T-Mobile Android Phone Release Seen Bringing 'Avalanche'

SAN FRANCISCO -(Dow Jones)- With Deutsche Telekom AG's (DT) T-Mobile USA Inc.
preparing to ship out its first cellphones built on Google Inc.'s (GOOG) open
Android platform later this year, wireless carriers are expecting an avalanche
of innovation from users - and radical changes to what customers expect and
demand.

But some disagree on where start-ups should focus their efforts if they aim to
make money in this fast-changing landscape.

At the Wireless Innovations 2008 conference in Redwood City, Calif., sponsored
by Dow Jones & Co., Joe Sims, vice president and general manager of T-Mobile's
broadband and new business division, said he had already seen prototypes of the
company's Android-based phone, which are scheduled to ship in this year's final
quarter.

(This story also appeared in Venture Wire, a newsletter published by Dow Jones
& Co. that covers the venture-capital industry.)

"I'm impressed," he said. "We will have more than one product...(The move to
an open platform) will be innovation across the board, not just one device."

T-Mobile, like other carriers, was leery of Google at first, because the open
platform that the search giant was pushing seemed radical and untested, Sims
said. T-Mobile is now a part of Google's Open Handset Alliance, as is chip maker
Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM).

Like T-Mobile, Qualcomm was "skeptical" of Google's plan at first, said Sayeed
Choudhury, Qualcomm's vice president of product management for CDMA
technologies. "But we got over that hurdle when we saw the use-case models,"
Choudhury said. "The Web-browsing, the taking and uploading of pictures."

Choudhury said he expects big changes to happen fast once the Android phones
get into consumers' hands. Nedim Fresko, director of strategic platform
initiatives at Blackberry maker Research in Motion Ltd. (RIMM), predicted T-
Mobile's release would be a "wake-up call for innovation."

But conference panelists differed on what areas of mobile technology - video
distribution, social networking, enterprise or entertainment - were likely to
heat up first.

"Security is the issue," Fresko said. "People want secure, managed and safe"
networks.

John Smelzer, a senior vice president and manager of News Corp.'s (NWS) Fox
Entertainment Group Inc.'s interactive media division, said photo and video
distribution would be the "next killer app."

News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and Dow
Jones Newswires.

Fox isn't immediately interested in moving social networks to mobile, Smelzer
said, but it sees great potential in start-ups working on applications that
replicate the broader online experience on handsets - for instance, middleware
companies, content aggregators, ad distributors and companies working on
encoding and transcoding data.

Subscription-based video has served Fox well, Smelzer said, and the company
plans to continue that model as networks and handsets move toward openness.

"For the long tail, we think it will be mobile Web," he said.

T-Mobile says all of its offerings will be tailored to the consumer, and the
consumer, in turn, will tell the carriers what they expect their mobile devices
to be able to do.

Panelists agreed that the major, inevitable changes in the next few years
won't be top-down changes, but will be a response from carriers to consumers,
who are going mobile in ever greater numbers and learning to expect much more
from their phones. In addition, they said, the time is ripe for innovators and
start-ups to deliver what consumers want in new, possibly lucrative ways.

"The college kids out there have all the ingredients, finally," said J.H. Kah,
senior vice president of Korean cellular service provider SK Telecom Co. (SKM).

"It's so easy and cheap for these kids to start new ventures," Kah said. "VCs
ought to look at very early-stage (companies), but the real winners (will be)
those that stick around a few years."

-By Timothy Hay, Dow Jones Newsletters; 415-439-6625

[Via: Cnn.com]

AT&T Will Sell Google's 'Android' Phone

And a 3G version of the iPhone is coming within months...

AT&T Wireless Boss Ralph de la Vega says that AT&T will be selling phones based on Google's Android operating system, but only after the baby bell executive was assured the telco wouldn't be forced to offer all-Google applications. "If it's good for customers we'll offer it like any other OS," says de la Vega. The wireless boss also confirmed longstanding rumors that a second generation, HSDPA-supported iPhone would be arriving within months.

First generation iPhone users shouldn't be too sad -- while far from the same thing (particularly in terms of latency), EDGE network upgrades are in the works that could more than double existing speeds. Still, with technophiles flooding to the new versions, expect a fire sale on used first generation iPhones shortly.

Via[BBR.com]


Technorati Tags: AT&T google, google phone, google apps

Google Android port turns phones into webservers

Webtide has announced a port of its open source Jetty webserver to the Android mobile phone platform. The i-Jetty technology allows mobile phone users to set up AJAX- and Comet-enabled websites on their Android phones for access via desktop PCs over the web, says Webtide.

Jetty is a lightweight, open source webserver implemented in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Webtide is the principle maintenance developer for the software, it said.

Jetty is designed to work as a standalone webserver or as a dynamic content server behind a dedicated HTTP server such as Apache. The Android-based i-Jetty version is loaded as a servlet on Android, says Webtide. Once loaded, it enables remote access to phone functions from desktop PCs.

The i-Jetty port to the Android open source software stack for mobile devices is billed primarily as a matter of convenience for cell phone users, who can use it to make calls from their PCs, or to access phone-based content such as address books and calendars using a familiar browser interface. According to Webtide, users will be able to view, create, and save changes to files from remote PCs, including address lists, system settings, call logs, and multimedia files.

Two years ago, Nokia touted similar benefits when it ported Apache to Symbian with its Raccoon project. So far, there has been little evidence of major developer support for Raccoon, yet with mobile phones far outnumbering PCs, the potential for changing the nature and scope of the web is intriguing.

Beyond convenience, Nokia promoted the Raccoon technology as something of a paradigm shifter for the web, especially for mobile webcam-based website projects or for personal web servers. In particular, said Nokia, the amount of personal information stored on mobile phones makes it easy to "semi-automatically generate a personal home page." Other applications touted by Nokia included finding the location of other mobile web sites in the proximity, mobile weblogs, and IM messaging.

i-Jetty users can also build publicly accessible mobile web servers said Adam Lieber, CEO of Webtide, in an interview. In fact, he said, the potential might be greater with i-Jetty compared to Nokia's technology. "I-Jetty is more of a full-featured Java application server as opposed to being just a page server," he said. For example, i-Jetty supports web services technologies such as AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML), which speeds up interactive processes on AJAX-enabled applications like Google Maps.

Beyond mobile phones: routers with webservers

Yet, mobile phones are not sufficiently powerful for most web-serving applications, Lieber noted. "Right now, the devices still don't have the processing power and connection speed to handle more than a small population of users," he said, quickly adding, "i-Jetty-enabled Android phones could certainly syndicate to a larger landed service."

A potentially larger new market could emerge, said Lieber, if Android takes hold in larger-format devices such as network routers. "Android-based networking devices such as routers and access points could host web-based services," he said.

A month-old blog from Chief Engineer Jan Bartel reveals some of the project's final struggles in making the port. According to Lieber, however, the porting process was "really fast" compared to typical ports to commercial Java servers. "Android is much more adaptable to projects like this. Instead of, okay, you can add your server to our application, it's like we'll adapt our environment to your server." The biggest challenge, said Lieber, was in "getting used to the Android emulators."

According to Lieber, the code is stable enough for productive use now. "It's posted, it's freely available, and it's good to go now," he said. One potential area for improvement will occur, he added, if Google decides to enable "dynamic adding of Java classes in runtime" in the next Android release. "Right now, there are a couple facilities that are not available in Android, but we're hopeful that they will make the change so more Java components can be added into an application while it's running," he said.

Availability

i-Jetty is now available for free download at Google Code. Webtide is demonstrating the technology this week at Eclipse.con 2008 in Santa Clara, Calif.

[Via LinuxDevices]

Android Will Outsell iPhone

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has not released sales predictions for devices based on its mobile operating system Android. But that doesn't stop Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms at the search giant, from being confident.

After his presentation on Thursday at the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, Miner said he expects Android-based devices to outpace sales of the popular iPhone.

"Once you have devices out there from Motorola (NYSE: MOT), HTC, Samsung, and so on, there's a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone," Miner said. Despite the runaway success of the iPhone, which sold 4 million units in its first seven months of release, "there's a single manufacturer, it's targeted at a particular demographic, and it falls far short of the 1 billion mobile phones sold every year worldwide," added Miner.

Introduced last November, Android is a "complete open-source [software] stack" for mobile devices, not just an operating system," Miner said during his eComm presentation. Trying to stimulate application development for Android devices, Google is offering $10 million in prizes in its "Android Developers Challenge" for innovative and useful apps.

Opening the iPhone platform to third-party apps, Apple earlier this month released the software development kit for the popular consumer device. Apple said this week that the SDK has already been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Miner, however, pointed out that significant restrictions will still limit the creation of rich and useful applications for the iPhone.

"There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can't do with the iPhone at least at the moment," he says.

Google said last month at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona that the Android SDK has been downloaded 750,000 times. "That's for a device that doesn't even exist yet," remarked Miner.

Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and LG all belong to the Open Handset Alliance, which was formed last year by Google to promote open platforms and open networks in the mobile and wireless industry. All four are expected to release devices based on Android in the second half of this year. Miner indicated on Thursday that he expects one of the handset makers (most likely Taiwanese manufacturer HTC, according to industry reports) to reach the market before the other three.

Android and the iPhone, Miner adds, are aimed at different markets.

"It's not a competitive thing -- it's great that people are finally building tools so all of these third-party applications can be built and get out there," Miner said. "[If I were a developer] I'd certainly be looking at the iPhone, and if you believe there will be lots of Android phones out there, as we do, I'd be developing for both platforms."

[Via InformationWeek]

Google Officially Acquires DoubleClick

Posted by Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO:

I'm pleased to share the news that we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick today. Although it's been nearly a year since we announced our intention to acquire DoubleClick last April, we are no less excited today about the benefits that the combination of our two companies will bring to the online advertising market.

Because we have been waiting for regulatory approval for our acquisition, we've been limited by law in the extent to which we could conduct detailed integration planning to map our way forward. That work will begin in earnest now. Although we don’t have detailed plans to announce today, we will communicate regularly with you about our progress in integrating our two companies.

An immediate task we’ll undertake over the next few weeks is matching and aligning DoubleClick employees with our organizational plan for the business. This will involve determining the right staffing levels for all functions and will ensure that we have the right people assigned to the right responsibilities within Google. We plan to complete this process in the U.S. by early April.

Outside the U.S., the steps we will propose are subject to consultation with employee representatives where applicable, and of course any decisions will be made in accordance with local law. The exact timing of the process outside the U.S. will vary based on the needs and requirements of each region.

As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well. We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we’ll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all of our clients and employees.

Advertisers and publishers who work with us have long asked that we complement our search and content-based text advertising with display advertising capabilities. DoubleClick gives Google the leading platform for display advertising, enabling us to rapidly bring advances to the market in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies.

As the combination of Google and DoubleClick delivers better, more relevant display ads, we're also looking forward to delivering an improved online experience to users. Because user trust is paramount to the success of our business, users will continue to benefit from our commitment to protecting user privacy following this acquisition. And our scale and infrastructure mean that users will also be spending less time waiting for web pages to load. Ultimately, we believe that by combining our advertising network with DoubleClick's display ad serving products, and by investing resources in the display ad business, we will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue. That in turn will fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content for Internet users everywhere.

[Via Google Blog]

Google Announce Apps For Android

Google have recently launched an open source collection of sample Android Applications under the name ‘Apps For Android’.

The aim for Apps For Android is to share some sample applications that will help to demonstrate the different aspects and possibilities of the Android platform.

The first available application included is called Wikinotes, “a wiki note pad that uses intents to navigate to wiki words and other rich content stored in the notes.”

WikiNotes for Android was written to demonstrate a number of core concepts in Android, including:

* Multiple Activities in an Application (View, Edit, Search, etc.)
* Default intent filters for View/Edit/Search based on MIME types
* Life cycle of Activities
* Message passing via Bundles in Intents
* Use of Linkify to add Intent-firing links to text data
* Using Intents within an application
* Using Intents to use an Activity within another application
* Writing a custom ContentProvider that implements search by note title
* Registration of ReST-like URIs to match titles, and do contents searches
* SQLite implementations for insert, retrieve, update, delete and search
* UI layout and creation for multiple activities
* Menus and keyboard shortcuts

[Via TalkAndroid]

Google Gears Goes Mobile

Charles Wiles is the product manager for Mobile Gears, and in this video he introduces us to the release, and the big picture on where this is going, and how exciting it will be to develop applications on the phone using Web technology.