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March 8, 2010

Blackboard Buys Mobile Messaging Company Saf-T-Net For $33 Million

Filed under: techcrunch — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 1:56 pm

Blackboard, a company that designs an education software for school groups, has acquired mobile messaging provider Saf-T-Net for $33 million. Saf-T-Net develops AlertNow, which is a mobile messaging technology aimed to the K-12 marketplace.

AlertNow’s technology delivers voice, e-mail and emergency SMS messages at a rate up to 2.5 million per hour to parents, students and school administrators. The company, which sent 25 million message in February alone, has over 2000 schools using its product and will be used to Blackboard’s mobile technology. Saf-T-Net will also help Blackboard further its dominance in the the K-12 market; Blackboard’s software has been used predominantly by colleges and universities.

Currently, Blackboard provides software for 5000 educational institutions. The company recently boughtTerriblyCleverDesigns, a startup that helped create iPhone and other mobile apps for colleges and universities, for $4 million.

Information provided by CrunchBase


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Blackboard Buys Mobile Messaging Company Saf-T-Net For $33 Million

March 4, 2010

Google Gesture Search Is Great — If You Can Get It

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , — @ 4:21 pm

Google launched a new application last night that enables users to search content on their handsets by drawing letters on the screen of their phones. But the app is another sign that users of older Android platforms are being left behind.

Gesture Search is designed to minimize the number of actions necessary to find contacts, applications and files when voice search isn’t a good option. Users simply launch the app and draw letters on the screen with their fingers to pull up corresponding contacts or other information. I’ve been playing with Google Gesture Search this morning on the Motorola Droid, and it’s pretty nifty — it does a good job of recognizing letters and immediately returning the most relevant results, especially among contacts.

Gesture recognition is another example of how touch — like voice — is becoming an increasingly important tool for mobile users who for years were forced to deal with 12-key inputs or QWERTY keyboards. As Stacey noted a few weeks ago, chip makers are recognizing the value of gesture recognition as a superior way to navigate today’s sophisticated handsets.

But Gesture Search is available only in the U.S., and only to users running Android 2.0 or later, a version of the operating system that is only six months old. Which means that while owners of the Droid and Nexus One can use the app, devices running Android 1.5 or 1.6 — including the G1 or Sprint’s Hero — can’t access Gesture Search. Android updates often require the active participation of handset manufacturers and carriers, which may not be interested in pouring resources into handsets that are already on the market. So it’s up to Google to address older versions of the OS if its apps are to be broadly accessible on Android devices.

March 1, 2010

The Few, the Brave — the Army iPhone App

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 4:57 pm

If you work for the U.S. Army and spend all your spare time hacking the iPhone and Android or fooling around with HTML5, this is a contest for you: The Army’s Chief Information Office is launching a competition aimed at mobile and web apps, with cash awards totaling $30,000 and the chance to get your application the military seal of approval. The contest is a joint venture with iStrategyLabs, and is based on that company’s successful Apps For Democracy project, which was a joint venture with the Washington, D.C.’s Office of the CTO in 2008.

iStrategyLabs founder and CEO Peter Corbett describes on the company’s blog how the contest will work. It starts with a press conference and media (and blogger) roundtable on March 3 at the Pentagon with Lieutenant General Jeffery Sorenson (the Army’s chief information officer) and runs until May 15th. A total of 100 teams will be selected to compete for one or more of 40 cash awards totaling $30,000. Awards will be announced in June, with public demonstrations. The competition comes with a software repository (forge.mil), a cloud-based development sandbox, a collaboration space designed around an Apps for the Army group on MilBook (the Army’s version of Facebook) and a Twitter hashtag: #apps4army.

Corbett says the idea for the project came from O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly, who said on Twitter after announcing the competition that he had hoped to get the rest of the U.S. military involved as well, but wound up only getting the Army on board. The Army has been making some significant strides in the areas of social media over the past year or two, including the launch of CIO Sorenson’s Twitter account, which the lieutenant-general posts to himself (in contrast to many other government departments). It also recently released a surprisingly forward-thinking social media policy.

February 24, 2010

Scribd Goes Mobile With Long-tail Books

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — @ 4:00 pm

Scribd, the document-hosting service that calls itself “the largest social publishing company in the world,” has launched a series of mobile services and features for sending books and other documents to any portable device, including a set of open APIs, and according to CEO Trip Adler, the company plans to launch mobile apps for the iPhone, Android and iPad in the next few months. He also said that Scribd, which has about 50 million unique visitors a month, will soon have published more books than the entire U.S. publishing industry did last year.

“We’ve spent the last few years building a repository of 10 million documents,” Adler said in an interview in advance of the launch. “Now we’re launching a way to really easily read these documents on any mobile device. So whether it’s a PowerPoint presentation or a book or a homework project, you can now send that to any mobile device and read it there.” One of the problems with the e-reader market, he says, is that “people don’t really know what to buy, or what to read on them — with these new services, as long as it’s on Scribd you know that you can read it on any device.”

Scribd’s launch involves three separate products:

  • A “send-to-device” option that will now appear at the top of every document the service hosts, which pulls up a list of all the devices Scribd can send to, including the Kindle, iPhone, Sony Reader, etc.

  • The Scribd Open Platform for E-Readers (SOPED), a development platform and set of application programming interfaces that companies can use to integrate with Scribd’s mobile services.

  • A series of mobile apps for the iPhone, Android, Kindle, iPad and other portable devices that make it easier to send and receive Scribd documents and books.

Adler told me that Scribd briefly thought about coming out with its own e-reading device, but “only for about a minute. It didn’t really make sense, because we’re a web software company, not a hardware company. So we decided to embrace as many different devices as we could.” Through a variety of different protocols — email, text messaging, etc. — the new “send-to-device” service supports the Kindle, the Nook, the iPhone, the Android, Windows Mobile devices, the BlackBerry, the Palm, the Onyx, the JetBook, the EZReader, the IRex and the Cool-ER. Adler said support for other devices will be coming soon.

Why ngmoco’s CEO Is Bullish on the iPad

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NeilYoung.gifApple’s iPad, which is soon going to find its way onto the market, has drawn criticism and scorn from many a technorati. But Neil Young, chief executive and co-founder of San Francisco-based mobile gaming startup ngmoco, isn’t one of them. Not only does he think that the iPad will make netbooks pointless, he believes it will usher in new opportunities for companies such as his to build new experiences.

“Most negative reviews are from people who I think who were expecting a fundamental new technology, not a new user experience,” he said in a conversation with me. “I remember the same type of commentary around when the iPod touch launched.” Of course, as we all know Apple has since sold many millions of those iPod touches.

Young, who just closed a $25 million round of financing from Institutional Venture Partners and previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Norwest Venture Partners and Maples Investments, believes that a big portion of the mass market of buyers are going to find the iPad “magical.”

“The iPad is going to occupy a different part of a user’s life — it will be at the intersection of your home laptop and netbook and personal game console,” he said. Unlike most, who are going to rebuild their apps for the larger screen resolution, ngmoco has devised a three-step strategy for targeting the iPad:

  • Adapt six of its major titles to iPad specifications and have them available for download alongside the device’s launch.
  • Enhance its games to take advantage of the large screen real estate and also augment them with other iPad-specific features.
  • Once iPad has scale or shows a trajectory of scale, build new applications specifically for that platform.

Young isn’t the only CEO of an iPhone games company who is thinking differently. William Volk, CEO of San Diego-based PlayScreen, explained to me that the iPad represented an opportunity to create a whole new kind of game. In a recent blog post Volk wrote,”The big screen and connectivity makes it a natural for social and team gaming. Think of board games, MMORPG’s and card playing.”

Like Volk and Young, I am very excited about the iPad, and am wondering what different types of apps can be developed for this new platform.

If you want to talk to me about these new experiences, apps or the iPad, drop me an email, connect with me on Twitter or simply leave a comment.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Is There Any Demand For a True Gaming Phone?

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Why ngmoco’s CEO Is Bullish on the iPad

February 23, 2010

Infographic: The iPhone, Nokia & the Smartphone Market

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — @ 7:00 pm

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Feature Phones: The Next Market for Mobile Apps

Infographic by Column Five Media

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Infographic: The iPhone, Nokia & the Smartphone Market

February 19, 2010

Skype-Verizon Deal: More Details

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — @ 8:30 pm

Skype and Verizon announced a partnership earlier this week that would embed the Internet calling service on Verizon’s smartphones. The partnership, at least to me, was driven by Verizon’s fear of the iPhone.

I wondered if the two companies had signed an exclusive deal. But during the press conference, when I asked Verizon chief marketing officer John Stratton and Skype CEO Josh Silverman about the deal, they both dodged the question. Then later during a conversation with Silverman, when I asked if his company would work with another carrier in the U.S. building a solution similar to the one being offered to Verizon’s customers, he declined to answer the question. “I cannot comment and speculate on this,” is what he said.

February 17, 2010

Android Dominates MWC as Carriers Quiver

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — @ 6:22 pm

Android has quickly become a force to be reckoned with in mobile, as anyone following Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week can tell you. Google has recognized that the future growth engine of the Internet is the mobile web — and the ad revenues that it generates — and it’s effectively laying the foundation for those revenues with the growth of its mobile operating system. And that’s making carriers very nervous.

Android was designed as a tool to make the mobile web accessible and enable Google to take its search and advertising business to the wireless world. And the platform continues to gain traction at an impressive clip. AdMarvel this morning became the latest mobile ad business to join the Android bandwagon, unveiling a toolkit at MWC designed to help developers deliver ads through their mobile applications. The new Opera Software subsidiary joins fellow mobile ad firm Smaato, which last week announced support for Android, as well as Greystripe, AdMob and a host of other competitors looking for a piece of the Android advertising pie.

That pie is getting bigger very quickly: AdMob recently said ad requests from Android devices had doubled in just two months, while Smaato reported Android’s clickthrough rates surpassed those of the iPhone in January. ComScore echoes those findings, indicating Android’s smartphone market share more than doubled from the third quarter of 2009 to the fourth quarter of last year. Those figures will surely increase, too, thanks to the fact that Android is now shipping on 60,000 handsets a day, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his keynote speech yesterday in Barcelona.

That remarkable traction has spooked network operators, which fear Google may already control too much of the mobile advertising market. Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao yesterday told MWC attendees that regulators must intervene and boost competition “before it’s too late,” claiming Google holds up to 80 percent of the mobile search and advertising market in Europe. Colao’s comments came a week after Telefonica Chairman Cesar Alierta said the telco might charge search engines for network use, citing the dominance of Google and other prominent web sites.

Those fears are justified in light of a report released yesterday by iSuppli. The market research firm said Google may actually reshape the industry, replacing calling plans with ad revenues as the foundation of the business.

February 15, 2010

Windows Phone 7 Is Impressive, But 3 Challenges Remain for Microsoft

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — @ 5:13 pm

Microsoft unveiled the long-awaited upgrade to its venerable mobile operating system this morning, and — so far, at least — the results are pretty impressive. The company has finally scrapped the cumbersome look and feel of Windows Mobile in favor of a more intuitive, streamlined user interface, and – much like HTC — is focusing on consumers by emphasizing the personalized nature of mobile phones in addition to productivity features. (See video below.)

Windows Phone 7 Series, as the new OS is dubbed, is built on the Zune HD interface and enables users to navigate the device via a series of integrated “hubs” (Office, pictures, games, music and video) and widgets. And Microsoft has wisely enlisted the help of industry heavyweights such as Qualcomm and AT&T to help it regain its lost relevance in the ultra-competitive smartphone space.

But producing a knockout mobile operating system won’t be enough to get back in the game, as Palm can tell you. For Microsoft to challenge platforms like Android and iPhone, it will have to address these three primary challenges before its new devices come to market in the fourth quarter of 2010:

February 11, 2010

Skyfire Bets on WebKit for Mobile Browsers

Filed under: gigaom — Tags: , , , , , , , , — @ 5:15 pm

The mobile browser startup Skyfire is joining the increasingly crowded WebKit bandwagon by buying kolbysoft, maker of Steel, a WebKit-based Android browser that appears to have cultivated a tiny but dedicated base of fans who’ve downloaded the app from Android Market. Like the popular Opera Mini browser, Skyfire, which currently supports Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 devices, uses a server to deliver fully rendered web pages. The company hopes to combine WebKit’s ability to “mobilize” basic Internet content with its own cloud-based rendering technology.

“I think, generally and philosophically, WebKit as a movement is doing a really nice job of solving basic HTML-type browsing,” Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck told me yesterday. “What it isn’t doing well is solving the problem of all the rich media on the Internet that’s in these very fat files — bandwidth-hogging files and proprietary plug-ins like Flash and Quicktime and Silverlight.”

As Om noted in 2008, Skyfire’s cloud-based technology impressively renders web content for mobile consumption and — unlike most mobile browsers — allows it to deliver Flash-based content and other rich media. The company currently relies on ad revenues but carriers are “potential customers,” Glueck said.

It’s difficult to gauge just how much traction Skyfire has gained since its launch in late 2008, but recent figures from StatCounter indicate traffic from its browser fails to match even Sony PSP usage. That’s largely due to the fact that the presence of Nokia’s Symbian on the mobile web is waning in Western markets and Windows Mobile traffic borders on nonexistent as Android’s Internet footprint expands — facts that surely helped drive Skyfire’s move toward Google’s platform. Indeed, WebKit technology drives the vast majority of traffic on the mobile web in operating systems such as iPhone and Palm’s webOS; RIM is developing a WebKit browser for the BlackBerry.

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