June 4, 2009

WorldMate comes to the iPhone

WorldMate is huge in the mobile world — it first started as a Palm OS app back in 2000. Then, as today, they realized that “travel = mobile” and so it made sense to build a mobile application for travelers.

WorldMate had an innovative approach and built what was the industry’s first on-device portal with a myriad of travel content for online/offline use. WorldMate was so successful that many PDA/Smartphone makers, including Nokia, Palm, HP, and Sony Ericsson, pre-installed it on their devices. More than 3 million people use WorldMate across the Symbian, BlackBerry, Palm OS and Windows Mobile platforms.

But that was then when making mobile apps meant being pre-installed on a pre-sale phone. The world has moved on since the launch of the iPhone to a new world of online application stores. Now, right before the expected launch of iPhone 3.0, WorldMate has come to the iPhone app store. Continue reading →

May 29, 2009

Photos of NetSquared

Here are 16 photos on Flickr I took at the NetSquared Global Conference held Tuesday and Wednesday at Cisco headquarters in San Jose.

Pictured above is Chris Messina of OpenID, Citizen Agency and Flock fame; he gave a stirring presentation about the open social Web.

March 25, 2009

Twiphlo: Making geolocation small & beautiful

Stowe Boyd, a longtime fixture in the tech and social media worlds, is joining Socialmedia.biz as a contributor and collaborating strategist. The following originally appeared in his blog /Message.

Geolocation tools fall into two broad categories:

Predictive location, generally oriented toward arranging to meet with other people when traveling to other places (like Dopplr and TripIt), or in your own town (like Mixin)
Location streaming, generally oriented to keeping others informed of location (like Google Latitude, DodgeBall, Plazes, or Brightkite), either for arranging meetings, or to maintain a geolocational lifestream.

I have used tools in both categories, and written about my experiences with them.

twiphlo Most recently, I have been using Dopplr for predictive purposes, and Brightkite for location streaming. But in recent weeks, I have found that Brightkite is too rich an experience, overlapping too much with what I am doing with other tools, particularly Twitter as my primary lifestream, and the various blogs I maintain on Tumblr. Perhaps it is also that I don’t have a deep sense of community on Brightkite.

One thing in particular annoys me about Brightkite, and that is the Twitter integration. While they have provided a sophisticated template-based approach to posting tweets based on Brightkite location updates, the tool to support updating Twitter location in the user profile is just broken. When I post ’542 Brannan St, San Francisco CA 94107′ the Twitter location gets set to ’542 Brannan St’ dropping the city, state, and zip code.

I was quite happy to stumble upon a small but beautiful location streaming tool the other day, called Twiphlo. It seems like the main window is designed for a mobile interface use, like iPhone. The basic idea is that you can post something, while at the same time updating your Twitter profile location.

Continue reading →

February 6, 2007

The Mobile Generation: a free book

mobile_generation Last summer I attended the 15th annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, taking part in a discussion about the Mobile Generation. More than two dozen participants (pictured above) examined the profound changes ahead as a result of the convergence of wireless technologies and the Internet. Plus, it was great fun hanging out with all these big thinkers.

The roundtable addressed the technological and behavioral changes already taking place in the United States and other parts of the world as a result of widespread and innovative uses of wireless devices, the trends in these behaviors especially with the younger generation, and what this could mean for life values in the coming decade. The roundtable tackled new economic and business models for communications entities, social and political ramifications, and the implications for leaders in all parts of the world. The 2006 Roundtable included 28 distinguished leaders from the fields of government, business, finance, academia and media.

The Institute just issued a 66-page book I authored: The Mobile Generation: Global Transformations at the Cellular Level. You can download it as a free PDF here.