Zumobi Comes to Blackberry

No iPhone 2.0 yet? Me neither. I’m sticking with my Blackberry Pearl until January when my T-Mobile contract runs out. (I’m nothing if not practical.) The iPhone news is killing me though, so I thought I would spread a little love for the other smartphone for a change:

Zumobi has come to the Blackberry at last.

I’ve been interested in Zumobi for some time and have been blogging about it on Channel 10 for awhile now. (I tried it on RWW, too, but I think that audience is more wrapped up in the iPhone, so it fizzled.) So, of course when I saw the news today, I was darned excited.

Why care about Zumobi? Well, despite what you hear in the blogosphere, the entire world does not have an iPhone yet. Yes, iPhone is important; yes it’s amazing; yes, it’s game changing…but that doesn’t mean that innovation should stop for the other platforms.

If you’re unfamiliar with Zumobi, this demo will give you the idea:

Basically, the software gives you a unique way to browse the web – through the use of tiles. This format, ideal for small screens, displays websites as widgetized small squares which you “browse” by zooming in on them. From the app’s configuration menu, you can choose which tiles you want from a gallery of choices and you can also make your own from any RSS feed.

How does Zumobi fare now that it’s been ported to Blackberry? Well CNet complained that loading Twitter and Facebook apps were slow – I’m installing it now, so I’ll get back with you on this later today as to whether this is true or not.

To get Zumobi for your Blackberry, you need to go to get.zumobi.com from your Blackberry’s browser. Signing up for the service via the website will not work – you’ll receive the SMS message, but clicking the link will give you the message that your phone is not supported.

Zumobi currently only supports Blackberry models 8100, 8300, and 8800.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Only a few weeks ago, I was lamenting on Twitter about the lack of a good flickr application for the Blackberry smartphone. I already have a mobile Facebook app with photo upload capabilities, so why not one for flickr? I knew that flickr would allow you to email in photos, but an app would be much quicker (or so I thought.) Needless to say, when I saw the news this weekend about the brand-new flickr app for Blackberry, I immediately went to download it (the link is here).

Since I read the news about the app via Google Reader on my phone’s mobile browser, I clicked through to download the app from the link provided in the blog post. But instead of downloading the application, I received this message instead:

Note

Microsoft® Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) users: if you encounter an error, look at the top of this page for a yellow bar that reads "This site might require the following ActiveX control: ‘AxLoader.cab’ from ‘Research In Motion’. Click here to install…" Click the yellow bar and choose "Install ActiveX Control…" to allow installation to proceed.

Apparently, there’s no over-the-air download available yet. However, when I returned to my PC and hooked up the phone via USB, the download worked just fine.

After signing in to the app with my Yahoo! ID, I went into the options and turned on a setting to “Enable Photosets.” The app then contacted flickr to retrieve a list of my current sets. After doing so, I was able to specify the particular photoset to add the picture to when doing an upload. The initial upload process seemed to take a long time for the first photo I tried – the message “Updating Account” stayed on the screen for nearly five minutes before I decided to hit “cancel.” I don’t know if it couldn’t process the upload due to the poor reception at my house or if there was some other problem. I have a couple of bars – enough to make phone calls and surf the web, but not a really strong signal.

A second attempt got a little further – the photo then showed up on the app’s main screen with a circle next to it to show that it was uploading. Unfortunately, that attempt ended with a red “X.” Finally, a third attempt worked – the photo made it to flickr and the red “X” changed to a blue checkmark instead. I’ll have to try this again from another location - hopefully, the app will work better when I’m in an area with a stronger signal, because this was a somewhat disappointing first run.

I was playing online at Brightkite.com and I just realized that I have 5 Brighkite invites left. Want one? Then comment here on the blog and let me know. I’ll need your email address to send you the invite so you’ll need to leave it in your comment somehow. If you don’t like doing that, you can comment here then email me (sarahperez at Gmail). It’s first come, first serve. Oh, and I did say blog comments, you crazy FriendFeeders!

If you want to learn more about Brightkite, check out my review from ReadWriteWeb. Here’s the intro:

Brightkite Wants to Win the Mobile Social Network Battle

Up-and-coming mobile social network Brightkite faces some serious competition from a myriad of mobile social networks, all of whom are fighting to win the emerging mobile market. However, Brightkite has a few tricks up their sleeve that they hope will make them stand out from the rest, the most important of which is their ability to create a social network that merges with your real life. Keep Reading…

By the way, I’d kill for a Brightkite Blackberry app. Call me Gen X, but SMS is not my fav.

This is a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

What are the three hottest web 2.0 social services right now?  Judging by the latest buzz amongst early adopters, these services are Brightkite, FriendFeed and that perennial love/hate favorite, Twitter.  What’s interesting about each of these services is that Google is noticeably absent from the market. Or is it?

Brightkite is the latest in a string of “geo-social networks” that allows members to check in at real world places via SMS, notifying their Brightkite friends of their physical location - just perfect for those spur of the moment stalkings serendipitous meetings with your nearest and dearest. (You can read more about what Brightkite has to offer over at ReadWriteWeb.)

FriendFeed (for those living in the stone age or still pining for the days of Compuserve) is a ‘”social aggregator” start-up by a bunch of ex-Googlers that lets users aggregate the output of a large number of online services into a central point.  According to the FriendFeed FAQ, the goal of the service is to “make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information“.  While that sounds like a steaming pile of aspirational nothing to me, FriendFeed has been picked up enthusiastically by the early adopter crowd.  It can crawl websites for your publicly available information and it also supports a long list of sites with APIs such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Mixx and last.fm (here’s the full list ).  Part of the excitement - and controversy - around FriendFeed is that the service enables other FriendFeed users to leave comments on your items in FriendFeed itself, providing not just an aggregation of your content but an aggregation of comments on your content.

And as for Twitter… well, if you haven’t heard about Twitter by now you’re probably reading this page by accident anyway.

But What About Jaiku?

In October 2007 Google acquired Jaiku, the Finnish social network that was the brainchild of two ex-Nokia employees Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen . Jaiku first came to the attention of many when Leo Laporte announced on his blog in April 2007 he was moving over to Jaiku from Twitter due to confusion between Twitter and his TWiT podcast network.  The influx of new users was sufficient to actually crash the service (such is the power of the Leo effect).

Let’s check off what features Jaiku boasts:

1. A geo-aware mobile phone app that reads your location based on names reported by mobile phone towers

2. The ability to import information from a selection of website APIs as well as any RSS feed

3. 140 char SMS friendly micro-blog status updates

… not to mention a slick user interface and threaded comments.

However, following the acquisition by Google, the silence was deafening. The usually highly responsive dev team didn’t post nearly as often. The API went missing in action a number of times. The normally rock solid service often either crawled to a halt or regularly reported 503 gateway errors (a database problem).  The blog went quiet, although the developers raised their heads above the trenches in January of this year to proclaim “big things are coming” (‘We’ve joined Google. Now what?’).  In April it was announced that Jaiku was being ported to the Google App Engine, which goes someway to explaining the lack of development.  Unfortunately, the momentum was lost.  Users started to slip back to Twitter.  Developers just didn’t seem interested in taking advantage of the API so there no was no widespread developer ecosystem like the one that sprung up around Twitter.

Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.

Of course, Google does have some history doing the same thing before:  Dodgeball, anyone?

This has been a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

This looks interesting - JuiceCaster, a mobile broadcasting app, is about to arrive in Java app form on T-Mobile phones. The service, which is also available as a WAP site at m.juicecaster.com, lets you post media - like camera phone pictures and videos - and send them to your friends’ phones. You can also post them to your MySpace page, Facebook profile, your blog, and more, all right from your phone.

The public videos on the service make it sort of like a mobile YouTube, and like YouTube, you can subscribe to your favorite channels, such as those belonging to your friends. JuiceCaster members and friends can also interact with all the media that’s being publicly shared by posting comments on the media which the owner can respond to.

In addition to the publicly posted media, friends can choose to send each other private videos, pictures, and audio or text messages instead.

Via a Facebook app, the JuiceCaster Mobile Status application, your most recent photo, video, or text entry on JuiceCaster can also update your Facebook status, which automatically updates your mini-feed and your friends’ news feeds with your latest info.

A Mobile Video Facebook app will add your uploaded videos to your Facebook profile.

For other sites, like MySpace, Blogger, Friendster, etc., there’s an embed code for a JuiceCaster widget. And for Twitterers, JuiceCaster can be configured to update Twitter with links to your media.

JuiceCaster 6.0 will become available on 12 to 14 T-Mobile handsets, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola models (like Razr), but subscribers will have to agree to an additional $3 per month charge. The WAP site, however, is free.

Earlier this week, Frengo, a mobile media company that provides games and social networking applications for your phone, announced the availability of its OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit. This toolkit will provide developers with a way to take their web apps from OpenSocial-compliant social networks and make them mobile.

The Frengo OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit includes SMS alerts and notifications and mobile web services like WAP site hosting, handset recognition and transcoding. And for developers looking to earn money from their mobile apps, Frengo will also offer traffic monetization, advertising brokering and premium billing services.

Frengo partner, RockYou, kicked off the launch with their mobile app, "Horoscopes," a web app that is available on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, hi5, and now is mobile, too.

Additionally, the infamous LOLcat site, I Can Has Cheezburger, is  also offering a mobile app built on the Frengo platform. You can text "LOL" to 44566 to start getting funny cat pictures delivered to your phone thanks to Frengo’s rich photo and image handling capabilities. (Or just sign up here.)

The Frengo platform will support all the major U.S. carriers and the majority of the global carriers, reaching more than a billion phones worldwide.

What I’m curious about is where does this leave Facebook? OpenSocial was originally designed to combat Facebook’s popularity and offer an alternative to their closed platform. Now with an OpenSocial-compliant mobile toolkit available, will Facebook feel compelled to join the group or will they just build their own toolkit for developers?

The Facebook mobile site (m.facebook.com) and Facebook Mobile applications, like that available for the Blackberry, both do a nice job of connecting you with friends, events, messages, news, and photos. However, Facebook’s slew of applications are not available when mobile.

Although some would argue that not having the ability to throw sheeps at each other is a good thing, the fact is many users enjoy the social network’s apps and would love to see them go mobile.

Imagine if you could access your favorite Facebook apps from your phone? Who wouldn’t want a little Scrabulous while waiting in line at the DMV?

Mobile reminder service kwiry, which I covered here, is running a pretty cool promo right now. If you’re using kwiry, then anytime you send in a kwiry for a specific book, movie, or music (song or album), you’re automatically entered in a contest to win that very item.

The more you send, the more chances to win. Just include one of these words - book, movie, or music - along with the title of the item.

Example: Spiderman 3 Movie 

You can enter as many times as you want with different books, movies and music, but you can’t repeat the same title within a week.

More details can be found here: http://blog.kwiry.com/announcing-its-on-us-once-a-week-36/

Bambuser  is a new service that lets you broadcast live video from your mobile phone onto your website or blog. You can also use a web cam, but that’s not nearly as cool.

To get started with this new, alpha service, do the following:

1. Install the bambuser application on your phone. Download it here or point your mobile browser to http://m.bambuser.com.
2. Start the application and review the configuration options at Options » Settings.
3. Enter your username and password at Options » Settings » Credentials.
4. Start the broadcast by choosing Options » Connect.

A new startup called kwiry, wants to help you remember those pesky, forgettable mental notes you make throughout the day. Their motto,"text is before you forget it," pretty much describes their service - text messages are send from your phone to your online account. Later, when you’re back at your computer, you’ll have an email from kwiry to remind you of your note.

You can also log into kwiry.com to see search results for your text. For example, if you had texted "NIN new album", your search results would display info about the album.

What’s strange about kwiry is that they decided that these notes are something worth building a social network around. On kwiry, you can share your notes with friends and see what’s they’re into as well. (Buy milk? Call Dad?) Hmm…I think kwiry should drop the social aspect and just focus on the notes, but that’s just me.

This could still be a useful service, but it has a lot to do before it’s comparable with Jott, whose new offerings are always a step ahead. For example, Jott’s most recent feature for Blackberry users lets them respond to emails by voice, via a "Reply with Jott" option. Genius.

For a service that’s primarily used by Crackberry-addicted professionals, it sure did take LinkedIn a long time to launch a mobile version, but one has finally arrived. The multilanguage WAP version of LinkedIn can be found by going to m.linkedin.com on your phone’s mobile browser. This scaled down version offers search, the ability to view your profile, and the ability to view your contacts and updates. From your phone you can invite other members and forward job postings. Still in the works is the ability to reply to job postings or update your own profile.

Oh and by the way, despite all the blogs covering this new mobile site with pictures of how great it looks on a iPhone, let’s get real - corporate users don’t use iPhones for business (their IT Net Admins forbid it!), it’s more likely that the way most users will see looks more like the image here (borrowed from Webware), kudos to them for a realistic screenshot.