Today we’re launching several new features that make Skydeck useful every single day: daily data, so you can check who called you yesterday and who you need to call back; an easy way to share contact information with people in your network; and the ability to search your network for people that you don’t know.
As always, we wanted you to be first to know. Thanks again for your great feedback and support during this private beta. We’ll be announcing our public beta very soon!
Daily Data
You’ve told us that you love being able to see and sort your calls and text messages in Skydeck, but you’ve also asked us where are the calls you made yesterday, or last week? It’s our most requested feature. (more…)
Today we’re announcing three new features that we’re really excited about.
The Network Tab
For most people, the best thing about Skydeck is the way we re-organize your address book around the people that are most important to you (and the people you’ve been neglecting). You could have a thousand names in your address book, but Skydeck knows who belongs at the top of your list.
We call it your true social network: your most important personal and professional relationships. But it’s just the ‘first degree’. Who are their most important connections?
A little company in New Jersey called Synchronoss had a very bad day today, and no one is quite sure why. I think it’s because the next iPhone will be subsidized.
Synchronoss sells software that allows cell phone companies and other communication service providers to activate cell phones and modems and cable boxes online. In particular, Synchronoss worked with Apple and AT&T to enable iPhone customers to activate the device at home via iTunes. This was one of many features that made the iPhone remarkable. Synchronoss deserves a lot of credit for pulling it off, and it was a huge deal for them, since AT&T accounts for more than 70% of their revenue.
Last night Synchronoss reported their Q1 earnings. This morning their stock dropped more than 40%. One line in the press release explains why:
“We have materially lowered our growth expectations for 2008 due in large part to reduced revenues associated with the iPhone.”
Synchronoss announced that they expect to make less money from the iPhone in 2008 than they did in 2007 - $30 million less. (more…)
This week rings in the 120th printing of the Carnival. While a major theme of the week was the “death of the mobile web” per Mowser’s downfall, the articles we received included an especially diverse collection of mobile news and opinions. Thanks to all who have contributed.
Now on to the stories, starting with my pick for this week’s best post. Krisse from All About Symbian discusses Nokia’s “Comes with Music” service that allows users unlimited music downloads for one year. He explores its economics relative to the alternatives (e.g., piracy, itunes), and the possibility for other varieties of this type of promotion. Is it sustainable for music? What about videos, games, applications? I found this piece especially compelling because of the philosophical shift Nokia’s move embodies on behalf of the music publishers and their pricing of digital content (think 5 years ago), and also because of the massive implications that this could have on the current and emerging mammoths of music distribution (e.g., iTunes, Amazon).
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Continuing to the rest of this week’s picks, I will unabashedly start with a contribution from Skydeck’s own Jason Devitt, who participated in last Thursday’s public FCC hearing at Stanford University (video of his speech in post) with the FCC Chairman and five Commissioners. He wrote up a short post describing the experience and the contributions of others.
Next, we have long-time reader, first-time writer Sascha Konietzke from funkfeuer, based in Germany. He discusses how Microformats leverage existing standards and facilitate an early Semantic Web, and the advantages that they can bring to mobile. Its a comprehensive, educational review with great insights into the benefits for mobile.
Is the future of telecoms local… ’super serving’ a local community? Ajit from Open Gardens discusses this and other worthwhile topics while reviewing Cincinnati Bell’s often contrarian approach to the market under its leader, the candid Jack Cassidy.
John Puterbaugh from Nellymoser writes a comprehensive post on the role of widgets in mobile, which summarizes their value into 3 concise points, and goes far beyond the overly simplistic explanation of ‘user experience’ benefits. The review is very detailed and interesting, being a how-to guide, research paper, and opinion piece all at once.
Matt Davies from Taptu reveals in an article titled Design Thinking, the best practices for revealing the features of your site or service to new users. Learn about the progressive disclosure method and make sure you’re not overwhelming your users.
In three points Igor Faletski from mobscureattempts to rebut the notion that “Mobile Ads are the next big thing”.
Peggy Salz from MSearch Groove discusses Russell Beattie’s decision to pull the plug on Mowser, and asks whether the mobile web is really dead, or if we’ve simply been looking in the wrong places. Is it alive and kicking on the fringes as a Generation Y social medium, not the information play we were expecting?
James Cooper of mjelly complements Peggy’s piece with another take on the same topic, using mobile internet statistics to state 10 reasons why it is alive and well.
Dennis at WAP Review discusses the benefits and drawbacks of the new Openwave OpenWeb transcoder recently rolled out by Sprint, which makes full PC websites usable on the limited browsers of feature phones. In context, the piece reviews the decision by Openwave and InfoGin to adopt the Developer Manifesto for responsible formatting, and this decision’s impact on future development.
Ray at Money Blue Book tells the story of his ordeal with Verizon’s exceedingly persistent contract renewal sales team, and suggests to readers fortunate enough to be at the end of their cell phone contracts that they should negotiate with leverage. He continues by informing readers of the often unrealized savings available through employee or student discounts, and provides carrier-specific links to find out if you qualify. We salute his service to the consumer community.
Andrew Grill from his namesake’s blog writes a very interesting piece arguing that the development of new ways to gather and process user behavior will improve the mobile advertising end-user experience. Andrew also describes a Newsweek article that inspired his post, which is about an MIT project that is displaying phone connections on a map in real-time between different world cities.
Bena Roberts from GoMo Newssummarizes her experience at the Mobile Marketing Forum, primarily with a review of Google’s “shockingly good” presentation on Mobile Marketing.
Barbara Ballard at Little Springs Design put together a quick read that discusses mobile social networking trends and gives suggestions for how businesses competing in this area can succeed. If mobile is who you are and where you are, should an “everything is a community” approach apply and even thrive?
Announcements and Events:
* Handheld Learning 2008 is “the premier conference on mobile learning”. It will be held in London from Oct. 13-15, so you have plenty of time to read up and put it in your diary. Mark van ‘t Hooft from Ubiquitous Thoughts is on the event’s steering committee, and has written a brief overview here.
* Great news for Mobilists. We’re delighted to announce that our friends at AdMob have agreed to sponsor the Post of the Week starting in April. Every week, the post chosen by that week’s Host will win a $100 coupon for mobile advertising with AdMob to drive traffic to their mobile website.
This week’s winner is Krisse from All About Symbian. Congratulations!
AdMob is the world’s largest and highest quality mobile advertising marketplace, serving more than 2 billion mobile banner and text ads per month. Founded in January 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile web and enables publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites. AdMob offers both advertisers and publishers the ability to leverage targeted and personalized advertising in more than 160 countries. Sample AdMob customers include Coca Cola, P&G, Adidas, GM, MSN, Paramount Pictures, Reuters, MTV and many more. AdMob serves ads for over 3000 mobile web sites including ESPN, AccuWeather, CBS, Weather Underground, Maxim and Peperonity.
To learn more about advertising or publishing with AdMob click here
Thanks to all who support the Carnival. Next week’s will be hosted by 3-Lib.
Yesterday all five FCC Commissioners came to Stanford and listened to seven hours of testimony about network neutrality, including two hours of comments from members of the public. The focus was on Comcast and how they allegedly block some P2P traffic (I say allegedly because they still refuse to say exactly what they were doing). Sadly, Comcast refused to show up, as did every other network operator invited, except for Brett Glass from Lariat, a small ISP in Laramie, Wyoming. (more…)
Skydeck is two weeks old and loving all the attention. Thousands of people have applied for an invitation to our beta - thank you - and we’re responding as quickly as we can. We’ve also had lots of requests:
“Once you go Firefox 3 you will never go back”
We guessed that the first thousand people would be more likely to be use Firefox than IE, but we didn’t expect to get ten times more requests to support the beta release of Firefox 3.0 than we got to support all versions of IE combined. Fear not, Skydeck now supports Firefox 3.0. If you held off on trying Skydeck, go back to your invitation mail and follow that link. If you ‘downgraded’ to 2.0 just for us, login to Skydeck in 3.0 and paste in this link to get the new toolbar: https://skydeck.com/extension/reinstall.html
“love how it only works w/ffox ;) stick it to da man!”
Er, not really. Wrong man. IE support is coming, it will just take longer. (more…)
We’ve been writing about the cell phone market at the Skydeck blog for almost a year without ever saying what Skydeck plans to do. That’s been pretty frustrating, since what we’re working on has implications for many of the problems that we’ve talked about here.
Skydeck still hasn’t launched — you need an invitation to join our beta test — but as of today we’re no longer a secret.
Skydeck is building an online service that will help people to take control of their cell phones and their cell phone bills.
First, we’re unlocking the valuable information hidden in your cell phone bill. (more…)
If you thought that the debate about open access was over, it’s really just begun.
Last week the FCC announced that Verizon and AT&T were the big winners in the 700 MHz auction, as expected. In particular Verizon won the ‘C’ block, the nationwide license to which open access conditions apply.
Now the regulators have to decide what the open access provisions really mean, and how they’re going to be enforced.
For most of us, open access means ‘any application on any device’: you can attach any compatible device to the network and run any application that the device is capable of running. Verizon used similar language last year when the company announced that it was going to open up its existing network to ‘any application, any device.’ (more…)
zzzPhone is a brave attempt to take the build-to-order model pioneered by Dell for PCs and apply it to the cell phone market. Several blogs have covered them and the New York Times picked up the story today.
This is the kind of innovation that open access makes possible. The market for the zzzPhone today is probably no more than a few tens of thousands of units worldwide, so it wouldn’t make sense for a major carrier to do a deal with them. But zzzPhone doesn’t need permission from a cell phone company to launch; their phones will work on any GSM network, including AT&T and T-Mobile in the US.
But even with open access, there are big challenges ahead for zzzPhone. PCs are not like cell phones and the Dell model may not succeed.
Since we posted about mystery charges from SJA Mobile a few things have happened that confirm our suspicions and also suggest that SJA has taken notice.
We are not the only ones. Comments on our blog and posts on HowardForums reveal that lots of people have been on the wrong end of charges from SJA Mobile, most of them Sprint customers. (more…)
Posted by: Jason
Posted by: Dan
