After getting into bed with the world’s best-known online music retailer Apple to launch the iPhone, O2 has decided to do a deal with former number one pirate music site turned respectable online song shop Napster. The deal will see O2 customers able to access what the operator calls “UK’s largest full track mobile music download service” with a library of over five million tracks.

Once an O2 user buys a song from company’s Active portal, it gets sent both to their mobile and to their nominated email address. During an initial promotional period, Napster tracks will be sold for 99p or 5 tracks for £4.

What’s not immediately clear from O2 is whether the price of the song includes the data costs of delivering the tune to a user’s mobile. Hopefully, it’s just a one off fee - there’s nothing worse than paying twice for the same bit of content.

China Unicom has leapt firmly on the Olympics bandwagon, announcing a slew of new content in time for the sports extravaganza later this year. According to Xinhua, the mobile operator will launch foreign language services and an international business centre.

Xinhua also adds that China Unicom will also provide English, Korean and Japanese hotline services during the games and extend opening hours for its outlets around the Olympic venues. It looks like the most interesting race won’t be on the athletics track this Olympics: it’s all about the networks. China Mobile, which is also working on Olympics content has promised to get its 3G network up in time for the Games while Unicom is reportedly spending billions of yuan on improving its GSM network. I wonder which will go down better with visitors - slow and steady or fast and just-released?

Come across Amethon? I confess I hadn’t. I was talking to Dean, their US business development chap by email this afternoon and they’re getting up to some rather interesting stuff in the field of mobile analytics.

Go2, the local personalised mobile content service for North America has recently deployed the Amethon service.

It’s pretty nifty stuff. Most analytics requires some sort of overhead — an image or a bit of javascript to each page. Not a biggie when you’re viewing a page on the web, but a serious issue when you’re viewing a page on a piece-of-shit Motorola RAZR on a slow connection.

I pulled this description from the Amethon / go2 news release:

go2 Media will receive near real time analytics without adding latency or page ‘weight’ to the end-user’s browsing experience. Amethon’s Mobile Analytics uses a proprietary ‘wireline capture’ technology allowing go2 Media’s mobile web traffic to be analysed without the need for page tagging or log file analysis.

Proprietary wireline capture, eh? Nice. Wireline capture technology. I’ll need to get my head around that.

If you’re looking for mobile analytics, talk to Dean.

I have added Amethon to the rather sparse looking SMS Text News Wiki under ‘mobile analytics’ here.

I’m using Mippin more and more of late. I’ve got it programmed in to every single one of my handsets. Whether it’s the iPhone, the E90 or the N95 8GB I’ve been testing courtesy of the WOM World chaps, I’ve got a bookmark right there.

It’s a really cool method of consuming content whilst I’m on the go. My favourite thing to do is to sit and flick through my favourite sites via Mippin whilst I’m in a restaurant alone. Or in the back of a cab or on the train.

Mippin makes any RSS feed work on your mobile browser. No need to arse about with an RSS reader. Particularly useful if you’re a multi-device user like me as all you need to do is login and woosh, there are all your regular site feeds. Want to check out SMS Text News? Simply type in your desired site URL into the Mippin search box and it’ll auto-discover the RSS feed and format it for you beautifully. It even fetches the site’s favicon. Check out SMS Text News on Mippin, you’ll see our trusty mini red phone favicon there.

I like it when site owners and developers do stuff. I like it when you can see them improving stuff. They’re big into that at Mippin — good news. A recent example? MippinToday. Here’s Richard from Mippin’s explanation:

MippinToday gathers together all the most recent updates from all of your favourite sites on the Mippin service into one handy page for quick and easy access. If you already use Mippin you can also directly access MippinToday at http://mippin.com/today on your mobile phone, it makes a great bookmark for those little breaks in the day when you want to catch up on what’s been going on.

Right on.

Here’s a screenshot:

I’m using the feature like no tomorrow. Wicked.

After years of nearly hitting the big time but not quite making it, it looks like mobile ticketing will finally be going mainstream from this year, according to analysts Juniper Research. The company reckons that by 2011, over 2.6 billion mobile tickets will be delivered to just over 208 million mobile phone users, thanks to a number of pilots around the world turning into full-on commercial launches.

By the looks of things, it’s going to be a mammoth market at $87 billion worth of mobile ticketing transactions by 2011, as operators start using mobile ticketing to cut down on paper and trim costs, as well as fighting fraud. Apparently, the airline industry will see the benefits with around $500 of cost savings each year once it adopts mobile boarding passes.

And finally - finally! - NFC tickets will also start spreading, with serious uptake happening from 2009. I’m really hoping this does turn out to be the case - no more excuses for lost or torn tickets. After all, Oyster functionality is already being tested on mobiles, why not bring other modes of transport on board too?

Mobile advertising company Rapid Mobile Media has pulled in £2million in venture capital series B funding led by US venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. The company said it put the investment towards speeding up the commercial deployment of its Ad360 mobile advertising platform and Active Provisioning automatic mobile application deployment technology.

As well as mobile ads, Rapid Mobile Media also provides real-time betting and gaming over mobile, as well as application development and provisioning platform.

However, it’s likely to be ad potentials that’s got investors interested. Rapid Mobile Media’s Ad360 platform, which delivers graphical and textual adverts automatically via WAP, SMS, MMS or application channels, is smack-bang in the middle of a burgeoning market: research from Nielsen says more and more of us are happy with ads and SMS is our favourite way of responding to them.

China is to get its very first English language ‘mobile newspaper’, according to China Daily, which will produce the content as a partner of China Mobile. The paper reports it will send “multimedia messages” to subscribers phones twice daily: once in the morning, once in the afternoon.

The service will cost 5 yuan a month, or around 35p, a month and will send users all the latest updates on business, health, celebrity and other news, as well as cartoon in the multimedia package. China Daily and China Mobile hopes the service will be taken up by oreign officials, embassy representatives, members of chambers of commerce and foreign companies, and students, among others.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t say how long the minimum subscription will be, which is a bit of shame - I could definitely see a market for visitors coming over for the Olympics this year and seeking a news fix.

Late last year, Jangl turned on text message services and plugged in to both Facebook and Bebo — meaning that Jangl phone numbers could be used to send and receive texts, voice calls and voicemails.

Well, I’ve been waiting for news as to how the great unwashed (that is, the social networking users around the planet) have responded to Jangl’s offerings. Phenomenally well, it seems. I just heard from Jangl’s Tim Johnson that sign-ups and message traffic is going wild. I asked Tim for some specifics to publish:

* A five-fold increase in the number of sign-ups across these sites;
* An almost ten-fold increase in the number of messages exchanged;
* On one recent day, user registrations totalled more than 10,000

What’s more, at their current rate, Jangl reckons they’ll do at least 1,000,000 message during next month. Excellent. Plus, their recent update last week also enables text-capable numbers in the UK and Canada. If you haven’t checked out Jangl recently, get yourself a Jangl account and start playing.

Mobile photo and video company site Tiny Pictures has announced it’s got itself on the business end of $7.2 million in financing. The investment round was headed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mohr Davidow Ventures and will see the company to “focus on international growth opportunities, as well as the further development of its recently launched ad platform”.

Tiny Pictures runs the sharing service Radar, which it claims is the biggest service of its kind with 15 million snaps uploaded every month. The company also offers sponsored content in its Radar Gallery, including film and music promotion, alongside the user generated stuff. Nice work.

Spinvox, everyone’s favorite speech-to-text company, today launched the first device-based service in the form of a Blackberry plugin. For GBP 5.00/year (US$10), in addition to your standard Spinvox package, Blackberry users will receive their voicemail in the form of an email delivered to their inbox with the word ‘Spinvox’ appended to the subject line. From the email they can easily return the call, or file the voicemail accordingly.

There is a free trial period, and interested individuals can cruise over to www.spinvox.com/blackberry to get the full scoop on packages. For the hyper-connected individual with a Blackberry, this is completely priceless, as you can now get your voicemail whether you’re in a meeting, in a library, or anywhere else that’s considered rude to make an actual phone call. Brilliant.

As someone who has completely disabled voicemail on his mobile phone simply to avoid the inconvenience of having to ‘dial in’ to retrieve them, I’d say this new feature for Blackberry users is priceless.

Mippin are steaming it. If you haven’t checked them out, take a look at www.mippin.com. Their service elegantly parses mobile feeds from around the planet and displays them beautifully — whether you’re using a piece-of-crap Motorola RAZR or a top of the line iPhone. It’s brilliant for catching up on news or entertaining yourself whilst you’re sat eating lunch on the train. Screw buying Heat magazine, get Perez Hilton and The Superficial — and even SMS Text News — parsed beautifully on your handset.

They’ve got some news today:

Mobile content portal ‘Mippin’ announces the launch of revolutionary video functionality for its global community of users, delivering the millions of clips referenced in RSS feeds to mobile data users worldwide.

In a joint technology development between market leaders Refresh Mobile and blueapple.mobi, the service will convert and distribute flash-based RSS video content of any publisher, from international publishing companies through to independent bloggers. The process will see video transcoded automatically to the .3gp mobile standard in real-time for viewing on users’ handsets.

In keeping with the popularity of video streaming on the internet, almost any content hosted on the web will be made available, including some channel content previously unavailable for mobile. Videos will be available throughout Mippin wherever a clip is included by a publisher. The service will give users the ability to search and view video immediately on request, providing a choice of preview, streaming and download options.

Here’s how it works.

Normally, if you’re viewing Perez Hilton’s main site, this is what you’d see:

Mippin, via Blueapple, converts that from Perez Hilton’s RSS feed into this:

(Or something like that — I took the screenshot using my web browser).

Very swish. This means that you can now via mobile video on a compatible handset from an RSS feed, easily and without arsing around. Smart. Got a moment? Try it out and let me know how you get on.

No dotmobi for LinkedIn it seems, they’ve gone live with their m.linkedin.com version — and I’m sure it will be phenomenally useful to many. Have a play about with it at m.linkedin.com and see what you think. And if you haven’t added me to your network, you’re welcome to do so (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ewanmacleod– use the email ewan@smstextnews.com to connect with me if necessary).

Link: LinkedIn Goes Mobile—Finally

Six months after Facebook came out with a version of its social network for the iPhone, LinkedIn is finally coming around to releasing a mobile version of its own.

It is live now. Just go to http://m.linkedin.com/ on any mobile browser. Of course, if you have an iPhone, you will see a version optimized just for that device.

(By the way, some enterprising chap has registered linkedin.mobi, which explains the .m strategy).

Honestly, this is one of the many reasons I’m on a GSM network in the United States. A big limitation of the U.S. CDMA carriers is the roaming issue. In many instances, while you may not be charged extra for roaming all the time, data services aren’t usually available when roaming. This is completely inconvenient, and it looks like Alltel is stepping up to the plate, today announcing a new roaming feature that will allow subscribers to use location-based services as part of new ‘network enhancements’. The announcement focuses on location-based services such as the Alltel Navigation and Axcess Family Finder applications. Although standard roaming rates still apply, it’s nice to know you’ll have access to the more advanced features, as well as just plain voice.

Kristi Crum, Alltel’s Director of Multimedia Content, says it best, “Through LBS Nationwide Roaming, our customers are able to use a GPS application when it matters most, especially when they are in unfamiliar territory.”

Love it. Alltel might be rather small fish, bringing up the back as the 5th largest carrier in the United States, but they’re sure making waves with their seemingly consumer-focused policies and offers. Keep it up, guys.

Video calling has always been something of a white elephant for operators, never really finding its feet: after all, the idea of exposing yourself to the person ringing you, warts and all, on video isn’t the most appealing prospect for most people. Of course, other people would happily pay to see that - leading analysts to suggest that the future of video calling is nudity.

Juniper Research says revenues from adult video chat are going to skyrocket and end up being worth $1.5 billion by 2012. While Juniper notes that uptake is low, monthly spend among users is very high - up to 10 or 20 times higher than for other adult services.

And not only are adult video callers not price sensitive, they’re very loyal - coming back “to the same hostess” for more repeatedly and “developing a virtual relationship with her”. Given porn is the usually the first service to be found on any new technology, I’m surprised this hasn’t taken off to a greater degree already.

Motorola, who hasn’t been doing all that great in the mobile arena, has completed their acquisition of SoundBuzz in Asia. This will enable Motorola to expand its MotoMusic platform, now with 13 countries, 3 of the top recording agencies on board, and over 45 independent labels.

The details of the deal were not disclosed, but the deal gives Motorola 750,000 tracks and over half a million ‘mobile music derivatives’ available for side-loading or OTA enjoyment.

On a side note, I rather enjoyed the end of the press release that stated, “Motorola is known around the world for innovation in communications.” Mmmhmmm.

Aspiro, a Sweden-based mobile content provider, has fattened itself up with a 75% stake in My Mobile World, a Norwegian mobile ad firm. Aspiro’s been spending quite a bit of time and money in Norway, having picked up a 25.5% stake in Mobile Entry, a mobile tech firm, late in 2007.

I can’t say I’m surprised at all. We have a mobile content provider hooking up in a big way with a mobile ad provider and a mobile tech firm. Sounds like good old fashioned working together, to me. Congrats to all.

Here’s a killer idea for all you busy salespeople out there. Sales-i, a ‘real-time sales acceleration service’ has launched a new mobile tool which allows you to access full sales account information directly on your handset. Sales-i Mobile brings full customer details directly to your handset through the built-in web browser. The system is designed simply so that first-time users will not need to endure a learning curve, and maintains similar functionality to the full desktop version, further simplifying things.

128 Bit encryption is also used to maintain the highest level of security and privacy. If you’ve got a sales force that could be more productive by being more mobile, you can get more information on Sales-i Mobile on their website.

The GSM Association has picked directory services vendor NeuStar to test out a carrier ENUM service, which the trade body says will make it easier to send IMs, MMS, emails, videos and any other IP content between mobiles and fixed line phones, as well as mobile-to-mobile transmissions.

The pilot of the service will start in 2008, with a view to going live with a full commercial service later on this year. The GSMA has said at least four operators will be involved in the trial: Bharti Airtel, mobilkom austria, Telekom Austria and Telenor.

Good news on the mobile-to-mobile front - making data services easier to use can’t be a bad thing - but I’m curious about how the mobile-to-fixed part of the ENUM service will work. Surely most people would be more likely to send videos and other content to an email address, rather than a fixed line phone?

Here’s a cool idea, though I’m skeptical of how it might be implemented. IntoMobile is reporting that it looks like Vodaphone is going to be using SNAPin Software to setup self-help channels on subscriber’s handsets. Starting out with smartphones, the system will offer customer care and billing, but also step-by-step walkthroughs for things like using the internet browser and the like.

Sounds cool, but my question is, if the user is having trouble with the handset, how is a handset-based ’solution’ going to help them? In particular, I’m picturing a Windows Mobile handset, where the user is trying to learn about surfing the web. It’s not really all that easy to switch between the tutorial and the browser, is it?

Perhaps it’ll be better in practice. Props, at least, for putting the customer first, Vodaphone.

Another little nugget out of MWC that’s got the potential to cause big waves: mobile entertainment company Jamba has announced its going to release music from EMI without any digital rights management (DRM) technology - that’s all the annoying technical restrictions that govern which devices you can transfer your purchased music to and how many times you can burn it to physical media.

Anyone shopping for music tracks on Jamba will get two versions of the tracks they buy, one MP3 file sent to their PC and another compressed AAC+ to their mobile.

The usual excuse for including DRM on purchased music, or any other content for that matter, is to prevent piracy by stopping people giving them songs to their friends or selling them. That may be part of it, but cassettes and CDs never had DRM to prevent such piracy and the music industry still flourished. To the consumer, DRM is typically viewed as an annoyance and a hinderance when moving music between mobile, PC or MP3 player, rather than a sensible anti-piracy move. It’s good to see Jamba getting rid of it.

This is absurd, completely, but if you can look past it, there’s a killer idea here. First, let me lay this out for you. There’s a new fishing game going around western Japan that allows mobile phone gamers to boat around and catch fish. Sounds interesting, but what’s special? The fact that the developer has teamed up with a local fish wholesaler who is offering to deliver real fish to the champions of the game.

It’s a bit confusing, as the gamer pays slightly under $10 for three games, where they do the fishing. If they catch anything, they are shown a slot machine where they have to match three numbers. If someone’s ‘lucky’ enough to do all that, the local fish wholesaler will deliver whatever they caught straight to the door.

While the whole fish thing might be a bit odd, what about other businesses? What about a mobile dating game that gave you a discount on flowers? Or perhaps something like the old Paperboy that earned you a free pizza? The possibilities are really endless once you wrap your brain around it.

The last statistic I read about India, in the Autumn of last year, indicated that India had around 135 million active handsets, with around 6 million signing up per month — together with a growing emphasis on rural market growth. So it’s hardly surprising that Adroit Claretdene Infotech has launched a free WAP email service, emailatmobile.com. The service runs on WAP 1.2 and should, theoretically, run on any WAP capable handset. I don’t have any stats to hand about India’s most popular handsets, but I’m willing to bet that a high percentage are WAP capable.

The service works with any POP or IMAP account and although the service is offered free, users should be careful to check out their provider’s data charges. Yachna from Adroit indicates that India’s mobile operators are offering unlimited GPRS browsing for around Rs 99/month (1.2 pounds, ~2.4 dollars).

No word on the emailatmobile.com model — perhaps it’s an ad-driven play.

I’ll definitely follow-up with them soon to see how they’re getting on.

With Orb running up to 5 million users, I wanted to give you an idea of why so many are starting to realize the value in media being served from the cloud, such as Orb does, versus locally stored data. I’ve been an Orb, er, member for a long time, but never quite got it to work. The problem was I was attempting to use AT&T’s EDGE network, which simply isn’t suitable for streaming video content. However, when I got my Nokia N95-3, which supports AT&T’s 3G HSDPA network, I decided to give it another go, and I’m completely floored.

The problem, currently, with locally stored video content, is the need for conversion. An .AVI movie file of say, The Princess Bride, is 713MB. Even if my mobile device was able to play that natively, that’s quite a bit of memory to suck up. So, to play it on my N95, for instance, I would need to convert it using something like Smartmovie or Divx Converter, which shrinks it down to a more manageable 70-80MB, without losing video quality. The problem is that now I have 2 copies of my movie - one for the PC and one for my mobile. I can’t really only convert what I want, when I want it, because that takes time.

This is where services such as Orb really start to shine. I have all of Season 3 of The Office (the U.S. one, sorry Brits). I want the convenience of being able to watch The Office on either my PC, N810 Internet Tablet, or N95, on demand, at any given moment. Even if I’m at home, Orb makes that simple and efficient by converting on the fly.

In fact, I often use Orb to stream video to my N810 while I’m cooking in the kitchen. I have full access to my entire video library, without having to convert anything, or worry about having enough space on my memory card.

The limitations, however, are obviously the internet connection requirement. If I’m disconnected, so is my media. However, as airlines are starting to add WiFi access to their features list, how much longer will there be completely disconnected places?

Are you finding it better to locally store video content on your device, after having converted it, or do you think that soon enough it will all be served from the cloud?

Here’s a question posted by Stefano:

Moving Mobile Content via Social Networks at “Stefano Sessa”

I have been tasked to conceptualize an application to move specific content via social platforms. This would obviously be moved at a premium to the end-user.

I’m pulling a fast-one and trying to get some ideas from my 3 loyal readers.

How would you guys go about moving mobile content between online social groups (think music, think competitions based on bands etc etc). I am not going to elaborate on what I thought of doing thus far, as it is irrelevant in this experiment. I do not want to place any kind of thought pattern which would hinder your natural thought processes.

So, the nexus behind the app should be to move content (potentially large volumes) between users, based on niche content they support.

Ideas?

My first thought is to keep the content in one location and obviously move links around, rather than the actual content.

ShoZu is a world expert in moving content from handset to the internet. They’d probably be my first port of call.

What do you reckon?

BuzzMyGoat.com is a cool new service brought to you by Outcast TV and allows users to pull from a large library of professional video clips to create quality custom videos to share with friends and family. The service sends the recipient an SMS containing the weblink to view their message.

BuzzMyGoat lets you send your first video for free, and the rest cost anywhere from free to 2GBP, depending on the content and level of personalization. ‘Buzzes’ can be video or audio content and are produced by a team of former BBC filmmakers.

This is a killer idea and a great way to make use of the hours of random footage that’s sure to exist from comedy shows.