Millions of People Now Get Live Streaming Video Sent to Their Phones
Live video, from around the world, streaming right through the phone in your hand: that’s pretty incredible. It’s not science fiction anymore, it’s now something that millions of people have experienced. San Francisco’s Justin.tv announced today that almost one and a half million people have downloaded the company’s live-video-stream-viewing app to their iPhones in the first month it’s been available. From Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech , to the Future of Money conference, to a lot of content I don’t care to watch, Justin.tv is definitely getting traction. This isn’t the only company fast finding a lot of consumer interest in mobile video streaming, either. Sponsor Competitor Ustream made a similar announcement when it hit the iTunes store in January, saying more than one hundred thousand people downloaded that app in its first 24 hours. Ustream has Justin Bieber content, which you may consider an asset or a liability, depending on your perspective. (Personally, I just love Justin Bieber. I know he loves me back and I want him to be a part of my family. ) The point is: People love live streaming video to mobile handsets. Justin.tv said today that it has made major stability updates to its app (sometimes these things still feel like tin cans with string between them), and added push notifications to alert users when their favorite live shows are broadcasting. The iPhone app already contributes about 20% of the company’s total new account sign-ups. We don’t know how many downloads the Ustream app has seen since it first entered the iTunes app store and was featured prominently there, but if we assume that the same one half of one percent of users will have rated the Ustream app as have rated the Justin.tv app, then Ustream would have seen well more than 11 million downloads so far. Presumably if the app had in fact passed 10 million by now, we would have heard about it. The moral of the story, though, is that live streaming video sent to mobile phones is here and people like it. Live video broadcasting from mobile is much, much less popular of course, but content creation is always less popular than consumption. It’s exciting to imagine how a more mature mobile, live-streaming video market will look. I’m ready to watch all kinds of things happen live on my phone. Discuss
Android: Motorola Replaces Google’s Location Engine With Skyhook
Tomorrow, Motorola will announce that it plans to replace Google’s location services on its Android phones with Skyhook ‘s location engine. By default, all Android devices currently use Google’s own location services to determine a phone’s location based on GPS data from the phone and the location of nearby Wi-Fi access points and cellular towers. Skyhook, which pioneered this method to determine a device’s location, made its name as the default location provider for Apple’s iPhone and desktop operating systems. Adding Motorola to its partners will give Skyhook a strong foothold in the booming market for Android phones and applications. Sponsor Developers Won’t Have to Change Anything The first Motorola devices with Skyhook’s location services as the default will ship later this year. According to Skyhook, developers won’t have to make any changes to their Android apps to work with Skyhook’s location engine. Motorola will simply replace Google’s libraries with Skyhook’s Core Location services. As location becomes a more important part of a growing array of mobile apps, being able to quickly determine a phone’s location even when inside and without a line of sight to the nearest GPS satellites becomes a necessity for developers. Skyhook, which launched in 2003, pioneered this system of using Wi-Fi access points to determine a device’s location. Clearly, the engineers at Motorola felt that Skyhook’s solution is currently superior to Google’s services. Over the last few months, a number of the Android developers we talked to voiced frustration with the quality of Google’s location services on Android. Indeed, some of the most popular location-based applications on Android like ShopSavvy and Flixster already use Skyhook’s Android libraries instead of Google’s built-in services. Discuss
Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps
In preparation for the upcoming ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , we’re outlining the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. In Part 1 we explored 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web. Now in Part 2, we look at 4 classes of mobile applications that have become popular in 2010: geo-location , Internet of Things , Augmented Reality , and mobile social networking . We’ll explore these and other trends with you at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , a 1-day event we’re running on Friday 7 May, in Mountain View, California. That’s the day after Web 2.0 Expo (2-6 May), so we hope you’ll extend your trip to the West Coast to help us define the future of mobile! To be certain of getting a ticket, we invite you to register now . Sponsor Geo-location Services In January, RWW Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote that the era of Location-as-Platform has arrived . Using leading location mobile service Foursquare as an example, Marshall wrote that “the mobile location ‘check-in’ is fast becoming the hot new status message type online.” He added that “it was only a matter of time until ‘where you are’ became a platform to build added value on top of just like ‘who you know’ has on social networking sites like Facebook.” ‘Where you are’ is the new ‘who you know’! The use cases for location data include showing nearby restaurants and ratings, mobile advertising, local news, events, and Wikipedia data about local buildings. That’s impressive enough, but imagine the possibilities when you add data from sensors . As I wrote in January, one use case that should become reality soon is receiving a real-time update of traffic conditions via sensors embedded in the road. What else can we do using location as a platform? We’ll discuss this in-depth at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit . Internet of Things As well as sensor applications, there are other emerging applications for mobile that intersect with the Internet of Things trend. They include barcode scanning, using your phone as an RFID tag and reader, and using your phone as a proximity sensor. As we explained in January , as well as your mobile phone reading and acting on sensor data from real world objects, the phone may also be used as a sensor itself. For example the iPhone has a built-in accelerometer, which is basically a motion detector. This is used for game control and also for re-sizing your iPhone display from portrait to landscape. The iPhone also has a microphone (which can be used as a noise sensor), a proximity sensor, and an ambient light sensor. Barcode scanning and its applications is a fast growing market in the mobile world. The most popular form of 2D barcode is the QR Code (the QR stands for “Quick Response”), which became popular in Japan and is now gaining traction in the U.S. and other markets. There are many emerging opportunities to utilize sensor and RFID data, which again we will explore at the Mobile Summit on 7 May. Augmented Reality Augmented Reality has been one of the hottest trends in mobile for about a year now. ReadWriteWeb even created an extensive report about AR and its market and development opportunities. We think that AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more this year. In our report, we profiled key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. In a recent post, Chris Cameron (the author of our AR report) noted that practical application is the golden ticket of Augmented Reality . As an example he pointed to the junaio iPhone application, which competes with Layar and Wikitude in the AR browser space. junaio recently announced that its formed a partnership with BART, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, to bring live train data to the app. junaio takes advantage of the API provided by BART to not only place locations of nearby stations in a user’s field of vision, but also estimate arrival time of trains at each station and display that live in real-time using AR. Mobile Social Networking A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez concluded that “the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.” The study found that during the 2.7 hours per day that people in the U.S. spend on the mobile web, 45% are posting comments on social networking sites, 43% are connecting with friends on social networking sites, 40% are sharing content with others and 38% are sharing photos. Sarah commented that it’s no surprise to find that the rise of the mobile phone corresponds with the rise in Facebook’s popularity, because “it has become a do-anywhere activity that captures people’s attention whenever they have free time, instead of an activity that requires people make time for it.” Sarah concluded that mobile social networking is an easier activity to participate in now that it’s been unchained from the PC. This of course has big implications for entrepreneurs and application developers, which we will explore at the RWW Mobile Summit. In Part 3 of this series outlining 10 big trends in Mobile in 2010, we will look at Mobile Business trends. We’d love to discuss these and other mobile topics with you at our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . See our announcement post for more details. If you’re a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . Discuss
Lenovo: Mobile will be 10-20% of Revenue in 5 Years
PC maker Lenovo announced today that the company expects its mobile Internet products to account for 10%-20% of revenue in five years’ time. This statement comes from President and COO, Rory Read, delivered at a media briefing that coincided with the launch of the newest Lenovo “LePhone” smartphone device in China. With the phone, a handset running the Google Android mobile OS, Lenovo hopes to grab a good-sized chunk of the still-emerging Chinese smartphone market. Sponsor Interestingly enough, Lenovo had, in early 2008, sold off its mobile phone unit to focus solely on its PC business. But as the financial crisis hit, companies delayed refreshing their corporate desktops and laptops in an effort to save money, a move which heavily impacted Lenovo’s bottom line. Last year, the company decided to once again diversify their offerings by bringing back the mobile unit. In January, Lenovo launched an improved “Ophone” device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, its first smartphone since the $200 million reacquisition of the once-discarded mobile business, returned to the company in November of last year. At the time, Lenovo execs said the phone would be central to the company’s mobile strategy. Today, they’re echoing that sentiment. According to Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing, mobile Internet devices will overtake traditional PCs in the next five years. And Read reminded everyone that the smartphone market in China was only now emerging. “It’s just the beginning,” he said. PC Manufacturers Focused on Mobile Lenovo isn’t the only PC manufacturer making changes in this direction, with smartphone launches laser-focused on China especially. Dell, for example, announced in November they would launch an Android-based handset called the Dell Mini 3 that would be sold only in Brazil and China to start. The company is also hard at work on an Android tablet, a colorful consumer-targeted device apparently being called the “Dell Streak.” Acer, too, has a line of smartphones running both the Windows Mobile OS and Android, available outside the U.S. in parts of Europe and Asia. HP, although still more focused on PCs, is set to launch its first “new-wave” tablet in the form of the HP Slate , a multi-touch lightweight device running Windows 7.
Op-Ed: Objects Aren’t Social
I first began writing regularly about the Internet of Things about a year ago. Now it’s bubbling up in the mainstream press and we’re also beginning to see web apps that are attempting to reach, if not quite a mainstream audience yet, then certainly the iPhone and Android-toting geek community. We’ve moved beyond the cutesy Internet-connected bunny rabbits and we’re now onto barcodes to stick on everyday objects . A new web service called tales of things just launched, which aims to attach stories to objects. It follows on from a similar service that got a good amount of press at SXSW this year, StickyBits . Both services want to get people to ‘tag’ real world objects, by sticking barcodes onto them and adding information about the object onto the Web (often via mobile phone). The idea is that this will make the objects ‘social.’ However, I think this is doomed to fail and here’s why… Sponsor Tales of things asks on its homepage: “Wouldn’t it be great to link any object directly to a ‘video memory’ or an article of text describing its history or background? Tales of Things allows just that with a quick and easy way to link any media to any object via small printable tags known as QR codes.” Both Tales of Things and StickyBits are going to struggle to get mainstream adoption. And it’s not because people just won’t stick barcodes onto objects – although that is a short-term pain point that both of these companies will likely fail to overcome. No, they won’t get mainstream adoption simply because the Internet of Things isn’t going to be just another social network platform . What’s unique about the Internet of Things is that it adds a huge amount of new data to the Web and allows real-world objects to become part of the cloud network. For example, sensors on a busy road communicate with your car to tell you of impending heavy traffic. Or when you walk into a shop, the store messages your phone to tell you that an item you’ve been looking for is in stock and on special. I met StickyBits founder Seth Goldstein at SXSW and he told me that his company aims to create a “social object network.” Trouble is, I just don’t think that Internet-connected everyday objects have much social value. Say I tag a book that I bought and attach the following ‘memory’ to it: “I read this book in the summer of 2010, it was a great read. I’d give it a 4/5.” Even if I wrote a much more in-depth review, what value does that have on a single object? If I uploaded that review to Amazon.com, then it’s put into context and gets aggregated with other reviews to form ratings and other ‘wisdom of the crowd’ intelligence. But on the object itself – my copy of the book – the review has limited value. If a friend of mine happened to scan my book with their phone, they’d see my review…and then probably head straight to Amazon.com to see what other people thought. Or perhaps check out what their own social network thought, via an app like Glue (a social network based on the media you consume – see our most recent review ). Objects aren’t social, they never were and they never will be. The real value of Internet-connected objects is that they can become part of the network, which means they can connect to one another and they add more data to the giant computer we call The Cloud. But social networks aren’t going to form around single objects, other than perhaps public ones – like the Eiffel Tower, for example. But then you are just talking about a location, which the likes of FourSquare and BrightKite can take care of. The Internet of Things is about utility, not social networking. Neither Tales of Things nor StickyBits offers much in the way of utility, that we can’t already get from sites like Amazon.com or existing social networks. Let me know if you agree, or not! Discuss