Houston’s KHCW-TV Uses Mobiles to Avoid the Holiday Rush

We all know what the holiday season will bring for us – unparalleled amounts of traffic. Surprisingly though, relief for some is coming from a TV station in Houston. KHCW-TV, Houston’s CW affiliate, is launching an ad-supported program, the Traffic Jam Cell Cams, targeting the two million commuters in the Houston area. This is a free mobile traffic site, which will allow users to view bottlenecks and traffic delays from their mobile devices before they head out on the road.

Houston TranStar and its more than 600 traffic cameras bring this service to commuters. TranStar was formed by four government agencies that provide transportation and emergency management to the area. The cameras are placed along toll roads, freeways and places of common congestion, covering about 6,000 square miles, 5.16 million people and 4.3 million registered vehicles.

“This is something that isn’t dependent on having a morning news show to offer traffic to commuters,” said Roger Bare, VP and general manager of KHCW-TV, Tribune Broadcasting Company, Houston. “This service gives people real-time traffic information anytime, anywhere and should prove to be popular with local commuters.”

3rd Dimension, a mobile application company, developed the technology. “Cell phones are incredibly useful and personal,” said Bruce Laskin, CEO of 3rd Dimension. “We hope that we have added to that utility with an application providing individualized video information whenever it is needed.”

KHCW Traffic Jam Cell Cams is compatible with data-enabled phones on the T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless networks.

Helio Devices Cooperate with PCs through Helio Player

This week Helio released its Helio Player, a PC application that lets users manage their music, video and picture collections on their PC and transfer them to and from Helio devices through a USB connection. This comes with no additional charge to Helio subscribers, and is an extension of Helio Music.

“Helio Player is designed to make it easier than ever to use Helio’s premium devices as portable multimedia players,” said Rob Gelick, VP of media and community services at the MVNO. “The intuitive design, inclusion of the Helio Music Store and ability to manage a personal library of music, videos and photos gives members new options for enjoying their entertainment on the go and sharing their favorites with all their friends.”

Helio Player was developed through a partnership with RealNetworks, and it is the first PC application from a US carrier that involves importing and managing data from a mobile. The application also allows users to buy the tracks from the Helio Music Store either via the PC or mobile and then transfer them to the other device. One interesting feature from the Music Store is the Gift/Beg option, where users can buy songs for friends or ask for music from other members.

The Helio Player is free and compatible with Windows XP and Vista and the Helio devices Ocean, Fin, Drift and Heat. Songs bought on the PC are generally 99 cents, while songs bought through the mobile run about $1.99.

AccuWeather.com Launches New Weather Info for Mobile Sites

AccuWeather.com this week launched its netWeather Mobile, a program designed to easily incorporate weather information into a personal or business mobile Web site. The service offers background options, Celsius and Fahrenheit displays, and weather conditions for millions of locations worldwide. This is just the latest in AccuWeather.com’s series of mini-applications, which are compatible with most operating systems and Web browsers. Bet of all, they’re all free.

Mobile Complete Lets Users Try Phones Before They Buy – Virtually

Consumers who don’t want to face the mall traffic this holiday season when picking out new cell phones for the kids, or want to take advantage of Web-only special deals, can now check out all the whiz-bang features of the phones the kids want – without ever leaving their desk.

Sure, those online sales can be great bargains, but unless you venture into a retail outlet, there’s no good way to tell how easy the media features on a phone are to use. After all, someone else’s review can only tell you so much.

This is where Mobile Complete can help. The company, whose flagship DeviceAnywhere provides mobile application developers with remote access to more than 1,000 models on which to test their apps, has brought its technology to the consumer market. Its new TryPhone service is an interactive Web program that enables consumers to test-drive fully functional virtual phones online.

Consumers can visit http://www.tryphone.com to get their virtual hands on a variety of phones on which they can press the buttons, run programs and compare different models.

TryPhone is free for consumers.

Initial handsets available for testing through the service include the BlackBerry Pearl, Samsung Juke, LG Muziq and Apple iPhone. Mobile Complete will be adding more handsets on a weekly basis.

“Historically, going to a store and purchasing a cell phone has been an unpleasant process for consumers who are faced with pushy salespeople and little opportunity to test devices,” said Mobile Complete CEO Faraz Syed. “So, after several years of serving the developer community, we realized the growing number of self service oriented consumers in need of a more convenient interactive purchasing experience…. TryPhone’s goal is to empower consumers to make educated decisions when choosing phones right for them, as well as helping them to understand how to take advantage of all the cool features available on today’s devices. Plus, it enables consumers to take complete control of the purchasing process, without ever having to step foot in a store.”

TryPhone takes advantage of the company’s DeviceAnywhere Direct-to-Device technology. To develop the TryPhone virtual devices, Mobile Complete built an automatic crawler that scans each DeviceAnywhere handset and creates a blueprint of all the pathways on the phones. These pathways are then leveraged to create fully interactive, virtual phones and applications.

 

Google Optimizes Its Applications for iPhone

– Takes Advantage of Touch Screen, Safari Browser, Wi-Fi

Google has a new and optimized interface that’s customized for the iPhone. The interface is supposed to make it quicker and easier to use Google’s free suite of applications such as search, Gmail, calendar and reader. Each application is accessed by clicking on a navigation bar at the top of the iPhone screen.

The move continues the increasing partnership between Apple and Google. Apple, for example, makes YouTube videos available on iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV. It is not clear whether the application suite will also work on the iPod touch and Apple TV. It would seem that it would work at least on the iPod touch, which has built-in Wi-Fi Internet access.

“The Safari browser on the iPhone is essentially the same as Mac OS X, so in many ways, you get the same capability as on the desktop,” said Gummi Hafsteinsson, a product manager with the Google mobile team. He said the company will put the application suite on other mobile devices. It was the technology in the iPhone, he said, that attracted Google to making the applications available on the iPhone first. Nokia phones that have the Symbian operating system and phones that run Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have a much larger installed base than Apple.

A Web technology called Ajax and the iPhone’s Safari browser are the basis for making the applications work quickly and seamlessly.

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and HTML) allows the iPhone’s Safari browser to get information in the background. Because Ajax can predict where the user will likely go next, it can pre-fetch information for the next step, which speeds matters up and makes switching between applications almost simultaneous.

‘Improve Google on the iPhone’Steve Kanefsky, a software engineer on Google’s mobile team, said on his blog that the redesign of Google’s home page for iPhone users is intended to take advantage of iPhone’s touch screen, Wi-Fi and Safari browser. “I started thinking about how to use Ajax technology to improve Google on the iPhone,” Kanefsky said. “I set out to create an application that would preload my favorite Google products and allow me to switch between them instantly. I wanted Web results as well as image, local, and news results without having to repeat my search. I wanted to check Gmail and my news feeds in Google Reader without having to load a new page every time. I also wanted Google Suggest to save me time typing queries on the virtual keyboard.”

The new interface appears to iPhone users when they go to google.com. Users that want to can still access Google’s traditional Web page by clicking on a link.

A “more” tab in the new interface takes the user to other Google services such as Docs, GOOG-411, SMS, News, Photos, Blogger and Notebook.

The Bigger PictureThe move is part of a larger Google push towards opening mobile products and networks. Its two prior major announcements are that it would bid on wireless spectrum in the US and that it had developed an open source Linux-based operating system called Android that it will give away to mobile developers.

Putting the Google suite of applications on the iPhone is seen as a direct threat to Microsoft with its Windows Mobile operating system and to Symbian and Nokia, which is Symbian’s biggest customer.

Pictures and Maps, TooSeparately Google said it has released an iPhone interface for its Picasa photo storage and sharing service. IPhone users can go to Picasa, log in and see all the photo album and pictures that have been uploaded. There’s a slideshow feature. Pictures can be displayed in both landscape and portrait mode.

Last month Google added a function called My Location to Google Maps. Not yet available on the iPhone, it allows users to find their general location on a map even if their cell phone doesn’t have a GPS chip.

Sprint, MySpace Collaborate for Mobile Web Partnership

Top tier social network MySpace and US cellco Sprint are partnering to offer a direct link to MySpace’s Mobile Web site when it launches officially in 2008.  Sprint is the first US carrier to offer a direct link from its portal to MySpace Mobile, providing customers with quicker access to the networking site, as opposed to typing in the URL address in the phone’s browser. 

The new MySpace Mobile site, which since launching in beta mode in September has received one million visits, will include new features like graphic design elements appropriate for viewing from a mobile phone and a new e-mail interface.

Sprint is also including direct links to other Fox Interactive Media mobile Web sites such as IGN, FoxSports.com on MSN, RottenTomatoes, AskMen and Photobucket.

“By providing a direct link to these sites, we’re making it even easier for customers to use their phones to access their MySpace accounts and other online services that are important to them, whenever and wherever they want,” said John Burris, VP of wireless data content for Sprint.

Helio Offers the Ultimate Mobile YouTube Experience

Mobile service provider Helio is offering “the most comprehensible YouTube experience” for Helio Ocean cell phone users to provide features like logging in from a mobile device and personalization options that are not currently available on most services. 

With the completion and launching of the app, Helio believes it has the ultimate mobile YouTube package, according to Helio CEO Sky Dayton.  “Accessing YouTube while on the go has been limited to browsing and viewing, without the rating, sharing and personalization features that have made YouTube a runaway hit on the Web.  Helio is taking mobile YouTube beyond anything else on the market, letting members view tens of millions of videos but also giving them true community interaction comparable to the Web and even beyond the Web,” said Dayton. 

Helio’s MySpace app lets viewers directly log in and upload videos recorded on their device or previously saved directly to YouTube in addition to browsing through millions of video found in categories like Most Viewed, Most Recent, Top Rated and Recently Featured.  When a user uploads a video, he can give it a title, description and tags; categorize it and set it to public or private.  Videos can be saved in categories like My Subscriptions, My Favorites, My Playlists, My Videos and Received Videos. 

A GPS tracking feature, which is available on the Ocean, even lets the user send GPS coordinates along with his homemade video to indicate the exact location of where the video was shot.  Users can also rate and comment on videos, subscribe to a certain YouTube channel and share videos through an integrated address book feature.

T-Mobile, Samsung Introduce a Katalyst to the Hotspot @Home Equation

Samsung and T-Mobile made the Samsung Katalyst, a new phone that supports the T-Mobile HotSpot @Home service, available last week.  The Katalyst is a slide-cover phone that also comes with a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth capability, Wi-Fi connectivity and lots of messaging options. 

With HotSpot @Home support, the Katalyst can use a home or T-Mobile Wi-Fi network, like those found at Starbucks and Kinko’s, for unlimited calling that doesn’t eat up cellular minutes.  The catch is that, to not use plan minutes, the call must originate from a Wi-Fi network, and the user must sign up and pay for the HotSpot @Home service, which starts at $10 a month and later jumps to about $20.  HotSpot @ Home uses the home’s wireless network. T-Mobile sells a wireless router, but any should work.

The release of the Katalyst seems to be an attempt at addressing T-Mobile’s biggest problem with the Hotspot @Home program – availability of capable phones.  The Katalyst is the fourth such phone and looks geared towards those who want a nicer looking phone for more than just placing calls but who do not need the full services, or pricing, of a BlackBerry.

“Since launching T-Mobile HotSpot @Home in June, we’ve worked closely with companies like Samsung to expand our selection of HotSpot phones,” said Saj Sahay, director of product marketing at T-Mobile USA. Katalyst “gives customers who want the calling benefits of HotSpot @Home a great new handset choice.”

Other Katalyst features include support for T-Mobile myFaves, Bluetooth, a music player, expandable memory (microSD memory card), speaker-independent voice recognition and instant messaging and advanced messaging support. 

Google Takes the Blue Pill

 Google has come out with a new addition to its Google Maps for mobile, a big blue “You Are Here” dot.  This dot comes courtesy of a new application called My Location that, well, uses a cell tower to find your location, and looks a bit better than similar dots found poorly placed on mall directories.  This beta technology is a big step because no GPS is required, which is nice since the majority of mobiles don’t come with GPS.

Once you open up Google Maps on a handset, simply press the “0” key, and a blue dot appears at your approximate location.  Sure, if you can get Google Maps on your mobile, then you can very well type in your location, but as Google’s mobile blog puts it “entering things into your phone using the keypad is so 2006.”  It does have some practical uses however, like if you’re lost and can’t find a road sign; if it’s dark and you can’t see street signs or if you’re sure you’re on Main, but not sure if it’s a street, lane or circle. 

Don’t worry if you have a GPS capable-mobile, My Location plays well with others.  It tends to be a little faster at determining your location than GPS, and since you’re already on Google Maps, it is a little faster to find your way to a destination after you find yourself.  My Location also tends to work a bit more reliably indoors and only runs your battery about as much as normal browsing, which usually is less than initiating a GPS system.

Another worry that can be put to rest: “Does Google know where I am?  Is Google tracking me?”  My Location knows where you are, but it doesn’t know who you are, or what your telephone number is.  That information is locked away from My Location.  If you still feel that Google and Big Brother are too close at hand, it takes one simple click to remove the My Location feature.

This feature is still in beta, so it’s not an end-all cure-all just yet.  The coverage and accuracy will vary a good bit, but Google plans to improve that over time as more people access Google Maps for mobile.  This also means it doesn’t support every device, but with the reach Google has in the mobile industry, this will be changing fast. 

The program looks pretty slick, especially once the kinks are out of it.  All we need now is a lovely voice to read those directions to us, and Google will have made a Web site on par with just about any GPS device.

To try out My Location, check to make sure your model is compatible, then text “MYLOCATION” to 33669, or head to http://www.google.com/gmm on your mobile browser. 

Zumobi Zooming Mobile Content ‘Snacking’ Services Enters Beta

Back in March, a company called ZenZui spun out of Microsoft. ZenZui’s claim to fame, its Zooming User Interface (ZUI) for mobile phones, was developed by the Microsoft Redmond Research lab.

On December 14, consumers will finally get to check out the ZUI concept when the company, now known as Zumobi, launches its beta program. The new moniker is supposed to better reflect the company’s Zooming User Interface and mobile platform business.

One way to think about Zumobi is as a new type of mobile browser, one that’s fully personalized and only displays content of interest to the user.

At the highest level, the ZUI features 16 customizable “Tiles” to reflect a user’s interest with such content as sports scores, weather info, entertainment news, blogs, photos and more. The software uses background data caching, so the user can access and interact with the tiles even when not connected to the Internet.

On a touch-screen device such as the iPhone, tapping on a tile provides more details about its contents. Another tap launches the application within the tile, and yet another tap brings it to full-screen mode. The smart service uses advanced adaptive user interface technologies to automatically adjust the experience to work on different devices and in different modalities such as portrait or landscape mode; a numeric keypad vs a touch screen; a mini-qwerty keyboard or traditional up/down/left/right navigational controls.

According to John SanGiovanni, Zumobi’s co-founder and VP of products and services, the company will offer a pre-configured Zoom space (the view with all 16 tiles), but will leave some of the tiles open so users can go to a Web site and pick the tiles they want to add. What tiles the user chooses will affect how much space Zumobi takes up on his phone because it caches content locally, so an app like Flickr would require more storage space than a text-based news service, for example.

Since it was born of Microsoft, it shouldn’t be surprising that the beta version will initially be available for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 handsets. A version for the BlackBerry and select J2ME phones will be out in early Q2.

Zumobi is also making the beta version of a software development kit available on Friday for companies that want to build tiles.

Zumobi is free to consumers and is supported by ads it sells within the tiles.