberry excels at providing secure access to corporate networks and the date therein. With the 5.0 release, companies will increase productivity and save administration costs while allowing users to forgo laptops in more situations than ever. Add in better FMC support and you have a great story for corporations looking to save time and money.
Forbes just released their list of fastest growing tech companies and there are a mix of companies on the list from semiconductor to biotech. Of special note is SalesForce.com who comes in at number 3 with EPS growth of 40%. Cbeyond ranks number 6 with 22% EPS growth. Other familiar communications companies include Neustar ranked 17 and j2 Global at 21.
Of note is Google at number 2, iRobot at number 4, Red Hat number 11 and Apple at number 14. Here is the complete list.
Seems quiet here too. Doesn't anyone smile in the city anymore?
