The Smartphone Hub

AndroLib, the website that enables you to browse and discover apps for your Android phone far better than the Android Market site does, has gotten a makeover and a bunch of new features today. Sure, it’s still not going to win any web design contests any time soon, but the revamp makes the site a ton more useful as far as I’m concerned.

AndroLib has also updated and expanded its statistics page, pegging the number of available Android apps at around 85,000 in total, and estimating that a whopping 1 billion apps have been downloaded to Android handsets around the world to date.

Check out the rest: MobileCrunch

A note on the FedEx tracking website notes that “Package deliveries are proceeding as normal, however tracking updates are temporarily being delayed. Please try back later.” Why? Because you people keep refreshing the tracking site, that’s why!

Don’t worry, though. Your package won’t end up on a desert island with Tom Hanks. Shipments are going through just fine.

Reader Willard spotted the error when he was trying to track is iP4 to Ontario, CA. He writes:

The fed ex website is reporting its tracking is not updating, im guessing due to an abundance of people checking their iphone pre order status since this morning mine said it was in ontario, ca and i already received it at my door in bakersfield, ca

Anyone else seeing tracking failures?

Check out the rest: MobileCrunch

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.

The only registrar currently offering a GoMobi option is name.com. Other registrars are listed as “coming soon”. The name.com mobile hosting plan is $50 a year, or $6 per month (if for some reason you only want six months worth of mobile site hosting).

Here’s the full press release:

Businesses can now create quality mobile Web sites in minutes when they “goMobi”

dotMobi’s new low-cost goMobi™ product creates a smartphone Web experience
on every mobile phone, giving any business a rich, icon-driven mobile website —
quickly, easily and completely.

ICANN MEETING NO. 38, Brussels, June 21, 2010 — dotMobi, a worldwide leader in the development and discovery of quality mobile content, today announced the global availability of goMobi™, a unique product designed to help businesses quickly and easily create & publish quality mobile websites in mere minutes. Unlike existing products, goMobi brings together the breadth of traditional content management systems with the speed and simplicity of mobile website builders. That means businesses of all sizes can join the mobile Web revolution with sophisticated mobile sites that work on all mobile phones but at a very low price point.

Targeted primarily at small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) as well as mobile developers and designers, goMobi lets businesses engage current and potential customers with sites that recognize the capabilities of each mobile phone and display the site’s content so that it looks its very best on that specific phone.

“All goMobi sites use a friendly, icon-based design, and all goMobi sites automatically recognize what handset your customer is using, so goMobi sites make every phone seem like it’s a smartphone. Because of this, your customers will always associate your company with a good mobile experience —no matter what phone they’re using,” said Trey Harvin, CEO of dotMobi.

“goMobi websites are hosted ‘in the cloud’ by dotMobi, so SMBs don’t pay extra for hosting or have to worry about other technology aspects,” Harvin added. “goMobi site owners can build a site in minutes and then focus on their business, while their mobile website works to bring in new customers. And if site owners want to make changes, they can do so in seconds. For example, a business owner can test different mobile coupon offers to see which one is most effective for bringing foot traffic in the door.”

Designed to meet consumer expectations of small businesses
dotMobi recently commissioned usability research firm Human Factors International to survey global attitudes towards the mobile Web in the USA, India, Germany and China. The company found that 53 percent of the respondents regularly use a mobile phone to access mobile websites while only 26 percent attempt to access standard desktop sites on mobile phones. Further, 83 percent of participants would prefer to visit a “made-for-mobile” website versus a “designed-for-desktop” version when using a mobile phone or portable device like an Apple iPad. And according to Web measurement leader Gomez, 61 percent of mobile Web visitors are less likely to visit a website again if they have a bad user experience.

goMobi was designed to meet these expectations while making the experience of building a mobile-specific website as carefree as possible. For SMBs, goMobi:

• maximizes customer contacts by using the capabilities of the mobile phone — calls, texts, location-based services — and helping convert leads into customers
• increases mobile visits to businesses through improved search-engine optimization (SEO) by using key words in search engines and free directory listings
• helps convert visitors to “hot leads” with features like mobile coupons and reservation requests
• incorporates external, third-party applications, adding functionality & localization for businesses and a distributed distribution model for application developers & channel partners.

“With interest in the mobile Web continuing to explode, SMBs can now reach the world’s billions of mobile Web users — quickly, easily and completely,” said Trey Harvin. “goMobi connects SMBs to their customers significantly faster because a goMobi site delivers only the content mobile customers need, while making it easy for businesses to set up and maintain a unique mobile website. And since a goMobi website works on all mobile handsets, it ensures a business is available on the complete range of mobiles available, not just iPhones and Androids.”

Special tools for developers and designers
The speed and ease of building mobile websites with goMobi is also a boon to Web developers and designers, so they can include mobile in their service offerings. To meet their special needs, goMobi includes a powerful suite of tools which allows developers to control the automated transformation of desktop website content to mobile-friendly content as well as accessing HTML metatags for site items, along with a mobile/desktop switcher and advanced device detection capabilities.

Getting goMobi
Denver, Colorado-based name.com was the exclusive partner for goMobi beta trials and is now the first to market goMobi with their complete domain and hosting offerings.

Bill Mushkin, CEO of name.com, said, “Given the ease and speed that anyone — from tech amateur to design professional — can now build and deploy a mobile website with goMobi, I’m positive that the current boom in mobile Web use will grow tenfold in a short time. Our wildly successful beta of goMobi is strong proof of that.”

For information on how registrars, Web services companies, developers and designers can offer goMobi to their customers, please contact sales@goMobi.info.

Details on setting up your goMobi mobile website are at http://goMobi.info (on desktops) and at http://go.mobi (on mobile devices).

About dotMobi
Headquartered in Dublin, dotMobi is a worldwide leader in enabling the development & discovery of quality mobile content through innovative services, in turn helping businesses and individuals reach the world’s billions of mobile phone users. dotMobi spurs mobile industry innovation by giving content providers the tools they need to ensure the Web will work on mobile phones with speed, accuracy and relevant content. dotMobi, a wholly owned subsidiary of Afilias Limited, was founded by 14 visionary mobile operators, network & device manufacturers, and Internet content providers, including Ericsson, Google, GSM Association, Hutchison 3, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia, Visa and Vodafone.

• Visit http://dotMobi.mobi for information on .mobi top-level domains and all dotMobi services.
• Visit http://mobiForge.com and http://goMobi.info for mobile site development and services.
• Visit http://mobiThinking.com for mobile marketing information and services.
• Of course, use the .mobi equivalents of these sites to guarantee a quality experience on your mobile device.

And see the dotMobi blog at http://blog.mobi.

I think this is a good idea, in general, and I’m sure they’ll get some business, but I think they’re introducing a little too much confusion into the domain name space by using different URLs for the desktop and mobile destinations for this effort. If a business is required to use a different URL for their mobile site, things might get even worse if a business chooses not to use m.business.com or mobile.business.com.

Check out the rest: MobileCrunch

Some of the first accessories for the iPhone 4 have appeared on Griffin’s website, six days ahead of the launch-date. The Elan passport wallet may not be as colorful as the err, Bumper, but it can store all your cards. More »










IPhone – Smartphone – Handhelds – Apple – iPhone 4

Check out the rest: Gizmodo

We told you this was coming: Swype has just made it possible for any Android handset owner to download their innovative touch-screen enabled text-input application straight from the website. Which means a whole lot of people can henceforth start challenging that Guinness World Record for speedy textin’ using Swype.

Up until today, Swype came pre-installed on only a fraction of available Android phones (including the all new Motorola Droid X) due to its licensing business model, although the company did open up to 25,000 eager beta testers a couple of months ago – most of whom seem to have completely fallen in love with it.

Well, anyone can download it now, but only for a limited time (a couple of days) and with a somewhat limited feature set. Important: it won’t work if you have a phone that came pre-installed with Swype and support will be via Swype’s forums only.

What Swype does is provide a faster, easier way to input text on any screen using your finger or a stylus, which makes it particularly useful for tablet computers and smartphones. It has a built-in database of words, so you don’t even need to be super accurate when swyping.

Swype already supported English and has now also added support for Italian and Spanish, which we’re told were the most often requested additional languages.

The Swype app should run seamlessly on all Android versions. Note that it isn’t available for download from Android Market – you need to actually visit the Swype website and make sure your phone’s settings allow you to install and run apps from ‘unknown sources’.

For your background: Swype was developed by founders Cliff Kushler (co-inventor of T9) and Randy Marsden (the developer of the onscreen keyboard included in Windows), along with a team of programmers and linguists. The company has to date raised $7.9 million from investors like DoCoMo Capital, Samsung Ventures and Nokia Growth Partners.

Here’s a recent interview Michael Arrington did with Swype CEO Mike McSherry:

Check out the rest: MobileCrunch

AT&T’s servers have made preordering a new iPhone from either their website or Apple’s pretty much impossible this morning. Did you have any luck, or have you been frustratedly repeating the same couple steps over and over again? More »










iPhone – Handhelds – Smartphones – Apple – AT&T

Check out the rest: Gizmodo

Apple’s website has just set the pre-order page live for the iPhone 4, however it appears the white iPhone is “currently unavailable for pre-order or in-store pickup.” Black it is, then. Shipping starts June 24th. UPDATE More »










IPhone – Apple – Smartphones – Handhelds – iPhone 4

Check out the rest: Gizmodo

Akamai, in a move aimed at helping it better deliver customer websites to a wider range of mobile devices, has acquired mobile services company Velocitude. The acquisition, the terms of which were not disclosed, will give Akamai the ability to dynamically transform customer websites to fit all the different screen sizes and form factors available on mobile devices.

Velocitude’s technology works by detecting the mobile device on which a user is accessing a website and automagically transforming that website to fit the screen dimensions and capabilities of the device. Since the majority of websites are not currently optimized for mobile delivery — and since the mobile device market is incredibly fragmented, with all sorts of device form factors and operating systems — technology like Velocitude’s makes it easy for publishers to reach all those devices without building new pages or websites for each of them.

According to Akamai’s director of corporate communications, Jeff Young, the new content transformation service should be integrated into Akamai’s network within the next 30 days and will be available as a module along with its existing application acceleration and dynamic site acceleration products. There’s also a heavy e-commerce and m-commerce component to Velocitude’s service, which should fit in nicely with Akamai’s existing small object and dynamic site acceleration capabilities. Akamai serves 90 of the top 100 e-commerce sites online; this acquisition will give them the ability to deliver mobile commerce services without creating applications or websites to target individual devices.

Akamai’s Velocitude buy is similar to rival Limelight Networks’ acquisition of mobile services firm Kiptronic last year. Kiptronic also provides on-the-fly mobile page transformation, enabling Limelight’s customers to create a website that is dynamically formatted to fit different mobile screens.

Mobile is becoming a huge market, as shown by the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI). In February, the network equipment vendor forecast that by 2014, we will be using 3.6 exabytes of data traffic each month on mobile networks worldwide. And Akamai wants to be the CDN to deliver that data.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: Metered Mobile Data Is Coming and Here’s How (subscription required)

For more on cloud computing, join the GigaOM Network for its annual Structure conference June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.

Check out the rest: GigaOM

Apparently an image on Apple’s website showed the iPhone Mail app offering to open files in “Keynote.” The image has been removed, but seems like a hint that the iWork suite will come to the iPhone. [Pocket-Lint via Engadget] More »










iPhone – Apple – Smartphone – Handhelds – IPad

Check out the rest: Gizmodo

Software That Analyzes The Content Of A Website And Inserts Affiliate Links Automatically Directly Into The Content (not As Separate Ads). 65% Commission!
Affiliately.