The Vodafone Mobile Application store was started on 15th February, 2010 in India on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress where the company announced ultra cheap phones for India and emerging markets.The store offers over 800 apps in Entertainment, Utility, Finance, Social Networking, Games, etc. with a mix of Indian and international applications.The operator aims to regularly update the store with new applications. The application store is available to customers with GPRS enabled phones.

Regarding the price of the apps around 15% of the apps are free ones whereas the remaining are paid applications in the price range of Rs. 5 to Rs. 30.Vodafone Mobile Application store has been launched in partnership with Arvato Mobile Kumar Ramanathan, Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone Essar said, “We are delighted to launch the Vodafone Mobile application store which combines an array of facilities for our customers including easy access to information, utilities and entertainment. The mobile applications are affordable and a significant step forward in the growth of mobile data and the future of Mobile intern

Skyfire, makers of Webby award-winning, PC-like web-browser for mobile devices, has launched the next generation of its Skyfire browser, version 1.5, for Symbian S60 3rd and 5th edition smartphones. See below their video explaining what is new about it :

Skyfire who is up against browsers like Opera mini or the newly released Firefox mobile is a mobile only browser. This has the advantage that they do only this and so are super focused on a smooth mobile experience. Of course there is the advantages of players like Firefox as they can sync between you PC and your mobile.

Whatever the case it is great to have players like Skyfire focussing directly on making the mobile internet a “turn-on” experience rather than the often “turn-off” browsing on your mobile device often is.

There was a lot of passionate response to the post a few weeks ago “Will Mobile Phones Replace In-Store Retail Salespeople”. Even more reason that these three announcements this week caught my eye:

■  The Aberdeen Group published a report that stated in 2008, the total of digital signage market revenue stood at $766 million and is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2014, growing at a healthy CAGR of 20%.
■  The London Daily Mirror reported according to unnamed sources that Nokia is planning to begin rolling out embedded NFC (near field communications) kits into its entire line of Symbian phones beginning Q3, 2010. The Finnish giant already has NFC in selected handsets, such as the 6216 Classic.
■  Malaysian manufacturer Fonelabs will produce two million low cost (under $100) NFC enabled phones in 2010
What do these three items have to do with retail? First, just as a refresher, Near Field Communication (NFC) is “a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance.” In other words, if you have an NFC enabled phone and opt-in, your mobile phone will be able to communicate with another proximate electronic device automatically.

The types of applications for NFC on mobile are numerous:

■  Electronic payments – swipe your phone and make a payment without a credit card. NFC technology is already being used in Japan in more than 30,000 stores. Users can place $50 amounts, for example, into their smart phones to make payments or even use them in smart vending machines.
■  Mobile ticketing on public transportation – swipe your phone on readers placed in buses, airlines, and trains
■  Electronic keys – swipe your phone and open hotel doors or your house door
■  Smart posters – use your phone to read RFID tags on billboards and other signs to receive additional information and to let the “billboard” know you are there
Smart posters is the one that I find particularly intriguing.

Let’s imagine for a second, that you walk into your favorite bookstore where you have purchased many titless in the past. With your permission, as you walk past an internal electronic billboard, you allow the billboard to communicate with your phone. Instantly, the billboard scans your past purchases and recommends new books to you that you might enjoy reading. Or even better, a scanner reads your phone as you walk in and sends you an SMS with a customized offer to you for a discount on items you purchase that day as an opted-in frequent customer.

It’s kind of like going into your favorite pub where everyone knows your name. Of course, downsides such as privacy cannot be underestimated (but, that is why it has to be on an opt-in basis). Imagine, though, how much more effective it would be to having a customized sales experience. In clothing stores, sales people can know what you like, know your size, know if it is in-stock, and immediately bring you customized selection of new items. Out of stock items could be posted to your customer ID and custom SMS messages could be automatically sent to let you know when the item is back in-store.

For the retailer, NFC gives unprecedented real time monitoring of consumer behavior in-store that could lead to better consumer in-store experiences – more accurate preference tracking of target audiences for better merchandise selection, display and pricing, and an ideal feedback channel for more detailed research. Individually, salespeople could be more effective in providing consumers with more meaningful in-store experiences if they are familiar with their past interactions.

Will mobile phones replace in-store retail salespeople? The consensus opinion from that last post was no, but it surely will change the playing field in a substantial way. The impending mobile NFC introductions are yet another way that the retail experience of the 21st century will never be the same.

Mark Jaffe is a mobile industry and digital media executive with an active consulting business that enables mobile technology companies, as well as other technology and digital content companies, to achieve breakthrough revenue growth with sustainable profits from a foundation of sound strategic analysis and innovation. He is also a noted speaker at industry conferences, as well as a speaker and facilitator at corporate retreats and strategy workshops. Further biographical information can be found at www.markjaffe.com.  His mobile industry blog, Mobile Mandala, can be viewed at  www.mobilemandala.com

The other interesting thing is that the carriers will also have the option of customizing the OS to suit their own requirements. bada will definitely give a tough competition to other Linux based mobile OS’s like Google Android and Nokia Maemo. Samsung is  obviously also planning to launch it’s own App Store.

Some additional UI tools include the ability to embed the Adobe® Flash® Player and the WebKit Internet browser directly into native bada applications, allowing seamless integration of premiere UI technologies. Also, the bada map control is easily embedded in your applications to deliver interactive mapping and routing with POI features for your users.

What does this mean for the other OSs that Samsung use today ? Well the forecast would have Symbian gone entirely by 2011 from Samsung phones and Microsoft’s OS at just 20%by 2012 where it makes up 80% of Samsung phones today. Not sure how this will affect Android but it would seem hard to understand that Samsung continue supporting Android against their own champion. The reach and actual popularity of Samsung phones (around 20% of the global market) means that bada will obviously be a force to reckon with if just by shear numbers!

Samsung has a vision of “Smartphone for everyone”, and by offering cheap Bada handsets as well as expensive ones, combined with a focus on in-app purchasing, Samsung hopes to entice developers with greater profits.

Samsung’s hoping to see an influx of applications thanks to the $2.7 million prize that’s been put up for grabs, and so far, EA and Gameloft have been signed up to develop games for Bada.

Bada will initially run on Samsung’s proprietary SHP (Samsung Handset Platform) paired with Samsung’s upcoming TouchWiz 3.0 user interface. It will be entirely multitouch, supporting both resistive and capacitive touch screens. Hardware-wise, it’s chip-agnostic, and Samsung aims for the cheapest bada handsets to be cheaper than the cheapest Android ones. It won’t run on older phones, however, and the first bada handset will arrive somewhere in the first half of 2010.

Definitely an exciting space to watch and see how well they pull this off.

Of those apps about 60% are free apps.

Android Market

It is all a numbers game really…  Such huge numbers are really in themselves not necessarily a good thing. Searching and sifting through such a large amount of apps is not great for users. Like on iTunes and maybe even worse Android Market is difficult to search on… users then really have a harder time finding what they want with such a swamp of apps.

Does this mean that I don’t think Android is a success.. or that Apple’s plethora of apps isn’t great. Not necessarily but it seems that we need to sort through the hype of the numbers game and see who of the OSs is really going to push usage for the widest number of people. And who is really going to make money for the software developers behind these apps. So that the eco system really thrives and has a durable model that will continue to grow not necessarily in terms of numbers of apps but in terms of numbers of users and in revenue.

This being said it does seem to me that Android is here to stay and has progressed quite well. It is a market that I believe all of us with a vested industry will be watching closely in 2010.

Mobile phones have to be one of the best on the spot, at the moment, information retrieval resources of all time.  How many times have you seen disagreements settled immediately, courtesy of a quick iPhone web research query?  Well, it looks like some companies are ready to capitalize upon our penchant for instant research about things that interest us.

Let’s flash back to a recent industry panel where a senior Best Buy executive said “The right information at the point of impulse increases desired consumer’s behavior, sales, profits and customer satisfaction.” That sure sounds like a description of one of Best Buy’s best in-store salespeople helping out customers standing next to the latest electronic gizmo in one of their stores. 

It isn’t.

The conference was a mobile conference and the speaker was the senior manager of marketing and emerging capabilities at Best Buy.  She was talking about using mobile phones – not salespeople – as the information source at the point of impulse. I guess there is nothing like a little recession to make retailers think a little harder about how utilize our collective penchant for using our mobile phones for quick research projects and potentially saving some money in labor costs in the process.

Here’s how it works:  Using the mobile phone, customers can request information about any product on demand in a Best Buy store with a call to action on a product fact tag in store. What a great idea for consumers (no more pesky sales people asking ‘how can I help you’) and what a great idea for Best Buy (cut a little payroll here and there as the idea takes hold – I know, I know, not one salesperson will be fired as a result of this technological advance which is solely dedicated to the betterment of our customers:)

The truth is that we are already moving more and more to a self-service environment, anyway.  Why not leverage the mobile phone to eliminate cost, bring down prices, reduce the frustration in trying to flag down elusive salespeople to ask questions, and give us another excuse to have fun looking up info on our mobiles?  It sure makes sense to me.

So, let’s take this one step further.

What if retailers gave us the opportunity to engage in interactive texting?  Think of all the time we waste, and frustration we accumulate, in big box stores feeling like we always have to muscle in to get a little service.  Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to just text in the question via mobile phone?  Then, get an answer and re-text our next question?

Why stop at electronics stores? What a great way for bookstores to compete with online retailers – just text in the title you are looking for and receive information on whether or not it is in-stock and where it can be found.

And, how great would it be to have self service mobile Q&A on the new car lot?  I don’t really like all of the sales pressure from those pushy car salespeople and now I can avoid it once and for all.  For good measure, I could just text the offers and counteroffers back and forth and never have to talk to them in person!

The best application, though, would be in high end department and apparel stores.  After trying on the overpriced designer suit, I could text in the question “How does it look?” I guarantee the response will be the same as if I had asked an in-store salesperson (who could actually see me in the suit) the same question.

On second thought, text messaging just can’t replace the sincerity of those baby blue eyes telling me I how good I look, even if they don’t really mean it.

Mark Jaffe is a mobile industry and digital media executive with an active consulting business that enables mobile technology companies, as well as other technology and digital content companies, to achieve breakthrough revenue growth with sustainable profits from a foundation of sound strategic analysis and innovation. He is also a noted speaker at industry conferences, as well as a speaker and facilitator at corporate retreats and strategy workshops. Further biographical information can be found at www.markjaffe.com.

If you would like to access Mark Jaffe’s blog Mobile Mandala directly, please visit www.mobilemandala.com.  If you would like to communicate with Mark Jaffe directly, please email mark@markjaffe.com

Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.*

A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 with prerelease support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year. Sign up to be notified when the beta starts.

Learn more in http://www.adobe.com/iphone/

Courtesy of Brian J. Friedman

EpiCollect software

A mobile phone application will help professional and “citizen” scientists collect and analyse data from “in the field”, anywhere in the world. The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles – on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species – in a web-based database. The data is statistically analysed and plotted on maps that are instantly available to those same phones. The approach is outlined in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

The software has been developed for so-called smartphones that run Google’s Android open-source operating system. Researchers can report back to the EpiCollect database with results from experiments they do in the field, and “citizen scientists” can send back photos or videos of certain species from their own backyards. The phones’ GPS system automatically logs users’ locations, and the data is then plotted by location using Google Maps. Then anyone can access the database online, or from their phone.

Real-time results

There have been many research projects in the past that make use of phones’ instant access and GPS functionality. However, lead researcher on the project David Aanensen of Imperial College London said that the full integration into a central and widely-accessible database makes EpiCollect particularly useful. EpiCollect on a mobile (Imperial) The approach allows “citizen scientists” worldwide to contribute “Many of the other tools that allow one to send data by mobile phone don’t have an easy way for any of the researchers to look at any of the data in almost real-time,” he told BBC News.

The team is already working to track the occurrence of chytridiomycosis, a fungal infection that is decimating the numbers of amphibians around the globe. “We’re investigating the use of the phones for the project; rather than researchers taking a GPS out into the field and recording their results on paper, we can get all of this data much more quickly – and it limits the amount of equipment they have to take out into the field,” Mr Aanensen said. He added that there is particular potential for using the approach with school projects. He cited the classic “quadrant” experiment in biology, in which schoolchildren set out a fixed area, for example in a park, and count the number of species in that area. “If we have a database version, it allows them to compare between their school and another school or a set of schools in one country versus a set in another country, and the natural ability to use a phone rather than paper might be more attractive to school kids.”

The team is now working to develop an iPhone-compatible version of the application. They are also as well as a website that, based on a given project’s aims, automatically sets up a database and writes the computer code to be uploaded to phones. “People who don’t have experience setting up databases and setting up websites with maps will be able to come along and have their own project database and phone software provided,” Mr Aanensen said.

“We want to just sit back and see the kind of exciting projects that people will be using this for.”

A week ago I was asked to give a presentation to a local meet-up mobile group called Mobile Portland about my 12 years in mobile and how that relates to the iPhone App Store. I decided to focus this on some conclusions I came to regarding building an iPhone business instead of being specific to Infinity Softworks.

I then gave the same presentation earlier this week at OTBC, a local tech incubator that I’ve been involved with the past few years, for a Lunch-and-Learn. In total over 100 saw my presentation in person or streamed across the web.

I’ve included both the slides and video here for your review. I think I’m taking a very realistic look at the challenges. Most of the popular press and blogs have been so overwhelmingly positive about the App Store and its impact for developers. But the make-up of the App Store is far more complicated than that for the vast majority of us, and the opportunities have morphed substantially over the last nine months.

I hope this helps you with your business decisions, giving you a little more insight into the opportunities and challenges with Apple’s App Store itself. My goal was to analyze this from a business perspective. Obviously my own experiences influence the slides but feel that the presentation is broader than any one company’s experience.

Video

This video was shot with the second presentation at OTBC. The first half, 27 minutes, is my presentation. The second half is Q&A.

Slides

If you’d prefer to peruse the slides instead, please keep in mind that the video tells a much fuller story than the slides do:

Visit Elia Freedman’s blog

According to AT&T, the problem is that it doesn’t have enough network capacity. Wired reports:
“We’re certainly not crippling any apps,” an AT&T spokesman said. “This is an issue of fairness…. While we would like to support all video services across our network, the reality is that wireless networks simply lack the capacity to support customers streaming hours of cable, satellite or IPTV video programming to individual users.”

However, Ken Biba, founder of wireless consulting firm Novarum, says “SlingPlayer is clear evidence that AT&T’s network is overloaded” and he interprets that the new iPhone 3GS video recording and uploading option will clog the network even more and he added that even when carriers roll out the fourth-generation Long Term Evolution cellular network, AT&T’s network capacity will still be insufficient because by then, smartphones will be even more sophisticated and affordable, creating even more congestion. He suggests,
“An even better solution would be if more cities deployed free Wi-Fi coverage to offload the stress from carrier networks.”

At this juncture it is a mandatory to oversee the statement of Aneesh Chopra the US CTO, said at a consumer electronics show held in June 2009 at New York :

“If you were to ask investors how satisfied were you with your data wireless network investments pre-iPhone, my gut instinct tells me, they were not delivering the revenues that one would’ve expected to justify the investments they were making,”

Chopra noted that faster Internet speeds create business opportunities and that the government aims to create incentives for such investment. “We can lead with public policy in this area the way that the consumer has led in the device world”. Already $7.3 billion has been allocated to hand out for broadband build-out in the President Obama’s economic stimulus package.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission plans to draw up a strategy to bring high-speed Internet to nearly half of the U.S. population that does not get it, many in low-income and rural areas.