If you’ve been reading ThinkMobile (formerly MobileContentToday) for a while, you know that I’m fascinated by mobile interfaces with real world objects like guitars, LEGO, chemical sensors, and (in the previous blog entry here), a ECG body sensor. Naturally, I had to spread the word about this project described on the ProjectProto blog.
You’ve probably used products that work the freemium model. Flickr has Flickr Pro, Pandora has Pandora One, and Google has tons of stuff you’ve got to pay for. And it’s all floating on a big foundation of free.
Now media companies, having let all the content out of barn, are eager to get some of it back in and put a price tag on it. Join us to find out how they’re doing it at our upcoming Freemium Summit, October 25 in NYC. Speakers include Anne Driscoll (Ning), Ryan Holmes (Hootsuite), Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare), and Brent Chudoba (SurveyMonkey).
You’ve heard of LANs (local area networks), WANs (Wide Area Networks), perhaps even PANs (personal area networks). But, how about BANs (Body Area Networks)? That’s what New Scientist reports on here:
Extremely low power electrocardiogram sensor nodes are attached to the body and transmit data wirelessly to Android powered phones. A custom hardware interface on the Android phone receives this wireless data. The systems developer, Julien Penders, notes that other types of sensors could be used in this way too.
If you have a smartphone with a camera, you’ve probably noticed the number of barcode scanning apps for them and, perhaps, the increased use of barcodes (more specifically QR codes) specially provided to provide an easy way to guide smartphone browsers to websites associated with advertisements in magazines and even websites (barcode scan the web page on your friend’s notebook computer, for example). You may have also noted that both the popular bit.ly URL shortener and the relatively new Google goo.gl shortener have simply ways to create QR code web links (and a “.qr” to the end of any of their shortened URLs).
So, is it any wonder that mobile barcode scanning spiked 700% since the end of 2009? That’s what ReadWriteWeb reports based on a study by ScanBuy.
I’m not quite sure why Android users make up the largest group of barcode scanners (45%) followed by far behind by BlackBerry (27%) and iPhone (15%). Any theories? All of these platforms appear to have good free barcode scanning apps.
Do you check to see if a hotel has WiFi in its rooms before making a reservation. And, if that hotel does not provide WiFi, do you look for other hotels in the area that do? This decision process has gone from rare to very common in just the past few years. And, there is a similar development in the process of choosing airline flight now. If you prefer to fly on a WiFi-enabled flight, TechCrunch reports on a new website that helps you find these flights.
There were approximately 8 million Android phones sold in 2009. As of early August, Google said that about 200,000 Android phones were sold every day. That works out to roughly 6 million units per month. If we assume that an average (probably underestimated) of 75000 Android phones were sold every day between January and June of this year, that works out to about 13.5 million phones. So, if 6 million phones were sold each month between July and September, we can add 18 million to 13.5 and guess around 32.5 million Android phones were sold so far in 2010. If we add the sales of 2009 and 2010 (so far) together, that amounts to 40.5 million Android phones. Google reports that 33.4% of all Android phones currently runs Froyo (Android OS 2.2). That works out to 13.527 million phones. Froyo is needed to run Adobe’s Flash for Android. So, if we assume that this report in ZDNet is correct:
Only 7.4% of Froyo-powered phones have Flash installed. And, those people with Flash installed on their Android phones will probably find that some significant Flash-powered sites still aren’t viewable on their phones as noted by ZDNet’s Larry Dignan: My 7 year old wants to stay at the park. My 4 year old wants to leave. I try and buy my oldest some time and hand her the smartphone pointed to a Disney.com video or NickJr. Dora and Mickey are a great way to pass the time. The rub: Disney didn’t quite work with Flash Player on Android. Neither did AddictingGames.com.
So, here’s the thing. There are a lot of Flash-less sites that provide nicely formatted content for your Android phone’s capable browser. Go find them!
So, what is so puzzling about this news about Nokia’s attempt to become relevant in the smartphone space with the touchscreen N900? The N900 is based on Nokia’s defunct attempt to create a Linux based smartphone: Maemo. Maemo was previously used by Nokia’s relatively well regarded but relatively low selling Internet tablets. Maemo merged with Intel’s Moblin project. This merged project is named MeeGo.
The reason why these two projects could be merged is because both Maemo and Moblin are Linux based. MeeGo is still in a pre-production development phase. This means that this dual booting N900 dual boots into two different but related Linux operating systems. The closest analogy I can think of is dual-booting a PC with Windows XP and a beta-release of Windows Vista.
So, how interesting is this development? If you are a Nokia fan, this is great stuff. You can run a production release (Maemo) with the option to reboot and test a beta release of the next generation platform.
1. Apple’s iPhone is heading to Verizon Wireless in the not too distant future
2. We may long for the day of AT&T’s relatively simple pricing schemes after Verizon gets their complex pricing structures into motion at full steam
Let’s take a look at just one iPad bundle and one 3G data plan.
A 16GB WiFi-only iPad bundled with a Verizon MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot will cost $629.99. The iPad alone is $499. If you buy a MiFi alone with a two year contract, its cost is free for new subscribers. iPads can be purchased without a MiFi from Verzion. But, there’s no advantage to buying one from Verizon compared to Apple’s own store.
Verizon is offering what looks like a no-contract month-to-month 3G plan similar to AT&T’s offering. However, while AT&T provides 2GB of data for $25 per month, Verizon’s plan only provides 1GB for $20. Verizon’s plan does have the advantage of letting you use the MiFi with devices other than the iPad, however. If you have an Android, BlackBerry or other smartphone from Verizon that can act as a mobile hotspot, Verizon has a $20 month plan (in addition to your phone’s data fee) that provides 2GB per month. So, you should skip Verizon’s iPad data plan if you have one of these phones.
Getting and interpreting data for consumer electronics is a tricky task. It is not just a matter of how you count, it is also a matter of what you count. Fortunately for us, the Pew Internet & American Life Project does a very good job in both areas and tends to report in much more detail than we normally see.
Pew’s data assigns some interesting numbers to what many of us have guessed but could not validate: Tablets and e-book readers have a lot more room to grow (sell) than nearly saturated consumer electronics categories like cell phones (85%), deskop (59%) and laptop computers (52%). E-book reades are owned by only (relatively speaking) by 5% of American adults while tablets are owned by 4%. Assuming that most of these tablets are iPads which only started selling in April of this year, it is interesting to note that e-book readers and tablets are neck-and-neck.
The best predictor (I use the word loosely – the relationship is probably more like a correlation) of computer ownership (desktop or laptop), e-book reader, and tablets is household income. Households making more than $75,000 tend to be most likely to own these devices.
However, the best predictor of owning a cell phone, MP3 player or game console is age (18 to 29). I should note that cell phone ownership is also highly related to household income.
I love it when my productivity tools work well with each other, and thanks to an update today from Livescribe, it is now easier to import notes I write with the Livescribe Echo pen into Evernote. If you are not familiar with Livescribe, they sell a couple of pens, the Echo and Pulse, that record handwriting and audio.
To record handwriting you must write on special paper that is covered with thousands of little dots so small that you barely see them, but the camera in the pen sees the movement through the dots and records the movement as your handwriting. The pen also has a microphone to record audio and the software synchronizes what you are writing to the audio so that when you play it back you hear what was spoken at exactly the same time as when you were writing. Combining audio and handwriting is great for taking notes during presentations or lectures, which is why the Livescribe pens are popular amongst college students and business people.
All of your handwritten and audio notes are stored in the Livescribe Desktop software and you can share notes by exporting them into PDF and image files, which you could then e-mail or store in Evernote. The latest version of the Livescribe Desktop software for Windows (there is also a version for OS X) now includes Evernote as a sharing option. When you click Share and select With Evernote, you have options to share the entire notebook or just the page. I was confused the first time that I tried sharing with Evernote because the Pencast dialog appears with the Share button grayed out. Before you can send the page to Evernote you need to enter a title for the page in the Pencast Name field. I think Livescribe ought to create a specific dialog for sharing with Evernote to make it obvious what you are supposed to do.
Pages that you select to share with Evernote are exported into PNG image files and then automatically uploaded to your Evernote web account. You then synchronize the Evernote desktop software with your account to get the note into your Evernote notebook on your computer. Evernote does character recognition and indexing of handwriting in images so that you can search for what you write. As an example of how Livescribe stores notes in Evernote, I have posted my notes from the Windows Phone 7 launch into my public notebook. You can see how well Evernote’s character recognition works by entering “wonderfully” without the quotes in the search box.
If you are interested in getting your own Livescribe pen, you can find them online and at Best Buy starting at $129, and you can purchase notebooks in a variety of sizes.
Opera Mobile for Android will support pinch to zoom, which is not available in Opera Mini, and it will take advantage of hardware acceleration. I think another difference between the two is that Opera Mini works with proxy servers hosted by Opera that retrieve web pages and compress them before sending them to the device, while Opera Mobile is a stand-alone web browser. While page compression significantly speeds up page loads, it also means the page is flowing through Opera’s servers, so you might not want to use Opera Mini to retrieve confidential information. In fact, I believe Opera Mini is not capable of loading secure web pages using HTTPS.
