This month, Google Labs released a new service called GOOG-411. A toll-free call will get you in touch with a friendly, natural-sounding robot asking you for your city, your listing or category, and then offer to connect you, give you address details, or send all those goodies to your phone via text message. The voice recognition is impressive and the overall flow is fairly speedy, though there are certainly redundancies that lengthen the overall process for the sake of usability (which in this case earns them points in my book). Luckily, there’s a cheat sheet for advanced users to blast past some of the menus.

GOOG-411 is a clever development effort on Google’s part as all of this infrastructure — maps, text messaging, business directory search — is already part of the Google suite of services and this mashup recipe sets them up with a solid core experience. Building on this service is only a matter of choosing which pieces will add to the user experience and not overly complicate its current simplicity. For example, I can easily imagine saying “Directions” and having step-by-step instructions of how to get there from where I am while leveraging my phone’s location data.

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If you think Tamagotchi is past tense for virtual pet, think again. They’re connecting with some US partners to create a competitor to Disney Mobile and Firefly.

“Tamagotchi virtual pet now comes as just one of the many features loaded onto a fully functional prepaid mobile phone for kids. The phone is being brought to retail through a joint effort between PlayPhone and Bandai America Inc.”

Summary:

• It’s aimed at kids, duh
• The handset is brightly colored and comes with a preloaded Tamagotchi mobile game and a custom Tamagotchi wallpaper
• It’s a no-contract, pay-as-you-go handset
• It comes with parental controls that parents will be able to limit dialing access for incoming and outgoing calls and lock the push-to-talk and Web access capabilities.
• Ability to convert users’ prepaid airtime minutes into mobile content credits to spend on additional wallpapers, games, and Ringtones on the TamaPhone.com Website – thus avoiding the use of a credit card.

Read more information at: http://www.collectiondx.com/node/147

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EMI keynote at CTIA Orlando

Eric Nicoli (CEO of EMI Group) hinted in his keynote at CTIA that his company had been “experimenting” with DRM-free music and said that their studies showed people would be willing to pay more for it. Last weeks’EMI Group announcement of an iTunes deal will make higher quality, DRM-free, tunes available for $1.29. The new offering doesn’t replace the existing $.99 DRM versions. What’s even more user-friendly is that users who own DRM versions can upgrade their tracks for $.30 each.

Eric Nicoli also made a call for the mobile industry, specifically those in the media and entertainment realm, to take cues from Apple and address issues like value for price, making compelling products and ease of use.

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This is no April Fool’s joke. “New Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Phone” is the New York Times write-up of the emerging trend.

From the article:

“In Japan, McDonald’s customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.”

Clearly the US has a way to go before catching on. Mainstream media just may be catching on too:
“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the digital world,”

Related resources:
1. “China: Craking the Mobile Ad Biz” – An article from BusinessWeek focusing on mobile barcodes in China
2. “All About Mobile Life” - A blog focusing on Kaywa QR code, a barcode service in Switzerland offering a bridge between We-based and Mobile content.

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My mobile lets me reach others and be reached anywhere I go. But I’m not satisfied. I want to know whether the people I’m trying to reach are reachable. I want to let people know when I’m not reachable, and what form of communication I prefer when they’re trying to reach me.

Mobile presence is coming to a phone near you. The following is my quick list of 10 go-to attributes for an effective mobile presence system:
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In the spirit of mobile social etiquette, I offer up these clips. If you’ve not seen them, Merlin Mann from 43 Folders fame plays “That Phone Guy,” that loud speaking, jargon-using, obnoxious mobile user that we sometimes find ourselves stuck next to in line.

Still on the Ground | Literally | Don’t run DOS | Okay |  Dots of Fluid

Mind Waffle | Foot Tattoo | Hearing Huey Lewis

A Dungaree | Salon-perfect | A Pulsing Sting | Is that how you get a pony?

[ Watch more at thatphoneguy.com. ]

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New technologies create new contexts of use. So when the folks behind Odeo invented Twitter, my new context-of-use became receiving and managing dozens of text messages a day while friends constantly update their statuses.

I want to stay connected to my friends, but do I need to know every minute detail of each of their days ad nauseum? It reminds me of the dawn of blogs, where fledgling bloggers felt their lives were so important that everyone needed to know what they had for breakfast.

Let’s look at Instant Messenger. At a glance, I can immediately see who’s available and who’s not available by the colored dot next to their name. If my friends decide that the world needs to know more about their day, they have the option to include an optional status message.

Updating your status is relatively quick and easy. With one click, I can pick from a list of status messages I’ve created and my status is quietly updated across those buddy lists in which I appear.

Note: Quietly.

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iPods sold at a brisk pace over the 2006 holiday season, which would seem to end the recent iPod sales slump. However, Tomi Ahonen aims to blow away any speculation that the iPod is still holding on to the music player throne. The barrage of evidence from Asian, European and UK studies he presents is pretty compelling. In a nutshell, he says that while iPod sales grew 45% that music phone growth has boomed to 243%, which means that though iPod sales are growing, the iPod market share has been long overtaken by music phones and is shrinking by comparison. (SonyEricsson alone shipped 60 million musicphones compared to Apple’s 46 million iPods).

Now, you’re thinking, “but just because people own a music-capable phone, a so called music phone, do people actually use them for listening/buying music?” Well, Ahonen says yes, and backs it up with some interesting European and Asian studies. The UK study he sites says that 80% of musicphone owners are satisfied or very satisfied with them. Thus Ahonen’s argument goes: the iPod is so totally over.

He’s quick to dismiss the iPod and usher in the music phone era, but I don’t think he’s really discussing the US side of the picture…
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The best mobile news and discussions for the week of 19 January, 2007.

Culture of Mobility

1// Mayor Bloomberg announced that New York will soon allow 911 (and 311) to accept digital photos and videos.

“If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you’ll be able to transmit images to 911, or online to nyc.gov,” the mayor said in his annual State of the City address. “And we’ll start extending the same technology to 311 to allow New Yorkers to step forward and document nonemergency quality of life concerns, holding city agencies accountable for correcting them quickly and efficiently.”

2// Book, I hot mod balk. (a.k.a - Cool, I got one call.)

Kottke.org has a mention of kids in the UK using “book” as a synonym for “cool.” It’s rooted in a T9onym where the word cool and the word book both come up when you enter 2665 on a T9 keypad.

3// In the clamor of the Apple Keynote, Nokia and Visa’s announcement of mobile Visa payments in the US snuck under the radar.

Mobile technology news

4// Mainstream press picks up on Qualcomm: BusinessWeek has a feature on emerging mobile technologies primarily mentioning Qualcomm’s mobile TV offering, MediaFLO.

5// Mobileburn has a review of Samsung + Cingular’s latest sleek little smartphone — the BlackJack, a Windows Mobile handset that is slightly smaller than Motorola’s popular Q. Being skeptical about Samsung handsets doesn’t mean I don’t want one. Did I mention it’s black?

Mobile UI

6// Looks like Alltel is doing the widgets thing.

7// Mike Krisher has an interesting piece on FlashLite.

8// Mike Rowehl on Rails Dev for the Mobile web: Rails and Mobile Content

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From the article: “Yesterday T-Mobile became the first major mobile phone carrier in the United States to begin selling service that allows a single handset to communicate over both cellular networks and Wi-Fi hot spots.

The first phones, which are available to consumers in Seattle on a trial basis, link to T-Mobile’s cellular network outdoors and to Wi-Fi routers at homes, in offices and in other locations like airports and hotels. This lets customers avoid using some of their cellular minutes and increases coverage in places where signals are typically weak, like basements and rooms without windows.”

Article at the NY Times

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