Mobile Innovation

3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO . Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately. The following are some short descriptions of eight companies offering multiperson SMS and a table displaying which services offer particular features.

The List

Jyngle is a web based service that has voice support, just launched and got a review over on CrunchGear today.
3Jam is funded, relatively straight forward and launched here at DEMO.
Pinger lets users quickly respond to messages by voice and received $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2005.
Swarmteams does a whole lot of things, though we weren’t able to get it to work well in testing for our original review. You might have better luck, and if so then this Irish service could well be worth using.
Loopt is a location aware service funded by YCombinator and Sequoia.
DodgeBall is old school and was acquired by Google in 2005.
Twitter is for groups of friends who want varying levels of instant, automatic updates on each others’ activities.
Moblabber is a mobile social network that users can receive topical messages from automatically.

There are undoubtedly more companies that offer multi-person SMS, or at least there will be by the time I click publish on this post - but I hope that comparing these seven company’s by feature set will help flesh out a vision of the landscape and where we stand today.

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Don't worry, the customer experience comes first when it comes to adding advertising to mobile content, or so says Paul Reddick, vice president of business development and product innovation for Sprint Nextel, during a panel discussion at the fall CTIA show in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

The show has been abuzz since yesterday when Reddick let it slip during a speech at a pre-CTIA event that Sprint plans to begin inserting advertising in its content starting this fall.

While some content providers, such as ESPN and The Weather Channel, have already added advertising to their WAP sites, the carriers have been reluctant to allow any advertising on content that is offered through their own collection of content. The concern has been that customers will be annoyed if they are bombarded with advertising on their phones. But Reddick said that Sprint will make sure the advertising is not intrusive and will add value to consumers.

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CTIA 2006 The CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2006 conference taking place this week in Los Angeles focuses not only on wireless data technologies for business but also on what the industry anticipates will be hot markets for wireless entertainment services, from music downloads to photography and video to interactive games.

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MusicStrands is doing some new stuff by taking their established music discovery and search engine and jazz it up by throwing in some social aspects. The established service enables the user to build her personal music profile, based on the music she plays in iTunes or Windows Media Player. The personal profile lets the user find music tailored to her individual taste, and let her see and share music charts of her favorite and most played songs.

The latest project of MusicStrands is PartyStrands, which takes the MusicStrands idea and applies it to a bar or a club. PartyStrands is a software that works with iTunes or Windows Media Player. A bar owner could run it on a PC that’s loaded with music tracks, and by using one artist as a starting point, it keeps churning out related tunes from the music library. It gets much more interesting, though as users can “join the party” by sending an SMS in with an alias, and their favorite artist. As more users join, the playlist gets influenced by their collective taste in music. PartyStrands is designed to run on a video projector or other large screen, so it can show the current track that’s playing and album art, while users can also send text messages to be displayed, and eventually pictures as well (some photos of it in action).

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In an effort to encourage greater adoption of broadcast mobile TV services and accelerate service deployment, Motorola and Nokia have announced that they will work to achieve interoperability among their DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast - Handheld) enabled mobile devices and network services. The handset manufacturers will work together to support solutions based on open DVB-IPDC standards available for operator partners interested in deploying multi-vendor mobile TV services and trials in 2006 and onward.

Among the many digital technologies available to deliver mobile TV services, Motorola and Nokia both view DVB-H as an effective technology for deploying broadcast mobile TV. DVB-H technology offers high service level quality, low battery consumption and offers the end-user the ability to simultaneously receive broadcasts while using other mobile services such as telephony and internet access on their device.

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