SevenClick! Mobile Technology Evangelists

Microsoft have chosen AT&T to launch the world’s first Surface into retail.

With this 30 inch multi touch screen, costumer could learn more about the mobile devices showed at stores by only placing it atop the Surface. They’ll also have the ability to explore interactive coverage maps. Later, users will be able to drag ringtones, graphics and video and drop it into “the phones.” Amazing!

This service will be availabe at New york, Atlanta, San Antonio, and San Francisco stores next April 17th.

Take a look to the entire picture gallery or watch this video to know more of about this “vaporware”.

Via EngadgetMobile

Congratulations to BlackBerry users! Cortado in cooperation with Box.net, the online storage provider, now offers BlackBerry users 1 GB of free, additional storage space.

With the new solution “Cortado Connect for Box.net” Cortado and Box.net have optimized access to storage services for BlackBerry devices. The software offers all BlackBerry users the ability to manage both their local and online storage as well as transfer files between them.

Moreover, file sharing is an important feature of this new service. To access the service, you just need a BlackBerry Internet Service account. The storage can be used for storing music, video, and other data files

We hope they will soon provide a similar tool for Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, Palm, …

Via Gizmovil

La Caixa presented last week the first iPhone enabled Mobile Banking site in Spain. The service works for iPhone and iPod Touch, and presents the aspect shown in the upper picture. The new service includes Línea Abierta, online banking, and ServiCaixa.

Congratulations!!! La Caixa has managed to be the first bank to announce an iPhone Mobile Banking site. And I say “announce”, because we have tested it and is far from being what it’s supposed to be an iPhone version of a Mobile Banking site.  Just a few adaptations to the mobile banking service is not enough for an iPhone version.

I suspect that the strategy of La Caixa is to launch an actual iPhone improved version for the next release, including AJAX and an interface specially designed to take advantage of the multi touch features of the iPhone. They announce new features for new realeases like office and cashier finding, LKXA, stock manage… We’ll evaluate new releases when launched, but from now on, we only consider this announce as an effort to be the first bank to have such service.

Link La Caixa Press Note

I love Fring (in fact, if you have read my last posts related to it you could have find it out by yourself ). It’s one of the most interesting applications I’ve ever found for my PDA Phone.

Now, Fring announces a great feature: file transfer. The functionality works from mobile to mobile and mobile to pc. It currently supports fring to fring and fring to MSN, and viceversa. More protocols to be supported soon.

Forget about MMS, bluetooth, infrared or cable connections to send your pictures to your PC. Just Fring them!!!!

Link Fring Blog

While Europe and the U.S.A. are still studying why the should deploy NFC systems, Japan and some other asian countries (i.e. Taiwan, South Korea) are improving it and launching the next NFC generation.

One piece of example is the system to be deployed by Gemalto (Taiwan) which  integrates NFC inside the SIM card itself.  This technology will greatly help to spread the use of the NFC as users will not be forced to replace their devices, just their SIM cards.  Moreover, it is supossed to have a wide range of action, from banks, transport companies and many other service providers, starting in the second middle of this year.

However, there are some doubts still unsolved like whether the phone carriers are in the mood for launching this service and how personal information and security are supossed to be processed.

Read the oficial press release here.

Japan is several steps beyond Occidental markets in terms of technology adoption.  Meanwhile, here in Europe, we are still discussing the best technology to establish mobile payments,  Japanese market have already adopted a valid solution in the form of Sony Felica cards.

DoCoMo is launching next friday a mobile solution for office security based on Osaifu Keitaki phones and Sony Felica cards. With these mobile phones, subscribing companies will be able to control access, open doors, buy food and even unlock computers. Just with the mobile.

How long will we have to wait for a similar service?

Via CellPhone Beat

Usually, the mobile phone user becomes aware of the quality of his / her purchase after some hours of using and testing the device. If something went wrong, it is very likely to be too late for a change or a refund.

Now, Mobile Complete (the world’s leading provider of mobile application testing, monitoring and support solutions for mobile devices and applications) has launched a new service calle “TryPhone” which allows the user to try and test more than 1000 mobile devices before buying them.

I’m my opinion, what is most interest is that this service is not based on flash nor emulation. Actually it remotely connects to real mobile handsets, accesible over the Internet using the award-winning DeviceAnywhere Direct-to-Device technology.

If you want to give it a try go to TryPhone website.

As NTT DoCoMo claims in a press release, NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and Google Inc. jointly announced that they formed a partnership that includes providing search services, search-related advertisement and potential applications to i-mode™ users.

With this agreement, Google claims to better fulfill their mission of “organizing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”, since they add their services the 48 million mobile Internet users currently subscribed to DoCoMo’s users.

But the agreement don’t stop at present, but puts a look at future services. Explicitly, they talk about new mobile marketing services for i-mode and bringing Android based handsets to the Japanese market.

This agreement is pretty logical because Google and NTT DoCoMo were already members of the Open Handset Alliance, leaded by Google.

Link NTTDoCoMo

As third generation mobile phones are becoming more and more popular, many of the actual multimedia services are launching (or upgrading) their mobile versions.

The latest one to do that, is the video giant Youtube, which is expanding its mobile video collection. In fact, the size of this collection will grow from a few thousands to tens of millions videos.

Moreover, Youtube is expanding the functionality available in its mobile service, by allowing the user to rate and comment videos.

The point of this expansion, is to reach the estimate 100 million users worldwide who are using 3G “smart phones” and the new users who will join this community in the next months.

Via Cellular News.

This week has been quite bussy for the Nokia Beta Labs peoble as they have released two new beta services: Location Tagger and Mobile Site Widgets.

Location Tagger.

This small application, which runs on some high-end S60 3rd edition Nokia devices, allows the user to tag pictures previously captured from the Camera application and add geographical coordinates from GPS. This information is stored in the EXIF header of the pictures.

The next step is quite obvious. The user will be able to send the pictures, usually to any of the picture upload most famous services (Flickr, Panoramio,…). If this service is integrated with Google Earth,l ike for instance Picasa, the pictures will be displayed in a map showing the user’s position, from they were taken.

Read more info at Nokia Location Tagger web site.

Mobile Site Widgets.

This set of applications is built on top of Mobile Web Server technology. Their aim is to run some applications on the PC showing information about the phone and provide access to some features like SMS sending. The goal of these widgets is to integrate the mobile phone into the mobile user’s “desktop experience” by providing him / her with improved UI features of the PC (screen & keyboard).

Moreover, this platform can be extended by the user by developing additional widgets. Here is the with some tutorials and how-tos.Read more info at My Mobile Site Widgets web site.