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Twitteriffic went crazy on this one…With a simple blogpost on jaiku.com, Jyri Engeström announced Jaiku got acquired by Google. Jaiku has been HOT since its beta launch in July 2006. Jaiku is an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones. Jaiku, Ltd. (Helsinki based) was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland.

Jaiku’s blog mentions “new user sign-ups have been limited for the time being. The idea here is to enable our team to get right to work with Google’s engineers on delivering a new, better service to you as quickly as we can instead of spending our efforts on optimizing the current back-end. Existing users will still be able to invite their friends, and those who are not yet on Jaiku can send us a request for an invitation to join.”

As GrandCentral (another smart ‘mobile next generation service’ acquired by Google in July), Jaiku will continue its service with its current closed beta user base for a while. GPhone or not, Google is once more taking mobile serious, at least the company is preparing a solid mobile OS.

Since Google anounced it’s partnership with LG Electronics it becomes more and more obvious that Google will launch it’s own branded handset in the very near future. The news today on TechCrunch that Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral is just another logical step by Google to enter the ‘mobile connected services’ space the company is already quite present. I mentioned about GrandCentral and The Mobile VoIP-wave coming to us in this article I wrote a couple of months ago for Read/WriteWeb.

The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.

While many are focused on the iPhone launch later this week, some other rumours are popping up about Google involved in Apple buyout rumours circulate as iPhone launch nears. In any case, the mobile space becomes more and more strategic and competitive, just look at the brands - we couldn’t even think of being mobile this year - only a few years ago… MySpace, YouTube, eBay, Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Prada, just to name a few… Oh God I love my job

MobileMonday Barcelona next event on May 7 presents and discusses the opportunities and challenges that lay ahead in Mobile Search.

Since Google introduced it’s easy to use Search Engine in 1998, a lot of things have changed in internet business, very few people could imagine the impact of simple search as we know it know. With even more mobile devices connected to the internet then computers globally, Mobile Search is one of the key area’s in mobile development to satisfy the demands of the consumer…

A mobile search request has to be easy and relevant and needs to be available in the right context. Organising all existing online data to be displayed correctly on a small screen is one of the biggest challenges laying ahead for the industry the coming years. Search news, locations, people, products, tourist and travel information, music and video files, all that data is already accessible on the last generation of mobile phone, a lot of companies are positioning in this interesting and lucrative market space.

Since 2005, a lot of new companies have been starting to position their service, projects like Wapedia, Mobilicio.us, 4INFO, Technorati Mobile, mInfo in China, and more recently mowser are some of the interesting projects around. This year seems to be a breakthrough year in Mobile Search now that the more established internet brands are starting to position in mobile and more and more deals are signed with operators.

I am happy to announce one of our most interesting speakers’ line-ups so far:

Jeff Pedigo, Director, Business Development at Yahoo! Inc. (UK)
Steve Ives, Founder & CEO Taptu.com (UK)
Philip Gontier, Sales Director EMEA, JumpTap, Inc. (USA)
Anat S. Amir, Senior Mobile Marketing Manager, EMEA, Google (UK)

I am looking forward to this event, check the MobileMonday Barcelona website for more details. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence for this event at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe/ to reserve one of the 150 seats available. Book now to avoid being left out!

Spotted at Jason Delport’s Mobile Observations:

At the end of last week there was a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the YouTube Mobile site going live and I was looking forward to putting it through it’s paces. I tried it in Firefox (without UA spoofing) and got a blocked message and so I tried it on my N70 and got the same message. I gave up on it but this morning I thought I would try again and was surprised to find that it worked in IE7! It’s still blocked in Firefox and on my N70 but you can see from the image below that the site is actually up and running. I’m not sure what’s going on with the blocking, seems inconsistent to me, why allow IE7 and block Firefox? The site is built in XHTML-MP and the videos are encoded in what looks to be 3GPP. I am looking forward to wasting a few travel hours watching videos on my mobile in the near future.

Oh dear, I will have to block my daughters’ 3G phone access again I’m afraid when this is finally going to be anounced. Parents, watch your bills the coming months! The content owners will be winners again since users want to connect to this kind of content from wherever on whatever device, doesn’t matter really the network as long as it’s affordable… the cost is going to be key to acces that content and to be part of creating some. Short video content is ideal for mobile but I don’t have to repeat all this things again here, no?

The 3GSM World Congress gives you a good overview of where the actual market is today - still a lot like last year - it looked at first sight… Some interesting movement could definately be ’seen’ in the mobile image recognition space.

Image recognition should not be confused with barcode scanning and QR-code technology though they are somewhere historically related of course, I wrote some of my views on this before here. Image recognition technology goes one step further in the sense that it doesn’t need a seperate application to be downloaded, or a decoder to decode, or a seperate ‘recognizable’ product code to be printed, and works - at its best - on most camera phones.

Some examples I saw during 3GSM were Global Peer Award jury winner Realeyes 3D (France) and finalists UpCode (Finland) and Tagit (Singapore), showing at the same time that real innovation can come from any corner of the world.

Since Google bought Neven Vision last summer and the attention visual search provider Riya got last year, the time seems right to bring image recognition commercially to mobile phones. One of the most interesting demo’s I saw during the exhibition was at the stand of Alcatel-Lucent: opening a video call, pointing your camera to a magazine ad connected your phone to your TV set over a 3G connection to be able to discover or store additional services to be viewed at home, dig?

Image recognition technology has some obvious advantages additionally to 2D-Barcodes like QR Codes or Datamatrix:

• They are graphically richer and more appealing, they can contain any logo or personalised image. Adding one to your blog, publication or advertisement might be less esthetically obtrusive than chaotic black and white codes, makes them ideally for next-generation mobile marketing campaigns.
• Unlike 2Dcodes, individual tags are easy to remember because they are images, not secretive machine only readable bar-codes.
• The Augmented Reality interaction paradigm makes it easier and more appealing for the user, your phone becomes like a sort of “magic lens”.
• Contextual menus can pop out of the tags: look up in wikipedia, listen to contents recoded, add contents to that tag…..it´s object hyperlinking or the mobile read-write web!

Daem Interactive had another interesting demo running with some logo’s and my face (!), pointing a cameraphone to it over a 3G connection connected the user immediately to m-trends.org mobile, very cool!

Ignacio from DAEM showed me this demo the first time in July last year, some might have seen the demo before at Under The Radar or MobileMonday Paris, now Ignacio gave me finally a go to blog this ‘atom3g’ demo of their patented application. Check it out, some of the coolest stuff around!

More insights on 3GSM later here.

At Macworld San Francisco 2007, a couple of hours ago, Steve Jobs unveiled (finally!) the iPhone. You can watch the full keynote here and how the phone works here.

After more than 2 years of speculations everywhere, the iPhone became probably the most ever hyped device before it’s launch. Note that exactly one year ago was the last time I wrote about the iPhone in my mobile & wireless predictions for 2006: “My guess is that if Apple makes a move into mobile, they will come up with something more then just a mobile phone.”

Damn was I right! Apple - btw dropped offically ‘Computer’ from their company name today, comes up with an awesome hybrid device that stays true to Apple’s core: to design high-class technology products… And it’s no less with the iPhone, bypassing all it’s competitors with a full surface touchscreen device for better UI, and reconfigurable/adaptable UI’s:

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

I will leave you the pleasure to discover the new device, some first thoughts on the features I read about as of now:

• Visual Voicemail = great!
• 3G Radio = ??? Cost? Can you imagine this while roaming
• Exlusive carrier deal = all Apple fans will need to switch to Cingular in US
• 1 more year for iPhone launch in Europe = Apple has time to deal with EU operators
• iPhone runs Mac OS X = developers: start developing those widgets!
• Touchscreen display = seems fragile to carry in your pocket
• Multi-touch support = that’s really complex in tech dev -> chapeau!
• Proximity sensor = turns off the touch sensitivity when close to your face, can you dig?
• WiFi automatically engages when in range = Apple has AirPort experience here

All the rest, no real surprises, except that everything looks SO much better on an Apple device!

FYI: next hype to come: the merging of the iPhone and the iPod = the ideal device

Note to Steve: do something about the iTunes way too closed DRM, buying CD’s might become another next trend to be able to digitalize and listen to the music I bought on ALL the devices in my family…