Messaging

AT&T launches Fast-Pitch New England contest

Jason Ankeny — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:11:40 -0400

AT&T announced the launch of Fast-Pitch New England, a mobile application developer competition the operator describes as "akin to a high-tech version of American Idol." The contest, which runs from August 18 to September 30, seeks to evaluate GSM-based mobile apps according to innovation and originality, marketability, ease of use and user-interface design. Applications may be submitted here in three categories: Browsing, messaging or downloads. Fast-Pitch New England represents the first locally-based application competition in AT&T's history, and is open to legal residents of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island--finalists will be announced October 22 and invited to present their application and business cases to a panel of AT&T execs, a venture capital firm, a handset manufacturer and other selected industry notables on November 12. Each finalist will be given 15 minutes to pitch their application, with the grand prize winner earning $10,000 cash--in addition, the winning app will receive application placement on the AT&T devCentral website, and the operator will fast-track the app for wider distribution consideration on one of its mobile download portals. AT&T stresses that iPhone applications are not being solicited for Fast-Pitch New England.

For more on Fast-Pitch New England:
- read this release

Related articles:
AT&T Game Development contest launches
AT&T opens Universal Design methods to developers
AT&T hosting developer events at CTIA Wireless 2008

IBM extends Lotus email access to AT&T, Sprint phones

Jason Ankeny — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:58:31 -0400

Computing giant IBM announced an expansion of its relationship with operators including AT&T and Sprint to provide expanded email access to IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software via mobile handsets. AT&T and Sprint have certified for use by subscribers IBM's Lotus Notes Traveler software, which enables wireless replication of Lotus Notes email, calendaring and personal information management data on select smartphones including the AT&T 8525, AT&T Tilt, Moto Q Global, Palm Treo 750, PantechDuo (Mustang C810), Samsung Blackjack, and Samsung Blackjack II (i617) as well as Sprint's HTC Touch, Samsung ACETM, Palm Treo 700wx and Palm Treo 800w. Sprint customers may also access corporate email on select non-PDA devices. According to IBM, the move continues its efforts to promote mobile access to its open collaboration software--in a related announcement, the firm said it will partner with device maker Research In Motion to launch the full line of Lotus collaboration software along with IBM Cognos business intelligence software on BlackBerry handsets.

For more on IBM's Lotus expansion:
- read this release

Related articles:
IBM seeks to accelerate mobile web development
IBM launches mobile applications initiative

Funambol launches open-source development forge

Tue, 27 May 2008 06:59:58 -0400

Mobile messaging software provider Funambol announced the launch of the Funambol Forge, a new open-source repository proposed as a collaborative hub for developers. According to Funambol, the forge will enable developers and other community members to work on mobile projects, share technical tips and download software and documentation--positioned as a central access point for all of Funambol's community programs including Code Sniper and Phone Sniper, it will also house the source and binary code for the open source Funambol Community Edition. The forge will also offer both mailing lists and online forums, as well as an online support forum for the myFUNAMBOL portal. Funambol's open-source push email and PIM sync solutions support more than 1.5 billion mobile devices from manufacturers including Apple, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG.

For more on the Funambol Forge:
-read this release

QUICKLINKS: Swirly Space develops MMS app for iPhone; Opera Mini browser now available on BREW platform;

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 06:59:55 -0500

> Swirly Space develops MMS app for iPhone. Article

> Opera Mini browser now available on BREW platform. Release

> Linux Phone Standards Forum completes LiPS Release 1.0 specifications. Release

> Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior resigns, accepts same position at Cisco. Release

> Nokia announces Open C Challenge winners. Release

Sun, Ericsson detail IMS partnership

Tue, 15 May 2007 06:59:58 -0400

Sun and Ericsson are working together to expand the GlassFish server environment for use with wireless networks. Ericsson is slated to add IMS technology and improve developer support for the product. Sun open-sourced the J2EE-based GlassFish a year ago for use in enterprise applications. Article

SIP on S60 Smartphones

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:01:36 -0500

DevX has an introductory-level article on implementing SIP services on a S60 device. This is a nice, high-level overview that tackles some of the basics, like C++ versus Java. Article

Editor's Corner: Mobile Messaging

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 19:01:39 -0500

SMS isn't just for choosing your favorite Idol. Sybase 365 reports that the company delivered 25 billion SMS and MMS messages in 2006, nearly double the amount in 2005.

And it isn't just consumers doing the texting. According to an Aberdeen Group report, 80 percent of "best-in-class" businesses use an enterprise mobile messaging platform. The report is underwritten by Clickatell, Good Technology and Nokia, but I don't doubt its conclusion: "The adoption of enterprise mobile messaging solutions is driven by organizational needs to react more quickly, increase collaboration within the organization, make better decisions faster, and create value for customers."

A big-iron, unified messaging platform may make sense for some enterprises, but there are a variety of options for developers interested in less ambitious deployments like adding messaging to an existing application:

Kannel is a new open source package for delivering SMS and MMS, but it makes you do some of the heavy lifting setting it up.
Clickatell has a reputation as an inexpensive and scalable hosted option with libraries for a variety of languages.
busineSMS.com offers SDKs for targetting multimedia messaging via MMS, Nokia Smart Message and EMS.
mBlox offers large-scale international bulk SMS services.
And there's always the SMS via email option, which a new service called TeleFlip aims to simplify.
What messaging platforms do you use? Post your answer using the comment link below.

Messaging may not be as hot as mobile AJAX, but SMS (and, increasingly, MMS) messages are easy to use and work cross-platform and cross-carrier without much work. How many mobile technologies can you say that about? - Eli

Editor's Corner: Mobile Social Networking

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:01:39 -0500

Mobile Social Networking
Streaming video and full-track audio downloads may be the next big thing, but SMS is still the killer data feature for most consumers (and studies show SMS continues to grow). This is especially true for mobile social networking sites.

Last week, Yahoo soft-launched Mixd, a new mobile social networking site that uses an SMS shortcode to send group messages or pictures. Mixd is clearly targeting younger users who are looking for an easy way to connect a group of friends.

Yahoo's entry in this increasingly crowded market shouldn't be a complete shock. Just two months ago, a Yahoo VP said that mobile devices open up "a whole new universe of contributors and users" for online communities.

In a sense, Yahoo is just playing catch-up to Google, which purchased SMS-based networking site Dodgeball in May of 2005. Google hasn't done much with Dodgeball yet other than link Dodgeball profiles to Google accounts, but clearly there are big things in the works.

And in the up-and-coming category we have Zemble. Zemble, which was just profiled in Wired's blog, is pushing easy-to-use group messaging and reply-to-all functionality. Not a bad idea, but it remains to be seen if Zemble can turn those neat features into a community (and if they can do it before the Yahoo's and Google's of the world get there). - Eli

Editor's Corner

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:01:39 -0400

Nokia launches BlueTooth competitor

Nokia today announced a new low-power, short-range wireless networking technology called Wibree. Wibree is based on an open industry specification and offers ranges comparable to BlueTooth with a data rate of 1 Mbps. It's main value, however, is small size, low power, cheap chips.

Bob Iannucci of Nokia Research Center told DDJ's Blog that Wibree is better than BlueTooth because it uses variable length packets that allows it to scale much smaller than BlueTooth's fixed length packet system. The first commercial version of Wibree is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2007. Nokia will likely offer the technology as a standalone chip and a combo chip with BlueTooth.

I'm looking forward to learning more about Wibree. BlueTooth certainly leaves a lot to be desired. But what does this mean for other personal area networking technologies like Zigbee?

P.S. On October 17 at 2pm EST I'm going to be hosting a webinar titled, Web in Motion: Competitive Advantage through Mobile Web Applications with Sybase iAnywhere's Director of Engineering. Register now so you can learn how to improve your mobile enterprise applications. - Eli

UIEvolution to create mobile MySpace

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:01:38 -0400

UIEvolution has signed a deal to create a new mobile version of MySpace. MySpace is apparently seeking a "graphical" version of their website that can run on a variety of phones. So much for Helio.