mBillionth Congress, Expo & Awards

Rewarding the best mobile innovations…

Innovative ideas

You can now be a mobile application developer, thanks to Nokia’s new Ovi App Wizard beta. The new service doesn’t require a software development kit — known as an SDK in developer parlance — or other downloads. Instead, users just plug in the URL of their Twitter feed, Facebook account or RSS feed, upload a logo, answer a few questions and with an “I Dream of Jeannie” head-bob, become an app developer in under 24 hours. Based on the user-generated video below, the actual work effort required to create an application is around five minutes.

The Ovi App Wizard takes the user-submitted information and creates an app that can be “delivered on more than 100 Nokia device models in more than 180 countries around the world.” Software can be free, ad-supported or priced according to the user’s specifications.

Source: Gigaom

At the Abu Dhabi Media Summit last month, Google  CEO Eric Schmidt was the biggest speaker of them all. And he surely made the desired impression, deftly handling some critical questions from the audience. His focus for the talk was on innovation, specifically on Google’s, and its efforts in the mobile space. His statement, that Google now starts all product development as mobile-centric, got a lot of play on Twitter.

Awesome ice skating warm-up routine

Samsung Mobile Explorers viral video

The first footage of Moto Blur, Motorola’s just announced social-network-centric homescreen overhaul for Android, has just gone live.

MoVi, Mumbai-based made-for-mobile content fountainhead, has teamed up with Dallas-based telecom convergent solutions provider, Corpus, to launch a bouquet of video-on-demand unicast for the broadband 3G mobile user. MoVi plans to launch its Mobisodic journey initially across 7 leading Asian Mobile markets along with Corpus’s expertise in VAS and support solutions while the joint offering will be scaled up globally.
“The proposed MoVi-Corpus joint portfolio for the 3G media platform is a premium mix of video-on-demand and value added services, world’s first that stands to benefit all of the creators, operators and consumers in the digital value chain of convergence,” says Amit Dev, Co-founder,’ Third Generation Mobile Pvt. Ltd,’ the holding company of MoVi brand.

They are intended to give Mobile operators the value-added opportunity to increase the critical ARPU [Average Revenue Per User], while loyalty coupons attached in the mobisodes serve to retain customers on the mobile operators’ network, thus reducing the dreaded churn factor.

As the mobile consumption is rapidly evolving, mobisodes seek to bring the next big growth wave in the telecom industry, as they are made available ‘On¬demand’ instead of the conventional broadcast platform.
“This joint package truly leverages all the essential skillsets and learning by our experts for tailor-made solution strategy to match mobile media advertisers with specific client needs,” adds Sachin Tummala, co-founder of Corpus Media Labs.

Original 300-second duration mobisodes are custom-produced for consumption by customers over an icon based interactive application enabling them to pull content of their liking. Says Amit Dev, “With the new Mobisodic content revolution, we bring the creative best of India to the rest of the world, so for our subscribers, Anytime is Prime time!”.
Meta-tags on video clips enable mobile consumers, for example, to select through options to buy the original video DVD or the soundtrack or later even to book tickets for films. Contests enable them to cash in on special offers at select restaurants or the affiliated coffee shops; while planned country specific cross-promotional tie-ups could prompt the subscriber viewing a video recipe to buy packaged ingredients from Mail-order, at their door-step.

User-generated video aggregator service YouTube announced its mobile uploads have increased 400 percent a day in the week since Apple released its iPhone 3G S, the first version of the iconic smartphone to offer video capture capabilities. Writing on The YouTube Blog, YouTube product manager Dwipai Desai and community manager Mia Quagliarello note that in the last six months, the firm has seen uploads from all mobile devices increase 1,700 percent. “This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements to the upload flow when you post a video to YouTube from your phone, and a new feature on YouTube that allows your videos to be quickly and effortlessly shared through your social networks

Source: Youtube Blog

While about 10.3 million U.S. mobile subscribers accessed video content on their phones during a given month in the third quarter of 2008, up 14 percent from Q2 totals, video adoption still lags compared to other mobile media formats according to information and media firm The Nielsen Company. Among the 11 international markets tracked by Nielsen, the U.S. leads in mobile video consumption, with about 5 percent of all subscribers screening clips–France and Italy trail at about 4 percent each. Sixty-six percent of all mobile video users say they consume content via mobile web video services–comedy is the most popular form of mobile video offering, with 40 percent of viewers noting they screened comedy clips during the third quarter, averaging 10 minutes per session. Apple’s iPhone is now the most popular phone for mobile video viewing–as of Q3, 11 percent of all streaming video users were iPhone users–and NBC reigns as the most-watched mobile video brand in the U.S., with 4.7 million mobile video users tuning to NBC-branded entertainment in the typical month, representing 46 percent of the overall mobile video audience.

Other findings of the Nielsen report: As of Q3 2008, the mobile video audience skews 60 percent male, while men comprise just 48 percent of the total mobile population. Moreover, mobile video users are considerably more likely to be younger: 64 percent of users are under the age of 35, compared to just 35 percent of total subscribers. African-Americans and Hispanics remain disproportionately represented in the mobile video audience–as of Q3, 14 percent of the mobile video audience was African-American and 24 percent of the audience was Hispanic (compared to just 9 and 13 percent of all subscribers, respectively). Mobile video users are also a bit more affluent than the average subscriber: 28 percent of video consumers boast household incomes of $100,000 compared to 22 percent of total subscribers.

Source: Nielsen Groups Report

A lunatic barrels down the highways of New Delhi sending text messages. You have to see it to believe it.

Source: Textually.org