How Vodafone and Nokia compete on a mobile social phonebook with GPS

I see a very interesting competition developing between Nokia and Vodafone. All signs indicate that they are in a race to present the first social phonebook on cell phones which makes use of GPS. The two contenders are their recently bought subsidaries: Plazes from Germany and Zyb from Denmark. Vodafone seems to be ahead in this race.

Three weeks ago I attended a press workshop at Nokia Maps, which has its developer center here in Berlin. I already wrote about it in this article. They showcased the latest functionalities of Nokia Maps 2.0 and how it can be connected over the internet with other services. "There are 60 billion phonebook entries on Nokia cellphones", said Michael Halbherr, CEO of Nokia gate5 GmbH. "That's the biggest social graph of the world." In the near future a Nokia cellphone's address book shouldn't show only phone numbers. A click on a name will also reveal the friend's actual location, what he does and what are his plans for later. Every entry becomes a node in a social network, as we already know it from Facebook, LinkedIn, XING or the like.

That's why in July 2008 they bought the German startup Plazes, also from Berlin. It let's you see on Google Maps where your friends are if they have entered their location either on Plaze's website, by SMS or through an automatic Wifi localization. Soon Plazes will become a part of Nokia's Ovi and work with Nokia Maps on mobile handsets. It will make use of the cellphones' GPS facilities.

The funny thing is that yet for weeks Zyb is announcing the same functionalities on their website. In the last months Zyb has developed from a simple tool for internet backups of cellphone numbers into an outgrown social network. The features on their website remind me of Plaxo Pulse and are all based on mobile phonebook entries.

But the real interesting stuff comes with their mobile software which is being announced on their website but cannot be downloaded yet. At least not with the 4 different mobile phones I have tried. Also there is no press release, which could have explained more, but that could be part of a viral strategy. At least blogger Pat Phelan got wind of it quite early and I heard from other exclusive previews. The new Zyb features look stunning and resemble quite exactly what Nokia has announced as future plans for Plazes:

The end of... "Where are you at?"
If your friends allow you to, you'll be able to see where they are right this minute. No more texting everyone from the restroom Friday night.
Using location technologies - and your own text input - the ZYB Phonebook quietly and securely transfers your location only to those you allow to see it.

The end of... "What are you up to?"
Show your ZYB shouts as your status line, let your friends see your Facebook status or Twitter tweets.
Millions of people including some of your friends already tell various services what they're doing right now. We'll use that information and combine it with ZYB shouts and your phone's calendar to show your friends what you're doing. If you allow them, of course.

The end of... "What new number?"
"The number you've dialled cannot be reached". We hate her voice as much as you do, that's why the ZYB Phonebook updates your friends' phone numbers automatically.
In ZYB there's no such thing as outdated contact information. The minute your change your own phone number, it is distributed to your connected friends in your ZYB Phonebook. They'll simply have your new info as soon as they sync their phones.

Vodafone bought Zyb in May 2008 for $50m, just some weeks before Nokia snapped up Plazes. Zyb's screenshots remind me very much of the Powerpoint about Plazes' mobile future.

New Zyb mobile app brings Twitter, Facebook, Plazes and LBS.

To me it seems that both applications will do basically the same, only that Vodafone's Zyb is nearer to market. On Wednesday I will probably get more information because I do an interview to a person involved.

Boxbe anti spam filter – a cure worse than the plague

To all my friends who received annoying marketing email messages from a miserable Silicon Valley internet startup called Boxbe: I beg your pardon.

After I signed up to Boxbe, more than 500 of my email contacts received annoying invitations, saying "I'm using Boxbe to screen my email and I've added you to my approved Guest List. Can you take a minute to make sure your contacts can reach me?". Many people have received this message already six times. Now I get emails back from buddies saying "could you please stop spamming me and my girlfriend? Boxbe sucks!".

All this happens only because I once hit the "invite friends" button at Boxbe. But have hit it only once and it was only by chance.

There is no reason for Boxbe to flood my friends with unsolicitated email messages. Most of them are Germans and don't even understand what Boxbe is. To them a Boxbe invitation is the same as an email from a Viagra pharmacy. My 73 years old aunt Gerda forwards all Boxbe messages to me and prays that I can take away this plague from her. My mum does the same. I then click the link at "If you would prefer not to receive any further invitations from Boxbe members, click here" and hope that helps.

What upsets me most: I was already aware that something like this could happen. The Canadian blogger Alec Saunders had published it under the title "Boxbe’s spam. A fatal mistake for them and me". Therefore I only "approved" my friends' email addresses at Boxbe and never "invited". Unfortunately one time I mixed it up and that's how it all started.

I have contacted now the Boxbe tech support (support@boxbe.com) as well as Boxbe Product Manager Randy Stewart (randy@boxbe-inc.com) to stop these annoying invitations. Boxbe, you can't sell yourself as an anti spam solution by being a spammer yourself!

If it wasn't for these stupid marketing messages, Boxbe would be one of the greatest solutions to keep up with the information overflow. It could keep my inbox clean from emails which are worse than Viagra spam: unsolicitated press releases and stupid advertsising messages. A doorkeeper for emails.

My problem is, that German law requires me to post a working email address in the contact section of my website. Another annoying fact is that PR agencies seem to sell my email address which I use for journalistic work. Therefore I get tons of messages to these addresses. Most of them are filtered as spam by an automatic solution. Only once a week I have to check for false positives, but the anti spam filter nearly never goes wrong.

But then there are marketing messages like the one I got from Dow Chemicals two days ago. Something is wrong with some crop, they said, and only pesticides from Dow can help, supposedly. WTF? Where did Dow get my email address from and why do they send this message? I am no peasant and as a journalist I am only interested in technology stuff, mostly when it's related to VoIP or mobile communications.

Boxbe would have put this message from Dow under a quarantine. Since it didn't come from an authorized contact, it would have had to wait at Boxbe before it could enter my real inbox. Messages from authorized contacts would go straight to my email inbox and are shown on my cell phone. All other messages have to wait in the outer office. Once a day Boxbe sends a summary of all these waiting messages and you can kill or authorize them with one click. Users of Yahoo Mail, Gmail or Outlook can have it even more comfortable.

"With Boxbe, your inbox is no longer a free-for-all", is the company's claim and I like this idea very much. By using the tool wisely and combining Boxbe with other technologies, your inbox would not only be free of spam about Viagra or penis enhancement. But you could also have a great fence against unrelated messages which slip through the spam filter but are unwanted anyway.

If only it wasn't for Boxbe's stupid bulk invitations!

I hope they will stop now. I have the feeling that Boxbe only sends them out when I make a change in my settings. Hopefully that's true! In this case I could give it another try.

In an other blog I found this alleviating comment from Boxbe:

randy@boxbe.com said...

Just a point of clarification here. We're not planning on sending invitations every week to users. Rather, if multiple Boxbe users invite the same person, we'll only send a maximum of two to that person in a given week.

Ideally, if multiple Boxbe users want to invite someone, we need to figure out how to send that person one invite from all those people combined.

We're still pretty new at the invite game, but hopefully we can work all the kinks out sooner rather than later.

Cheers,
Randy Stewart
Boxbe Product Manager

Hope that helps.

Watch Qik mobile live videos on your cell phone!

Qik is the latest favourite gadget of famous video bloggers like Robert Scoble, Jeff Pulver, Steve Garfield, Loren Feldman, Laura Fitton, Cali Lewis and others. They can simply switch on their mobile phone's video camera and yet they are sending live videos onto their viewers' internet browsers.

When I met with Qik's VP Marketing and co-founder Bhaskar Roy, he said that they were planning to bring these videostreams also to mobile phones. "Qik is developing a new live streaming to other mobile handsets", says Bhaskar. "You won't even need a browser to watch a livestream. We send a Realvideo stream directly to your friends' cell phones." The cell phone will not only be a camera for mobile live video streams, but also a tv set to watch them. Everyone is a sender and a receiver, because Qik plans to stream its videos in 3GP format to mobile handsets.

Well, they can stop now their development or should at least consider this blog post (just kidding!): I am already able to stream my Qik live videos as 3GP videos to mobile phones. And I am not even a techie. I just did a mashup with another hot startup in mobile space: dailyme.tv from Berlin, Germany. Here you can see a screenshot, showing a Qik video on a Nokia E61:

Screenshot from a Qik video stream on a mobile phone

Qik offers and RSS feed to every user's account which can be subscribed in dailyme.tv. So the Qik streams don't come as live videos to the phone, but they are fairly often updated. "The more often a video RSS feed is updated, the more often we send it to the phones", explained dailyme.tv CEO Michael Merz when we met this week. His service is basically a content aggregator for mobile phones. They bring tv shows and video podcasts into 3GP format which basically every mobile phone understands. So dailyme.tv is also a good way to watch video podcasts in weird formats which only an iPod can handle. The Symbian Freak wrote a good introduction into the service:

The mobile phone television service, dailyME.tv, started a TV push service just in time for the CeBIT, that automatically brings video files and podcasts to subscribers's mobile phones. DailyME is the simplest way to have mobile access to premium TV content and a wide range of Videocasts. Users have the opportunity to be their own TV manager: register, program your own TV and video channel and have it updated automatically, whenever you are online with your mobile phone (WLAN, UMTS, GPRS, HSDPA).

One can choose from a wide selection of different channels and divisions, offered by the service provider. There is no live streaming and content can be downloaded over an internet connection and currently there is only client for Symbian S60 3rd edition phones. Thanks to the unique transmission technology (patent pending) on the basis of the technologies on-hand today, an individual program can be made available for mobile phone users 24 hours per day.

A fast internet connection over Wifi or 3G is necessary for dailyme.tv. GPRS could also be used, but then you should expect longer loading times. The videos have a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, and picture quality is reasonable at 350 Kbit with 12.5 pictures per seconds. What I like most about dailyme.tv is that they are able to transcode every video format, even the *.flv Flash videos from Qik. Over Wifi it doesn't even suck much battery. From time to time the handset connects for very short to download the latest videos. A drum sound of the Devicescape software reminds me that dailyme.tv again started a download.

I can watch the videos later in idle times while commuting. "From April on we will start to offer dailyme.tv also for Windows Mobile 5 Phone edition and Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition", says Michael Merz. "Then we will send our videoclips also in WMV format." I think he should also talk to Qik, which has great XML interfaces. They already offer one click integration of their videos into Twitter, Seesmic, Mogulus, Blogger, mobuzz.tv, justin.tv and Youtube. Great names, but none of them has such a cool application for mobile video.

Disclosure: I am not on a dailyme.tv payroll. I just like their service and that it comes from Germany. Qik is also a mostly Russian company, only the head office is in Silicon Valley.

Why I am disgusted with Plaxo Pulse

I don't like Plaxo Pulse. It feels scary and gives me a sense of lost privacy. For years Plaxo was just an address book service in the internet. I could store my friends' address data and access them from whichever computer. From time to time I sent automatic emails which asked the to update their information.

But all of a sudden I got emails from Plaxo that someone commented on something. On what please? Wasn't Plaxo my private address book, available only for me? How could someone comment on that? Plaxo's weekly update started to tell me that friends had updated their blog or started discussion groups. Again that was information I didn't ask for. Today I received an email which took me to a comment on a Plaxo website. There someone writes about a photo of mine "It's interesting how one's imagination about a person changes when we see a photo. I imagined you very different." Scary, isn't it?

Why does my private address book make me get comments about my appearance from people I interviewed only once, on the phone months ago? I don't like that. I would like to turn all this Pulse crap off at Plaxo. But it seems that in this case I would also loose the address book update functionalities. That's what I have learned from the forum entry "Re: Plaxo Pulse violates privacy policy"

Why must this Web 2.0 crap invade everything? I don't want my address book to autonomously "connect and socialize with one another". That's much more abilities than I ask for! An address book is a very private thing and a social network is something public. I don't want these two worlds to mix. I don't want Plaxo to automatically publish my private connections and exploit them for their company purposes.

Maybe I have to dump Plaxo at all.

Bhaskar Roy: Qik should be a part of Nokia's Ovi

Qik is one of the greatest mobile internet applications I know. You just start the software on a Nokia N95, and yet you are broadcasting live video to everyone over the internet. Have a look at my company's Qik stream at Mogulus if you want to see the next transmission.



I immediately thought that this kind of live video broadcast is the last feature that's missing on Nokia's social platform Ovi. There you can already share photos, videos, comments and blog entries in more than 100 file formats. "We support nearly every existing file format”, said Serena Glover, Director Service Operations, Connect New Experiences at Nokia and ex CEO of Twango in an interview with me at the Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona. But Ovi always keeps you waiting for your friends to upload a new video. You can't just tune when it's still being filmed. It feels more like Blockbuster video than real television. Unlike Qik, which lets you broadcast and see events while they are still happening.

"Absolutely! Qik should be a part of Ovi", therefore said Qik's VP Marketing and co-founder Bhaskar Roy when we talked in Barcelona. He also related how venture capitalists are competing to do his company's second round of funding. Our chat was very interesting and insightful. Who had thought that this Silicon Valley company is mostly based in Russia? While India born Bhaskar and his friend Ramu Sunkara run Qik together with some other Stanford graduates from the Californian city of Santa Clara, most of their employees live and work in Moscow. Nilolay Abkairov, who was a former speech codec developer for Skype mobile, and his team are busily porting Qik to all smartphone platforms.

His friend Alexi handles the video streaming issues, which make use of quite nifty technologies: The handset shoots the video as MPEG4 and immediately streams it as H.263 over a 3G or Wifi connection to Qik's server. There it's being transcoded into Flash for Qik's website or into a Realvideo stream for mobile handsets. "Qik is developing a new live streaming to other mobile handsets”, says Bhaskar. "You won't even need a browser to watch a livestream. We send a Realvideo stream directly to your friends' cell phones."

So soon the cell phone will not only be a camera but also a tv set. Everyone is a sender and a receiver at the same time – if he has the right handset. "Qik works on all S60 platforms and a version for UIQ is in development”, says Bhaskar. "A version for Windows Mobile will be launched soon.” Their aim is to make Qik work on every possible camera phone. That's why the team in Santa Clara is also developing a Java client for cheaper handsets. They even tested Qik successfully on phones with just 100 Megahertz CPU and only an EDGE connection to the mobile internet. "Qik consist of a layer that's different for every platform and a platform independent layer”, explains Bhaskar. "That's why it takes only some weeks to port Qik to a new platform."

So while the future looks technologically bright for Qik, I asked Bhaskar how his company wants to earn money. Until now the service is free and Nokia hasn't made an offer yet. "In this year we will only concentrate on consumer acquisition”, is his answer. Advertising on Qik's website would be easy to implement, like Google does it on Youtube. Also companies could sponsor certain channels on the website. "We could also offer value added services for very cheap prices like $1 per month", says Bhaskar. As an example for a premium service he mentions privacy. Until now every video appears directly on Qik's starting page as soon as you activate the camera. Every stranger can see it until you switch off or hit the "0” key.

Facebook is so 2007!

People are, just, well, bored of social networks reports The Register, quoting comScore numbers, processed by Creative Capital.

The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007. December could perhaps be forgiven as a seasonal blip when people see their real friends and family, but the trend was already south.

The "user engagement" is dropping off, which should be of particular concern for the sales people struggling to turn these free services into profit-making businesses.

This time around, expect spinners to work on massaging the comScore figures, and happy-clappy bloggers to leap to social networking's defence by claiming the falls are sign of the market maturing, and of fierce competition. They could be right, but it still means that the individual business are not the goldmine their greedy backers slavered over.

On Facebook people "join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted".

That's exactly what I did! I am nearly healed from the Facebook virus, just logging in once a week. Facebook is so 2007!

I love The Register for their expertise and vocabulary.

I am looking for interviews about VoIP security for a big German magazine

Dear readers,

I need your help: Until Januar 25, 2008, I have to deliver an article about VoIP security to a big German economy magazine with 770.000 readers. Therefor I am looking for interesting information and interviews. One focus of the article is mobile VoIP security, but not the only one.

The magazine regularily engages me as a freelancing writer for such topics. But this time I want to unleash the power of Web 2.0 by posting this inquiry to my blog.

Do you have interesting material that could be helpful for this article? Maybe I should do an interview to you?

I am looking for speeches, presentations, whitepapers, blog post and similar stuff about VoIP security threats (wiretapping, minute stealing, man in the middle attacks, DoS attacks...) and how to prevent them (encryption, firewalls, ...). So please send me your PDF, URL, Powerpoint or Word document about the topic in the next few days!

I will read the information and then contact you for an interview. These points are interesting to me:

1. What are the most common / most dangerous / latest security threats?
2. Interesting cases of VoIP security breaches and actual hacks?
3. How to protect VoIP / mobile VoIP?

You can find my contact data here or simply post a comment to this blog entry.

Thanks a lot.

Best regards,
Markus Göbel

Interesting article for Facebook haters

"I despise Facebook," writes Tom Hodgkinson today in The Guardian.

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Mainly, Hodgkinson has a go at Facebook's backers, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. He presents an entire conspiracy theory about how Facebook is funded and aided by the CIA and neocon circles to exploit its users, who create all the content only to see it sold as advertising space which makes a few people even richer. He also writes:

After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".

As far as I remember 9/11 happed in 2001. So if the CIA discovered its interested in internet startups already in 1999, it had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and the subsequent War on Terrorism. Still the text is interesting to read and could make me shiver if I knew that it's entirely true. But from my desk in Berlin I just can't check the facts, whether in favour or against Facebook. However I can perfectly understand the story of Hodgkinson's friend who spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk.

What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

At least Facebook always eats up more time than I had planned to spend and it hasn't give me much in return. At least it's free and I can switch off its email notifications.

Let's get rid of Twitter and Facebook!

Pat Phelan has a very interesting blog post about "what's the cost of Twitter?". He extrapolates that the worldwide economy will loose $13.5bn in 2008 because people waste time with silly Twitter updates. His thought provoking text caused a big discussion and reminds me of last year's story "Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions". But while Pat seems to agree that Facebook is a terrible time sucker, he still declares Twitter a "tool I couldn't live without". For me they are of the same category.

I like Pat very much. But I don't need a status update every time his airplain is delayed, he buys a CD of Take That or answers a friend's question. That's the kind of information I find in Twitter feeds. For me that's not useful and causes a false sense of intimacy. That's why I don't like Twitter. I am very happy that Pat doesn't publish his "Daily Tweets" so often anymore, blog posts where he just mirrors his Twitter feed. They are mostly noise between his excellent articles. As a technology journalist I have to follow hundreds of blogs and filter out such distracting information.

That's what Twitter costs me, although I don't even use that tool. I whish my browser had some kind of Adblocker for irrelevant Web2.0 crap.

Call me for free with Tringme!

Much has been said about startups like Ribbit, Tringme or Flashphone which use the Flash browser plugin for click to call widgets. Aswath Rao even declares 2008 the Year of Flash based VoIP Clients. I can only say that you don't have to wait till next year to call me for free using Flash. I love my Tringme call widget:

These calls are entirely free to you, because the caller speaks into the Flash widget on my website using a headset or the laptop's built in phone and speaker. On Linux the sound is a little bit weird. The automatic voice, which says "please wait while we connect your call" before every connection, sounds like a 45 rpm record played on 33. The phone call itself sounds like Mickey Mouse, but still the the words are understandable. On Windows everything works just perfect.

Also to me these calls are entirely free. Other than my widgets from Sitòfono and Voxalot where I have to pay to call the person who wants to contact me.

I achieve this by using FWD as SIP provider to power the Tringme widget. The Tringme account website says "Connect my phone and voicemail widget to Phone number or extension". Unfortunately it accepts only numbers and no SIP addresses in this input mask, but as a workaround I have simply put my FWD number there. In the "TringPhone SIP Settings" part of the account configuration I left my FWD login data. Which means that every Tringme call is in fact a free FWD on net call. You can probably do the same with Gizmo Project's SIP account data and phone numbers, as well as with many other VoIP providers.

Also there is another widget for people who don't want to talk to me, but just leave a voicemail.

Only seconds later I get a call and a voice says "You have a Tringme" before it plays the message. The Tringme widgets are much better than Gizmocall which also allows free calls from a website.

You could call me for free by simply typing http://www.gizmocall.com/mgoebel in your browser's address bar. This website also uses Flash, but additionally you have to install a plugin for Windows or Mac. For ten months yet Gizmo owes us a Linux plugin. Although the company's CEO, Michael Robertson, even has his own Linux distribution, Linspire.

But why bother? The Flash browser plugin gets more and more versatile and works on all platforms. It's a new way to disrupt the telco industry, circumventing the PSTN and offering a new option for free phone calls that so many people appreciate.

So, if you want, please give me a Tringme call!

And, before you ask: No, I couldn't get Truphone's Facebook application running, which should basically do the same like Tringme, only that it uses Java. After one week of tinkering I gave up. But congratulations for winning the "Red Herring 100 Global" Award.

Voxalot's Facebook application for really free phone calls

You know that I bashed Facebook very hard for being a terrible time sucker. Many Web 2.0 applications need too much attention, compared to their value. But there are some utilizations that make me smile, because the unleash the potential of Web 2.0 without wasting my precious time and money. Like Voxalot's latest Facebook application, VoxCall for Facebook, that really disrupts telecommunications. It let's me make free phone calls without touching the PSTN. Read the announcement:

On Monday 19th Nov 2007 Voxalot will be officially launching our new social communications application for Facebook called VoxCall.

VoxCall is an exciting new initiative from Voxalot that allows Facebook users to click on their friends and initiate phone calls. The beauty of VoxCall is that it is self-organising in that if your VoxCall friend changes their contact phone number, you don't even have to be notified... VoxCall will use whatever number they have registered.

VoxCall also offers both public and private chat rooms where VoxCall friends can get together for a group discussion.

The underlying technology that VoxCall uses to connect calls is Voice over IP addresses (often known as SIP URIs). When you add the VoxCall application, you will be prompted to enter your SIP URI. To ensure that you are the rightful owner of that number, VoxCall will display a PIN number on the screen and then call the number you entered. Your phone will ring and you will be prompted to enter the PIN, which is validated.

As such, VoxCall supports calls between friends that belong to *any* "open" voice network (not just Voxalot).

The beauty is that VoxCall uses VoIP without touching the PSTN. My buddies just enter their SIP URI and I can call them with just one click in Facebook. When they change their SIP address I don't have to bother to update my data since their Facebook button stays the same. We stay connected for free from SIP to SIP.

I find this much more nifty than the Facebook apps from Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, Rebtel, IVR Technologies, iotum, Sitófono or Grandcentral. They also connect people on Facebook and let them call me for free, in most cases. But there is always a telephone number involved, so that someone has to pay an incumbent telco which provides them.

Nokia's file sharing platform MOSH is full of illegal contents

Nokia has a serious problem with software piracy, but at least they are trying to solve it. Some days ago the company announced SEEK, a new search function for Nokia's file sharing platform MOSH which had been launched in August. MOSH exists as a small website for mobile phones and in a bigger version for computers. Every subscribed user can upload files and downloads even work without subscription.

Although new users have to give their personal mobile phone numbers to subscribe, MOSH is full of pirated software. For instance the program VirtualRadio for Nokia s60 3rd edition costs US $20.50 when you buy it from the company's website. At MOSH you just have to look up its name in the internal search engine. Within seconds you find the program and then you can send a free SMS on Nokia's cost with a direct download link to your cell phone. After the installation the software works without any restriction, although the MOSH user paid nothing.

Pirated software now much easier to find?

This search for pirated software, and of course also for legal contents, could now become much easier: SEEK allows MOSH users to make requests for content they crave and the community can then respond with suggestions or custom created content. "SEEK allows the rapidly growing, and global, MOSH community to connect with one another and to obtain content not yet available", says the press release. Instead of "content not yet available" they could also have written "in others places only available for cash".

Yet five weeks ago Jan Rezab, CEO of Redboss (one of the top distributors and developers of mobile games in the Czech Republic), told in his blog told that "the only problem is, that people are sharing free, illegal mobile games on the site. Games from EA, THQ, Fishlabs, and many companies are available on MOSH". I tried to verify that and found for instance the VirtualRadio software and many games. Of course Nokia doesn't encourage this kind of use. Instead they imagine that users share self created contents like a personal "video of a specific dive in the Maldives".

"MOSH has a strong focus on responding to the needs of its community of users and feedback from the community is the motivation for SEEK", says Lee Epting, Vice President, Forum Nokia. "We have always focused on MOSH being a service created for, and shaped by, users. Seeing users request content from one another, as well as the desire for community discussion, forms the foundation of SEEK." His words sound a little bit sarcastic to me, taking into account that many users take MOSH as a free one stop shop for pirated software.

Officially launching on December 14, an exclusive demo of SEEK could be seen at CTIA Wireless in San Francisco October 23rd through October 25th. MOSH, short for mobilize and share, has seen more than 6 million downloads since its beta launch on 9th August. Hopefully these weren't all pirated software downloads.

Hunt for piracy with fingerprints

After I wrote a short article about SEEK and the illegal content on MOSH for Areamobile, I soon got a phone call from Finland. On the phone was James Waterworth, Communications Manager Technology at Nokia. He said that the piracy problem is high on MOSH's agenda and should be solved soon.

For copyright protected music and movies they already have an automatic solution: MOSH checks the digital fingerprint of the file and prevents the upload if it's copyright protected. For that Nokia could use existing filter software that already had been used in similar ways at Youtube or Flickr. "Try to upload a song by Madonna!", Waterworth told me. But I didn't do so because I don't want to get in trouble. That's also the reason why I don't post any direct link to illegal MOSH contents in this blog post. Look for yourself, dear reader! Yet I wonder why still I can find Madonna's song "Hung up" at MOSH.

Much more difficult is it for Nokia to filter illegal software. There was no existing solution for cell phone programs, so Nokia now has to develop their own. In some weeks, Waterworth says, pirated software will be detected automatically at MOSH. Nokia will check against a blacklist from software companies which contains every piece of software they don't want to see for a free download at MOSH.

Until then Nokia asks users to report copyright infringements and illegal contents to the moderators who monitor MOSH day and night. They will delete them by hand. The responsible for the illegal upload will be warned and if he does it again his account will be canceled.

Sipgate opens API for VoIP mashups

The VoIP company Sipgate, one of the biggest in Germany with also significant business in the UK, offers a special service for developers. "Sipgate API" is a new interface to integrate almost every Sipgate function - VoIP, SMS and large administration tools - in own applications. The Sipgate API enables to use central Sipgate functions within your own software or web projects, so that VoIP tinkerers can set up their own mashup services.

In his latest blog post Thomas Howe, the master of mashup, was so kind to explain again what mashup means:

A mashup is an application that uses
1) modern Web integration technologies
2) to take content or services from two independent sources
3) to solve a unique or niche problem.

The first element of mashups are the integration technologies they use. These integration technologies create a “web as platform” architecture, allowing the mashup developer to integrate his software on top of the world class infrastructures provided by Amazon or AOL, simply, easily and safely. The most common technologies used for mashups include Web services calls, which either come as a SOAP or REST flavors, AJAX, Javascript and Ruby.

The second element of mashups is that they take content or services from more than one independent source. This is where the “mashup” word comes from. Mashups take things that might not go together, and puts them together in a valuable way. The classic mashup is the Chicago Crime Map, that took data from the Chicago Police Department and plotted it on Google Maps, so that you could see where the burglaries happened.

The "Sipgate API" is provided free of charge and can be used for mashups with every Sipgate account. Up to date the fax function of Sipgate can be used only with the German service.

To make integration easy, Sipgate publishes also the source code of the Firefox extension "Sipgate FFX" as well as several Perl examples and a KDE panel application under a GPL 2 license. Further more .NET developers will find with "sipgate API .NET SDK" a comfortable library to use the "Sipgate API" services easily. Over a mailing list developers can also exchange experiences and tips.

You will find all information about the interface and the exemplar applications including detailed documentations under www.sipgate.co.uk/api.

Finally Google Reader adds search

Techcrunch reports that Google adds search to Google Reader. Now that's a news that I have been waiting for. Far too long! It's so great to finally have it. You can find the official announcement here.

I already had missed this feature so urgently that I had to install a hack which made use of Google's customized search. It searches through the websites whose feeds I am using. This trick I found via this excellent post "Saving Time for Productivity with Google Reader" from Web Worker Daily. But the disadvantage were too many and too old search results.

Instead the new Reader search ransacks only actual blog posts and presents them in chunks of 40 results.

Why are people like Jeff Pulver so crazy for Facebook and Twitter?

That was a funny to read yesterday: VoIP guru Jeff Pulver published the manifesto "Social Communications. A way of Life for me.", stating that "advent of Social Media provides us all with a great set of online tools we can use to build friendships and conduct business". He tells how he feels connected with hundreds of friends and collaborators without the need to ever meet the person face-to-face and declares 2007 as his year when social media extended itself into his life and changed everything.

Sometime during 2007, with the advent of my discovery/obsession with twitter and my recent adoption of Facebook as my iHome, the result of my actions have accelerated the way I have been able to create new relationships with people. These are people whom I've never met, yet over time people whom I feel truly connected with. And I would include in this list some of the people whose blogs I read as well as some of the people who have taken the time to leave a comment on my blog and whom I got to know afterwards.

The text ends with an invitation to join him on Facebook and Twitter, where we can read important information like "Good morning! Looks like a great day. I just hope the weather stays like this for my drive/ferry/drive to Boston on Thursday." or "Jeff is sleeping and dreaming about Jerusalem ROCKS!".

I nearly cracked up laughing when directly afterwards I read the post "Facebook Crap" on the Wireless Utopia blog. The writer Rajiv, a programmer from Bangalore, came straight to the point:

I finally have to admit it: I have not been able to figure out Facebook. No, not their business model. But what to do with it. I am on it and so are a decent amount of friends. But I hardly ever go beyond the home page. I see all my friends adding all sorts of applications, running quizzes, giving each other gifts, reading fortune cookies and whatnot. They seem to be having a good time.

But somehow I fail to enjoy it. None of the apps are really interesting. Or useful. To be frank, some of them are downright childish. Fortune cookies, comparing likes and dislikes. Who has the time for these things.

You are so right Rajiv! I feel the same. Facebook is a great time sucker.

On purpose I made there only "friends" who should be serious people: CEOs, CTOs, analysts, investors, sales people, journalists. I hoped to get in interesting discussions and to learn something. But what do I see? Messages like "Andy Abramson is going to dinner, about to drink wine..." or adult people pretending to be Zombies and virtually bite each other.

The groups, where we could have discussions, are barely updated with new posted items or wall posts. Even the page of the Rebtel group, with 153 members, didn't change in the last 12 days. Other groups that sounded interesting (EQO Mobile, Jajah, Ooma, FWD, ...) didn't develop further than some introductory statements.

Twitter is worse because it's only silly personal status messages. Have fun to read Jeff Pulver saying mostly "Good morning" and talking about the wheather on his Twitter page.

Who needs this? I wonder what Jeff Pulver would say.


UPDATE:

Reuters: Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions
Mon Aug 20, 2007 6:29AM EDT

Too many websites for social bookmarking

Did you see these new small symbols at the end of every blog entry?

                                      

They are for social bookmarking and I think this market needs an immediate shakeup.

Social bookmarking is a great Web 2.0 phenomenon. People can put bookmarks on your blog articles and share them with others. This sometimes skyrockets your website traffic when an article is featured on the starting page of such a service.

But there are much too many of these websites. The 20 social bookmarking services I found for my blog are just the most important in English. There are much more in Spanish, German, French and other languages, which also would accept my English articles. So to address all possible readers I should have about 50 of those tiny symbols, that only experts recognize as useful buttons for social bookmarking.

This is ridiculous.

Until now I could not decide which of the 20 social bookmarking services are the really most important. I just gathered them from other smart blogs that actually should know.

To be helpful to my readers I want to tell them at least how to implement them on Blogger:

<!-- START SOCIAL BOOKMARKING -->
<p style="float:right;"><small><a href="http://www.technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" target="_blank" title="See this page in Technorati"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/technorati.gif" alt="See this page in Technorati" /></a> <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> in del.icio.us"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/delicious.gif" alt="book mark <$BlogItemTitle$> in del.icio.us" /></a> <a href="http://slashdot.org/submit.pl" target="_blank" title="Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to Slashdot.com"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/slashdot.gif" alt="<$BlogItemTitle$> to Slashdot.com" /></a> <a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to Digg.com"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/digg.gif" alt="Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to Digg.com" /></a> <a href="http://boingboing.net/suggest.html" title="Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to BoingBoing.net" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/boingboing.gif" alt="Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to BoingBoing.net" /></a> <a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?title=<$BlogItemTitle$>&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> in Furl"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/furl.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> in Furl" /></a> <a href="http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?title=<$BlogItemTitle$>&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> in Spurl"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/spurl.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> in Spurl" /></a> <a href="http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&<$BlogItemTitle$>=&Url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> in Blinklist"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/blinklist.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> in Blinklist" /></a> <a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/bookmarklet/add?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Ma.gnolia.com"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/magnolia.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> in Ma.gnolia.com" /></a> <a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_wine/save?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&h=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Newsvine"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/newsvine.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Newsvine" /></a> <a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Reddit"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/reddit.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Reddit" /></a> <a href="http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&new_comment=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Fark"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/fark.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Fark" /></a> <a href="http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Yahoo MyWeb"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/yahoo.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Yahoo MyWeb" /></a> <a href="http://iq.lycos.de/lili/my/add?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Lycos iQ"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/lycosiq.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Lycos iQ" /></a> <a href="http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&bkmk=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Google Bookmarks"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/google_bmarks.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Google Bookmarks" /></a> <a href="http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?mini=1&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Blogmarks.net"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/blogmarks.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Blogmarks.net" /></a> <a href="https://favorites.live.com/quickadd.aspx?marklet=1&mkt=en-us&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>&top=1" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Windows Live"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/windows_live.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Windows Live" /></a> <a href="http://www.netscape.com/submit/?U=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&T=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Netscape"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/netscape.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Netscape" /></a> <a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at StumbleUpon"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/stumble.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at StumbleUpon" /></a> <a href="http://tailrank.com/share/?link_href=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Tailrank"><img src="http://www.goebel.net/pics/tailrank.gif" alt="Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> at Tailrank" /></a></small></p>
<!-- END SOCIAL BOOKMARKING -->

First Blog post

Hello folks,

today I start my tech blog. I know I am not the first. But I realized in the last days that I have opinions to many devices that are not well reflected in the other media. I read other blogs, websites and newsletters, but sometimes I want to answer. So the last times I wrote comments in the blogs of Om Malik and Andy Abramson. That's enough. Now I am going to start my own blog and whenever I have an opinion I am going to write it down there. It will still probably be comments on other people's thoughts and still appear in their comments section. But now as a trackback to my own blog entries.

I first called the blog "Tech desiderata" because I see that there are still many things which have to get better in nowadays technology. Many stuff bores me, annoys me or just does not work. I will tell my readers about it and hopefully won't be boring myself. But the name is now "Markus Göbel's Tech News Comments".