iPhone WordPress App is now in the Testing Mode

The Wordpress – Iphone app is underway, but they are looking for hardware testers to get the next version ready for users.

Changes in the iPhones operating system delayed this new update, but now they are nearly ready for the release to the Apple store. The upcoming version includes landscape mode with the extra wide keyboard, link creation help, editing and creating Pages, comment moderation, asynchronous publishing, photo resizing, and a few more goodies.

Skyte integrates into Nokia Cellphones

To have an application for a mobile platform is one thing; to have it deeply integrated into the phone’s software is another. Knowing that, Skypehas partnered with Nokia to integrate its software into the Finnish company’s handsets, starting with Nokia’s N series of smartphones.

The first smartphone to receive the Skype treatment will be Nokia N97, starting somewhere in the third quarter of 2009, and other devices will follow.

This is especially handy for those international calls from conferences and similar events, when regular phone calls are expensive as hell, but WiFi is almost always freely available. Having Skype integrated with your phone’s core functions means you’ll spend less time fiddling with it to get it to work, which can make the difference between a very pleasant and a very annoying overall experience.

Google Docs are Improving Functionality for your Mobile devices

Google announced an improvement to the mobile version of Google Docs. That is list view for spreadsheets, which allows you to view, edit, sort, and filter your spreadsheets from your mobile device.

Previously, you could only view your spreadsheets on mobile devices. Now, they basically have full functionality.
The mobile access even made better by adding new capabilities with List View for spreadsheets. You can quickly view, edit, sort, and filter your spreadsheets on a variety of mobile devices including Android-powered devices like the T-Mobile G1, the iPhone and iPod touch, and the Nokia S60.

Google launches AdSence for search

Google has announced a new AdSense mobile product named AdSense for mobile search. AdSense for mobile search gives carriers and mobile publishers a quick way to simply embed a Google search box on their mobile sites.
This is a lot like AdSense for Search, but the mobile version. Currently, this is a private beta so you need to fill out a form and be accepted into the beta to give it a try. Plus, this is fully hosted by Google and runs of their servers.

Google Books Search are now Mobile

The Google Books Blog announced they have now created a mobile version of Google Books. If you have an iPhone or Android phone just navigate your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m to start using Google Book search on your mobile device.
There are many differences between the mobile version and the regular version. The most obvious is the look and feel, but the biggest technological difference, as Google explains, is the use of OCR technology. Google Book Search typically shows scans of the page, but if you view the book on a mobile device, they will try to extract the text using OCR and show you plain text, not scanned text.

AdMob Launches Offering for Android Applications

AdMob has announced the launch of its Android application advertising offering. This allows developers to monetize their apps via a mobile banner ad. AccuWeather, Jirbo, and TapJoy are among apps that are utilizing the new option.
“Android’s open platform enables developers to build rich mobile applications that provide a great experience for users,” said Ali Diab, Vice President of Product Management for AdMob. “We are already seeing strong interest in developing applications for Android-based devices, similar to what we saw with the iPhone last summer, and are very excited to take the lead in helping developers monetize their applications on this fast-growing device platform.”

AdMob has been avaliable to iPhone developers for months now. AdMob also offers advertising options for mobile sites.

Inside AdWords: Seminars for Success in 2009

Inside AdWords: Seminars for Success in 2009

Google Androide and T mobile

Google and T-Mobile are working to create a new breed of cell phone. The T-Mobile G1 is the world’s first Android Phone.
An “android” is traditionally defined as a robot with human qualities. It’s known as the T-Mobile G1 Android, the Android Phone, the G1 Phone, or (more informally) the Google Phone.

An Android phone allows you to browse the Internet just as you would on a normal computer. It allows one to run several applications at the same time, on one phone. You can switch between applications, and you can also be notified when something new occurs on one of those applications. It allows you to chat and share photos on applications such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, etc. It allows you to copy URLs and share them with friends via a chat line, using a simple touch-screen interface.
The G1 Phone integrates fully with your Google accounts. Here are a few of the features and capabilities of this new cell phone:
• Google Maps
• YouTube
• Gmail
• Contacts
• Calendar
• IM (Instant Message)
All of these Google applications will be available to you with a single logon - and they will be automatically synchronized with the web. What that means is that any change you make in one of your google accounts from your phone will also show up the next time you log on from any other computer.
Any information you save on your phone in this way will appear on your computer as well - and vice-versa. If you lose or break your phone, your data will still be there waiting for you on your Google account, which you can access from anywhere in the world. And there is no need to worry about your information being stolen, as its password-protected.
An example of the use of the this phone is the integration of the cell phone with your Google Calendar. Any event you save on your Google Calendar will be available to you on your phone, wherever you are. So you can access your schedule easily, on the go and from anywhere, as long as you have your phone with you.
No more schedule books! And you can probably say goodbye to those tiny notebooks and pads of paper you carry around to save your information.
What’s more, once you save information on your Android phone, there’s no need to transfer it over after you get home. Its all there, safely stored on your Google account, for ready access whenever you need it.

Report from AdMob network.

Apple now dominates the mobile web in the U.S. with a 48% market share. This growth, interestingly enough, does not just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch also saw a meteoric rise in usage during the last month. Traffic from the iPod touch to AdMob's network in the U.S. increased 3.4 times from November to December.

Overall, requests from the iPod touch increased from 18 million in July 2008 to 292 million in December. While traffic from the iPod touch grew at a steady clip over the last few month, a good part of this growth came, not unsurprisingly, in the week after Christmas. After the iPhone (10%), the iPod touch (4.7% ) is now the second most popular mobile device on sites that run AdMob's advertising. Overall, iPhone requests grew 86% since November.

Read more at AdMob

Mobile phone users are on the rise

According to comScore, there are 228 million mobile phone users, and data plan subscriptions are on the rise. Subscriptions are up 37% from last year, with 37.8 million users now subscribing to data plans. Unlimited data plans, those without restrictions to Internet access, account for nearly all of that growth, rising 47.4% from 2007.

But what about local search
People in the mobile industry predict smartphones will dominate by 2014. But what will happen in the interim with mobile local search?
Like other advertising supported services, free directory assistance services offer callers a toll-free number to reach an automated system. They then can ask for a particular business or ask for business recommendations by a location in a city. At the outset, the system plays an advertisement, and there can be other ads later in the call. The system can also provide details to the caller’s wireless phone via text messages.

For those trying to reach mobile users who haven’t upgraded to smartphones, marketing with free directory assistance seems the smart way to go.

What about Google Android in 2009

There will be several mobile devices that run the Google Android operating system.
Android is currently only available on the G1 for T-Mobile, but that will change soon. By the end of 2009, we’ll see more manufacturers using Android on their devices, including Motorola and Samsung. In addition to the G1, HTC will be launching more units that run the operating system in 2009.
The Open Handset Alliance will grow, and more companies will promise to have devices running the open source operating system. The hype around Android will fuel development, and make the Android Marketplace successful.

Advertising on mobile phones seems to be getting through, at last.

MARKETERS have often claimed that mobile advertising is taking off. But this time they could be right. Global numbers are hard to come by, but a leading mobile-advertising firm, AdMob, says the number of advertisements it has delivered worldwide has tripled, and this because many of the obstacles that have held mobile advertising back are going away.



Apple’s iPhone, Google’s G1 and the BlackBerry Storm have solved this problem. They have touch-screens large enough to display the web properly—and advertisements, too.
Faster networks and lower rates also help. Having to wait for an advert to download, while being charged for the privilege, was unlikely to inspire warm feelings about the product being advertised. But with download speeds increasing and flat-rate “all you can eat” data plans, mobile services and applications are becoming more popular—and, increasingly, funded by advertising.

Perhaps most importantly, marketers are starting to work out which types of advertising work on mobile phones. Simple text-messages and banner adverts still dominate, but a more interesting idea is to spread the word using several channels. Amobee, a start-up, allows customers to insert adverts not just into text messages and mobile-internet sites, but also into games and other programs that run on handsets.
Advertising on mobile phones, like that on social-networking sites, presents risk and opportunity. The risk is that it can seem intrusive, since it appears in an intensely personal context. But that is also what makes it so attractive to advertisers—provided they can target their audience without seeming insensitive.

Get AdWords campaign into G1 and iPhone

G1 and iPhone ads have many of the same benefits as standard mobile-format ads, such as allowing you to deliver mobile-specific calls-to-action and reaching your audience when they're on the go. Showing ads on the G1 and iPhone also has additional advantages for your advertising. Users are performing a lot of searches on these devices, and searches are likely to go up during the holiday season. Last Christmas, the iPhone drove more traffic to Google.com worldwide than any other mobile platform.

Read more on Google's mobile blog

Flickr adds mobile video-sharing features

Flickr has "radically overhauled" their mobile video-sharing features in an effort to make the popular video and photo sharing site more easy to use on your phone.

The completely "revamped" m.flickr.com is currently available to users of the Apple iPhone or iPod Touch but will soon be available to any smartphone using Firefox or Opera mobile browsers.

Flickr mobile is still being developed for Nokia N series owners as well as phones using the Android operating platform.

Google Releases Enhanced Maps Features for iPhone

and it requires software update
Google announced today that it has updated Google Maps features for the iPhone. This includes the addition of:
-Street View
-Public Transit
-Walking Directions

"The most eye-catching one is Street View," says Mobile Maps software engineer Joe Hughes. "Apple's silky-smooth implementation makes it a joy to pan around the world. You might wonder why you'd want to look at panoramas of the world while you're already out in it, but I've found it handy for getting an idea of what to look for when going somewhere new. In somewhere like New York, it's also a great way to get your bearings when you pop out of a subway station in an unfamiliar part of town."



The public transit feature includes over 100 cities around the world, offering schedules for transportation systems, and this number is likely to grow as more systems elect to participate.

As an added bonus, you can email info about your location to friends, which can definitely come in handy when you're trying to meet somebody somewhere. To get all of the new features, you have to go to iTunes and update your phone's software. Now some are wondering when these features will become available for Android

Google now Sync for Blackberry

As more of its services are used in business environments, Google started to provide synchronization tools for mail, calendar and contacts, but their launch wasn't timely and they were pretty limited. For example, the Google Calendar/Outlook sync tool is limited to the main calendar, while the Blackberry sync application doesn't upload preexisting events to Google Calendar.

To install the application, visit m.google.com/sync from a Blackberry

The good news is that Google's applications are constantly improving. The sync tool for Blackberry added support for contacts synchronization. "This new functionality will enable you to sync your handheld's built-in address book with your Gmail contacts. This all happens in the background and over the air, so your information is always up to date, no matter where you are or what you're doing," explains Google Mobile blog.

Google Voice Search To The iPhone

The New York Times reports in Friday’s newspaper that Google’s iPhone app will be updated with voice search capability. The move should come as no surprise: The launch of Goog411 in 2007 brought immediate speculation that mobile voice search was on the way, and Google tells the Times that data collection from the Goog411 project helped create this new iPhone service.

Currently 1-800-Free411 is the leader in the ad-supported free directory assistance market.

With the new Google iPhone app, you’ll be able to speak your search query into the phone rather than having to type it out. The Times article explains what happens after you ask your question:

"The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.
The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location."

New Firefox for Mobile

A modern version of the browser wars of the 1990s could be shaping up, with the battleground being the mobile phone. And there's a new list of contenders: Safari on the iPhone, Internet Explorer Mobile for Windows Mobile, RIM's BlackBerry Web browser, and a version of Chrome for Google's Android phones. Within the next few months, there will be a new entry: a scaled-down, sped-up version of Firefox, called Fennec.

Last week, Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox, released an "alpha" version of Fennec, just as the desktop version of its browser reached 20 percent of the market for the first time.

Yellowbook Launches G1 Mobile Application

Local business publisher Yellowbook has launched a new mobile application for the G1, the brand new Android-powered phone. Yellowbook already has apps for Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm, and the iPhone.
If you want to download it to your phone, follow these instructions:
1. Tap the Browser icon on the home page.
2. Tap Go to URL.
3. Enter yellowbook.com in the URL bar.
4. Tap Go.
5. Tap the pictures of the phones on the lower right side of the page.
6. Expand the screen to view instructions for this phone, located at the top right.
7. From your phone, TAP HERE to start the download process.
8. Follow your phone prompts for downloading the application.
For more information on Yellowbook's mobile apps, visit http://www.yellowbook.com/iphone-windows-mobile-blackberry/.

Google Android and Open-Source

When Google announced Android, its software platform for mobile devices, it released an SDK for developers to work with, but it also promised to eventually release the code under an open-source license. Today, Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance did exactly that. You can now download the code and help Google and its partners to develop it further. The source code has been released under the Apache 2.0 license and consists of the complete codebase of Android, including all the libraries, media codecs, and applications.

The timing of this announcement coincides with the release of the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, which will go on sale tomorrow.

Apache License

The Apache License allows developers to distribute and modify the source code in any way they want, and developers are not required to distribute the new code under the same license. The new license does not even have to be an open-source license, which will give companies the option to develop their own, proprietary platforms on the basis of Android.


iPhone and Android Compete for Developers

It will be interesting to see where developers will take the Android platform now that they have full access to it. We have already seen the release of quite a few very interesting programs for Android in anticipation of the G1 launch.
This announcement also sets Google apart from Apple, which is trying to keep complete control over its iPhone platform. While most users probably don't care about the politics behind the scenes, the Android platform might siphon off quite a few developers from the iPhone - especially given Apple's erratic behavior around including applications in the iTunes store lately.