NOKIA: We Don’t Pee Our Pants

As the Apple iPad and iPhone pioneer the tablet computing market, almost every other computer and cell phone maker is scrambling to get its own tablet device on the market to compete with them. Many are quickly adopting Google’s Android operating system to power such devices. Anssi Vanjoki, vice president of mobile solutions for Nokia, thinks the strategy is foolhardy. On September 21, 2010, he told the Financial Times that Nokia adopting the Android platform would be the same as “peeing in their pants to stay warm.”

Research-in-Motion is working on a BlackBerry Tablet running its own software -- not Android.

3 Reasons Why Web Addresses Will Be Useless Soon

I’ve written a few posts about domain names on this blog. While they’re still relevant today, I’ve predicted domain names won’t matter for very long. Domain names have been snatched up quickly sense the internet went mainstream. New top-level domains have been introduced in an effort to alleviate the crowding: .co, .us, and now even .xxx for sexually explicit websites. But everyone still believes the only commercially valuable web addresses end in .com because that’s what consumers automatically assume when typing an address. I just don’t think it matters anymore

Apple iAd Mobile Ads Unimpressive So Far

A few months ago I told you about Apple’s announcement of its new iAd mobile advertising platform. (read that blog) I’ve noticed a few iAd mobile ads popping up this week in the Echofon Twitter iPhone app. They are tagged with the small, elegant iAd logo in the bottom right corner of the ad. I clicked on it immediately expecting to discover a whole new form of multimedia advertising like Steve Jobs demonstrated during his keynote presentation announcing iAd and the iPhone 4. I was disappointed to say the least.

LEFT: An iAd mobile banner ad in Echofon marked with the iAd logo in the bottom right corner. RIGHT: Tapping the ad merely taked you to the Apple App Store to download the app being advertised.

Dell Streak: An Android-Powered Device with an Identity Crisis

Look! It’s a smartphone. Wait… no… it’s a tablet computer. No, it’s the Dell Streak! Computer maker Dell announced this week that it would be releasing a new Android OS powered device called the Streak. There seems to be some confusion in the tech press over exactly what kind of device it is though. Early reports were calling it a tablet computer like the iPad or the Android-powered Cisco Cius that I wrote about a few weeks ago. (read that blog) Then many started calling it a smartphone. No one seemed to know much about it except that they wanted one!

The Dell Streak towers over the iPhone 3GS.

QR Codes: The Bridge Between Print and New Media

Those of you who know me personally, know that I work in the commercial printing industry. As technology advances and content quickly migrates to the web, we see the printing business declining. But QR codes, while not a savior of the industry, can help integrate print media into fast-paced internet and mobile marketing campaigns

You’ve seen them by now, the funky, square 2D barcodes known as Quick Response Codes (QR codes for short). They’re popping up everywhere in physical media: magazines, newspapers, movie posters, and even billboards. When scanned with a camera-equipped mobile phone, the codes can send users to any variety of online destinations through their phone’s mobile web browser where they may find more information, see photos, or watch movies.

QR codes are most often seen as the black and white bitmapped images like the one on the left. But designers are getting more creative with them now, like the code cleverly placed inside Iron Man's armor in the movie poster on the right.

Sub-Smartphones are Dropping Like Flies!

This week we saw the product death of two major lines of mobile phones that were slightly less than what we expect from modern smartphones. In a world where the apps-driven Apple iPhone and Google Android mobile phones rule the marketplace, the Microsoft Kin and T-Mobile Sidekick lines just didn’t cut it.

Microsoft Kin 1 and Kin 2

What the $8 Billion GPS Upgrade Means to Mobile Marketing

The Global Positioning System, otherwise known as GPS, has become an integral technological cornerstone for society, rivaled only by the Internet itself. Today it was announced that the 24 orbiting satellites that comprise the system are getting an $8 billion upgrade that will significantly increase the capabilities of the system and relieve strain from the growing number of applications utilizing GPS. With so many of us carrying GPS-enabled cell phones and using GPS navigation devices in our cars, one can foresee huge implications in the world of mobile marketing.

Garmin nüvi 260W 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator

Facebook Syncing is Bad for Smaller Social Networking Sites

I have recently been experimenting with a lot of the new smaller social networking sites like Gowalla, Tumblr, and Miso. All three of the sites I just mentioned allow users to have their posts on them automatically synced to their Facebook and/or Twitter accounts as status updates there. Posting links to your infant website on the two biggest social networking sites in the world right now seems like a reasonable enough way to increase traffic. But I’ve noticed that any interaction with those posts mostly occurs on Facebook or Twitter instead of drawing my friends to the smaller sites to sign up and interact there. So I’m beginning to wonder whether Facebook syncing is beneficial or harmful to the life of these new networks.

A Gowalla Check-In Synced to Facebook

iAd – Apple’s Entry into Mobile Advertising

Back in January Apple Inc. acquired Quattro Wireless for a speculated $275 million. Considered to be a leader in the mobile advertising market, the reason behind Quattro’s acquisition by Apple could only be assumed to be for future application on the iPhone. Several months passed and the news of the deal faded like a distant memory.

Where you at? – Location-Based Social Networking

First came MySpace, the first hit social networking site that gave members an html canvas to express themselves. MySpace was slowly dethroned as the leader in social networking by Facebook. And then along came Twitter, its micro-blogging little brother. With both Facebook and Twitter possibly reaching the maturity stage of the product life cycle, one has to ask: What’s next in social networking?