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Mobile Technology Evangelists

According to several of the most respected on-line sources, including Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Wired and Information Week ( the original source of the information seems to be The Wall Street Journal), Microsoft plans to announce next monday a brand new Windows Mobile Application Store.

Monday 16th February seems to be the chosen day. Well, it looks pretty clever, since Steve Ballmer is making a keynote presentation in Mobile World Congress, taking place in Barcelona.

Along with this new service, Microsoft is also presenting My Phone service, an on-line repository of personal information for mobile devices. This seems to be true, since the official website has been up and running during the last weeks (in fact, it was discovered by fault, with the subsequent confirmation by Microsoft).

Don’t expect details of the new Microsoft Service. Nothing has been disclosed yet. Nevertheless, everything seems to be true.

I believe Microsoft will use this keynote to present more products and services, like Windows Mobile 6.5, My Phone, and so on… Last year’s MWC announcementes were, you know, disappointing. Hope they have learned the lesson. At least, Steve Ballmer will be present this year, and it assures the show. If you don’t what I’m talking about, check this video.

Via Wired, WallStreet Journal, Information Week

Ladies & Gentlemen, The President of the “new” United States.

Is Mr Obama a geek? or just a 21 century citizen?. Why can’t he use his cellphone anymore?, Is this a matter of National Security or just there’s not a safe way to call yet?

Two weeks ago, New York Times reported about Obama´s love of Blackberry. Next January, once he become the President of the United States of America, he will have to put an end to this romance. Why? USA Security Agencies don’t trust Blackberry system.

“For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.”

If you remember, In UK the BBC admitted that it had been forced to suspend its Blackberry email service after senior executives reported portions of other people’s electronic conversations appearing in their own messages.

In France, French ministerial workers was banned from using BlackBerries by the General Secretariat for National Defence (SGDN), responsible for French national security. RIM issued a strong defense of its network, claiming  Blackberry’s security mechanisms – AES 256 – as “the strongest commercial cryptography available to any vendor in the world”.

Even Indian Goverment put pressure on RIM to provide security agencies with a way around its encryption mechanism. They demanded either a “master key” into data and e-mails sent from the company’s BlackBerry devices or making RIM servers able to be monitored by Indian security agencies.

The source of these problems is the transport and delivery mechanism used by Blackberry. In order to make Blackberry´s Push service work, RIM integrates his servers with carriers. This way, mails are sent through Blackberry servers placed on UK and USA before you receive them. If you were responsible of your country’s national or presidential security, Would you trust a system working that way?

So, what can Obama do?
What does Obama need?

You will find the answer in this blog very soon!

Thanks to appleBlog, we have get to an interesting post in DaringFireball, where they analize the use of private APIs on the implementation of the new voice search feature, on the last reselease of Google Mobile. This might set a precedent in the use of private APIs on iPhone.

More accurately, the point is the use of proximity sensor API. It seems Google is using an undocumented API call in order to know when the user talks on the microphone.

The way iPhone triggers voice activation is so smart:

1. Move the iPhone.
2. Trigger the proximity sensor next to the speaker at the top of the iPhone.

No problem with the first step. But it seems that threre is no way to know when second step takes place. I don’t know iPhone APIs in depth, so I won’t dare to talk about the technical analysis.

The important fact is that, in theory, use of undocument APIs are not allowed if you want your application on App Store. So, Google has been given permission to use it, or… someone in Apple did not realize they were breaking the rules.

The question is: in case Google actually got this special permission from Apple, will other less powerful companies have the same opportunity?

Via appleBlog
Link DaringFireball

Thanks to Gizmovil, we have get noticed of the release of Momail in Spain. Now we can enjoy the push mobile email solution offered by MomailSystems, a Sweden based company.

The Momail service is now available in 14 countries in Europe. A beta release is available in 20+ more countries.

Momail offers free and easy-to-use push mobile email that integrates with all your current accounts. Some features of the system are:

• No client installation. The service rely on built-in email client.
• 1100 handsets suppported.
• Email message optimization.
• Attachments ( and optimization of the attachments)
• Push email (by means of IMAP IDLE)

It looks really fine. I will give it a try!

We bet mobile email will become a mainstream application in the next months, as the flat rates for data become affordable. And we, of course, are talking about PUSH email.

And, going beyond email, it will allow the boom of push-based mobile applications, in a broader sense.

Via Gizmovil
Link Momail.es

It´s time to throw away that old fashioned, big and annoying Business Card holders and other storing methods. Forget storing, start digitalizing. B-Scanner allows you to scan and browse all the cards you need, all bundled on a tiny device.

Read the rest of this entry »

Introducing TB · Solutions last News Bulletin nº3, in this new issue you can check who we are, what we do and which are our solutions. Of course you can download it in the link below. In addition to this TBS releases its new web site. Now TBS brings you all its information with a new web design.

Download TBS Bulletin nº3

8.000.000 iPhones sold this year, 5,649,000 iPhone 3Gs added to the 2.4 million first-generation iPhones the company reported it had sold in the first six months of 2008. That means Apple has manufactured more than 8 million iPhones this year. Even if we plus this number with 2007 sales, Apple has sold 11.71 million iPhones worldwide.

WOW

Therefore that means, not only that Apple make lot of money with its device, it means that Apple create and market its products like no other to reach with them as a great success, even history icons, and of course it obtains this.

Congratulations Apple for this great success, and for bringing us this great machine.

Via Fortune

Ipoki is a Spanish social network based on localization. Its main service is sharing your position with your friends in real time and tracking your buddies location in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Plugins for Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 and Blackberry are available. But, if your device does not include GPS, you can update your position on your web browser.

Your location information can be used for automatically geoloc your photographs in Flickr and other web services.

Now, Ipoki has developed a new service they call Life Streaming, that generates a KML file that includes all the positions you have recorded and adds the related items to each position – Flickr photos, videos, etc …

It’s one more example in the field of location based services, that for sure will be commonplace and very appreciated by mainstream users.

Via Loogic
Link Ipoki

Probably only a few of you readers know who Michael Mace is.  Well, I think that he will introduce himself better than me:

“I’m a principal at Rubicon Consulting, where we help tech companies solve tough strategy and marketing problems. Drop by and sign up for our newsletter. I’m former Chief Competitive Officer and VP of Product Planning at Palm, VP of Strategic Marketing at PalmSource, director of Mac Platform Marketing at Apple, and served in a lot of other roles. For more info on me, visit my website.”

Pretty Impressve, isn’t it? Apart from these, he writes a personal blog named “Mobile Oportunity” where he analyses, very precissely I must admit, key events related to mobile world.  He is not very prolific (Michael, if you read this, please, don’t take it as a critic ), one post a week, but his posts are always worth reading.

One of the his last posts has been specially interested for me. It talks about Psion, a company we could cald Symbian’s father. The post mentions an extremelly interesting article by The Register about Psion, which is also worth reading.

Please, take this advice and spent (not waste) some time reading both articles.  You will not regret it.

Link Mobile Oportunity – The end of the dream
Link The Register – Psion the last computer

This news has gone unnoticed but in really specialized blogs. Openwave’s mobile clients business has been acquired by Purple Labs. This includes Openwave’s browser and client messaging products including all code, patents, customer contracts and the engineering team.

Openwave was the leading mobile browser vendor few years ago. But his business has vanished as WAP has been fading away and mobile versions of desktop browsers (Webkit, Opera) has appeared on the scene. This explains the low price of the acquisition: just $30 million.

Purple Labs is a French company backed by European venture capital firms and is the only independent software vendor with a complete Linux solution for mass-market 3G phones. The deal will provide them not only the technical assets but an entry point to very important customers.

A very insightful analysis on this topic, as usual, on VisionMobile.

Via Moconews
Link VisionMobile