BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK Perhaps the starkest example of the digital divide cropped up at this week’s SXSW (South by Southwest) technology conference in Austin, Texas, where a marketing agency hired members of the local homeless population to walk around carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices, offering conferencegoers Internet access in exchange for donations. Yes, you read it [...]
BLOGGER: ANDY WESTON “I wonder where you are and I wonder what you do…” Of course, Lionel Richie wasn’t referring to user anonymity, but there is an ever-growing focus on the importance of uncovering user identity. The recent riots that rolled across the UK this month have again highlighted why it’s so valuable to be [...]
BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to mobile ads, which is to basically ignore them almost automatically. But according to a recent Google-commissioned survey, I’m apparently an anomaly – the report states that most users do actually pay attention to and engage with mobile advertising, with 82% of smartphone users noticing [...]
BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER Hats off to Amazon again for adopting yet another new innovative business model with this week’s launch of the Amazon Cloud Player and Cloud Driver software and services – and in doing so, it has managed to beat Apple and Google to the punch by being the first to launch online music [...]
BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER A friend of mine (let’s call her “Julia Roberts”) was horrified this week when, after carrying out a Google search, it brought up her search results together with the question: “Are you Julia Roberts?” Her identity wasn’t something she was aware she’d ever revealed to Google, but her enthusiastic patronage of social [...]
BLOGGER: YOAV SNIR Is mobile communications now all about the connected world? Well, if you attended last week’s Mobile World Congress, you would think so. There were certainly enough connected devices around, with almost every original equipment manufacturer – from phone manufacturers to consumer electronic giants – apparently about to launch a tablet. Everyone else [...]
BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK AT&T’s decision to join T-Mobile and offer carrier billing in the US for Android Market (Google’s app store) should come as no surprise. As Michal Harris noted in a blog here late last year, the service providers’ market has fragmented, with over-the-top players, niche app vendors and expanding retailers muscling in on [...]
BLOGGER: DANA PORTER As more and more content is delivered over the Internet, consumers are “leaning forward:” moving from passively consuming content to designing their own viewing experiences. And, of course, the battle for the revenues to be gained from owning this experience has heated up. Pay-TV providers, who traditionally controlled the customer television experience, [...]
BLOGGER: MICHAL HARRIS Steve Jobs memorably lashed out against Google last month, saying “Android is very, very fragmented and getting more fragmented by the day,” insisting that “when selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.” Jobs was arguing that Apple’s closed platform approach offered [...]
BLOGGER: AMNON EKSTEIN I was sorry to discover that Google had decided to pull the plug on Google Wave so quickly after its release to the public. This was Google’s first real foray into social/collaboration networking prior to Google Buzz, and I think it offered one of the greatest collaboration tools available on the Web [...]
BLOGGER: AMNON EKSTEIN You definitely know that cloud computing is shaping up to be “the next big thing” in computing when Google, Amazon, Sun, IBM, Microsoft with its latest Windows Azure platform and others, are all offering a variety of services based on the concept. Many organizations and potential users are currently evaluating whether it can deliver [...]
BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER When I joined Facebook, I remember the legal notice at the time said something to the effect that anything you post on Facebook was their property to do with as they pleased. Slightly worrying, but I kept it in mind when adding information, making sure it wasn’t too personal. I also checked [...]
By: Jeff Barak No doubt many service providers are cracking open the champagne at the news that Google is shutting its online mobile phone store. As Andy Rubin, Google’s head of mobile admitted: “It’s clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service [...]
By Stephen Krajewski Back at Mobile World Congress again after a two-year break, and it was easy to notice a dramatic change in the event’s focus compared to previous years: everything now seemed to be about putting anything you could possibly think of on a mobile device. Serious apps, silly apps, and those apps “you never [...]
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