a happier New Year for Australian fringsters?
There are increasing signs that Australian fringsters will have extra reasons to expect a happy new year in 2008 …with the big telcos coming to the party. Two recent articles in the <i>Sydney Morning Herald</i> provide indicators that the mobile data price cuts may be on the way.
In particular, check out “Mobile Data Price War Hots Up” and “Vodaphone Enters Mobile Data Price War”. For more on Vodaphone’s moves and a discussion of the telcos strategy, see here. To add icing to the cake, the Australian manager of Smartphone manufacturer HTC has gone public with his views that a price war is looming (see here).
Of course, we shouldn’t count our chickens before they’re hatched, but these seem to be good omens.
[Image below: “NYE 2006 v07”, from Vlad M. on Flickr.Used with permission]
fring AIM and Yahoo! Messenger makes IM world closer
fring keeps getting better.
fring is making it’s ‘presence‘ (*) known in the “chat” or “Instant Messaging” (IM) field. fring has supported Twitter microblogging, Skype Chat and GoogleTalk chat for some time. Recently fring added Yahoo! Messenger and AIM (or AOL Instant Messaging as it’s also known) to the family. AIM, along with the pioneering ICQ protocol, helped found the whole IM world. Today fring helps users tap into that world by providing ready access to the most popular IM protocols, with the exception of the proprietary Windows Live Messenger.
fring has added the text chat access to Yahoo! Messenger and AIM, not the voice access aspects of these services, which are carried by another set of protocols.
[Image: "stained glass instant message", from E.Vaughn on Flickr.Used with permission]
Skype chat, Yahoo! Messenger and AIM chat services are all based on proprietary protocols, in the last two cases, namely YMSG and OSCAR . GoogleTalk in contrast is based on an Open Standards protocol, namely XMPP . So fring, as a mobile chat client (i.e. a chat client for your mobile phone) gives you access to the most popular open and two of the three most popular proprietary protocols.
So fring is helping to bring the IM world closer with AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and SkypeChat all accessible from the one neat integrated package. Your fring contact list merges all your contacts from diverse networks.. and diverse IM protocols.
(*) P.S. In the IM world “presence” refers to the ability to see who from your contact list is on-line now.
crunch time, party time
The end of the year spells “party time”, and we’re not just talking about New Year’s Eve celebrations. fring has been nominated for this year’s “Crunchies” awards.
As ‘VentureBeat’ (see article here)
“The Crunchies is a joint effort between us, GigaOm, Read/Write Web and TechCrunch, and aims to recognize the best technology innovations and start-up achievements.Some 82,000 nominations were made for companies in each of twenty categories. Five companies in each category have made it to the final vote…”
This is the first year the Crunchies have been awarded and fring is in the running under the ‘best mobile startup’ category. Besides fring, the other finalist s include AdMob (a pioneer in mobile advertising), Loopt (a mobile social network that use geotagging to help you find your friends), Shozu (a service that enables you to directly publish camera phone pictures to the web) and Twitter (a fring partner and the pioneer micoblogging service). It’s an honour to be nominated alongside such distinguished peers.
You can check out all of “The Crunchies” nominees online here. And you can vote for your favourite mobile nominee here.
It’s worthwhile to check out the various categories and submit your votes. I’m sure you’ll find some interesting new applications, gadgets and services, as well as some of your favourites, like fring.
mobiles make life tougher for pollsters
One interesting aspect of the proliferation of mobile phones, is that traditional public opinion polling may have become less reliable. At least that’s what the New York Times reports here
It seems the pollsters’ methodology includes validating preliminary results by random calls to residents in the voting districts being surveyed. But as mobile phone number schemes aren’t geographic, this shift in consumer behaviour has undermined the pollsters’ accuracy.
In the recent Australian federal elections, the pollsters had to experiment with new techniques to capture the mobile voter (see article here ), but it seems like it is still early days and more experimentation is required. In short they need to develop a new standard.
But things don’t stand still. With the increasing integration of the internet and mobile telephony, the growth of VoIP and mVoIP services like fring, my guess is that the pollsters might need to go back to the drawing board.
may you live in interesting times
In a speech in Cape Town, South Africa, on June 7, 1966, Robert F. Kennedy said, “There is a Chinese curse which says. “May he live in interesting times.” Like it or not, we live in interesting times..” (source)
The idea that “to live in interesting times” is a Chinese curse, is something of an urban myth. The Chinese don’t seem to know about it. But whatever the origins of the phrase, we do live in interesting times.
The new web 2.0 and cell phone technologies have only really just begun to change the world, and even hard core technologists and business leaders have a hard time imagining how it will all develop. I have absolutely no idea… but I find watching it all evolve fascinating. Also fascinating to watch are two great mashup applications, Twittervision and Flickrvision .
Both of these mashups are from software designer and blogger David Troy. The 3D version of Flickrvision is just astounding. Both Twittervision and Flickrvision give viewers an insight into the new worlds being weaved now by the convergence of web, networking, mobile telephony and cameraphone technologies. Where will it all lead? Who knows? But it will certainly be interesting. And that’s not a curse.
GTalk plus fring …a translator to go
GoogleTalk’s new language translation features (discussed here) are new utilities that fringsters may enjoy exploring. The advantage of activating language translation on GTalk is, of course, that fringsters can access them on the go.
The new GTalk service promises what may turn out to be, for fring users, a translator in your cell phone. I have only had opportunity to perform a few experiments so far and hope to report in more detail soon.
Montre cet espace!
观看这次太空 !
iPhones gobble up the web
Iphones are taking over the web. Well, not really. But they are impressive performers in their web demand. So says the WSJ.
“IPhone owners embraced the browser to the extent that they represented 0.09% of all Web pages viewed in November. That doesn’t sound like much, but consider that through September, Apple had only sold 1.4 million iPhones. As a point of comparison, devices running every version of Windows mobile operating system combined made up 0.06% of Web page views…”
Smartphone generation gap …not so gappy
It’s a myth to think there is a “digital divide” between the now greying (or already greyed) “baby boomer” generation and Gen X and Gen Y. At least when it comes to mobile phones. Or so says a recent marketing survey, see here.
In fact the survey finds only marginal differences in mobile adoption rates.
“Gen Y (ages 18-24) leads the pack at 85 percent, followed closely by Gen X (25-44) at 82 percent, younger Baby Boomers (45-54) at 80 percent, and older Baby Boomers (55-64) at 79 percent.”
Surprisingly there isn’t even much of a gap when it comes to take up of smartphone technology.
“Although more Gen Y-ers and Gen X-ers have feature-packed phones that allow the user to connect to people and information in a variety of ways, the Boomers are not too far behind:
51 percent of Gen Y-ers say they have phones that can access the mobile internet, followed by 47 percent of Gen X-ers, 39 percent of younger Boomers and 32 percent of older Boomers.”
Gilgandra goes Wi-fi
One of fring’s partners is myKP . They’ve recently been awarded a contract by Gilgandra Shire Council in New South Wales’ centre-west to establish a community / public wi-fi network. See story here.
Gilgandra , population 2700, a farming centre, has been heavily impacted by the drought over recent years . Gilgandra, joins with Sydney’s Lane Cove and Pittwater Local Councils , in establishing free wi-fi in their town centres.
Hopefully Gilgandra’s forward thinking should inspire other rural communities to add wi-fi , and tech generally. to their future plans.
tough stuff
The Sonim XP-1 just might be the world’s toughest mobile phone. So says ‘trendhunter.com’.
I’m not sure, but this video is a tough act to follow.
It’s likely that a specialised market for rugged mobile phones for use by tradesmen, farmers …and the incredibly clumsy… will develop in the years to come.
