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Here some impressions from the excellent Under The Radar: Mobility Conference from November 16 in Mountain View, CA. Debbie Landa and her team are doing an incredible good job creating this type of events bringing together various types of quality (!) value chain players in mobility. Just seeing the number of VC’s around per square meter shows that mobility is definately on the radar in Silicon Valley. You can view some of my UTR pictures here as a Flickr set.

The number of company pitches one could view in a day was pretty impressive: 32 companies, divided in 8 tracks in 2 rooms; The 2-track system however made me skip some presentations I would have loved to see too. Anyway, on the overal side, this was a very smoothly organised event and a chance to meet loads of new people in the industry, mainly focused Silicon Valley. It was very interesting for me to get a better notice of the US mobile market and understand better between the differences US and European markets.

The overal tone of the conference was all about web 2.0 going mobile, there has been numerous blogposts and discussions lately on the topic… Daniel Appelquist has one of my preferred mobile 2.0 definitions so far:

Mobile 2.0 is not “the Future.” it is services that already exist all around us. These services are maturing at an amazing rate and what they are doing is effectively knitting together Web 2.0 with the mobile platform to create something new: a new class of services that leverage mobility but are as easy to use and ubiquitous as the Web is today. These services point the way forward for the mobile data industry.

I started with the first session on VIDEO with ComVu, Juice Wireless presenting JuiceCaster, Nexage and Veeker; a very potential set of companies. My favourites are ComVu because I can stream (imagine a good flat rate deal somewhere of course) and geotag automatically, and JuiceCaster has it’s community building stuff together. I can’t really remember about Nexage, neither can I found notes back and the Veek Video Peek from Veeker just doesn’t sound right.

Then I went off to the other room to see Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob (excerpt here below); everytime I hit their homepage, I’m always impressed by the number of incoming live ad requests coming in, and they are not fake - as some suggested inside the Microsoft building… Correct me if I’m wrong.

In this ADVERTISING/MARKETING track Greystripe won the audience award for it’s great presentation and idea - inserting ads into mobile game downloads, ok but that’s too American for me, I just don’t believe a cell phone is not a TV and in the long run kids will just skip the ad whenever avaiable or possible.

Meanwhile I missed the session on MEDIA SHARING and SharpCast who won the audience award here. SharpCast is doing what everybody else forgot to do well between the desktop and the mobile: it’s all about syncing your life! I also missed the transactions track but you can view winner Mobo’s pitch here below by CEO Noah Glass himself:

During lunch I catched up with Scott Rafer from MyBlogLog and Dave Harper. Dave (here below) presented in the next MOBILIZE session his WinkSite project. Moderator Rafe Needleman from CNET made a very true review of that session. You can read Dave’s presentation here, don’t forget to check their pitch!

Meanwhile in the other track Loopt was winning the overall audience choice. Loopt is doing what Plazes (and some others) are doing for a while now yet, somehow Loopt chooses resolutely mobile and seems to have spend a lot of time on usability and user experience, stuff not the least to be underestimated on the mobile phone. I’ll check the new stuff Felix will show us next monday for an definitive update on MoSoSo.

In the IMAGING track Daem Interactive was to me way ahead of the others but I may sound too subjective here The key in the image recognition technology sector will be how fast the companies presented can go to market with the right solution. Japan is leading innovation and ideas in this area but the companies in this track at UTR showed some very mature technology and solid business ideas behind.

In the Galileo room, TalkPlus was showing what voice 2.0 is all about and convinced judges and audience with it. Get a grimp of it yourself here in demo and interview I did the day after with TalkPlus CEO Jeffrey D. Black.

Jeffrey explains the voice 2.0 concept (left) and demonstrates a SIP Call

Jeffrey D. Black, CEO TalkPlus explains TalkPlus

My list of companies to watch has been growing quite fast now, here below the ones I recently added - check back in a year or so and let me know what happened with these companies

ComVu
JuiceCaster
Loopt
Plusmo
WinkSite
Mobo
Sharpcast
TalkPlus

You can view all the Under The Radar: Mobility judges and audience winners here.

Note: all video shooting done with a Nokia N93, thanks to vpod.tv for hosting - actually you should check their portal, Rodrigo is currently live reporting from Nokia World in Amsterdam.

And as an extra for the incrowd fans: hear Peter Vesterbacka (Some Bazaar) explain his “to found 100 companies in a year” pitch. Way to go, Peter!

2.0, admob, Analysis, ComVu, daem, GreyStripe, image recognition, innovation, juicecaster, juicewirless, Loopt, m trends.tv, mobile 2.0, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Events, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile marketing, Mobile RSS, Mobile Search, mobile video, mobile20, mobility, Moblog, Mobo, mtrends, n91, n93, nokia, Nokia N91, Nokia N93, Operators, Plusmo, Predictions, ScanR, Sharpcast, silicon valley, social media, spanish startups, startups, TalkPlus, Trends, Under The Radar, utr, vc, veeker, web 2.0, web20, winksite

Nokia to unveil the Nserie Music Collection. From Darla’s blog:

As you can see, the N73 and N70’s have been made over in a new color… black is back! The N91 gets an external and internal make-over. Also dressed in black, the new N91 has upgraded its HD from 4gb to 8gb, hence the device name… Nokia N91 8GB. Just when you thought you couldn’t have any more music. That should keep someone musically entertained for a long time!

Nokia is definately serious in challenging the ipod right in it’s heart, the music (& video) player, while offering all those extra and excellent mobile phone features.

I have been writing on the Nokia N91 is (busy) killing the ipod before here. The story got picked up at geek.com - Is the N91 really an iPod killer? where an interesting debate is brewing amongst readers.

Related to Nokia’s music phones and one of my favourite apps I use, the Nokia podcasting application: Apple is now trying to claim the term podcast. Read more about it on Robert Scoble’s blog, Wired News, and The Guardian. I think Apple is not applying a good strategy here, maybe because competitors, such as Nokia, are using podcasting-named applications on their phones or devices? And now with Microsofts’ Zune coming in, it won’t get better, more and more podcasts will be created and listened to… for sure!

As an Apple fan at heart, I think they don’t have a right to claim the term “podcast”, the term submerged on the internet - inspired on the ipod - and was used before Apple introduced it into iTunes, trying to claim it will not help their excellent credibility market status they have amongs consumers nowadays. Some common sense cannot hurt these days in business… On this regard, I would like to point you to the famous Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers quarrel:

Note: The following is an excerpt from pages 159-165 of the PDF version (pages 147-153 of the print version) of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, published under a Creative Commons License. A free, legal copy of the entire PDF of this book can be found here. The content of the original Groucho Marx letter can be found here.

“There’s a famous story about a battle between the Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers. The Marxes intended to make a parody of Casablanca. Warner Brothers objected. They wrote a nasty letter to the Marxes, warning them that there would be serious legal consequences if they went forward with their plan.This led the Marx Brothers to respond in kind. They warned Warner Brothers that the Marx Brothers “were brothers long before you were.”The Marx Brothers therefore owned the word brothers, and if Warner Brothers insisted on trying to control Casablanca, then the Marx Brothers would insist on control over brothers.An absurd and hollow threat, of course, because Warner Brothers, like the Marx Brothers, knew that no court would ever enforce such a silly claim. This extremism was irrelevant to the real freedoms anyone (including Warner Brothers) enjoyed. ”

However, Nokia might be better introducing “Ncasting” for their Nseries podcasting

3G, Analysis, Announcements, apple, audiocasting, audiofeed, Cool Devices, creative commons, Free Culture, ipod, lawrence lessig, marx brothers, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, n70, n73, n91, n91 8gb, ncasting, nokia, Nokia N91, podcast, podcasts, s60, user experience, warner brothers

(*) sub-title: “Connected Holidays (with the N91)”

Back from a 2-week holiday… time flies… just realizing it’s the end of the week… and I haven’t blogged yet (!) … while there are so many interesting things happening to write about…

Before I left with my family and some friends to enjoy The Emporada Triangle I managed to buy the Nokia N91, the phone David Williams from Nokia demonstrated to me in November last year in London and which has been described in the blogosphere as the iPod killer.

Regulars of m-trends know about my passion for music-on-the-move and I had the pleasure to experience the Apple iPod 40Gb for over a year until it crashed unluckily and unreparable, too bad for such a solid music device. I decided to wait for the first real music-phone, it came later then expected but it has been worth the wait.

Apart from some adress book sync problems I managed to counter quickly thanks to Justin’s post and some Mac hacks here, my whole experience with the N91 has been just brilliant!

The first thing that impressed me was the quality of the sound watching a Real Player video… impressive. I added some 500 of my favourite tunes to the 4Gb harddrive, synchronised from my iTunes library and created new playlists on the fly while I connected the device to a hi-fi stereo… this is the first phone I know of with whom you can create instant parties everywhere, anytime I have been writing before on my doubts how to scroll big music libraries without a scroll wheel (as the ipod) but this doubt vanished completely after the first use.

The rest of the HD space I used mainly to download some podcasts with the Nokia Podcasting Application, I also installed Shozu (probably one of the best mobile apps around!) to upload some holiday pics with a click to Flickr.

Our host had a wi-fi connection in the house so I could browse the mobile web the first time for free (!) The latest Nokia Web Browser for S60 is probably the best I have experienced on a phone, with it’s zooming capabilities you can ‘browse’ a webpage the way you want it. The same browser lets you subscribe and store your favourite feeds; I can tell you I haven’t missed a thing on the news side though I had planned to disconnect completely for at least a couple of days

I could perfectly browse my MyStrands Mobile account, I had some problems though listening to the Real Player audio previews due to some tough operator proxy settings. I read Justin Oberman selected my Connecting Cultures through Music article as Post of the Week of his Carnival of the Mobilists #41 hosting. I’ll accept the invitation for the brownies, Paula! I also installed the Free Mobilists’ Mobile RSS Reader package so I stayed tuned on my mobilists friends’ feeds, nicely bundled.

I wouldn’t type loads of email with that phone - there are other models for that, like the BlackBerry killer, but I could easily configure my regular email account and check my mails once in a while. I read Caroline launched the Wireless Industry Partnership and she informed me the 2nd CTIA Gathering of the Mobilists was fully booked for the 2nd time, great!

Well, this is basically a sum-up of the apps I used the most upto now, there’s still lots to discover - oh that SIP Client - and Visual Radio, no stations avilable yet in Catalonia… but too much to mention in one post, so I will have to update you on more experiences I guess…

So, what has this article to do with my title? Simply, it looks much more obvious that Nokia can add now easily more music features and storage to it’s phones than seeing Apple creating all those phone features to the iPod…

And oh btw: one of the features I appreciate the most is the ‘one touch button’ to switch from music listening to an incoming call and the ability to create a ringtone from any song in my library. You won’t get bored with this phone, Nokia is listening to it’s users… Mobile 2.0 is definately here… Driewerf hoera!

… Then he came home and did a Phone Software Update… better get used to it!

3G, Analysis, apple, Cool Devices, ethnographics, Fun, iphone, ipod, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Mobile OS, Mobile RSS, mobile web, Moblog, n91, nokia, Nokia N91, podcasts, s60, social media, usability, user experience, wi fi

Charlie has an interesting post bringing sideloading to our attention. I didn’t knew the term as such but, when reading his post, I realised I was a severe ’sideloader’. From Wikipedia:

“Sideload is a term used in internet culture, similar to “upload” and “download”. It is the process of moving data between two web servers. Sideload is now becoming the popular term for getting music files from the internet to peripheral devices such as cell phones and PDAs. It can also mean getting music from a PC to a cell phone.”

Charlie made a good point that sideloading should be made easier on mobile phones. Not everybody finds his needs in the operators or 3rd parties music collections, or doesn’t want to pay another time for songs he has already on his pc - and cannot transfer them to the phone due to DRM restrictions, or just doesn’t want to go another time through the sometimes painfull process of OTA downloads - due to breaking connections or having paid for a corrupted file (which still happens too often with unreliable 3rd party downloads).

Personally, sideloading podcasts to my phone has been one of my favourite pc to mobile related tasks this year and since I got a N91, it seems I’m going to keep doing this for a while. I’m really amazed with the phone’s capabilities, but more on this in another post.

I am particulary happy with the “set as ringtone” feature I can use for whatever song I have in my music player collection - graciously linked to my iTunes on my laptop. I think Nokia made a very good move here by providing elements for users that never download music Over-The-Air. I’m sure I’m not the only one who could never find a decent ringtone ‘expressing my personality’ on an operators’ portal. Just trying to find a tune was not always a model for a good user experience. Making this function available for people like me creates an extra fun layer… I can set a ringtone from whatever record in my collection, way to go!

Downloading podcasts OTA is not really recommendable yet - especially without flat-rate fees as here in Spain, so I’m just sideloading them to my phone. I will try to download them however over any public wi-fi I encounter while being on the road.

Besides, I don’t really understand the discussion on wi-fi use vs. 3G OTA downloads. I have been testing my own habits for a while now, figuring out when I would use a wi-fi connection instead of a 3G connection to connect to the internet. To stay connected to the operators network is crucial when you’re ‘moving’, but have you ever wondered how much time people actually use their mobile phones when they’re NOT on the move? At work, or spending time at home or at a friends’ place, surfing from a public wi-fi hotspot, waiting at the airport, etc.

Probably more then 80 % of the time we use our mobile phone, we’re not on the move! Think about it! Which means people are just going to use more sideloading and will connect to wi-fi or other networks and hotspots whenever they’re available. Never read this in a report!

3G, Analysis, Cool Devices, mobile music, mobile phones, Nokia N91, podcasts, sideload, sideloading, user experience, wi fi