According to Bobby Ghoshal, the future of news consumption is in finding new ways for users to interact with content and influence other users’ reading habits, and the development of online “news personalities.” Ghoshal is the co-founder and CEO of Flud, a news aggregation app that unveiled its updated platform for the iPhone and iPad earlier this month. (The Android version is set to launch in January.)

With Flud, everyone has the potential to become a news source,” Ghoshal says. “It’s all about taking consumption and merging it with social networking.”

Flud’s new platform allows news enthusiasts to create their own news profiles, recommend content to their community, discover new information and sources from friends, and to build information networks around key interests. The San Diego-based startup recently received funding from Detroit Venture Partners and Detroit-based Ludlow Ventures.

What Flud aims to create is a sort of meta aggregator, where users are curating content to create individualized aggregation sites within the larger Flud ecosystem. If that sounds daunting to a novice, Flud has also created a “hit list” of content Ghoshal and other members of the Flud team consider especially worth reading. (For example, I discovered during my interview with Ghoshal that Xconomy is on that list.)

Flud thinks of its content as having three tiers. Tier 1 belongs to the publications that are ubiquitous at news stands: Time; Cosmo; Sports Illustrated. Tier 2 is the place for niche blogs that are widely read—think TechCrunch or Perez Hilton. Tier 3 is the home of blogs that may not be household names, but that have enough of a readership to stay relevant in the market.

Tier 3 is where Ghoshal sees a big opportunity with Flud users. The new platform includes a feature that allows users to see who else is reading an article at the same time they are. (Ghoshal calls it “serendipitous news discovery.”) Ghoshal is hoping that users will be pleasantly surprised to see 20 or 30 other people reading the same cult-favorite blog they are, and that will lead them to reach out for additional content recommendations.

Other new features in the updated platform include a Flud button, which allows users to endorse high-quality content; an activity feed to track what’s trending inside a user’s news circle; the ability to push content out to Tumblr and connect to Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Instapaper, and Read It Later accounts;  and synching across devices so that a user’s “news legacy” follows them from phone to tablet and vice versa.

It was the popularization of the tablet computer, Ghoshal says, that inspired he and Matthew Ausonio to found Flud in the first place. “The tablet was intriguing, and we guessed that using them to read news would be huge,” he says.

The initial app was launched in August 2010, but Ghoshal describes those … Next Page »

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about how cars have become enormous smart phones on wheels. At the time, though, I didn’t know just how much Ford Motor agreed with me.

I certainly do now. The company (NYSE: F), based in Dearborn, MI, is aggressively recruiting software developers to write mobile apps specifically for its SYNC in-car connectivity system. Ford’s online SYNC Mobile Application Network has already attracted about 2,500 submissions. The company is wooing developers on college campuses and consumer electronic trade shows in Europe and the United States.

When you think about it, Ford’s foray into mobile apps makes sense for both the car maker and app makers.

Thanks to Apple’s iPhones and RIM’s ubiquitous BlackBerrys, world wide revenue from mobile app stores will hit $15.1 billion this year, a 190 percent increase from 2010, according to the research firm Gartner. That includes revenue from consumers who buy the apps and the apps themselves generating advertising revenue for their developers.

For apps makers, cars could offer another lucrative sales platform. And just as unique apps helped propel sales of iPhones and iPads, Ford is counting on apps to make their cars more appealing to prospective buyers.

In some ways, fuel economy, style, and even quality have become commodities, says Doug VanDagens, global director of Ford’s Connected Services Solutions unit.

A robust selection of apps can be “one of the most important differentiations for our company,” he says. “We want to sell more cars.”

So far, Ford’s apps, currently sold through iTunes and the Android market, are mostly intuitive, focusing on navigation, emergency calls, and traffic information. Eventually though, apps will expand into advanced search, social networking, and entertainment, VanDagens says, though he notes there are limitations.

“What’s applicable in the car is not applicable for the Xbox,” he says.

VanDagen says Ford’s main advantage is a broad architecture that’s “very app friendly” versus competitors he says force developers to adapt to specific car platforms.

Ford’s courting of the Silicon Valley world seems to be paying off.

CEO Alan Mullaly has delivered a keynote address at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for three straight years now, a key technology gathering where people are more likely to see Steve Jobs or Bill Gates than a Big Auto executive. Ford has also won “Best of CES” award from CNET, and Popular Mechanics’ Editor’s Choice award for its MyFord Touch driver interface technology.

“We’re not super, super smart, but we are on top of what’s happening in the consumer electronics world,” VanDagens says.

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Though there were only a handful of actual financing deals and partnerships for Northwest companies over the last week, the technology sector definitely made some strides toward laying the groundwork for future investment. Take a look at the highlights:

—Seattle-based online marketplace for rare and out of the ordinary items, Bonanzle, changed its name to Bonanza, and acquired local marketplace community for niche products and artisan crafts, 1000Markets. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

—Verizon Wireless amped up its mobile presence with a number of company partnerships, including two with Northwest mobile startups—Seattle-based Ground Truth, and Portland, OR-based Urban Airship. Both companies will be providing tools for the Verizon Developer Community. Financial details of the partnerships were not given.

—Ashland, OR-based electric motorcycle company Brammo raised $12.5 million out of a Series B financing round potentially worth as much as $30 million, and attracted a new investor, Oklahoma-based oil and gas company Alpine. The raised an initial $10 million venture round from ongoing investors Chrysalix Energy Venture and Best Buy Capital in 2008. Brammo currently has two electric motorcycles on the market.

—Two weeks ago the Zino Society held its annual Zino Zillionaire Investment Forum, and last week we got a peak at the six startup finalists contending for two $50,000 investment prizes. The six companies vary from consumer products, to technology, health IT, and cleantech. Zino investors are expected to make their final decision in coming weeks.

—This isn’t a deal, but was one of our most popular stories of the last week. With all the media hoopla over the forthcoming film on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook phenomenon, “The Social Network,” our national IT editor Greg Huang decided to scour Hollywood’s best and brightest for the perfect cast for “TechStars: The Movie,” if there were to be one (are you listening movie studios?) And if I may say so myself, it looks like an incredible lineup!

—This isn’t a deal either, but knowing Margo Shiroyama could help you find one. I sat down with Shiroyama, the executive director of the Northwest Energy Angels, to talk about her first six months on the job, and what she envisions for the future of the NW cleantech industry.

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There’s some interesting personnel news today in the world of mobile software apps for companies. Boston-based Apperian, a mobile development and platform startup, says it has appointed a new CEO as of last week. He is David Patrick, a veteran of Lotus, Sun, Novell, and a number of cutting-edge tech startups on both coasts. He succeeds founder Chuck Goldman, a former Apple executive who is staying on as chief strategy officer and will continue to run the company’s services, sales, and business development.

I took the opportunity to get to know Patrick a bit, and to get an update on Apperian’s business. The company has about 20 full-time employees plus a number of consultants; there were three new hires last week, and more will come soon. Patrick says the firm’s revenue “has grown very dramatically” and could be on pace to increase by 300 percent this year over last year. Nevertheless, one of his first objectives as CEO is to raise a Series A financing round. To date, Apperian has been supported by $1.5 million in seed money from CommonAngels, plus services revenue from its mobile-app development work.

“I’ve looked at a lot of startups, and this is the first one I’ve seen as healthy as it is after 18 months,” Patrick says.

Founded in January 2009, Apperian has developed consumer iPhone apps for companies like American Greetings (electronic cards), Intuit (tax forms), and Timberland (retail marketing). It also counts Estee Lauder, Rue La La, Progressive Insurance, and Warner Bros. among its customers, for whom it has developed 55 apps so far. But an even bigger opportunity may lie in creating a platform for companies to develop their own internal mobile apps—what would amount to an “enterprise app store” for iPhones, iPads, and Google Android-based devices.

That’s what Apperian announced it was working on this spring, as my colleague Wade detailed in an interview with Goldman. The software platform is still in beta mode, Patrick says, and he has been studying it for the past couple of months (before officially starting with the company), thinking about issues such as how to ensure the security of confidential data and users’ identities on mobile devices. In the meantime, the company seems to be gaining traction, particularly around the iPhone and iPad.

Challenges aside, it’s clear that being an early player in the emerging mobile business … Next Page »

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Since 1997, owners of selected General Motors vehicles have had the option of subscribing to OnStar, a cellular service that lets drivers make hands-free phone calls, hear turn-by-turn navigational cues, receive remote diagnostic reports, and get emergency support in accidents. In the car business, 13 years is a long time—but in the world of mobile communications and software, it’s eons. So GM’s perennial challenge with OnStar is to keep up with the ways consumers are accessing data on other mobile platforms, especially their smartphones.

Today the company announced that it’s upgrading both the hardware that goes into OnStar-equipped cars and the telematics infrastructure that connects this hardware to the Internet and other resources. The aim is to enable drivers behind the wheel to engage in mobile-computing activities like sending receiving text messages and Facebook newsfeed updates, but without endangering themselves or other drivers.

The news was part of a general branding and marketing push—unveiled at simultaneous media events Tuesday night in Austin, Miami, New York, and San Francisco—that showcases OnStar’s new capabilities as an “infotainment” platform. The message of this “LiveOn” campaign, to be conveyed through TV commercials and print and online ads, is that OnStar has evolved into much more than the navigation and emergency-response system familiar to many consumers.

But the company is proceeding with caution, padding its message about mobile interactivity with an emphasis on what it calls “responsible connectivity.” ”Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel, mind on the drive” was the mantra used by Timothy Nixon, GM’s executive director for infotainment and OnStar engineering, at the San Francisco launch event. “But if I can keep my hands on the wheel while listening to a Facebook newsfeed and reply to it, why not?” he added in remarks to Xconomy.

GM had announcements on several fronts. It said it would build a ninth generation of OnStar hardware into new vehicles, featuring better voice recognition, Bluetooth-accessible phonebook listings, and improved navigation services. Connecting OnStar-equipped cars will be a new “Advanced Telematics Operations Management System,” or ATOMS, which it called “one of the most powerful and comprehensive machine-to-machine telematics systems in the world.”

It’s this new system that’s allowing the company to experiment with voice texting—a feature that would connect drivers’ smartphones to an in-dash system via Bluetooth, read text messages aloud using speech synthesis technology, and allow users to verbally select preset responses (but not compose new responses, which might conflict with proliferating no-texting-while-driving laws).

ATOMS is also behind a new Facebook audio update system that the company demonstrated at the launch event. It lets users listen to the most recent updates in their Facebook news feeds, and record audio updates that are then automatically posted to their feeds. But the company isn’t saying when this feature might be available—Nixon said it’s something engineers just started experimenting with in the last few weeks.

In addition, GM launched a series of OnStar-connected mobile apps under a new “MyLink” brand. The apps, like traditional wireless keyfobs, let iPhone and Android owners interact with their Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac vehicles remotely—including … Next Page »

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Bruce D’Ambrosio wants to make online content sharing easy. Eager to bridge the gap between content owners, and publishers, the 63-year-old serial entrepreneur and computer science professor at Oregon State University founded DigitalScirocco in 2009, and rolled the startup out of stealth mode in March. Since then D’Ambrosio, who serves as the company’s CEO, says the venture has only been growing. Fast.

The Seattle-based startup jumped into the digital content marketplace, positioning itself as a middleman between website owners, and media organizations. The idea is to make mainstream content published online more readily—and affordably—available for website owners, bloggers, and publishers who would like to repost the content on a secondary site. For example, if a local chef wants to publish a related article or photo from, say, The New York Times food section, on their blog or website, they would have to first contact either the Times, or a third-party media organization like the Associated Press or Getty Images, to negotiate a deal and buy the rights to republish the content.

This can be not only a long and difficult process, but an expensive one as well. That’s where DigitalScirocco comes in, providing an automated marketplace for website owners and content owners to connect. Using an online auction platform, websites can search for and purchase rights to content they want, at cheaper prices, while DigitalScirocco earns a cut of the sale for facilitating the transaction.

After being online for a few months under stealthy cover, DigitalScirocco tipped its hand, making its services publicly available five months ago. At the time “We were then in the ‘I know there is a market somewhere’ mode, and, I have to admit, a bit stuck looking under the streetlight,” D’Ambrosio told Xconomy via e-mail. But after carving out their first three partnerships—with global news organization Thomson Reuters, San Francisco-based technology and business news site VentureBeat, and city-specific entertainment information site BeDynamic, DigitalScirocco found new areas for expansion.

“We’ve now found several markets we can reach at a viable cost of sales and are ramping up sales efforts,” D’Ambrosio says.

And as of today, the growing company has teamed up with Atlanta, GA-based sports newswire service US Presswire, to build a sports photo news service targeted at small-market news organizations, bloggers, and personal websites. Through the service, DigitalScirocco and US Presswire will be able to automate and track delivery of recent and historical photos and edited captions to purchasing websites that have limited or no in-house editing resources. Conversely, these sites will have access to all of US Presswire’s new and archived photos almost immediately, with no first-use wait times that many media organizations employ.

“We are building an end-to-end workflow such that images can appear on our client websites within minutes after photographer submission of the image from the venue,” D’Ambrosio says.

The service was scheduled to go live on September 1, but has seen some last minute delays. It will allow website owners to select photo feeds to match individualized topics based on a variety … Next Page »

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The rising popularity of New York, NY-based Foursquare, which launched in March of 2009 and has quickly become the most popular location-based social networking mobile application in the world, has caused an explosion of development on geolocation applications worldwide. Some of the most well known here in the states include Gowalla, BrightKite, Loopt and Seattle-based Whrrl, which all engage mobile smart phone users by encouraging them to “check in” everywhere they go throughout the day, connect with friends based on the local networks they build, and earn rewards for repeat usage.

Many of these applications, like Foursquare and Whrrl, have incorporated some gaming aspects into the system, pitting friends within the same network against each other in competitions for the title of “mayor” of certain locations, or to earn points that add up to “badges” or memberships to exclusive “societies” based on interaction and loyalty. But unlike searching for the closest coffee shop on Google Maps, it’s the social interaction of the applications that draws users in, according to Leigh Fatzinger, founder of Seattle-based Nology Media, a company that develops and implements social media campaigns for businesses and organizations.

“I’m checking into a location that exists, and I want to know the people around me,” Fatzinger summed up when we spoke last week about the recent onslaught of location-based social networks and what they mean for consumers and businesses. According to Leigh, these new social apps are no fad. Not only do such networks allow people to interact with those around them and experience everyday habits in new ways, he says businesses and organizations have now found a way to re-engage their customers and encourage return patronship by mixing social networking with social commerce.

“We had dinner at the Four Seasons last week—it was actually my anniversary—and I checked in at the restaurant and found out the Four Seasons was offering a 10 percent discount off the entire bill for check-ins and free mini burgers to their mayor,” Fatzinger says.

The fact that big businesses like Four Seasons and Starbucks, which partnered with Foursquare back in March to offer special perks for people who check in at their retail locations, are buying into the power of social network and the check-in platform means there is marketing power behind it, Fatzinger says.

“The server said it had started the day before and I was the first person to use it,” he says. “This would have been unheard of for the Four Seasons a year ago.”

And the potential for marketing campaigns directed precisely at you based on the places you already go to and brands you already interact with on a daily basis, has caught the eye of investors. Foursquare, which surpassed the 2 million registered user mark this weekend (adding new users at a rate of 100,000 per week), recently brought in $20 million in Series B financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. And the increasing interest in location-based social networking applications—among consumers, brands, and marketers—has revolutionized the nature of social media.

Alongside the plethora of applications that allow you to check-in to real locations such as restaurants and coffee shops and communicate with friends within a certain geographic range, new apps are popping up on the marketplace that allow you to check into “virtual places” that include Web sites and mobile applications built around ideas, organizations and books. One example is MISO, which has been termed “a foursquare-like app for homebodies” because it allows users to check in to TV shows and movies and connect with like-minded people with similar entertainment tastes.

“Now imagine where that can go—you can check into a book. When we talk about location-based, we have to think about what the location is. I can be sitting in my living room, but I can check into this book and share ideas with others…it’s a new way to exchange information,” Fatzinger says. “We’re going to be checking into a lot of things as we find commonalities between us…it will always come back to how do services make money and how do marketers tailor.”

Given the variety and myriad of social networks out there, I thought it might be interesting to list the different location-based search and social applications born right here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a small cluster, but it’s growing. If you notice one I’ve missed, feel free to comment below and I’ll add it to the list.

Location-based search and social networks in the Pacific Northwest:

Anttenna (Seattle, WA)

This year-old application is something like a hybrid between Twitter’s microblogging, … Next Page »

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Nine years ago, San Diego-based Qualcomm introduced Brew, a programming language that made it easier for software developers to integrate short programs with wireless devices so mobile users could also play games, send messages, share photos, and get other services.

The idea was to provide a standard programming environment to accelerate the adoption of mobile applications. By operating between an application and the wireless device’s operating system, Brew enables programmers to develop applications without needing to code for the system interface or to understand wireless applications. With Brew, application developers also can easily port their games and other programs between all Qualcomm-based devices.

In 2008, Qualcomm replaced Brew (the name stands for the stilted acronym “Binary runtime environment wireless”) with Brew MP (as in Mobile Platform), which was developed as a flexible and scalable mobile operating system. Qualcomm designed Brew MP to support handsets and mobile devices across all market tiers, including 3G devices and smart phones.

Today Qualcomm boasts that Brew operates in 25 countries and generates more than $3 billion in revenue for Brew applications developers. The company says there are now more than 250 million addressable Brew devices and more than 1,400 Brew-enabled handsets. Yet Brew is not necessarily a favorite among mobile developers, since the top six platforms for applications developers are the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, Palm/WebOS, and Symbian systems.

So it makes sense for the wireless technology giant to re-energize its community of mobile developers by convening Uplinq 2010, a conference that brings Brew developers, operators, device makers, publishers, and others together for two days at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in downtown San Diego.

“Qualcomm is committed to advancing the reach of Brew MP, and subsequently delivering richer applications and better experiences to consumers using a range of devices across the world’s largest markets,” Qualcomm’s Mitch Oliver says in a statement released before the conference. “By fostering increased collaboration within the Brew MP ecosystem, we envision many more devices and applications benefitting consumers who desire a more compelling and personal mobile experience all around the world.”

The conference, which begins at 8:30 a.m. today, includes keynote talks by Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm’s chairman and CEO; David Christopher, chief marketing officer for AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets; and John Stratton, a Verizon executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

I’m looking forward to learning more about all of this. Among the items on the agenda later today is a session billed as an overview of Brew MP—”the operating system for the mass-market smartphone.”

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Heads up, stodgy bankers and business road warriors: in case you haven’t noticed the blatant signs over the past 12 months or so, your trusty BlackBerry is no longer cool. Yeah, I know you think that because you recently traded in your old-school model with scroll wheel for the sleek black Tour or Bold 2, you’re on top of the latest trends. Sorry to burst your bubble, but your BlackBerry is the equivalent of a Motorola RAZR in late 2007.

I’m almost ashamed to write about it, being a closet BlackBerry user who’s anxiously awaiting the day I am eligible for an upgrade. That puts me squarely within the ultra un-hip “late majority” consumer segment. The only way I can muster the courage to use my BlackBerry in public is that the choice becomes less clear with each passing day which device should be my next. Today if I buy an iPhone 3GS (still my favorite from a pure hardware standpoint), I’m stuck with AT&T, best known for dropped calls and clogged data pipes. Not to be ignored are the host of new Android-based devices that have started coming online. So, I’m waiting to see how things shake out over the next few months, and whether a clear winner emerges. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

So you’re not convinced you, too, are behind the times and need some proof. Here goes:

It’s an app world—There’s no denying we are in the beginning of a mobile and social revolution. Whether your goal is to stay plugged into pop culture or keep your business skills honed, you had better embrace this brave new world or risk being left behind. Mobile apps have become an integral part of our culture, and almost all companies—from mobile pure plays and social media upstarts to large e-tailers starting to execute a mobile strategy—build for the iPhone first. That has translated to 100,000 apps in the iTunes store and over 2 billion total downloads as of November 2009, compared to just 5,000 applications in BlackBerry App World.

Wired vs. wireless—If your employer doesn’t “sponsor” your BlackBerry (if you work for a small company this may also apply to you), you likely connect to a BIS server to receive e-mail and connect to the Internet. That means keeping your schedule and contacts up to date between your BlackBerry and computer requires syncing the two via BlackBerry Desktop software, which despite having reached v5.x, constantly requires removal and reinstallation. But I digress. The main point is that like the RAZR, USB is so 2007. Apple has wireless syncing and backup options for all iPhone users. And, as industry experts expected, Apple is making inroads in the enterprise market. After all, if the necessary security measures are in place, IT managers will simply strive to meet the needs and wants of their customers (i.e. company employees).

Brand perception—In late December, the BlackBerry e-mail network suffered two outages over a two-week period. RIM’s service disruption was an aberration, but users were outraged and analysts criticized the company for not having adequate server backup measures. Following the outages, BlackBerry’s Buzz score fell to +28 (positive brand perception scores range from +1 to +100), a number I’d classify as mildly positive. Contrast RIM’s normally reliable service with that of the iPhone; especially in urban areas people are plagued with dropped calls and poor bandwidth on a daily basis. You could argue AT&T’s network, and not the iPhone itself, is largely to blame. But at the end of the day, you’d expect people to … Next Page »

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Not surprisingly, given the rush among handset makers and software developers to cash in on the mobile-software explosion, there’s a been a big uptick in the availability of mobile apps that make use of location information, according to a report published today by Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. That’s true not just for the Apple iPhone, but for Android, Blackberry, Palm, and Nokia phones as well, the company found. But a big chunk of the applications are what Skyhook is calling “bulk apps”—identical templates that publishers fill with varying information, such as travel guides to hundreds of world cities.

As many as a third of all of the location-aware apps in Apple’s iTunes App Store, the company’s catalog of iPhone applications, are mass-produced in this way, Skyhook found. A single developer, Molinker, sells more than 850 travel-related bulk apps. The cornucopia of apps piling up in the various application stores, in other words, may not be quite as rich as it looks.

“There are over 50,000 [Apple] App Store apps, and this massive number is often referenced as a sign of the tremendous growth of the App Store,” Skyhook said in a press release accompanying the report. “But, it is important to understand that bulk apps make up much of this volume.”

Skyhook posted the survey of location-based applications today on its blog Location Revolution. The company studies the spread of location-aware mobile applications because it makes the underlying location-finding software built into many mobile devices, including the iPhone.

Skyhook surveyed both the numbers and prices of applications emerging in the iTunes App Store, the Android marketplace, Blackberry App World, Nokia’s Ovi Store, and the Palm App Catalog. A handful of apps are priced at $6 to $9, with navigation or sports-related apps sometimes selling for even more. But the most common price for location-enabled apps is $0.99, the company found—and hundreds of new apps were released at this price in the first half of 2009, thanks to the bulk app phenomenon.

“The release of bulk apps is a monetization strategy,” Kate Imbach, Skyhook’s director of marketing and developer programs, said in the company’s release. As developers look for various ways to make money on mobile applications, creating hundreds of variations on a single low-cost app may be an alternative to hitting the jackpot with a single killer app, Imbach observed. “As developers experiment with these strategies, it will be interesting to see if bulk apps gain traction,” she said.

Here are a few of the Skyhook report’s other interesting tidbits, broken down by device type:

Android

There are 4,000 apps in the Android Marketplace, and about 400 of them are location-aware. One-quarter of the apps are paid, with an average price of $1. Travel and shopping apps are the most popular varieties of location-enabled applications.

Apple iPhone/iPod Touch

Of the 50,000 applications in the iTunes App Store, 2,800 are location-aware. About 77 percent of these apps are paid, with the average price being $3.47. Navigation and news-and-weather apps are the fastest-growing categories of location-based applications in the App Store.

Blackberry

The Blackberry App World, which debuted in April, offers 79 location-aware applications, 57 percent of which are paid, with the average price at a surprisingly high $11.70. Travel and navigation apps are the most popular categories of location-aware apps among Blackbery users.

Nokia

Nokia’s Ovi store, launched in May, contains 23 location-aware apps, 43 percent of which are paid, with an average price of $3.11. “Nokia’s Ovi Store has the smallest ratio of [location-based] apps to total apps,” Skyhook noted in the report. “Only 2 percent of Ovi apps use location. This is surprising considering Nokia’s demonstrated interest and massive financial commitment to the location space, including the $8.1 billion acquisition of Navteq.”

Palm

The Palm App Catalog, launched in June with the release of the Palm Pre smartphone, includes nine location-aware applications, all free, with entertainment apps and lifestyle apps as the most popular.

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Taking a cue from the success of Apple’s App Store, San Diego wireless giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said today it is opening its own suite of mobile software solutions and expanding its online retail site for mobile subscribers.

Qualcomm says its Plaza Retail, rather than targeting a single platform, gives online publishers and developers the ability to provide mobile applications and content for a variety of platforms. Beyond Qualcomm’s Brew, which maintained strict control of its applications, Retail Plaza will support apps written for Java, Flash, and BlackBerry operating systems. Retail Plaza also plans to support Android, Windows Mobile, Palm’s webOS, Symbian, and LiMo Linux.

Qualcomm says its approach offers a wider range of distribution channels and new opportunities for its Brew community as well as new customers.

In a statement, Arvin Chander, vice president and general manager of Plaza Retail says, “Success in this market will be dictated by delivering mobile retail experiences across multiple platforms and networks, backed by a healthy ecosystem of publishers with an automated, transparent supply chain.”

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In a market glutted with free cell phone applications, and as advertising budgets dive along with the rest of the economy, what’s a mobile-media company to do? Seattle’s Zumobi has a few tricks up its sleeve. Namely, don’t charge your sponsors anything upfront, and find innovative ways to drive users of one of your applications to your others. Ken Willner, Zumobi’s CEO, described these strategies to me in an interview yesterday.

The company spun off from Microsoft Research in 2006 to create a widget-based mobile platform. In the last year or so, however, it has changed its focus from cell phone platforms to mobile-media applications for “superphones” (iPhone, Android G1, BlackBerry, and their ilk). Zumobi currently has five such apps on the market, all free for users to download. The more well-known among them are the REI Ski and Snow Report, which combines ski and weather conditions for more than 1,800 resorts around the country with a targeted REI catalog, and Inside Xbox 360, a news site and forum for Xbox gamers.

In November, Zumobi debuted Ziibii, an iPhone app that Willner calls a “social ticker.” It combines updates from social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, as well as RSS feeds, and sends them across your iPhone screen in random order as rafts on a virtual river.

With so many companies out there making free iPhone (and other cell phone) applications, I wondered what could make Zumobi stand out to users and advertisers. Willner, who has an extensive background in advertising and wireless media, thinks it’s all about branding the applications, and making them appealing enough to drive repeat usage.

“There are more than 10,000 apps in the iPhone store, most of them free. There’s just a lot of clutter out there,” he said. “There’s a real lack of sustained-usage type of apps that give the user a reason to come back, day after day or month after month.”

To that end, Zumobi is trying to build a network of applications, centered around the “Z-button,” a button on all of their applications that takes the user to a gallery of Zumobi’s other applications. This strategy is driving four to five times more usage of its other applications compared to average click-throughs from Web or mobile advertising, Willner said.

As for making sure people want to use its applications over and over again, that’s a trickier concept. Zumobi is just trying to come up with applications that provide some repeated usefulness for its users, Willner said. And then tie them to a sponsor, like REI.

The branded applications seems like a risky strategy when the ad market is tanking, but Zumobi is absorbing most of that risk itself, Willner said. When approaching a partner such as REI or Lenovo—Zumobi and the laptop-maker released an application tied to the Beijing Olympics for users to follow games on their phones—Zumobi pays for all the initial development and marketing of the application. Sometimes it creates the application for the partner company, sometimes it’s the other way around. Either way, through Zumobi’s performance-based business model, the partner only pays once the app is on the market and being used, said Willner.

“When you meet with a potential partner and tell them that you’re willing to put your skin in the game, willing to take the risk yourself, that’s a great message in this market,” Willner said.

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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 »

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Updated Sep. 24 (see below): OK, this is getting good. Yesterday’s announcement that Amazon’s MP3 music store will be pre-loaded onto the G1—the first mobile phone to be powered by Google’s Android operating system—makes the future of music and other mobile services you can get on your phone delectably messy. The deal also drives home the impact that Seattle-area companies are having, and will continue to have, on what promises to be a very global product.

After all, Bellevue, WA-based T-Mobile is the carrier putting out the G1 phone. And, oh yeah, the handset maker for the G1 is HTC, a Taiwanese manufacturer whose North American headquarters happens to be in Bellevue as well. “The T-Mobile G1 is our opportunity in the U.S. to accelerate the mass adoption of the mobile Web,” said Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer of T-Mobile USA, in a statement.

But Amazon’s involvement in the deal is what’s really interesting here. Its music store, currently a distant #2 to Apple’s iTunes, offers some 6 million songs from the four major labels plus thousands of independent labels. The G1 partnership could push Amazon over the hump and position it squarely as Apple’s chief music competitor. It certainly “will put Amazon MP3′s vast selection of low-priced DRM [digital rights management] -free music at the fingertips of even more customers in more places,” said Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital music and video, in his statement.

Although iTunes still owns the majority of market share in downloaded music, the major labels are clearly backing Apple’s competitors—not just Amazon, but also Napster, MySpace Music, Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace, Rhapsody (another store with local roots, in RealNetworks), and others. What’s more, as VentureBeat points out, much of iTunes is not DRM-free yet, and its songs are slightly pricier than Amazon’s (by 10 cents per track).

It all adds up to a serious push by Google and Amazon to dethrone Apple and quickly grab some mobile market share. But what do local experts think of the strategy? I pinged Bill Baxter, chief technology officer of Seattle-based software firm Cozi and previously the founder of online-music startup SnapTune, to get his take on the deal.

“I have been tracking G1,” Baxter wrote back. “The basic strategy is to suck all the oxygen (licensing revenue) from Microsoft and Apple, leaving only oxygen for Google (ad revenue) which they alone could dominate. Clearly, giving away the software stack, allowing Amazon to do their MP3 thing, probably without collecting a single dime of the download revenues, is an aim to take out Windows Mobile, iPhone, and iTunes all in one fell swoop. It’s an interesting strategy and we’ll see just how effective it will be.”

Baxter is skeptical on that front, though. “I really don’t think Google is very good at complex software stacks for consumers,” he continued. “Further, by relinquishing control over hardware to ODMs [original design manufacturers] like HTC will only undermine the customer user experience. This is the problem Microsoft faces. I would not be surprised to see an iPhone killer (if you’d call it that) come from Microsoft where they control the entire experience (think Xbox-like strategy). We’ll see if Google can pull this off.”

Update: I also heard from Enrique Godreau, co-founder and managing director at Seattle-based Voyager Capital. “With respect to the G1, I would say that this is not a technical innovation, but rather a market innovation,” Godreau says. “That is, I expect the greatest impact of this product to be in the way that carriers, consumers, and coders interact with each other from now on. Like Berlin, carriers need to embrace the reality that for them to continue growing in this information age, they must tear down that wall.”

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Today marks the start of CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2008, the world’s largest wireless-data event, in San Francisco. A host of local wireless companies are peddling their products there, and at least one of them has some interesting news. Seattle startup Ontela, which makes software to transmit digital photos from camera phones, is announcing today that it has formed a partnership with 14 additional wireless carriers from around the U.S. and eight new photo-sharing social websites.

I called Ontela CEO Dan Shapiro, a veteran of Microsoft, RealNetworks, and local startup Wildseed, to learn more about the deal. The new carriers include United Wireless, Alaska DigiTel, Cellcom, and Golden State Cellular, who build on Ontela’s existing customer roster, which consists of Alltel, Cellular South, Cincinnati Bell, and nTelos. On the photo-sharing website side, Ontela has added the likes of Facebook and Friendster to its current stable of Blogger, Flickr, Photobucket, and Snapfish. All told, that could translate into millions of new users, says Shapiro.

It’s an important step for Ontela, which sells its software directly to wireless carriers, who bundle and sell the service to subscribers as part of a monthly package. Ontela was founded in late 2005, and is backed by Steamboat Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, and Voyager Capital. (Venture capitalist Tom Huseby, profiled here last week, is chairman of the board.) The company raised a $10.3 million Series B round in May. About CTIA, Shapiro says, “We’ve got a couple of enormous projects just about finished, and we’re having conversations around that. We’ll show our latest demonstrations.”

Here’s how the technology works. A carrier pre-installs the Ontela application on a camera phone. The software detects when there’s a new picture taken on the phone. It sends the photo wirelessly to Ontela’s servers, located in Tukwila, WA (hosted by Qwest), which then redirects the photo to wherever the user wants it—into his or her e-mail inbox, a photo-sharing website, or a laptop hard drive. (While we were talking, Shapiro took a snapshot of himself, on the left, and emailed it to me in 30 seconds… showoff.) As Shapiro puts it, “Our mantra is ‘no clicks.’ You take the picture and it gets delivered automatically.”

And that’s the key to building Ontela’s customer base—ease of use. You’d think someone would have done this already, made it easy to send photos from your phone. But it’s surprisingly hard to make that process simple. “The big dirty secret of mobile data sevices is that they’re really hard to install, and even hard to find,” Shapiro says. “I can do it, but my parents? No way, no how.” So Ontela is targeting mainstream users, not tech-savvy teenagers or “power” business users who have all the latest gadgets. (Full disclosure: I once took a trip to China and rented a camera phone, but never managed to get my photos off of it, so I would qualify as mainstream. Except I still don’t even own a camera phone.)

I asked Shapiro about the challenges of selling software to wireless carriers—especially as a startup—and he was pretty candid. “It is a pain in the neck to sell to the carriers,” he says. “For us, for our business of selling to the mainstream, it is the only way [to reach those customers]. But for an advanced email client, or something targeted to Slashdot users, I’d go off-deck…It was two years of continuous work, it’s a long sales cycle…We were taking a big gamble, putting it in carriers’ hands to sell. We have to make sure the value is there for carriers, so they sell it effectively.”

On the plus side, the sales strategy of going through carriers gives Ontela access to an enormous marketplace—basically anyone who buys a mobile phone. “The carriers’ webpages have been phenomenal; people learn about [Ontela] when they pay their bill online,” Shapiro says. “We’re seeing great results from demonstrating the value of our product through people using it, and carriers training sales people to sell at the point of sale [of phones].”

The next step? Going after the big carriers, and then the international market. If Ontela can do its one simple thing and do it well, it should catch on with those who just want their mobile technology to be easy to use. That’s certainly a big opportunity in a world where an estimated 3.3 billion people use mobile phones, but only a small percentage know how to make them live up to their full capabilities.

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Bellingham, WA-based Tatango, a mobile-applications startup focused on text-messaging to groups, rose 77 spots to #91 in this month’s edition of the Seattle Startup Index. Other big gains were made by Frugal Mechanic, an auto-parts shopping site, and Smart Desktop, an office-software maker, according to Marcelo Calbucci, who compiles the monthly list.

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