(c)Joia Shillingford

Making the news, not filtering it

SocialMedian, the news filtering and recommendation website founded by New York-based internet entrepreneur Jason Goldberg, has been acquired by German business networking site Xing.

Goldberg, founder of US jobs website Jobster, will move to Xing’s headquarters in Hamburg as a vice president of the business.

XING, which claims 6.5 million business users, plans to offer its members filtered news on topics that tie in with their interests or business needs.

“We want to offer our members the greatest value in their networks, and this includes having the relevant news at their fingertips,” said Lars Hinrichs, chief executive and founder of XING. “Now we have the technology necessary to do so.

“We're also excited to have someone like Jason working with us to develop the XING ecosystem of partnerships with leading companies around the world.”

SocialMedian sends out emails of the top stories on topics subscribers select. Recent topics have included the credit crunch and the US elections.

The emails can be received on mobile devices, such as the BlackBerry, or on PCs. Or users can interact directly with the site at www.socialmedian.com.

XING also has offices in Barcelona, Istanbul and Beijing. The deal was announced on December 19.

More on: http://blog.xing.com/category/english

(c)Joia Shillingford 2008


Driving without due care and attention

A clever piece of concept art at the Frieze Art Fair in London this month showed a wall of text messages.

In front of them, stood a Witness Appeal board for a fatal traffic accident between a lorry and a cyclist. A reminder not to text while driving.

Battery-free BlackBerry

A guest on CBS News on August 7 came up with the alarming (if true) suggestion that China’s intelligence service has the technology to switch on a BlackBerry when it is switched off, and to turn the microphone on. He advised visitors to remove the battery from their BlackBerry when it is not in use.

Mobile's the Star

In the Hong Kong film The Detective (currently showing on Virgin Atlantic to the US), a Nokia N-series phone features so often it is almost one of the characters.

The phone is used by actor Aaron Kwok - who plays Detective Tam - to store and take pictures in a murder investigation. The film is edgy and well directed by Oxide Pang Chun. The action begins when Tam searches for an elusive woman, with just a photo to go on...

(c) Joia Shillingford 2008


Mobiles good enough to eat

Almost anything can be the inspiration for a new mobile phone, it seems.

At the China Design Now exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Lenovo - which was sold to the Chinese - is showing a phone inspired by a traditional Chinese dish - the hotpot. It's the second on the left.

Voicemail-to-SMS company broadens focus

Spinvox, the UK business best known for converting mobile voicemail to texts, has hired speech expert Tony Robinson to head up its Advanced Speech Group.
Robinson and Phil Woodland, a consultant to Spinvox, worked together at Cambridge University on the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK), a way of solving two fundamental problems with speech recognition systems:
1/That they find it hard to recognise continuous speech
2/That they are speaker dependent, working best when trained to recognise the speech characteristics of a particular user.

Daniel Doulton, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Spinvox, says having Tony Robinson working for the business full time will mean it can further speed up its voice to text/email product. “He brings with him further breakthroughs,” said Doulton. “We will improve the system’s ability to self-learn and to ‘ask’ for help with converting certain words to text.”

The company is positioning itself as a wider speech recognition business and is thought to be a possible acquisition target for a larger player. Doulton expects the company to move into new areas of speech recognition, such as replacing some of those automated phone systems by late 2009. You know the ones that tell you to “press 1, if you want to buy a ticket…press 17 (or that's how it feels) if you have lost your baggage”. He says “the technology could be available sooner; it’s a question of getting the distribution arrangements in place.”

The company has recently broadened out from its main product by developing related products, including, most recently, two systems for Vodafone Spain launched in February.

These allow callers to Vodafone customers to press 1 to dictate a text message verbally if the person they are calling is not available and they don’t want to leave a voicemail. Another product allows Vodafone Spain customers to press 115 to dictate a text message verbally – from choice, rather than because the recipient isn’t answering.

The products are not exclusive to Vodafone Spain and Doulton expects Spinvox to sign up several more customers for them later this year.

Spinvox has also added a product that enables people to blog using voice-to-text conversion from a mobile or fixed line, or to update social networking sites like facebook or text-message based Twitter.

What´s new in mobiles?

Want a "life partner to hold"? To play the music you like and give you a "rousing climax"? To touch? This is what Samsung promised for its mobiles at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

But before you start wondering why your current mobile is underperforming in this area, the "life partner" is a phone that will help you blog or record the important aspects of your life in photos, thoughts, schedules and texts.

And that "rousing climax", that´s how music sounds when you listen to the Bang & Olufson improved sound quality on some of its mobiles, claims Samsung, the Taiwanese company.

"With 11 new phones, Samsung is also aiming to attack some of the lower tier markets, but the focus at the moment remains mid to high tier," says Richard Windsor, communications hardware analyst at brokers Nomura. "This makes sense as Motorola continues to languish, making it much easier for Samsung to reach its goal of 16% market share."

Samsung´s stainless steel flagship phone called Soul, has a 5 megapixel camera with stabiliser, fast data speeds, amplifier by B&O and is 12.9mm thin.
"It´s not only beautiful, it has the full range of functions," says Samsung´s Yong Ho Shin, who is clearly in love.

Judging by the amount of footfall on its stand, Nokia, the Finnish handset giant, also has a major hit on its hands with the N96, essentially a tiny computer that is the next step on from its existing N95. Its stand was the busiest of the handset makers on the first day of the show.

All four of Nokia´s new phones running the Symbian operating system "incorporate assisted-GPS powered navigation, imaging and music functions but only the N96 is optimised to do them all at an optimum level of performance," says Windsor.

But the overriding trend in new handsets was touch, touch and more touch. Or in mobile jargon: touchscreens. This trend shows just how much Apple´s touch-operated iPhone has influenced mobile phone design.

LG really emphasised ease of use at its press conference and in its products. Its top-of-the-range LG-KF700 has a choice of three different types of control: pictures you press or browse through with a finger; a dial at the side of the phone you can scroll with a thumb; or a keypad.

This gives the user real choice about how to operate the phone and in its shiny chrome-look casing, is right on trend. LG also demonstrated a prototype of a watch phone but was reluctant to give details on a release date.

And of course, its marketing features the word ´touch´ again as in "Smartly touchable, more usable." But despite the hype, life partners in the traditional sense do not yet come packaged into a phone.

Juan Manuel Soriano of OpenBox New Media (c)Joia Shillingford


Quotes of the Mobile World Congress

We see touchscreens as a growing trend in the mobile industry..”
Dr Skott Ahn, president and chief executive, Mobile Communications, LG Electronics, 1:30pm Monday 11 February, first day of the show.

“One of the next big things is the move to mobile broadband”
Pat Russo, chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, 12 noon, Tuesday 12 February, announcing an R&D joint venture with NEC of Japan on Long Term Evolution/4G technology.

“When it comes to market competition, we will cut each others’ throats nicely”
Hamid Akhavan, chief executive of T-Mobile, 6:30pm on Wednesday 13 February, stating that the the Next Generation Mobile Networks alliance on LTE standards won't remove competition.

“How was last night’s party?”
Unknown MWC visitor on his mobile, 11:25am, Thursday 14 February.

“I’m too tired for sex”
Juan Manuel Soriano, product manager of mobile games company OpenBox New Media, 6:30pm on Thursday 14 February, the last day of the show.