AT&T and 1-800-FLOWERS are seeing a greenish-red this year for Valentine’s Day. The largest GSM carrier in the United States has added a link to the 1-800-FLOWERS mobile shop to its MediaNET deck, as part of their ‘Cupid Goes Wireless’ campaign. AT&T subscribers can login to send their special someone a free animated flower bouquet (hopefully with a disclaimer for men that mobile flowers will not cover them for the entire holiday).

There’s also a contest to win a $50 gift pack from 1-800-FLOWERS.com. This is obviously great for 1-800-FLOWERS to have exposure on AT&T’s MediaNET homepage, as its currently the default homepage for the mobile browser on most of AT&T’s 65+million subscriber’s handsets.

The FCC’s 700MHz frequency auction is in full swing, and hit an important milestone today. The “C” block, the one everyone wants, finally reached the reserve price of US$4.6 billion. This triggers the requirement that whoever wins this particular block of airwaves is required to operate it ‘open’, allowing any compatible device to access it. If this reserve had not been reached, the FCC would have re-auctioned the “C” block again, without the open access stipulation, paving the way for more closed systems in the U.S. It’s a very good thing that this did not happen.

The FCC is keeping all bids anonymous until after the auction is closed, so we’re not sure who placed the US$4.7 billion bid, but we do know that Verizon, AT&T, and Google were among the bidders most interested in this block of the 700MHz frequency.

Yeah, I know, I couldn’t resist the title, really. American Airlines has officially launched its mobile website, though unfortunately it only uses auto-redirection, and no m.version is available. Hopefully they’ll fix that. Anyways, Mobile AA.com offers a simple mobile-optimized interface for mobile flight check-in, as well as the ability to check flight schedules and get airport weather conditions.

There’s also a handy link to visit the full HTML site if you’re on a mobile that can handle it and need more access. According to Yahoo! News, an updated version will be available later this spring, featuring the ability to book flights, change reservations, and a host of other features.

American Airlines is currently also testing the Paperless Boarding Pass program in Houston, and this could easily be implemented using the mobile web, as well. If you’re flying out soon, why don’t you give it a go?

We let you know about Flixwagon a while back, and the service has now entered Alpha mode, allowing anyone to sign up and give it a spin. To celebrate the launch, Flixwagon is also announcing a partnership with MTVnews.com and ChooseorLose.com to bring reports from the ‘Street Team ‘08′, along with Nokia Nseries.

MTV’s got a crew of citizen journalists outfitted with Nokia Nseries devices and Flixwagon ready to get out and cover the youth voting scene. February 5th, ‘Super Tuesday’, the teams will be out at polling stations, candidate rallies, and anywhere else related to voting, to catch things in action. The reports will be streamed in live from mobile to web at MTVnews.com and ChooseorLose.com, offering the citizen journalists the ability to reach nearly 100 million people.

Nokia Nseries has provided N95s for the occasion, seeing the VGA-quality video recording capabilities as a huge plus. Flixwagon has also loaded the handsets up with their new application to allow the videos to be streamed directly online. The MTV Street Team ‘08 is made up of 51 members, and there will be a cool map to show which members are live at the moment.

What a great innovative way to encourage youth to participate in the voting in this country.

This week Whatley is going all Web 2.0 on your ass. It’s all very well having these magnificent tools at our disposal — but how do you actually get them working? I’ve always liked the concept of geotagging my images — but haven’t quite got round to working out how to do it. It’s actually refreshingly simple. Here’s James with the overview:

- - -

There’s been a lot of buzz online lately about Nokia Beta Labs’ latest software release – the Nokia Location Tagger.

A quick overview from Nokia:

“With Nokia Location Tagger, you can automatically tag your location data to your pictures. As you take a picture, your GPS coordinates are saved to the EXIF header of the JPEG file. You can use this data later, for example, to locate your pictures on a map.”

That’s a great feature – Fantastic!
(more on the application of this functionality later)

Nokia also go on to say:

“In the near future, we hope to make location tagging a seamlessly integrated part of your Nokia experience. Until then, Nokia Location Tagger is a small standalone application that gives you a sneak preview. We are not planning to productize this application as such, but we’d love to hear your thoughts already now, so that we have time to take it into account in the mainstream development.”

EVEN BETTER!

However, I will not be using this application. I have absolutely no need for it whatsoever. Installing the Nokia Location Tagger onto my handset would be a complete and utter waste of time.

Why? Well, since downloading and installing Share Online 3.0 (another Nokia Beta Labs product) the Web Upload part of my N95 has been rendered useless. I’m told this is probably something to with http protocols on Vodafone; an early Jaiku beta release had similar problems. However the difference is I could uninstall Jaiku. This is not the case with Share Online 3.0. Grr…

So how do I upload media from my N95? Answer: ShoZu.

Yes it does all the cool things like photo/video uploads to all my sharing sites etc but Ricky covered most of that yesterday.

The ‘other’ cool thing that ShoZu does is… *drum roll please* …Geo Tagging!

That’s right. Exactly the same thing that Nokia’s Location Tagger! ShoZu however announced this feature at LAST YEAR’S 3GSM! …nearly a full year ago.

But I’m not here to moan about Nokia playing catch up AGAIN…

I mean, that thing that the iPhone does when you turn it like *that*?
SO cool.
Wouldn’t it be great if the N95 could do that?! If only it had something like a built-in accelerometer…

No wait.

As I said – I’m not here to moan about that – I’m here to show you what this kinda stuff can DO!

Right then.

First you need a GPS enabled phone – an N95 for example.
Then you need ShoZu, (with the GPS tagging switched to ‘on’).

Once you’ve got those two sorted get yourself a Flickr account and enable the two following options:

1. Import EXIF Location Data - http://flickr.com/account/geo/exif/?from=privacy
2. Import Geotagged Photos - http://flickr.com/account/geo/import

All done? Good. Now take a few photos and upload as you like. Got that far? Excellent.

Now go to your Flickr page – here’s mine http://flickr.com/photos/whatleydude/

Scroll to the bottom and you should see some feeds – you want the geoFeed.

Right click on that and then ‘copy link location’.

Once you’ve done that – get off to www.google.com/maps and right click, paste into the search box and ‘search maps’.

You SHOULD end up with something >like this:

N95 + ShoZu + Geotags + Flickr + GeoRSS + Google Maps = Mash Up Central!

Give it a go and see what you come up with. I was chuffed to bits when I finally got mine together and working correctly. Hence the desire to impart knowledge I guess. Two quick notes before I sign off. First a big thanks to the my Jaiku buddies who inspired me to put this post together and second to point out another great use of ShoZu.

Enjoy! J

If you’ve been one of the people trying to use Gmail via IMAP on your Windows Mobile device (and experiencing quite a few weird issues), the Google Mail team have news for you — they’ve fixed the problems.

Link: Official Gmail Blog: IMAP on Windows Mobile devices

There are a lot of email clients out there, each with its own quirks, so making IMAP work across all of them can be tricky. We’ve worked with Microsoft engineers to debug the incompatibilities with Windows Mobile and made some tweaks to our code. As some people have already noticed, these fixes went out last week, so you should now have a better experience reading and sending Gmail messages using IMAP from your Windows Mobile device. If you haven’t yet set up IMAP, just follow the configuration instructions to get started.

The configuration instructions are here.

Garmin surprised the world last night by announcing its new Nuviphone. The handset is a solid block with a full touch interface, camera, HSDPA, and, obviously, GPS. That’s about all the details that Garmin released, in terms of technical specifications. Honestly, if the iPhone is any indicator, actual specs don’t really matter much, specifically in the U.S.

There’s three things that are fascinating to me about the Nuviphone. The first is the touchscreen, followed by the software innovations and GPS implementation.

If you think about it, who better to build a fully touch-controlled device than a GPS manufacturer? They’ve been making GPS units for years that are navigated solely by touch (no pun intended). If you’ve not actually used one of Garmin’s touch GPS systems, run yourself up to Best Buy or wherever and play with it for a bit. They’ve had haptic feedback for a while now, and have no doubt studied user interaction with the devices for just as long. Newer devices also connected to your handset via Bluetooth, and allowed you to navigate your phonebook and initiate calls and the like through the GPS unit. Basically all they’ve done is crammed the phone part into the unit, removing the need for a 2nd device. Brilliant.

The software innovations should prove to be really interesting, as well. Photos, apparently, are automatically geotagged in the EXIF data, and can even be stored as visual landmarks. They’ve partnered with Google’s Panoramio to offer visual browsing of Points Of Interest, as well. I’d be anxious to use that in a new city, to get a better idea of the places I would like to visit, and those I could probably pass on. That’s neat.

The GPS implementation will be Garmin’s own, obviously. I recently had a chance to play with this on the N95-3, and it’s amazing. The Garmin Online section features localized gas prices and hotel rates, among other things. If that’s not genius, I don’t know that is.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for this when it’s closer, the due date isn’t till Q3 2008.

Are you sitting comfortably? There’s a bit of shock news. Lenovo is selling off its mobile unit. What do you mean you’d forgotten it had a mobile unit?

Lenovo is set to make $100 million on the sale, with a bunch of VCs led by Hony Captial taking it over. The company said its hand enough of the mobile market and is selling the unit to concentrate on what it does best - selling PCs. According to Lenovo, the handset business will now “operate independently and set its own strategic direction”.

The unit hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory recently. Lenovo’s latest set of quarterly results showed that the mobile handset sales dropped off by 31 percent year on year - making a rather painful contrast with its laptop business which turned in a 38 percent increase - and fell 17 percent the quarter before. A good move then on Lenovo’s part, and hopefully the unit will be able to make more of a mark in the future.

It’s not the end of Lenovo’s interest in mobility though - it’s still working with the likes of Avaya to turn its laptops into softphones.

They’ve arrived! The first tranche of SMS Text News 2007 Annuals have arrived!

To those who’ve already ordered, your Annuals will be dispatched first thing tomorrow.

Here are some photos:

Yours for $50 plus postage at the SMS Text News Shop.

The keen-eyed folks over at Wireless and Mobile News have spotted Google is experimenting with QR codes — which it calls 2D barcodes — in print ads.

The codes can be snapped with a cameraphone and then decoded by QR code reading software. You can encode whatever you like in a QR code, but typically they’re used to convey URLs, contact details or vouchers to your phone. So by printing a code in a magazine, companies can get all their advertising goodies straight to your phone in a couple of clicks.

In Google’s mind, QR codes are a way of bridging the online and offline worlds of advertising - “For advertisers, using 2D barcodes in newspaper ads can be an effective and flexible way to engage with potential customers. The benefit to readers is an easier, quicker way to get more information about businesses that interest them,” it says — like clicking on a URL, only these ones are in your local newspaper.

The search company has already signed up jewellery company Blue Nile as a QR codes customer.

Having tinkered with QR codes a bit, I’m always interested in why they’re not more widely used. The Japanese have been onto them for years, but there’s not much take up outside of Asia, which is a bit of a shame, given they work so well. Mind you, if anyone can get people using them around the world, it’ll be Google.

Well for the second time ever, we’ve not been able to actually *send* flowers to the person we wanted to. The first failure, late last year, was when we couldn’t find a florist willing to deliver to Afghanistan Mobile.

This time, well, we couldn’t find the address for John Hadl, founder and CEO of Brandinhand. There’s plenty of possible addresses to use but we emailed hunting for one for John to no avail as yet. We’ll sort this out but meantime I wanted to get the post up.

John was recommended for our weekly well-done, nice-job award of a bunch of flowers by the founders of messaging and marketing company, 4INFO. Zaw Thet and Markus Nordvik explained to me that, in their opinion, John has done a stunning job — particularly with the likes of Procter & Gamble and Coca Cola — advancing the cause of mobile marketing across the States.

Top work John!

The next SMS Text News Unlimited Drinks is on Friday 22nd of February 2008 here in San Francisco.

I appreciate that this might be a big ask if you’re currently sat in London, Moscow (Hi everybody at MTS Russia) or Sydney. But you know, it’s a global village. And you could even buy some trees to offset your carbon emissions.

We’re going ultra-personal this time with San Francisco — Unlimited Drinks will be hosted at my rather superb penthouse in Nob Hill. (For the avoidance of doubt, I’d like to point out that I am, alas, not a yet a trillionaire with an apartment in every timezone — this is, alas, just the one I rented for the time I’m here).

Although it sports excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay, it won’t, I don’t think, hold the standard Unlimited Drinks capacity of 150 people so do email me quickly if you’d like to come along. Think fridges stuffed with unlimited drinks and some brilliant catering. (For those a little bit more at home with comfort food, I will, in true mobile blogger fashion, be proving the concept of mobile ordering by ordering a pizza from Pizza Hut via mobile — and possibly something from that Taco place via Gomobo.com)

If you’d like to join me for a relaxed evening of mobile related discussion (and to poke around with a lot of different devices), then whack me an email with ‘SF drinks = yes‘ in the subject line.

We’ll be operational from 6pm — you’re most welcome to pop by for a drink to say hi or pop by for longer. Expect a mix of friendly mobile and media related people. A critical point: There will be food. Tons of food. I’ve just done the catering order so if you’re coming straight from work, have no fear, there will be lots of stuff to eat (and obviously drink).

What is Unlimited Drinks?
It’s an opportunity to meet people from the mobile industry and related areas in relaxed surroundings. It’s also a personal thank you to you for reading. There are no badges, no feedback forms, no thumping music, no ‘one glass of wine’ rules. The guest list is strictly controlled, generally by huge hulks in dark coats with bad attitudes. I don’t tolerate arses (see the ‘attendee criteria’ below) because I don’t want to waste time talking to people without spark, enthusiasm or a bit of vitality. I don’t like going along to ‘networking’ events that aren’t managed. I like there to be a visible host to act as a central focal point (just in case you can’t find someone to talk to, you know how it is). Therefore at an Unlimited Drinks event, you’ll be met at the door by me — and I’ll most probably politely demand a business card (I know, old world) so I can remember to put you in my write-up of the event the next day (helps with the memory). I’ll then point you to the bar — or in the case of this upcoming event, steer you to the bar and the food and introduce you to some other attendees.

I host these events in different cities (watch out for Cape Town, Moscow and Sydney coming soon). The name of the event is related to the ‘unlimited data’ plans that many network operators have introduced — and they obviously all come with fair use policies. Ditto Unlimited Drinks — the fair use policy is heavily governed by my ability to pay the bill!

How are they funded?
It’s me who pays for the events — sometimes with some assistance from sponsors. Often Nokia are good enough to send us out some of their latest handsets to play around with during the evening and I try to bring along some other technology too (at the upcoming event, I’ll give you the opportunity to try and break one of the new JCB phones).

Attendee Criteria
My job is quality control. I manage the guest list because I don’t want to spend the evening surrounded by weirdos — and the other attendees don’t want that either. So, if you’re simply looking for a job and have no capacity for independent thought and zero passion for mobile, don’t email me — try out a ‘mixer’ or the like, because Unlimited Drinks is not for you.

If, however, you work in or around the mobile industry and you’ve got something to say — good or bad, or both — about what’s going on with mobile, good. Come on in! You needn’t work for a mobile operator — in fact, we often have attendees from all sorts of professions — PR, legal, accounting, marketing — the glue, the commonality, is a degree of passion for mobile.

Get on the list
Just knock me an email (ewan@smstextnews.com) with a one-liner about yourself and anyone else you’d like to bring and I’ll get you on the list. In order that your email doesn’t disappear into the vast void, you can help me out by using the subject ‘SF drinks = yes‘.

See you there?

Our Application of the Week Panel is live and are about to receive their first assignment!

Check out who’s on the panel here.

The Wall Street Journal has a report that Sprint and Clearwire, who previously were chatting about going in together on a nationwide WiMax network, have started talking again, this time looking to outside investors such as Google, Intel, and Best Buy to help fund the high-speed network. Sprint’s WiMax network, dubbed ‘Xohm’, is set to be launched sometime this year.

Clearwire has been operating in various areas of the U.S for several years now, and they do a tremendous job of taking over markets. I was in college in Abilene, TX, a small town in West Texas of roughly 115,000, when Clearwire came in, and there were billboards everywhere, three retail locations, and 2 mall kiosks in a matter of weeks. The network itself is awesome. You have a modem that you simply plug into a power outlet to get the wireless signal. My roommates and I switched from cable internet to Clearwire for roughly the same monthly cost and didn’t notice a difference in speeds at all.

Clearwire currently covers 44 markets in 16 States. I’m anxious to see Sprint and Clearwire work together to spread across the entire US soon. Time will tell if they’re able to work together and get some investors in to help them out.

(Image courtesy of Intomobile.com)

Vision Objects recently announced the integration of MyScript technology into the Pulse smartpen and Livescribe Desktop software. This allows the smartpen to track your handwritten notes, transmit them to the Livescribe Desktop software, and then manipulate the words, including the ability to search through your handwritten notes. The Pulse smartpen sounds fantastic, it records an audio track of the lecture at the same time as the student is writing. Thus, at the end of the lecture (or wherever else you’re using it) you have a digital copy of handwritten notes that is digitally synced with the audio track.

My question is, why isn’t this digital pen technology embedded into a cellphone yet? Sure, it’s a bit awkward to hold, but you could totally ‘write’ with a corner or your handset, it record the handwriting digitally, and then you could attach the signature to an email or perhaps use QuickOffice on your smartphone to digitally sign a document and send it off. This could be incredibly useful for mobile professionals, mobile salespeople, anyone else who might need to digitally sign something and email it off right away. The digital pens that I’ve seen in real life are already massive, why not just stick them into a smartphone?

MTV’s Executive VP or Digital Distribution and Business Development, Greg Clayman, was recently caught at a National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) event and asked about mobile. The video can be found on MoCoNews.net, it’s under 6 minutes long and he gives a bit of insight into where mobile content will be headed in 2008, as well as some interesting facts about the ringtone market.

Mr. Clayman seems to think that mobile video (both creation and consumption) will really take off in 2008, and gives an idea of what’s really taking off. Content such as news, weather, and sports are obviously slam-dunks for being viewed on a mobile, but he also claims that music-related video content is doing phenomenally. He also mentions MediaFLO a little bit, and suggests that it will be interesting to see where that goes this year.

Continental Airlines, the 5th largest in the U.S., announced recently a partnership with LiveTV to offer inflight email and IM capabilities to passengers by January 2009. Set to be added to its fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft, the service will be free to all passengers and available on laptops as well as WiFi-enabled smartphones. They will also be offering 36 channels from DirectTV’s satellite TV lineup, free for everyone but Economy class, who pays $6 for the privilege.

According to the press release, the IM seems to be limited to Blackberry messenger and Yahoo! messenger protocols, though I’m not quite sure how or why. In any case, I’m all for internet connectivity on airlines, just not voice.

I was recently introduced to MiniFriday, a Mobile Virtual World, currently only for Nokia S60 handsets (available for both 2nd edition and 3rd edition). MiniFriday is developed by Sulake, the same company behind the successful virtual world ‘Habbo’. The interface looks a bit like SchoolHouse Rock, but it’s fun, looks great on my N95, and easy to get into without taking it too seriously. MiniFriday is basically an interactive IM/Chatroom environment, visualized in a bar or club atmosphere. They currently have over 200,000 users, which isn’t bad considering that it’s really only a small research project. There are different ‘rooms’ for different languages, which makes it really easy to get in and meet people from your same locale.

Virtual Worlds are starting to really take off, with places like Second Life and World of Warcraft inticing millions of users into the graphical world. I can’t help but think of TRON, where the virtual and real worlds start to collide. The idea of taking these worlds mobile, however, is interesting to me. I think the bigger question is, are these virtual worlds more mobile or portable? I think that’s an important distinction to make.

My laptop is portable. I can easily move it from place to place. However, I wouldn’t say it is very mobile. My mobile phone, however, is quite obviously mobile, as it’s easy to use while on the go, without needing to stop to use it. The portability of these virtual worlds is quite obvious: of course I’d like to take my virtual world from my home to work, to a friend’s house, or elsewhere. However, what about the mobility? Is it really something I’d like to be involved in while walking down the street, standing in line at the grocery store, or other mobile usage situation?

After playing with MiniFriday for a little while, I’m honestly not convinced either way. The interface is definitely well done, and offers quite a bit in terms of eye candy and usability. However, I don’t know that my presence in this virtual world would be all that consistent, other than specifically to meet someone in it for coffee or a beer.

Thoughts?

Bored of waiting for Apple to launch the iPhone on the network you like? You and a great big wodge of US iPhone users. According to an analyst quoted by Reuters, one quarter of iPhone owners are using their Apple mobiles on networks that aren’t AT&T’s.

If that’s the case, then it’s Apple that should be worried, rather than AT&T (the carrier said last week it had achieved the highest number of quarterly subscriber adds of any US carrier ever after all.) Apple gets a share of data revenues for each AT&T user signed up on an iPhone contract, so for every one that’s off the grid, the company’s bottom line takes a hit - up to $500 million according to Reuters.

It just shows the pulling power of the iPhone - after all, that’s one in four iPhone owners that are risking ending up with a brick the next time Apple updates the device’s firmware.

AT&T has struck with a multi-year pact with Yahoo which will see the internet company’s search and display ads appearing on AT&T handsets, and a new co-branded portal for mobile web users emerge. The deal will also see the pair cosy up with joint services for AT&T’s broadband customers.
The union comes on the back of some interesting announcements at both AT&T and Yahoo of late - the mobile operator just announced a set of quarterly results where it revealed 2.7 million subscribers joined its the fold - the largest quarterly add for any US operator ever - and mobile data revenue up 57.5 percent on the year before. Meanwhile, Yahoo has recently had a change of leadership, with Jerry Yang taking over as CEO, and a restructuring which will see 1,000 jobs lost.
Archrival Google has also been focusing its sights on the mobile world - last week, it struck a deal with DoCoMo. Under the agreement, Google will become the default search for DoCoMo users, Google services will get polished up for i-mode handsets and Google Maps may come preloaded on some i-mode mobiles in the future.WIth mobiles set to become the dominant way of accessing the internet in the future, it’s surprising there aren’t more of these deals being struck, especially in emerging markets.

So I am in love with my N95. (How could you not be?) It’s been two whole days now and I don’t know how I lived without it.

Since it’s one slight downfall is battery life, I decided to go out and buy a car charger for it.

Off I go to the mall, and to The Telephone Booth

I’ve never had a problem with them, I even remember buying a Sony Ericsson T200 (in icy blue!) from them in the past, along with numerous, numerous PAYG cards when I was just a teen, so I figured they were my best choice to pick up the charger, and they’re conveniently located.

Right so, I’m wandering around waiting for the salesmen to finish with his current customer with my N95 in my hand and he wanders over with a “oooh nice phone! I have one of those!”

My eyes widened with a “there IS hope!”

So we started chatting away about it, he has the original one, I have the N95-3, etc. etc. until salesman #2 comes over and says “What phone is that?”

Salesman #1 happily answers with a, look I’ve found a friend!, type tone “that’s the N95! you know! the other phone I have!”

and Salesman #2 says “oohhh! that’s right. That’s the one you’re not allowed to show while you’re working here.”

Oh.my.god. Are you kidding me?

My jaw almost hit the floor. I couldn’t believe it. He’s not allowed to let a customer see a phone better than the ones they’re selling.

(by the way, I didn’t even get my car charger, they were sold out!)

“Living through the 90s and not getting involved in an internet start-up is like living though the 60s and not smoking,” — so said Serena Doshi (one of my co-founders from Liv4now.com — a long, long time ago).

I reckon, to paraphrase Serena, that living through 2007 or 2008 and NOT launching a Facebook application is like living through the 60s and not smoking.

So here we go.

I wanted to put a picture of the phone I am mostly using on my Facebook profile. So I knocked up an application to do that.

“WHY?” yelled my other half when I told her I’d done it, “Who would want to put a picture of their PHONE on their profile?” she continued.

I did my best at a reply: “Er, well, it’s just something that appeals to me. People do it on forum signatures and that sort of thing. So I wanted to do it on Facebook.”

She rolled her eyes and carried on writing a message to a friend. Via Facebook.

Anyway, here’s what it looks like when you add to your profile:

And when you add the application and update, it puts these wicked little messages in your feeds:

And it’s using the SMS Text News icon.

No branding on the application. But I do plan to update the application of the week on the bottom of it — that’ll be a link to the relevant piece on SMS Text News. If I can get the weekly update to change everyone’s profile.

I’d be most grateful if you could put it on your profile, perhaps just for a day or so, in order that I disprove the doubts of my other half.

To install the application, go: here/a>.

Since the iPhone came out, accelerometer-based applications have been all the rage, specifically in the S60 world, since Nokia admitted the popular N95, as well as the recently launched N82 features a built-in accelerometer, and made it easy for developers to take advantage of this. The newest application to make use of the chip’s motion-sensing technology is called ShakeSMS. If you’ve got your N95’s key locked, and you receive an SMS, rather than unlock the keys, click to open the message, then exit out and re-lock the keys, with ShakeSMS all you need to do is give your handset a quick shake. The first shake will bring the message up on your screen, so you can read it, and then shake the handset again to re-lock the keys.

Here’s a video if you want to see the application in action.

I realize this is essentially a pretty gimmicky application, but it goes to show that there’s some really creative people out there looking at accelerometers as a completely new and innovative way of interacting with our mobile devices. Another developer, Samir, has developed applications that rotate the display, as well as allowing you to flip the phone over to silence the ringer, and use the accelerometer to navigate through the menus. In the argument over hardware keys vs. touchscreen, accelerometers certainly bring a whole new world of interesting abilities.

ShoZu is hands-down one of my favorite applications on my Nokia N95, and is among the first that I install whenever I get a new S60 handset. ShoZu is now compatible with over 300 different handset models, from high-end to low-end, and allows you to quickly and easily upload videos and pictures to your favorite media-sharing sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. They also have a cool product called ZuCasts that allows you to get content downloaded directly to your device.

For me, ShoZu rocks because I can set it to automatically upload every picture I take with my N95-3 directly to Flickr, Facebook, and any other image-sharing site. I don’t have to do ANYTHING on my phone at all, they’re automatically pushed online. However, if you tend to take more….private pictures or videos on your mobile, there’s also a convenient setting where ShoZu will popup a small box, asking if you’d like to upload the recently taken photo/video to the destinations you’ve designated. These features may or may not be available on your specific handset, but I’d highly encourage you to check ShoZu out if you haven’t.

Ewan recently met with the CEO and I’m anxious to read his thoughts soon. ShoZu has also secured deals with handset manufacturers and will be shipping pre-installed on more than 50 million handsets this year. A big congratulations to the ShoZu team on their recent funding, and keep up the killer work.

NFC trials are nothing new, both in the United States and abroad, but it’s interesting to know that the testing is getting more and more popular. The latest includes Nokia, a usual suspect, along with Mastercard and U.S. Bank, in the Spokane, WA area. NFC, or Near-Field Communications, allows two equipped devices to exchange information simply by placing them in close proximity to one another. Nokia has been working closely on the technology, specifically in the usage of NFC for mobile payment systems.

For this trial with U.S. Bancorp and Mastercard, participants were given an NFC-enabled Nokia handset equipped with Mastercard’s PayPass technology, for use at the nearly 80,000 PayPass-accepted locations nationwide. Previously Nokia also participated in NFC trials in New York City, the UK, Germany, and China.