The MoPR Blog

Jailbreak Community Battles Apple for Control of iPhone

Wired has an interesting article from Brian Chen in its Gadget Lab detailing the history of the jailbroken (jailbreaked?) iPhone, Apple’s efforts to thwart hackers and even a link to an application that will easily jailbreak your iPhone in two minutes.

And while you’re on the Wired website reading this article, be sure to also check out Brian’s article from August this year, “6 Reasons to Jailbreak your iPhone.”

Bada, Samsung’s New Open-Source Operating System: What’s the Beef?

“Does the world really need another OS?” asks Addy Dugale at the start of this Fast Company article about a new smartphone operating system from a handset manufacturer that already produces devices running Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and LiMo. With four smartphone OSs in their lineup, why would Samsung launch its own operating system? Perhaps the Apple iPhone’s 17 percent share of the smartphone market has something to do with it? Read Addy’s article to get all the details, and be sure to watch the Samsung Bada video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlUCPcos3o4:

For a little more detail in video format, Mobile Gazette has its own explanation of Bada http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpjxHGvnevc:

Coming to CES…

“In case your smatphone/netbook ain’t cutting it” was Engadget’s rhetorical statement last May regarding smartbooks, a new category of devices that are slightly smarter than a smartphone and slightly phonier (as in more phone) than a netbook. Some news out this week from Qualcomm and some Engadget discovered from Mobinnova are profiled in two articles that gives us a little more detail about this new device category certain to make — or at least attempt to make — a splash at next January’s Consumer Electronics Show.

In case you miss it

Verizon and AT&T have been having a war of words that seems to be escalating into a war of attorneys over Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” advertising campaign. The Verizon campaign, which plays off Apple’s “There’s an App for That” iPhone campaign, shows two maps, a red Verizon map of the US indicating robust wireless data coverage and a blue AT&T map indicating sparse coverage. Eric Zeman at InformationWeek shares a letter that AT&T posted publicly refuting Verizon’s claims. This tit-for-tat battle between the two largest wireless carriers in the US is just ramping up and will certainly produce more fun moments as the two companies fight for new customers and ARPU in a market reaching saturation. When you choose your carrier, TheMoPRBlog wants to know: are you a red stater or a blue stater?

The $10 Phone Bill

The cover story of current edition of Forbes magazine, written by Scott Woolley, is entitled “The $10 Phone Bill.” Such a scenario was discussed in the halls of the most recent CTIA, and Forbes teases “AT&T and Verizon’s worst nightmare is starting to happen.”

This in depth article about today’s North America wireless phone industry presents an insightful look at the challenges the major telcos face, the evolution of the industry to 4G and the acceptance of VoIP calls from mobile phones, and the opportunities for emerging players.

Just as interesting as the main article, a call-out article also by Woolley presents a Moore’s Law inspired analysis of Hi-Def Phone Calls. My favorite sentence: “Eventually the U.S. will catch up to Moldova, as the cost of better-sounding voice call becomes too cheap to ignore.”

iDidn’t, but you might have

In case the special effects laiden and action packed commercial of Stealth Bombers firing objects at unsuspecting farmers, school children, fishermen, hikers and motorists escaped your view, Verizon launched Droid, its first Android phone. This a much anticipated smartphone launch for Verizon, which has been losing market share to AT&T since that carrier’s debut of the iPhone in 2007. I am still curious why Verizon chose Air Force bombers firing pods into the US heartland as the visual for its launch of a smartphone. See for yourself, this commercial has erie Big Brother imagery.

By the way, on Twitter. Silicon Florist editor Rick Turoczy called to our attention that given all the hype about Droid coming to Verizon, who the owner of the website Droid.com turns out to be.

In case you miss it

On Friday last week it was reported that the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) unanimously adopted a new policy that will allow domain names in non-Latin based alphabets. This move clears the way for website addresses to be written in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindy, Japanese and other languages.

And the winner is…

Guess who Fortune magazine named CEO of the Decade?

In a recent post on Mobile Entertainment Business Stuart O’Brien wrote up a study conducted by mobile analytics and payment company, Bango.

The Bango study surveyed Nielsen’s top 20 most popular websites and found that half of them didn’t work on a mobile handset, even though nearly 10 percent of traffic to these same sites is now coming from mobile phones.

And, it’s not just iPhone users that are regularly accessing the Internet from their phones. Researchers at IDC say that 1.3 billion people will connect to the Internet via mobile phones by end of 2008, and the vast majority of these mobile browsers are using mass market phones from Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola.

“Our figures indicate that up to 10 out of every 100 customers are now routinely entering web addresses from their phones and hitting a site designed only with PC users in mind, which results in a bad experience,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP of Marketing and Alliances at Bango. “Businesses should be asking now which handsets, countries and languages matter most to their business and developing a mobile strategy to match this.”

Bango says many major websites aren’t optimizing their content for mobile users, despite the growing importance of such traffic. In the list of sites that work well from a mobile handset you find names you might expect, such as eBay, Google, and Facebook. However in the list of top sites that don’t work well from mobile there are surprises like, Apple, Microsoft and Craigslist.

Bango’s study also found that many online sites didn’t know how many mobile visitors they are getting. Bango’s figures show that typically 3-10 percent of visitors come from a mobile origin.

I would think for bloggers and other sites with dynamically changing content a solid mobile website is even more important. I recently heard a presentation from MoFuse, a company which gives content publishers, like bloggers or real-time news sites, the ability to publish their content to the mobile web. You don’t have to be a content publisher to use MoFuse though, any website can be “mobilized” (the act of creating a mobile website from a web-only version) in just a few minutes using the MoFuse platform. It’s simple to do, and the MoFuse platform is free to use.

MoFuse is already the fastest growing mobile site publishing network and one of the top mobile publishing networks in terms of traffic. Companies already using MoFuse include: Mashable, Read Write Web, Cool Hunting, and MakeUseOf – which isn’t working as of November 6, due to a nasty blackmail scam / domain stealing ordeal.

Here are some shots of the Mashable site, mobilized with MoFuse:

MoFuse will be presenting at Under the Radar Mobility, November 12th in Mountain View, California. Drop us a line if you plan to be at the event and would like to speak with MoFuse or any of the other presenting companies.