Voice messaging service Pinger no longer requires recipients to be pinger members in order to listen to messages on their mobile phones. Instead, upon receiving messages from Pinger users, recipients will be prompted by a text message to click and call a local number to hear the message. Previously non-members were emailed Pinger messages. Sending messages out and managing contact lists will still be reserved for Pinger members, however.
Pinger’s normal service is meant as an alternative to text messaging, letting users send voice messages to each other without ringing the recipients phone, waiting, or difficulty of typing while on the go. All a user has to do is call into their Pinger number, say the name of the recipient or recipients (for group messages), and leave a voice message in their Pinger mailbox. Pinger members are then notified of the message by text, prompting them to click through and listen to the message, to which they can immediately reply by another Pinger message.
Pinger is rumored to be backed by a total of $11 million including financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and DAG Ventures.
Katie Fehrenbacher over at GigaOm is reporting U.S YouTubers will be treated to a mini version later this year at the conclusion of the exclusivity clause in YouTube’s contract with Verizon wireless. The service will be live in Europe later in May.
The mobile version will be a condensed version of YouTube, featuring 800 videos picked by YouTube’s editorial staff. No word yet on what video format they plan on using to navigate mobile’s maze of varying standards.
Yahoo! has announced a new service that will be kind of a big deal for the mobile arena. Yahoo! Mobile Publisher Services is a suite of services designed to enable publishers to increase the discovery, distribution and monetization of their content on mobile phones. The suite is comprised of Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network, Mobile Content Engine, Mobile Media Directory and Mobile Site Submit. That’s a lot of mobile, so let’s take a look at what each of these products do. Read More
VoiceSignal makes the majority of voice recognition systems found in almost every major handset made. Never heard of them, you say? Well, that’s because they’re so embedded that its a struggle for them to even get their logos on the handset screens. Any time you issue a voice command, however, there is an excellent chance you’re using VoiceSignal technology.
Now they’re offering VSearch, a part of their suite of solutions, that works just like the “Call Jane Smith” voice recognition systems of yore. This new system allows for map search, music search, and even ad-supported local search, all from the handset with only a minimum of network usage.
VoiceSignal is currently signing partnerships for in-line advertising and other goodies and they’re bringing down map data from multiple sources. On the test devices I saw, you could even say “Find Madonna” for a list of Madonna ringtones and even search for individual songs by name and artist.
Look for it on future handsets from many carriers, depending on upcoming partnerships.
HOMBRE, which stands for Hands On Mobile Runtime Environment, is a 65 kilobyte environment for building mobile applications. It can run on almost any handset and actually uses the handset’s on board applications and API calls to play video, audio, and access network features.
The UI itself is quite nice and reminiscent of Helio and Adobe’s Web 2.0 reflection-tastic UIs you find on the MVNO and Samsung’s phones. HOMBRE is coded in XML and they’re currently looking for developers and offering up to $50,000 to the best app.
As a former developer, I’m intrigued by the product but a little dubious. Unfortunately, I also always think of the magazine “Honcho” when I heard the name, but that’s because I have the mind of a twelve-year-old.
TechCrunch has covered the release of a new mobile widget platform, ZenZui, who launched their mobile widget browser this morning. The browser has lets users search through a grid of 36 widget tiles by panning and zooming around the grid by touchscreen or keypad. Each of the widgets in the browser serves as a mobile optimized interface to a website like Zillow or Amazon. It’s essentially a way to grow deck placement.
Widgets are created by developers and monetized on the service via “well-established advertising principles like CPA and CPM (we call it CPZ – Cost Per Zoom)”. ZenZui will split revenue with widget developers, as well as offer an ad-free version that displays messages from non-profits instead.
ZenZui’s zooming user interface was initially developed by Microsoft’s Redmond Research lab, and was spun off into it’s own company. In partnership with Microsoft IP Ventures, the company received $12 million in Series A funding from SeaPoint Ventures and other investors, with Microsoft retaining a stake in the company.
MobileCrunch has also covered other widget platforms such as Bluepulse and Nokia’s Widset.
I’ve been scouring CTIA for MobileCrunch worthy material and I think I’ve found something. What do you get when you meld Second Life with mobile ad serving with Japanese teenagers? eXplo.
EXplo is an odd 3D environment that runs on almost any handset and allows you to chat, share photos, and view video and stream music in a simulated world. The world I saw was fairly small — a little plaza, a cool music video room, and one other participant — but apparently it’s quite popular in Asia and teenagers go there to visit temporary job listings and watch videos.
You can even create a little “sharing room” where you and your buddies go to project images on the screen in front of you. The graphics are fairly primitive but the movement was quite smooth and the concept, while initially silly, is fairly compelling.
No word on U.S. launch, but you can take a closer look at Gemini Mobile.
I’m headed to Orlando tomorrow for CTIA Wireless. If anyone is looking for me, you can bug me at john @ crunchgear.com or call me at 6468270591. For those so included, CrunchGear and Jellyfish are holding a smack shopping event to coincide with the festivities. What is this “smack shopping” you ask?
The site offers a limited number of products at a deep discount. The Smack Auction reduces the price over time, but only until supplies run out. If you don’t buy before they’re out, you’re stuck. The key is to time it and buy just before you hit that magic, hidden number.
The fine folks at Jellyfish are planning to offer phones and laptops at a considerable discount, so hang out next Monday and be ready to rumble.
Without a doubt, the most popular classified ads site on the Internet is Craigslist. The simple, utilitarian site is a shining example of how the p2p Web can work, and one of the secrets to its success is the anonymization of its users by email forwarding and masking. Many people who wouldn’t want their real email addresses published can use an anonymous, temporary @cragislist.org address to keep things private while maintaining email as a valid form of commercial communication.
At some point this week, the wheels of commerce may be set to turn over, changing the logo on forthcoming Treos to that of Nokia or even Motorola. The two have been bidding on Palm, maker of the Treo, for a few weeks now, and a couple of private equity firms have entered the fray, and the rumors are that things will finish up this week. Nokia wants the Treo name recognition, and Motorola wants a decent foothold in the smartphone market (the Q is not that). Sadly, if one of these companies gets Palm, we see them absorbing the popular smartphone maker instead of propping it up. Read More
Yahoo! is being aggressive with its new mobile portal, called oneSearch, and it shows. As a portal, Yahoo! knows that content is king, and that getting to said content is what Mobile 2.0 is all about. Enter oneSearch, a new page (at m.yahoo.com on your handset) that aggregates a large number of Yahoo!’s features onto one easy-to-use page, including Y! Messenger, Y! Movies, and even a handy portable version of flickr.
Even more, the service is really fast, not necessarily because the backend stuff is beefy, but rather because the content you’re looking for is grouped together in a fairly intuitive format. Finding tickets to 300 took less than 20 seconds on an EDGE connection, truly easy to use.
It’s part of the My Yahoo! service. While you could use it without logging in, you’d be doing yourself a disservice, as the system can use your preferences to speed up finding the information you’re looking for. And it’s free.
About oneSearch [http://mobile.yahoo.com/mobileweb/onesearch]
Emoze is a dream come true for business folk out there who are still holding out and refusing to accept that corporate issued Blackberry. Emoze claims the free push email service will work on any mobile phone that has email functionality. It even works behind corporate firewalls, has military-grade encryption and its been designed to support all cellular and wireless networks. So how does it work? Read More
The Sanyo Katana – Could a kid step on it and break it? Mine almost did!
I just got in a phone from an interesting MVNO, Kajeet. The service is aimed at kids and their parents and offers a few basic features that Mr. or Ms. Mom and Dad might like. Read More
Sprint Nextel is dropping Sirius Hits, its streaming audio service, to bring 10 new channels of mobile music. The carrier will also add video from CNN, the Weather Channel, E!, NFL, and Fox Sports.
No details on pricing or, mor importantly, why they decided to drop Sirius but perhaps their retooling their offerings to use the new WiMAX service they’ll be selling in select areas.
Hot on the tail of Slacker comes another social music service, MyStrands Mobile. This S60 application offers music discovery as well as music sharing and builds on a library of 6 million tracks. You and your friends can share your current playlists and collects your playback history on your own MyStrands page.
It’s officially available now and the video above gives you a good idea of what to expect.
Publishing your location-based wireless applications to your handset just got a whole lot easier.
That’s because of location-enabled mobile applications developer uLocate Communications’ new mobile GPS widget platform, WHERE.
Now available on several Sprint phones as of today, WHERE works with GPS location technology to enable WHERE Widgets to be placed on these handsets.
The process is easy: users add WHERE Widgets to their WHERE handset application in one of two ways: by selecting from menus that live on the handset, or by dragging and dropping them from the Where.com directly to the phone.
Developers wishing to write WHERE Widgets would use the PHP and Ruby-complaint.WHERE mark-up language and scripting utilities- which makes it possible to create WHERE apps on J2ME and BREW handsets.
NewsGator Go!, previously only available for Windows Mobile, is now available for Blackberries and Java-capable phones including models from Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung.
This version synchronizes with your online NewsGator account and caches articles for later, offline consumption. You can also send stories via email through the program’s interface.
This is somewhat similar to Helio’s HOT service, a mini-RSS widget that pops up popular stories over the standard Helio interface. Check the site for compatibility, but most mobiles now have a Java client built-in, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
NewsGator Go! costs $29.95 alone or $14.95 with any of NewsGator’s other products (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Inbox). It’s officially available tomorrow but you got the hot dope today, people. Enjoy.
Mobile IM is the number four cellphone killer app — the other three are, in order, voice, SMS, and Snake — but, surprisingly, it’s the hardest to use. Of all the IM programs I’ve tried, only Danger has managed to make it seamless as possible. Mundu, a new product from Indian developers Geodesic is coming in a close second.
The product supports AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. The UI is fairly clean and during the course of my testing the “lag” I’ve experienced with other mobile IM clients — the lag is most visible when you a message come on the desktop IM client and then it appears a few minutes later on the cellphone — was fairly minor with only about a minute between messages.
I tested the WinMo version of Mundu but it also runs on Palm OS. Geodesic expects to launch a Symbian Series 60 version soon. Now, for the good part. Most IM clients charge monthly or bi-monthly, a costly proposition. Mundu costs $11 with no per message fee. We’ll write that again. $11.
Is it better than the default IM clients that might come with your phone? If you’re using a Sidekick, no. But if you’re using something like OZ, you might have a better experience with Mundu — there’s a 5 day free trial, so you might as well give it a go — and it’s definitely better, and cheaper, than other clients I’ve tried.
Version 4 also includes media sharing as well as in-line file sharing for adding a bit of flash to your chats. This includes video and image exchange as well as file and music sharing. Finally, it also includes email notifications for Yahoo, MSN, and Google, if that’s your thing. Generally, this is an impressive — if under-represented — IM client and is worth a quick look.
Yahoo! Go for Mobile is now available — in gamma version — for Windows Mobile devices. This version includes everything the Symbian folks are already crowing about including email, oneSearch (Yahoo’s mobile search product), photo sharing, and RSS/news ticker-type feeds. Check Yahoo’s mobile site for more information on compatibility but if it runs WinMo, it probably runs Yahoo.
Today mapping veteran AtlasCT (est. 1987) is launching a new mobile photo geotagging application for Java ME called reLive!. It seems similar to Yahoo!’s geotagging program for Flickr, Zonetag. However, reLive! is not meant to only geotag individual photos, but also connect them on the map in the context of a trip. When paired with a GPS system, reLive! lets you automatically map tagged photos, video, or virtual postcards you make along your trip. Since each photo is also time stamped, the photos, video, and postcards can also be ordered along the path of your trip. The whole trip can also be viewed and shared through an account on their website. Their current default example is of a meandering trip through Barcelona.
The program won the Social Networking award for Europe at the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge at 3GSM in Barcelona. The application was designed to show off AtlasCT’s vector based mapping program, which requires smaller data transfers and flexes with varying mobile screen sizes. AtlasCT is not targeting consumers directly. In a deal made with Nokia the mapping software comes pre-installed on all Nokia smartphones. They are currently seeking more OEM deals in the US and believe there is at least one camera manufacturer ready to incorporate GPS right into their device.
The OEM route seems like a smart move until GPS becomes more pervasive. Only a small percentage of US phones support GPS without some kind of Bluetooth addition (Helio and Boost support GPS over their whole network). If you’re really into geotagging, check out this Sanyo phone that innately supports geographic metadata.
Voice messaging service Pinger no longer requires recipients to be pinger members in order to listen to messages on their mobile phones. Instead, upon receiving messages from Pinger users, recipients will be prompted by a text message to click and call a local number to hear the message. Previously non-members were emailed Pinger messages. Sending messages out and managing contact lists will still be reserved for Pinger members, however. 
Yahoo! has announced a new service that will be kind of a big deal for the mobile arena. Yahoo! Mobile Publisher Services is a suite of services designed to enable publishers to increase the discovery, distribution and monetization of their content on mobile phones. The suite is comprised of Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network, Mobile Content Engine, Mobile Media Directory and Mobile Site Submit. That’s a lot of mobile, so let’s take a look at what each of these products do.
HOMBRE, which stands for Hands On Mobile Runtime Environment, is a 65 kilobyte environment for building mobile applications. It can run on almost any handset and actually uses the handset’s on board applications and API calls to play video, audio, and access network features.
The UI itself is quite nice and reminiscent of Helio and Adobe’s Web 2.0 reflection-tastic UIs you find on the MVNO and Samsung’s phones. HOMBRE is coded in XML and they’re currently looking for developers and offering up to $50,000 to the best app. 
Without a doubt, the most popular classified ads site on the Internet is Craigslist. The simple, utilitarian site is a shining example of how the p2p Web can work, and one of the secrets to its success is the anonymization of its users by email forwarding and masking. Many people who wouldn’t want their real email addresses published can use an anonymous, temporary @cragislist.org address to keep things private while maintaining email as a valid form of commercial communication. 
At some point this week, the wheels of commerce may be set to turn over, changing the logo on forthcoming Treos to that of Nokia or even Motorola. The two have been bidding on Palm, maker of the Treo, 
Yahoo! is being aggressive with its new mobile portal, called oneSearch, and it shows. As a portal, Yahoo! knows that content is king, and that getting to said content is what Mobile 2.0 is all about. Enter oneSearch, a new page (at m.yahoo.com on your handset) that aggregates a large number of Yahoo!’s features onto one easy-to-use page, including Y! Messenger, Y! Movies, and even a handy portable version of flickr.
Sprint Nextel is dropping Sirius Hits, its streaming audio service, to bring 10 new channels of mobile music. The carrier will also add video from CNN, the Weather Channel, E!, NFL, and Fox Sports.
This is somewhat similar to Helio’s HOT service, a mini-RSS widget that pops up popular stories over the standard Helio interface. Check the site for compatibility, but most mobiles now have a Java client built-in, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
Mobile IM is the number four cellphone killer app — the other three are, in order, voice, SMS, and Snake — but, surprisingly, it’s the hardest to use. Of all the IM programs I’ve tried, only Danger has managed to make it seamless as possible. Mundu, a new product from Indian developers 
