Americans spoiled by $99 iPhones may not realize there are other phones that, in some ways, are better social tools than Steve Jobs’ touchscreen supergadget. But having handled INQ’s spanking-new Chat 3G and Mini 3G, both of which lucky Brits will probably get for free with a service plan, I’ve raised the bar on the iPhone in my pocket. INQ, the London based handset maker whose slogan is “Social Mobile,” has crafted Facebook and Twitter apps — plus others for other social networks and Web 2.0 services — that sit onboard, always running, and have none of the slow responsiveness of the downloaded Facebook and Twitter apps I use on my iPhone and BlackBerry.
INQ’s clever trick with their first model last year, the INQ1, generated this rave review at TrustedReviews for its hardwired social network apps:
Facebook, Skype, Twitter, YouTube, Bebo, eBay, Last FM, Microsoft Instant Messenger, Gmail, Google Maps are not only available on the handset but they run full time in the background, pre-fetching data and keeping users continuously connected. All run thin clients which can be accessed with or without signal (such as when on the Tube) and any notices written offline automatically sent when reception returns.
Taking this to the next level is a game changing contacts database where the INQ1’s contacts are seamlessly combined with those detected from these services. This means FaceBook, Twitter, Skype, Gmail, Yahoo, WLM contacts and more are merged grouping contacts with the same name or those with similar (ie, ‘Gordon Kelly’ and Gordon K’ would cause a prompt asking whether they should be merged or not). Consequently select any contact and you’ll have the option (where applicable) to either call, text, email, Facebook, IM, Twitter or Skype call (but not eBay) them, even their avatars and statuses are transposed. Brilliant.
The Chat 3G and Mini 3G have an improved version of the same system.
It’s too bad these phones haven’t made their way into America yet. Flipping through the latency-free menus on INQ’s Facebook app surprised me until I realized: Of course a phone should be able to run this app this fast now. We’ve had our standards lowered by the inferior performance of apps that weren’t tuned for speed.
Both phones are buffed up with what feel like ruggedized keyboards compared to the tiny keys on a BlackBerry or Palm handset. An INQ exec described the design as “bloke-proof.” If you’ve got workingman’s hands, the Chat will feel less fragile under your thumbs. And just like a Pre, both models will sync to iTunes to let you play any of your own tunes that don’t have iTunes digital rights protection on them. (Engadget writer Paul Miller argues that this is still “only dipping their toes into the media playback pool, with hardly any onboard storage, empty microSD slots, and the ever-annoying USB-to-3.5mm converter headphone jack situation.”)
But for an addicted Facebook or Twitter junkie, INQ’s instant response, always-on operation, and careful integration of friend networks with its address book are quite possibly a better deal than a more powerful phone that has 100,000 apps. Sometimes, one good app is enough.
Dear Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T: When will they be available?
From: INQ releases super-bargain “social” phones — when will Americans get them? | VentureBeat
This is a tool that I will soon be testing.
Here is the announcement:
Echo is the way to share your content, and watch the live reaction.
Echo is…
- Real-time – Watch people react to your content live – without refreshing the page!
- Social Gestures – Echo captures the Social Gestures relating to your content including comments, likes, star ratings and more!
- Stream – Echo simplifies the presentation of conversation to just two levels. This simpler, cleaner style helps people keep track of contributions and engage in parallel conversations.
- Hyper-Distributed – Visitors share your content with their friends across all their favorite social networks at once – broadening the conversation and driving new traffic.
- Aggregated – Echo captures conversations related to your content from across the web and places them on your page.
- People – Echo allows people to connect to your site using their profile from the worlds most popular social networks. Users can even bind multiple social media accounts together.
- Open – Echo is open to integration with 3rd party developers. Submit your content to the stream and add value to hundreds of thousands of sites across the web.
- Multimedia – Echo items can include safe HTML, photos, and video for a richer conversation.
- Multiplied Engagement – Echo increases engagement by providing more ways for users to get involved and express their opinion.
Any site…
Like previous JS-Kit widgets, Echo can be embedded on any site with just a couple of lines of JavaScript or using a Blogger/WordPress plugin. Once there, it acts like a dream catcher, gathering and amplifying the social ripples that we all know are there but, until now, could never expose on our own sites.
Customization…
You have complete control. Customize the color scheme of your Echo Stream. Moderate items. Block users (wherever they might be) and more.
Change the conversation…
Echo puts the power back in the publishers hands – enabling them to amplify the Echos caused by their content and visualize the distributed conversation like never before. The result is more engagement, more traffic and more visibility into your audience.
Echo is currently in Private Beta. To reserve your spot on the invite list, please visit the Echo site and follow the instructions.
Echo – Change The Conversation!
Passengers to vote on ‘standing’ flights
Ryanair, the World’s favourite airline, today (9th July) launched an online poll to ask if passengers would ‘stand’ on short flights if it meant they could travel for FREE, or pay 50% less than seated passengers. Ryanair is gauging passenger demand for its ‘vertical seating’ which will allow passengers to travel – for free – in a secure upright position on short flights of approximately one hour. The poll, which is available on ryanair.com until midnight Monday 13th July, asks passengers:
- If it meant your fare was free would you stand on a one hour flight?
- If it meant your fare was half that of a seated passenger would you stand on a one hour flight?
- Do you think passengers should have a choice of standing on short flights as they currently do on trains, buses and underground transport?
Take part in the online poll here »
Ryanair’s Stephen McNamara said:
“Ryanair carries more international passengers than any other airline. Train, bus and underground commuters often stand for hours each day yet pay the same fare as those who get a seat. Ryanair passengers who are willing to stand on our one hour fights should be able to fly for free. Ryanair is asking passengers to take part in our online poll which will gauge passenger demand for free flights in our ‘vertical seating’ cabin.”
I would fly on these seats for sure – at least once to try them out.
Great post:
When the telephone was invented, no one really knew what to do with it. It was thought that it might be a great way to broadcast useful information, and perhaps, music. The thought of one person talking to another was not even considered a possibility. There were sensible reasons (also known as prejudices) for that, of course. Speaking to someone without first having been properly introduced was considered poor form, as was talking to people below you on the social pecking order. Such unfortunate events were frighteningly possible if the telephone was unleashed.
However, The People stepped in and everything changed. Before long, the telephone found its true purpose: making connections.
Technologies often take a while to find their feet. The Internet, which was started to protect military information from attack, is now a worldwide network connecting billions of people. The phone is transforming, through mobility, into a powerful life support center – communications, organization, entertainment…you name it, the mobile phone can do it. So what’s going to happen to Twitter? This remarkable phenomenon born out of the status bar on Facebook (now called ‘What’s on Your Mind?’) sends millions of short (less than 140 characters, and that includes spaces and punctuation) messages each day.
Something about the Twitter format has proved irresistible to us. Like texting, it keeps you in the flow. You don’t have to make a lot of effort, and you can truly reach out and touch somebody.
Now businesses are becoming tweet-friendly. I’ve heard that the attendance at some meetings have been slashed (that’s got to be a good thing) with a small core team meeting and tweeting about what’s happening. Good-bye meetings for catch-up, background, or holding territory. Maybe Twitter is the ideal form for Winning Ugly – fast, focused, and functional.
Last week, I visited a site that provided a glimpse into another possible future for Twitter. Open Brands calls itself a social brand monitor. By combing through the globe’s tweets, it finds and gathers comments on specific brands. What you get is a real time look into what people are thinking about a brand, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. If you want to know what people are thinking about Oprah after a particular show, just scroll through the tweets.
I was riveted by the Toyota tweets. It was like dipping into a stream of authentic engagement with a mix of commentary, opinion, pointers to interesting articles, and responses to other tweets. Fascinating. It felt like people were inventing the future.
From: Kevin Roberts
News of Michael Jackson’s death caused a massive surge in internet traffic last night, temporarily crashing Google and driving huge amounts of traffic to popular sites such as Twitter and BBC News.
The Press Association reports that so many people headed to Google to verify early reports of Jackson’s death that Google’s News servers interpreted searches for “Michael Jackson” as an automated attack for about 30 minutes.
The BBC News website reported that UK traffic was 48 percent higher than usual at 4am on Friday, while Twitter traffic also surged.
Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, said that Jackson quickly became the most popular topic on the micro-blogging site as soon as he was rushed to hospital yesterday.
“My twitter search script sees roughly 15% of all posts on Twitter mentioning Michael Jackson,” wrote Mr. Zuckerman on his Twitter page. “Never saw Iran or swine flu reach over 5%.”
However, at one stage Twitter also failed to cope with the surge in traffic, according to reports. Five of the top ten trending topics on Twitter were related to the pop king at 9am on Friday morning.
Thousands of people switched to Twitter from AIM after AOL’s instant messaging service failed to cope with a surge in traffic, according to PC World magazine US.
Users from the UK, US, and Australia all reported problems. During the 40 minutes of AIM blackout, more than 4,000 people turned to Twitter to find out what was happening with AOL’s service, only to find out that Michael Jackson was hospitalised. Then came reports that the 50-year old singer is dead.
Jackson collapsed at his Los Angeles mansion was rushed to hospital by paramedics before being pronounced dead at 2:26 pm (2126 GMT). Celebrity gossip site TMZ has been credited with breaking the news after a tip-off that a paramedic had visited the singer’s home.
There’s a huge gap between CEOs saying they want their companies to innovate and actually acting in a way consistent with what they say. Do you see Innovation on this image?
This lack of congruence drives internal change agents crazy, catatonic, or out the door.
At the very least, it makes them cranky and unwilling to “go the extra yard” required to turn their inspired ideas into reality.
And so, as a public service to all of you out there whose CEOs are not walking the talk, here’s our TOP TEN reasons why not.
After nodding my head and chuckling, I am going to choose one or two, align with some fellow change agents, and kick start the process of doing something about it.
“If not you, who? If not now, when?”
10. Innovation sparks dissonance and discomfort.
9. Innovation increases the amount of seeming failures.
8. Results only show up long-term.
7. More meetings.
6. CEOs conserve resources. Innovation requires more resources.
5. Innovation flies in the face of analysis.
6. CEOs assume the Board will not be impressed.
5. Imbalance of right-brain and left-brain thinking.
4. The perceived absence of time.
3. Over-reliance on cost-cutting and incremental improvement.
2. Inability to enroll a committed team of champions.
1. Insufficient conviction that innovation will make a difference.
PS: This list is only a conversation starter, folks. Speak up! Pitch in!
Great article on mobile devices being part of our current work and personal lives that have become increasingly harder to separate, and the fact that we will become increasingly unwilling to tote around more than one mobile device:
Mobile life seems to know no boundaries. Though the etiquette of turning the CrackBerry off during a date is as important as ever, various facets of our personal and work lives are rapidly merging and in many cases, overlapping.
I’m an employee, a friend and a sibling; I play different roles in a 24/7 time frame. To that end, I’m looking for a smart device to support my diverse lifestyle, one that doesn’t compromise either my IT department’s sleep schedule or — more importantly — the integrity of my personal data. In order to make this happen, targeted re-engineering of mobile devices and device management technologies is essential.
Many CIOs are exploring user-owned device computing. In this model, the user buys and owns the device, while the company pays for the plan and supports the enterprise applications that get provisioned on it. Per most enterprises’ acceptable usage policies, IT departments retain the right to corporate data on the device, which is fair and necessary. The way these policies are implemented, however, is where things get tricky. Certain events, like a job separation, trigger their enforcement, requiring the mobile operations administrator to immediately remove corporate data from the separated employee’s device. In order to do so, however — even if the enterprise is equipped with leading device management technologies (among them BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Microsoft Mobile Device Manager and iAnywhere Afaria) — the administrator is forced to wipe the entire mobile device “owned” by the user.
So, what’s wrong with the story? From the corporate side, nothing. The now former employee, however, would have lost all of the information stored on the device he’s now left with, some of which was likely not related in any way to the company that was footing his monthly bill.
Mobile devices currently offer users the option to tag Personal Information Management (PIM) data (email, contacts, calendar) as personal or corporate. But personal or corporate, all data — even application-level data — is stored in the same data repository on the device, which means device management tools can’t leverage those user-defined tags to selectively wipe out any of it.
I believe there is a significant opportunity for mobile device manufacturers to re-architect a mobile device operating system to enable data classifications at a fine-grained level. Similarly, device management tools need to be updated with capabilities to selectively manage corporate data without compromising the integrity of the data deemed by a user to be personal.
As our work and personal lives become increasingly harder to separate, we will become increasingly unwilling to tote around more than one mobile device. Until we’ve implemented technologies related to on-device data storage classification and associated device management updates, however, one truly mobile device for a 24/7 life will remain out of our reach.
From GIGAOM
On a personal note, I can say that I am a proud father that just helped his 11 years old daughter create her own blog on the Skyrock platform.
We had to lie on her age since its only available 12 and over. But the pressure was too high. Most of her 11 year old friends had already their own blogs, and as an online consultant father I could not let that go on for too long.
Last week I had to convince my wife that the time had come for our small baby to start blogging and sharing with, not the world out there, but with her friends around exciting subjects like: the other boys & girls from school, latest singers, etc…
Now my second, 9 year old daughter, wants a Facebook account. I don’t know how much time will I be able to keep her away from social networking! But its all coming so fast, and I love it!
Drop her line or a comment, whether or not you like Britney Spears…
The Wall Street Journal reports as fact, not as “according to sources,” that Microsoft has a multimedia touchscreen phone code named Pink. Microsoft and Verizon, the Journal says, plan to launch the phone and an app store early next year specifically as an iPhone competitor.
The news comes after Verizon and Apple execs got into a press conference food fight over whether or not Verizon would offer the iPhone next year. The current iPhone models are not compatible with Verizon’s CDMA network technology.
This is exciting, the more competition, the better for us, consumers and users of smartphones – but the only down side, will be the operating system, running on Windows!
Looking forward to try out this device anyway.
