Here they come: Motorola preparing its own Android phone

October 20, 2008 · Filed Under Recent News · Comment 

Motorola has been a phone maker on the ropes since their home run with the RAZR, but they may be heading to break their drought very soon. It appears to be gearing up to release a social networking smartphone, and it will use Android, Google’s widely hyped open source OS, according to BusinessWeek. 

Motorola’s Android phone, according to the report, is expected to feature a fully featured touch screen similar to the iPhone, as well as a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and functions to connect to such social-networking sites as MySpace and Facebook easily. Will it be a clone of the G1, the recently released phone from HTC? Reports indicate it will be fairly similar.

The phone is anticipated to make its U.S. debut in April/May of 2009, according to sources, which noted that carriers have already seen spec sheets and images of the devices and have tentatively agreed to carry the phone. 

Motorola’s Android phone will likely carry a price of $150-$180 (with a two-year contract) according to the report, which is fairly reasonable for a phone with this feature set.

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Blackberry vs. iPhone - Who will win?

September 15, 2008 · Filed Under Technology · Comment 

The batteground has been marked, the weapons are sharpened. The war has begun.

Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry handheld e-mail device, is moving deeper into the consumer market, where it is sure to run up against tough competition from Apple iPhone, which has expanded its reach this year into various international markets.

Earlier this year, RIM forged a partnership with social networking site Facebook that lets BlackBerry device owners access information from their Facebook pages.

Now, RIM has announced partnerships with a host of new companies that will give BlackBerry owners access to Windows Live Search, Google, getting tickets on Ticketmaster, MySpace, and TiVo. This gives it a huge head start against Apple, but RIM lacks their “flash factor” and deep advertising pockets. The bevy of partnership announcements is just the latest move by RIM to tap into the consumer market.

A look at RIM’s business and how it’s changed over the last few years, specifically with the Pearl handset, they’re clearly trying to expand from a traditional enterprise/company customer base to a broader consumer market, and the aggressive nature of these partnerships indicate the battle lines being drawn against the iPhone.

They still have their core business built around e-mail and messaging end of things, but they’ve been adding support for video and cameras, and all the things that fit into the consumer side of the market for a while now. The partnerships with Microsoft’s Windows Live Search and Google have an obvious goal - to get BlackBerry users the fastest, most relevant, location-based search results possible; something the iPhone had been criticized for early on in its product cycle.

The partnerships with MySpace, Ticketmaster, TiVo and Slacker serve the same purpose as RIM’s alliance earlier this year with Facebook — to make the BlackBerry a “lifestyle” device.

It’s made a difference: Like many of its competitors in the handheld market, RIM is growing very quickly. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2008, RIM reported earnings of US$1.7 billion on $6 billion in revenue, up from earnings of $800 million on $3 billion in revenue in the previous year.

One thing is clear: the iPhone will get stiff competition in the smartphone arena from RIM.

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Twitter-licious?

February 29, 2008 · Filed Under Technology · Comment 

What Is Twitter?

Twitter is the newest craze to hit the blogging and social networking world. It is a social networking site that allows users to send messages 140 characters long to friends who are on their Twitter friends list. Twitter resembles  messaging applications like Yahoo! messenger because it allows users to communicate using short texts, called ‘tweets’.

Users can create a profile on the twitter website, invite friends to their friends list, and start sending their messages to the website via SMS and sending it to 40404.  These messages will then be relayed to the people on their friends list. It is entirely up to you if you want to send a message to a hundred other people, or to ten.

If you are on somebody else’s friends list here’s the low-down on what you’ll be seeing (and often!). Every time your friend decides to send an update, these updates are instantly displayed on his site, and is sent to you, if your phone, email, browser, or IM service if you are one of the people who have signed up to receive his updates.

If you want to stop receiving updates on your phone, you can do this by keying in OFF and sending the message to 40404. You can turn Twitter ‘off’ if you are in habit of doing some messaging at specific hours of the day. Some people like to send messages at night, as a way to relax and unwind.

Twitter is the brainchild of Jack Dorsey. It was originally a research and development project of his start-up company Obvious LL in 2006. The service rose to popularity when it received the South by SouthWest Web Award in the blog category. By 2007, Twitter Inc., a separate entity from Obvious LLC, was born, with Jack Dorsey as its CEO.

What made Twitter so popular in so short a time is that it is a very simple and easy way to broadcast anything to your friends (and stalkers). It has often been referred to as micro blogging since you can only so much with 140 characters. Despite this, more and more users are seeing Twitter’s potential not only as a way to inform others about what you are up to, but also as a great marketing tool.

Twitter has been greeted by many with mixed reactions. Those who have been using social networking and messaging services see Twitter as one of the many start-up services that work exactly like the others before it. As of May 2007 there were 111 other sites that looked and worked like Twitter online.

Others say that Twitter is but another addition to the ties that are pulling us all closer together, which may be a good thing for some. Some people, however, think that services like this are already too much of a good thing, and that they can easily make us feel ‘too connected’ for our own good.

But despite this Twitter has a host of fans.  Many blogs and social sites now have twitter plugins.

One could say it’s twitter-ific!

 

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An Overview of Social Platforms and the OpenSocial Initiative

February 19, 2008 · Filed Under Technology · Comment 

It seems that everyone today webpage that ends up being their own persona to the world.  Be it a superstar athlete, a musician, an actress, or just some guy down the block, everyone seems to be connected and blogging on-line.  

And anyone who is anyone has a Myspace or Facebook page these days to connect with their fans, their friends, or even nobody in particular. (60 Million active facebook users vs. 110 Million for myspace)   

For the purposes of this article we’ll keep it simple and leave the discussion with the two giants in the industry. 

Facebook made waves last year by opening their API to allow for user created Social Networkfacebook apps.  This created a surge in popularity for Facebook, as well as a mini virtual market for small casual applications that run the gamut from trivia games to trivial time-wasters. 

Myspace is rumored to announce their own custom application system in the very near future.

These changes have transitioned both myspace an facebook into more of a platform then just websites.  The user base already existed in large (large) numbers, but now the content is much more engaging, customizable and dynamic.  The social platform tempts advertisers as the holy grail of marketing, and users were hooked before they even knew it. 

Of course Google couldn’t stand on the sidelines very long.  Google’s OpenSocial is just the latest attempt to join in the fray of the white-hot social platform development trend. Launched in November 2007, Google released a collection of API’s built to work together and to standard the core and method which websites and services work and speak together. 

You can think of Open Social as a similar initiative for social platforms as Open ID is for User IDS. While Facebook and MySpace got an initial headstart in launching the Social Networking revolution, Google has actually made large strides into the medium in just a few short months.   

Since the launch, OpenSocial has gathered support from the likes of LinkedIn, hi5, XING, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning, among others to create a huge conglomerate of social networking sites and applications that are all now linking together to form one community that uses one standard for all the software applications used across it.   

Facebook, with a reported 60 million users, doesn’t seem to be that worried yet since they believe their users are satisfied with the service and the applications and netware that run over it.   Sooner or later, however, as OpenSocial and the network it is creating across the internet continues to build and gain size, the two will almost inevitably be forced to join together or clash over user bases that will be huge. 

Google has already extended an olive branch according to some reports, and Microsoft, which owns Facebook, rebuffed their offer at a partnership.   

As the recent Open ID initiative demonstrated last year, there is strong movement in the internet community to bring barriers down and let users bring a distinct digital identity with them wherever they go electronically.  It remains to be seen if while users are beginning to enjoy seamlessly moving about the internet with one sole digital identity, if they will have any enthusiasm for a protracted trade war between two conglomerates determined to rule the internet social networking community. 

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