Last time I checked, there were 85,000 iPhone applications in Apple’s iTunes App Store, a number that seems to grow by thousands every week. But most of those apps were dreamed up by developers, not by average users. Now there’s a way for anyone with a bright idea for an iPhone app to submit it—and, if other people like the idea enough, to see it get made.

It’s called Appswell, and it launched yesterday. The idea behind the Cambridge, MA-based startup, the brainchild of a young serial Web entrepreneur named Dan Sullivan, is to take advantage of the collective creativity of iPhone users to come up with the next great money-making app, and give everyone a chance to share in the proceeds.

Anyone with an iPhone can submit an idea to Appswell or vote on other users’ ideas. Each month, the company will turn the most popular idea into an app, and reward the creator with a $1,000 cash prize and a stake in future sales.

“Rather than a bunch of developers putting 20 things on a whiteboard, we think we have a method of engaging thousands of people,” says Sullivan. “For the consumer who has a great idea in his head but isn’t a developer and will never build it, we are narrowing the gap for getting that idea tested and vetted and turning it into reality.”

Appropriately, there’s just one way to submit an idea for an app: through Appswell’s own free iPhone app. (The app, and the company itself, were ready to launch back in mid-September, when I first met Sullivan. But like so many other companies, Appswell had to wait for weeks while the still-mysterious iTunes App Store approval process inched forward. Sullivan finally got the okay last night.)

The app itself couldn’t be simpler. To submit an idea, users simply create an account, click “Add your idea,” and enter a name, a category, and a short text description. Users can also browse ideas submitted by others by category, popularity, or recentness. If you see an app idea you like, you can vote for it, comment on it, or share it via e-mail or Twitter.

At the end of each month, Sullivan says, the company will hold a week-long, American Idol-style showdown between the five most popular app ideas. The winning idea will be turned into an actual app by Appswell’s developers—assuming that it’s pitched at general consumers, can be sold for $1 to $2, and meets Apple’s standards. The winner gets the cash prize plus 10 percent of future proceeds from the app.

The Appswell app is so new that users have submitted only a couple dozen ideas so far, some of which were seeded by beta testers, according to Sullivan. The most popular idea, as of this morning, was for a “sound board maker” that would let users make short sound recordings and edit them into comical audio clips.

Sullivan says he believes Appswell is the first company to try the crowdsourcing model in the iPhone app arena. But he thinks the experiences of companies in other markets—he points to Threadless’s T-shirts and Local Motors‘ car design competitions—bode well for his startup. The beauty of Appswell’s model, he says, is that …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

[Corrected 9/28/09: Chase Jarvis is based in Seattle, not San Francisco. I regret the error and apologize to our Seattle readers!] Seattle-based commercial photographer Chase Jarvis is known for his arresting, color-saturated images of people in motion—skiing, swimming, somersaulting. He’s also known for (literally) trademarking the phrase “the best camera is the one you have with you.” His point is that you don’t an expensive SLR to take great pictures. You can do a lot with the camera in your pocket or purse—which more likely than not is a camera phone.

This week, Jarvis took his slogan to the next level, launching a trio of products—a book, an iPhone application, and a photo-sharing community on the Web—intended to encourage all photographers, pro and amateur alike, to get more creative with their camera phones. This cross-media campaign is a brilliant concept—both as a digital-arts-education project and as a piece of self-promotion for Jarvis and his studio—and it also happens to fit in really well with the theme I’ve been writing about in this space throughout September in “Seven Projects to Stretch your Digital Wings,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, go spend $2.99 on Jarvis’s app, called “Best Camera,” and consider today’s column Project #8.

Original

Jewel

Paris

Slate

Candy

There are more than 1,300 photography-related apps in the iTunes App Store, but as far as I know, Best Camera is the only one that comes with a dedicated community of other iPhone users. The app allows you to take a picture with the iPhone’s built-in camera, apply a range of cool digital filters and effects, and then upload your finished photo to a gallery that’s constantly being updated, in real time, with new photos from other Best Camera users. You can give the photos you like best a thumbs-up, and browse photos either by popularity or recentness.

In addition to introducing you to a bunch of other creative souls, Best Camera will let you play with your own images and perhaps invent your own new styles. That’s thanks to a surprisingly flexible interface for applying various filters to your raw images and changing the order in which the filters are “stacked.” The filters themselves go well beyond the typical gray-scaling, contrast-enhancing, or redeye-reducing algorithms you’ll see in other iPhone image editing apps: working with Übermind, a Seattle software development firm that specializes in photography-related applications for desktops and mobile phones, Jarvis dreamed up a dozen effects altogether, including four “signature filters” inspired by his own photographic styles.

It’s hard to describe the signature effects in words, but one filter, called “Jewel,” gives photos a warm, rich, almost antique look, while another called “Candy” creates an intense, high-contrast, caffeinated feeling reminiscent of Jarvis’s advertising photography. At left, I’ve lined up examples of the same photo from my own iPhone album, altered using the “Jewel,” “Paris,” “Slate,” and “Candy” filters, respectively.

As someone who loves to spend time looking at other people’s photos and trying to understand their styles—I could spend hours using the “Explore” feature at Flickr—I think the community feature of Best Camera is especially fun. It’s a nice feeling to upload a picture and then see it appear in the public gallery, which is accessible right from the app. You can browse the gallery from a desktop browser, too, at www.thebestcamera.com; the bonus, if you go there, is that the “recipe” used for each photo—that is, the combination and order of digital effects the photographer chose—shows up right alongside the image. (You can see all of my Best Camera photos here.)

Jarvis certainly isn’t the only professional photographer singing the praises of camera phones. Shawn Rocco, a staff photojournalist at the News & Observer in Raleigh, NC, shoots with a long-since-obsolete Motorola E815 mobile phone. In fact, the American art world seems to be developing a bit of a fetish for …Next Page »

Comments (10) | Reprints | Share:        

Hillsboro, OR-based TriQuint Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TQNT) announced today it has acquired TriAccess Technologies, based in Santa Rosa, CA. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TriAccess makes integrated-circuit amplifiers for audio, video, and HDTV applications. TriQuint Semiconductor, founded in 1985, makes wireless communication technologies for mobile manufacturers, cellular base stations, and defense and aerospace contractors.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

[Update, April 21, 2009: The third RunKeeper video has now been posted.]

Maybe Jason Jacobs’ foot injury wasn’t quite as bad as he was suggesting last week. Just minutes ago the CEO of Boston-based FitnessKeeper, which makes a popular iPhone run-tracking application called RunKeeper, crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon with a very respectable time of 3:55:07. Not bad for someone who’s battling a serious case of plantar fasciitis—and wearing a lycra iPhone costume.

As we explained Friday, Jacobs decided three weeks ago to run the marathon dressed as an iPhone as part of a social media campaign for RunKeeper organized by a group of Emerson College marketing communications undergraduates. The students are producing a series of viral Web videos about the marathon preparations; the second video came out last week, and a third, about the actual race, will appear sometime soon. [Update: the third video been posted here.]

The dramatic crux of the “Apprentice”-style videos is the team’s concern over Jacobs’ recurring foot injury, which prevented him from doing much training for the marathon. But given that Jacobs maintained a pace averaging 8 minutes 58 seconds per mile for 26.2 miles, and placed 14,217th in a field of more than 26,000, it would seem that his injury was not a massive impediment.

Jacobs, who raised more than $2,500 for the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital as part of its “Race for Rehab” team, took the term “mobile computing” to heart during the race, using his iPhone to send out frequent updates about his progress. You can read the Twitter posts he pecked out here and see the runners’-eye-view pictures he uploaded to TwitPic here. You can also see the route of his run, as recorded by RunKeeper, here.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Here at Xconomy, we love our iPhones and Blackberries and Windows Mobile smartphones, and we love the local companies that create cool software and services for them. In fact, we love them so much we’re organizing an April 7 conference on “The Future of Mobile Innovation in New England“—and we’re looking for companies who want to show off their latest, coolest technologies in a series of two-minute, onstage “mobile bursts.”

If your company is based in New England, has a mobile application or service that can be demonstrated live (no PowerPoints), and you’d like to nominate yourselves to participate, please send me a note at wroush@xconomy.com. We’ll pick five or six companies, who’ll have a chance to show their wares to a big audience at Microsoft’s New England R&D Center in Cambridge, MA.

The meeting, scheduled for 1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. with a networking reception to follow, is designed to focus on fundamental questions about the technologies and business models that will keep the mobile industry growing through the recession and beyond. It’ll be jam-packed with keynote presentations, panel discussions, and intimate chats with local mobile-technology luminaries and investors, including representatives of Apperian, Enterprise Mobile, Charles River Ventures, FitnessKeeper, Flybridge Capital Partners, Google, Microsoft, the MIT Media Lab, MocoSpace, Quattro Wireless, Skyhook Wireless, Veveo, and Vlingo. The full agenda for the conference is here. If you’re interested in attending, you can buy advance tickets here.

Until March 13, tickets are available at the early bird rate of $125; after that the price goes up to $195. Student tickets are available for $50, and students are eligible for scholarships under Flybridge’s Stay in MA program.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

A growing number of online media companies offer mobile-friendly versions of their articles or videos, often resizing or stripping down the material to make it more easily accessible on smaller screens, and at lower bandwidth. But if you’re a cell phone owner who wants to spend a few minutes scanning mobile sites, there’s a problem. While there are services that aggregate specific types of mobile media, such as Veveo’s vtap for videos, there’s no central place to scan all of the most popular mobile content.

Today, however, Denver, CO-based Buzzwire is launching just such a service. The 20-employee startup, which obtained $4 million in venture funding from Boston’s Spark Capital and Matrix Partners in 2007, is rolling out a new community-driven website at m.buzzwire.com that collects mobile-friendly content from around the Internet, including sources like CNN, The Boston Globe, ABC.com, Slashdot, The New York Times, and People. It’s “something that hasn’t been done in mobile—a kind of mashup of Digg and Yahoo Buzz,” says founder, chairman, and chief product officer Andrew MacFarlane.

Some of the stories and videos listed on the site are selected by Buzzwire’s editors, and others are sent in by users—but all of it’s been vetted to make sure that it’s easily accessible from the user’s mobile device. The service is similar to Digg in that many of the stories are contributed by readers, and it’s similar to Yahoo Buzz in that stories are ranked according to how many people are clicking on them and sharing them. It differs from both Digg and Yahoo Buzz, however, in that users can’t actually vote stories up or down—the rankings are calculated by Buzzwire’s own algorithms.

When Buzzwire launched in 2007, it was tackling a very different problem: delivering actual streaming audio and video to cellular subscribers’ phones. And that’s still part of the company’s business—AT&T, Verizon, and Alltel use its platform, among others. But the new mobile content aggregation site “is what we meant to do from the beginning,” says MacFarlane. “We are big believers in the mobile Web. Ultimately, mobile devices are going to vastly outnumber PCs in terms of how content is addressed on the Internet, and we’re just trying to design a service that makes finding good content as easy as possible.”

Readers will like the service because the ranking algorithms will generally favor the highest-quality content, and publishers will like it because it will drive more traffic to their mobile sites, MacFarlane says. “This year 60 to 70 percent of publishers say they’re trying to figure out how to adapt content for and attract traffic to their mobile websites,” he says. “This is a place where users can go to find what’s interesting, we’ll send the traffic off to the original sources.”

Publishers can keep the cycle going by including buttons on their mobile websites that allow users to automatically share their favorite content at Buzzwire. MacFarlane says these so-called “Buzzie” buttons are “the first sharing buttons in the mobile world”—TV Guide Online is one of the first publishers to adopt them. But even if a story doesn’t have a Buzzie button, readers can send a link to Buzzwire via e-mail (to post@buzzwire.com) or text message (to the short code BUZZ9 or 28999).

Buzzwire earns money on the new portal through the advertisements interspersed with the story listings. The mobile advertising business is in turmoil, with many companies in the space hard-pressed to recruit as many advertisers as they or their publishing partners would like. But for the service’s introductory “beta” period, Buzzwire has struck a deal with a single advertising agency, New York-based Deutsch, to fill up all of the available ad inventory on its mobile directory. So for now, Deutsch clients such as DirecTV, Kodak, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation have exclusive advertising rights at m.buzzwire.com. And after the beta period, according to MacFarlane, the company expects to work with other agencies and advertising networks to create “rich video advertising” tailored for specific types of mobile handsets. (Publishers can usually charge advertisers a higher rate for video ads than for typical text or display ads.)

Buzzwire gained a high-profile leader in December in the shape of CEO Greg Osberg, the former president and worldwide publisher of Newsweek and Newsweek.com and the former president of sales and marketing for CNET. MacFarlane, who had been CEO prior to Osberg’s arrival, continues to direct the company’s product strategy. He says the company has between 20 and 30 employees, all based in Denver. (Buzzwire had a Boston office until summer 2008, but closed it to cut costs, MacFarlane says.)

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Redmond, WA-based Mobui, a mobile applications startup, has received an equity investment from Teletouch Communications, a Fort Worth, TX-based cellular services provider and retailer. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Mobui will use the funds to expand its software development and customer operations, while Teletouch gets access to Mobui’s applications being built to run on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android G1, and other handsets.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

In most New England technology sectors, mid-2008 marked the start of a steep downward tumble in venture, IPO, and M&A activity. But not so for mobile technology. According to a report released today by Mobile Monday Boston, the local mobile industry boomed in 2008, with the total amount of money raised shooting past the $500 million mark for the first time.

The dramatic increase in activity put an end to four flat years in which New England mobile fundraising varied between $320 and $390 million per year. The exact 2008 total reported by the 101 participants in the Mobile Monday Boston study was $566 million, a 45 percent increase over the 2007 number. See the chart below; the figures, which include money raised through venture investments, IPOs, and acquisitions, are also detailed on the Mobile Monday Boston website.

It’s the first time the group—the local chapter of Mobile Monday, a worldwide organization for mobile-industry professionals—has aggregated such figures. “We wanted to quantitatively demonstrate the strong growth of mobile and wireless in Boston over the last few years,” says Kate Imbach, a Mobile Monday Boston co-founder and organizer who is also director of marketing at Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. “We’ve watched the total number of companies here grow and seen strong investments in mobile, but couldn’t draw solid conclusions about how the space has changed and where it’s going before we put these numbers together.”

The number of mobile companies based in and around Boston has exploded in recent years. MoMoBoston’s survey showed that only 10 local mobile companies raised money in 2002. In 2008, 45 companies received investments.

Altogether, Mobile Monday Boston counts 180 companies in the mobile space in New England. (Our “Greater Boston Mobile Technology Cluster” list, published three weeks ago, was based largely on a member list shared by the organization.) Mobile application and software builders form the largest group within the local mobile industry (39 companies), followed by marketing (14 companies), advertising (15), voice recognition (14), content (13), hardware (11), and infrastructure (11).

MoMoBoston didn’t detect any dropoff in mobile investment as 2008 progressed: the total of $562 million was invested in fairly even chunks across the four quarters, with a slight spike in the second quarter.

“The report is very encouraging,” Imbach says. “With over half of a billion dollars invested in 2008 and 180 very diverse companies operating locally, Boston has quietly developed into the worldwide hub of mobile and wireless.”

Adding up the funds invested in each company over time, MoMoBoston found that Boston-area mobile companies have raised some $4.63 billion altogether. And that fundraising success is likely to continue, at least for a while, says Chris Hazelton, wireless and mobile research director at The 451 Group, a market research firm with offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington.

“While not immune to the economic downturn, mobile software and services will continue to be a key area for investment over the next 18 months, due to long product development cycles and only a slightly muted growth rate in sales of smartphones,” Hazelton said in Mobile Monday Boston’s announcement today. “Investors are still excited about the mobile space, and with a significant academic and technology base, Boston is the place to watch for acquisitions and investments in mobile.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Though we in Boston can’t claim to host a major handset maker like Nokia or Motorola or a major wireless carrier like Verizon or AT&T, the New England area is nonetheless one of the world capitals of the mobile business. As Xconomy’s lead infotech writer for the East Coast, I spend at least a quarter of my time writing about mobile technology. And even after a year and a half on the job, I’ve only scratched the surface of the mobile ecosystem around town, which boasts more than 150 companies, from mobile advertising and marketing firms to applications developers to hard-core infrastructure technology companies.

We figured it was high time that we assembled a list of local mobile companies, similar to our previous cluster stories like Boston: The Hidden Hub of Music and Technology, the Greater Boston Internet Video Cluster, We, Robot: The Greater Boston Robotics Cluster, the Boston Health 2.0 Cluster, the Boston and Seattle iPhone Apps Catalog, and the Greater Boston Innovation Map.

Many thanks to Kate Imbach of Skyhook Wireless and Mobile Monday Boston, who generously shared the Mobile Monday membership spreadsheet on which we based our own list. We’ve played around liberally with the categories in the Mobile Monday rundown. Of course, any errors and omissions in the lists below are our responsibility, not Kate’s or Mobile Monday’s.

We’ve enhanced the list with links to previous Xconomy stories about each company, where available. We restricted the list to companies verifiably based in New England (meaning we left out companies whose websites didn’t list an address), and we didn’t include companies that are still in stealth mode. In some cases we included companies whose main business relates to land-line networking or telephony but which have mobile technologies or operations.

As always, our industry cluster lists are works in progress. If you spot a mistake in this list or you know of a company that should be added, please write to us at editors@xconomy.com.

To browse the list, continue to the next page, or pick a category:

Advertising

Applications and Content

Enterprise

Hardware and Infrastructure

Location-Based Services

Mobile Marketing

Mobile Search

…Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Back in April I wrote about Mobicious, a Needham, MA, startup that once focused on publishing a directory of mobile applications but took a dramatic turn in direction by launching a free, advertising-supported photo-sharing community called SnapMyLife that’s optimized for mobile phones, especially the Apple iPhone. After just eight months, SnapMyLife has signed up more than 500,000 users, and today Mobicious announced that it has raised $5 million in new funding for the project.

Existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Carmel Ventures put up the new funds, which bring Mobicious’ total venture financing to $9 million. Mobicious said it will use the money to add new features to SnapMyLife, market the service to more users in other countries, and pursue international partnerships.

“SnapMyLife is the first mobile-oriented service to allow a wide range of consumers to easily share photos, while building a global community of friends,” Mobicious founder and CEO George Grey said in a statement. “SnapMyLife’s premium demographic, high quality content, and location-based services set us apart and offer advertisers a unique opportunity to reach older and more affluent consumers.”

SnapMyLife can be accessed via a Web browser on a mobile phone or via a specialized iPhone application that the company released in July. The application lets users take pictures, upload them to online photo albums, and see the locations where the photos were taken displayed on a map. Users can also easily browse photos that were taken near their current location or uploaded by friends, as well as comment on other users’ images. The service is supported by small text ads that appear at the bottom of most photo pages.

“We expect SnapMyLife to do well in the current climate,” Rina Shainski, general partner at Carmel Ventures, said in the company’s funding announcement. SnapMyLife has “a strong management team and a compelling service that provides advertisers with high quality, targeted content and users,” Shainski said.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

About five years ago, in a previous life at another technology publication, I wrote that I wished I could “Google my sock drawer.” I was being facetious, but my point was that searching the Web had become so easy that it left me yearning for equally convenient ways to search other things, like the books in my local library, the stores in my neighborhood, the recordings in my CD or DVD collection, even the everyday stuff in my house.

Well, the idea of searching your sock drawer isn’t so tongue-in-cheek anymore. You still can’t ask Google to find the missing half of your favorite argyles—but you can use the new Amazon Mobile app to take a picture of your sock drawer, then have Amazon send you a link to a page where you can buy a matching pair online.

You can also use the popular Shazam app on the iPhone to capture a few seconds of a song playing on the radio, and find out instantly what it’s called, who recorded it, and where to buy it. You can use the Street View feature of the new-and-improved Google Maps application on the iPhone to take a virtual stroll down Boston’s Newbury Street and decide which stores you want to visit. Once you get there, you can use a location-aware app like Urbanspoon or Yelp to find interesting restaurants. And you don’t even have to type in your search terms anymore: Vlingo’s new iPhone app and the latest version of the Google Mobile app can work with spoken-word input just as easily.

My point is that the newest search-related applications, especially those for advanced wireless devices like the iPhone, are lending new meaning to the very concept of search. Finding entertaining media, useful products, and interesting places no longer requires a PC, a keyboard, a Web browser, or even a traditional search engine. On the query side, devices like the iPhone 3G have built-in cameras and microphones that let them capture unconventional types of input for a search, such as photos, spoken instructions, or snippets of music. They can also fill in key pieces of context on their own—for example, by grabbing your current location from the built-in GPS chip. On the output side, the devices can supply links, reviews, videos, maps, even walking directions. The end result—a new level of connectivity to the people, things, ideas, and places around you—is, to my mind, one of the best reasons to invest in a broadband-capable smartphone. (I admit to being an iPhone chauvinist, but similar experiences are available on other gadgets, such as the high-end Blackberry devices and the T-Mobile G1 phone.)

I’ve been playing around lately with three mobile search applications in particular. Each one illustrates different strengths of the mobile platform. And together, they’ve brought me full circle, to the point where I wish that conventional desktop or laptop-based search tools had some of the same capabilities as these mobile marvels.

The first is the new Google Mobile app on the iPhone, released November 14. The app has two functions. It’s a convenient portal to the browser-based versions of many of Google’s other Web services—Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk, Google Reader, et cetera. But it’s also a freestanding search engine, with a compelling new keyboard-free “voice search” option. All you have to do is lift the phone to your ear, as if you were making a phone call; the iPhone’s accelerometer takes that as the cue to start listening for a spoken query, like “Quantum of Solace Boston showtimes.” Take the phone away from your ear, and the software sends your voice snippet to Google for processing; within seconds, the search results show up on screen. There’s a fun, Star Trek quality to the whole operation, except that the phone doesn’t talk back. (Maybe that’s the next improvement Google will roll out.)

Second, the new iPhone app from Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo, which came out December 3, also lets you initiate Google searches by speaking. With Vlingo, you have to tap the “Press + Speak” button to start the process, rather than holding the phone up to your ear, which is an annoyance, once you’ve gotten used to the Google method. But the Vlingo app does do several cool things that the Google app doesn’t. For example, you can …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The Mobile Internet World trade show, produced in Boston in 2007 and 2008 by the Trendsmedia events division of Boston-based market research firm Yankee Group, will be transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009 and revamped as a “more intimate” conference focused on networking and education, according to a Trendsmedia announcement.

The announcement, e-mailed to 2008 conference attendees today, said the decision to move the convention from the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel and drop the exhibit-hall showcase aspect of the event was “based on popular demand,” but that it would also allow Yankee Group to avoid “supporting major trade show costs and resources.”

One mobile executive recently told Xconomy that the program, the size of the crowd, and the volume of business-development opportunities at Mobile Internet World 2008 were disappointingly slim. So the move to the Bay Area could well represent an attempt to repackage the conference—which is aimed at executives from wireless operators, application developers, and other companies involved in delivering services and information via mobile Web browsers—to have a bigger payoff for attendees.

In the Bay Area, the conference will also be closer to two new centers of power in the mobile applications business: Cupertino, CA-based Apple, whose decision to open up the iPhone to third-party application developers has created a huge new market for mobile software, and Mountain View, CA-based Google, whose open-source Android mobile operating system is expected to further disrupt the industry.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Rave Wireless, a Framingham, MA, startup that makes security and emergency alert software for mobile phones, has closed a $7 million Series D financing round, according to a November 15 report in PE Hub that cited regulatory filings. The report said Rave has now raised about $42 million, with major contributions from Bain Capital Ventures, Sigma Partners, RRE Ventures, and Trilogy Equity Partners.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Back in July I wrote two somewhat skeptical stories about Slydial, the free service that lets you leave voicemail messages for cell-phone users without causing their phones to ring. My problem wasn’t with the technology itself, but with the misanthropic way that MobileSphere, the Boston company that created Slydial, was marketing it. They were promoting it as the perfect solution for those times when you have to call someone, but you don’t really want to talk with them. In the company’s own words: “Slydial provides the illusion of communication without the hassle of engaging in a time-consuming conversation.”

Well, it turns out that a lot of people are misanthropes. Either that, or Slydial has stumbled upon an unexpectedly useful new variation on the old technology of telephony. Since Slydial’s July launch, users have sent just over a million Slydial messages via its free, ad-supported service at 1-267-SLY-DIAL, the company announced Monday. That growth has come exclusively through word of mouth and public relations: the company hasn’t spent a dime on advertising, according to Gavin Macomber, MobileSphere’s executive vice president for marketing and business development.

The company believes that it’s hit a nerve with the service. “Just based on the response from our customers in the last three months, we think voice messaging is going to be huge,” Macomber told me this morning. “When we spoke back in July, there was a lot of ‘Hey, this is a great way to break up with your girlfriend’ going around, and sure, the name of the service is Slydial. But it’s also become a really practical and efficient way to communicate with somebody.” For example, many users have told MobileSphere that they turn to Slydial in situations where it would be difficult or dangerous to send a text message, such as when they’re driving, Macomber says.

To make sending “sly” messages even easier, MobileSphere also announced this week that it has created three dedicated Slydial applications—one each for the Apple iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry line, and Windows Mobile phones. The applications let users initiate Slydial calls just by clicking on a name in their phones’ built-in contact lists—so they don’t have to remember the recipient’s phone number.

“All of those first one million calls were made by people using the 267-SLY-DIAL number, then, at the prompts, manually entering the recipients’ mobile number,” says Macomber. “But at the end of the day, it’s a slightly cumbersome process. That’s what the mobile apps are meant to address. If you’re a Windows Mobile, iPhone, or Blackberry user you can go into your address book in one simple step and voice-message somebody.”

You can download the Windows Mobile and Blackberry versions of the software after signing up for a “MySlydial” account here. The Slydial iPhone app isn’t available from the iTunes App Store yet (which is a saga unto itself—see below), but I was able to get the app directly from MobileSphere and test it out. It works exactly as advertised. I was able to use the app to leave messages for several people in my iPhone’s address book.

But as with the regular Slydial service, you still have to listen to a 10-second audio advertisement before your call is put through. And the system isn’t foolproof: if you really don’t want to interrupt someone, or if you don’t want them to know that you called until they notice that they have gotten voicemail, you should be aware that calling someone via Slydial sometimes causes their phone to ring once, depending on which cellular network they use.

Every time I used the iPhone Slydial app to call Rebecca’s T-mobile phone, for example, her phone rang briefly—too quickly for her to answer it, but giving me away nonetheless. [Editor's note: Dude, knock it off!] But when I called Bob’s Verizon phone, my call went directly to his voicemail, without making his phone ring.

Those differences result from the fact that the major wireless operators all use different voicemail technologies. (Even within networks, systems vary from region to region. That’s why a Verizon subscriber in Boston can forward a voice-mail message to another Verizon user in Boston, but not to a Verizon user in New York.) But these incompatibilities are exactly what …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego-based Qualcomm, which is famous for its CDMA wireless communications chips but is also a leading maker of GPS chips for cell phones and other devices, has signed a deal with Boston’s Skyhook Wireless that will move it toward hybrid location-finding technologies.

Qualcomm will incorporate Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System—a software system that determines a device’s location based on the identities of nearby Wi-Fi networks—into its gpsOne line of Assisted GPS chips, Skyhook announced today.

“Combining Skyhook’s technology with our gpsOne offering will enable users to obtain location fixes much more rapidly and provide for a more ubiquitous [location-based services] experience whether indoors, outside or in complex environments such as urban areas,” Jason Bremner, senior director of cellular products for Qualcomm, said in a statement.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Acton, MA-based Tatara Systems, a mobile communications software company, said last week that it has sold its broadband mobile product line to Smith Micro Software for an undisclosed sum. The company said the sale would allow it to focus on systems that let corporate users to access voice-over-Internet telephony services on their cell phones.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Last week’s unveiling of the first phone running the Android operating system—the T-Mobile G1, which will be available to consumers on October 22—suddenly made Google’s vision of an open source smart-phone platform to compete with Apple’s iPhone seem much more real. But developers writing applications for Android phones have been immersed in the new operating system for months, and one of the teams that’s gotten the most pre-launch publicity is right here in Boston. It’s the group of current and former MIT students behind Locale, an application that automatically changes an Android phone’s settings based on its location.

If you’re a movie or music fan, for example, you could use Locale to teach your Android phone to shut off its ringer whenever you go to your favorite cinema or concert hall. Or you could program that risqué Gisele Bundchen or Tyson Beckford wallpaper to change into a staid nature scene when you walk into the office. It’s such a bright idea that the Google-led Open Handset Alliance picked Locale last month as one of 10 winners of the $275,000 top prize in its first Android Developer Challenge, a contest designed to stimulate outside programmers to come up with useful apps for the Java-based operating system.

That’s a cool $55,000 each for the five members of the Locale team—Clare Bayley, Carter Jernigan, Jasper Lin, Jennifer Shu, and Christina Wright—and comes on top of the $25,000 the team won for making it through the first round of the Android contest. The group was one of six teams participating in an experimental spring-semester course, “Building Mobile Applications with Android,” taught by well-known MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson. Though the students had only four months to come up with a functioning application, “All of them actually produced things that worked, which was amazing to me,” Abelson told Bob.

Not only does Locale work—it’s one of the applications that will be available starting October 22 from the Android Market, Google’s answer to the iTunes App Store for the iPhone. That’s according to Carter Jernigan of the Locale team, who’s now a full-time software engineer for Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, MA. Jernigan met me for lunch in Kendall Square this Tuesday, and I asked him how his team came up with the idea for Locale, what it was like to win the Android Challenge, and how he thinks Android compares to other mobile platforms. (Locale “wouldn’t even be possible on the iPhone” thanks to restrictions put in place by Apple that keep third-party programs from running in the background while other programs are active, he says.) An abridged version of our interview follows.

Xconomy: Did you have the idea for Locale going into Abelson’s class, or was it something you came up in the course of the semester?

Carter Jernigan: The brainstorming began before the class. One of the prerequisites was that you needed a team and a project—not necessarily a final idea, but some idea of what you wanted to be. So we did a lot of brainstorming and came up with the idea for the application and assembled the group before we applied to be in the class.

X: Did you also know ahead of time that you wanted to enter the Android developer contest?

CJ: We knew about the contest going into the class, but entering it wasn’t our primary goal. Our primary goal was to do well and get an A. But entering the contest was certainly doable within the context of the class.

X: Why did you pick the problem you did— a location-based application for changing a phone’s settings?

CJ: I was looking for an application that would solve a problem that people have on a daily basis. The idea hit me when I was just observing friends and family members and coworkers having their phones go off all the time. Having the phone behave differently depending on where you are is a way to solve the problem.

X: Haven’t there been previous attempts to get at this problem of cell phones ringing at inappropriate times? For example, I’ve read about movie theaters and playhouses experimenting with jamming devices that would prevent audience members’ phones from receiving calls.

CJ: My understanding is that jamming devices are illegal. And blocking people’s communications is such a blunt way to solve the problem. I don’t think that’s the right solution. One of the things Google is trying to do with Android is …Next Page »

Comments (19) | Reprints | Share:        

At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, October 18, 500 couples will fan out across Philadelphia in search of a $25,000 diamond ring hidden by a local jeweler. Equipped only with cell phones, the couples will receive text-message instructions directing them to an array of local landmarks, where they’ll have to complete puzzles and other challenges to earn points and get directions to their next stops. The first team to earn 100 points will be sent a riddle whose solution is the key to the diamond’s location.

It’s called the “Robbins Diamonds Scavenger Scramble,” and it will be the biggest test yet for a new Boston company called SCVNGR. Led by 19-year-old Princeton undergraduate Seth Priebatsch, the company is one of the first startups to emerge from DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based incubator similar in conception to Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, the well-known “startup camp” based in Cambridge, MA, and Mountain View, CA. SCVNGR’s shtick is running text-message-based interactive games for corporations, associations, and non-profits, using proprietary algorithms designed by two Princeton professors to efficiently direct large numbers of game players (or museum visitors, or anyone moving in space) through a series of checkpoints.

You might not think it would be very difficult to set up a scavenger hunt using text messaging, which is, after all, a 20-year-old technology. But the hard part isn’t sending out the messages, says Priebatsch; it’s knowing where to send the players. If you’ve got 500 teams competing, after all, you don’t want them all rushing to the same spots in the same order. That’s where the routing algorithms come in.

“Once you finish a question and send in the right answer, the system dynamically picks your next location and clue based on how far away the other locations are, how many people are there already, and how important the clues are,” Priebatsch explains. “You can’t know where you’re going to go ahead of time. If you played the same game 100 times you’d never take the same path.”

SCVNGR has already hosted demo scavenger hunts for organizations like the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and for Dreamit Ventures itself—where Priebatsch was in residence from May to August—and it has other events coming up at Princeton, MIT, Tufts, two museums in Boston, and one museum in Philadelphia. (A major hunt in downtown Boston, planned to coincide with Boston Arts Festival in early September, was scrubbed due to bad weather.) In just its first few weeks out of Dreamit, the company booked $25,000 in revenue, Priebatsch says.

The Boston native would be starting his sophomore year in Princeton’s Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) department right about now, but he’s on a one-year leave from the university to get his company off the ground. ORFE is a section of Princeton’s engineering school where students are drilled in both the technological and management skills needed to become entrepreneurs. Which sounds like the perfect place for Priebatsch; even at 19, he’s already a serial entrepreneur, having started out with the obligatory lemonade stand (albeit on Boston’s posh Newbury Street), then followed up with PostCardTech, a Boston-based startup that produces CD-ROM-based “interactive postcards” for tourists.

SCVNGR is half events company, half platform provider: at the same time that it’s mounting scavenger hunts for individual clients, the five-person startup is polishing a free, Web-based interface that allows anyone—from a mom organizing a teen’s birthday party to a museum administrator planning an innovative way for guests to explore a new exhibition—to write a series of clues and assign them to a network of locations. The company may try to monetize free games by sending out location-based advertising messages along with clues.

It all adds up to a busy schedule: “I’ve been running at 600 miles an hour and having a great time doing it,” says Priebatsch. That was certainly the case when I visited SCVNGR’s offices at TechSpace, a renovated loft in Boston’s SoWa neighborhood that’s home to dozens of small startups. In the 30 minutes I was there, Priebatsch had to excuse himself three times to deal with urgent phone calls and text messages about a scavenger hunt that was getting underway that morning at Drexel University.

The concept for the hunts came together last winter. “I was messing around with some ideas, and I thought it would be cool to build an easy-to-use, high-tech, cell-phone-based scavenger hunt that could be played from any phone,” Priebatsch says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be great if …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Overland Park, KS-based Sprint, which is building a nationwide WiMax network called XOHM, has picked Boston’s uLocate to power the local information and mapping services for XOHM subscribers. XOHM, a so-called “4G” network, will cover entire metropolitan areas with broadband wireless data at speeds approaching those of cable Internet service. In an announcement yesterday, uLocate said developers will be able to use its Where platform to build information services that use the location information built into WiMax signals.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Investors still see the mobile search and advertising market as one of the hottest tickets in the digital economy. Since its founding in 2004, mobile advertising startup JumpTap, neighbors of Xconomy just down First Street in Cambridge MA, has raised about $47 million from the likes of General Catalyst Partners, Summerhill Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and WPP. Up until yesterday, that is. Today the company announced that it has raised another $26 million, in a Series D round involving all of the company’s existing investors as well as new lead investor AllianceBernstein L.P. (NYSE: AB) of New York.

JumpTap isn’t a household name, but it provides the technology behind the mobile Web search applications on Java, BREW, and WAP phones from a host of cellular operators, including AT&T, Alltel, Boost Mobile, and U.S. Cellular in the United States; Bell Canada, Rogers Wireless, and Fido in Canada; Telefonica in Spain; TeliaSonera in the Nordic and Baltic region; and Virgin Mobile.

Like Google, JumpTap places clickable ads alongside search results (it gets these ads directly from agencies and brands and from mobile advertising networks such as Third Screen Media—another Boston-area mobile company, acquired by AOL in 2007). The whole idea behind JumpTap’s service is to keep mobile users from going to Google and other traditional Internet search providers, and thereby reserve a bigger slice of search-related advertising revenue for the operators, for content-publishing partners such as Fox Mobile Entertainment and NBC Universal, and for itself.

Mobile carriers are definitely in the market for help selling search-related advertising: as we reported on Friday, Verizon is in talks with Seattle-based Medio, which raised $30 million in venture funding in 2006, about setting up a new all-in-one search service for its subscribers. But there’s disagreement over the actual size of the mobile advertising pie. Newton, MA-based market intelligence firm Strategy Analytics says global spending on ads for mobile platforms will hit about $1 billion this year and increase to $2.4 billion in 2009. Market research firm eMarketer, which counts text-message ads in its totals and makes more optimistic assumptions about economic growth in Brazil, China, India, and Russia, says spending will top $4.6 billion this year and $7.4 billion next year.

Regardless, it’s a growing market, and JumpTap says that it needed more cash to continue expansion of its global ad sales division—which has already grown sixfold this year, with the opening of offices in New York, Madrid, and Stockholm—and to further develop its search and behavioral targeting technology. Mark Mackenzie, vice president and head of digital media venture investing at AllianceBernstein, said in a statement that JumpTap has positioned itself as “the hub of the mobile advertising ecosystem” and that the company’s existing relationships with carriers, advertisers, and publishers put it in a good position to win more business and “define the way mobile advertising should be delivered.”

Comments | Reprints | Share: