Seen in Sweden

Mobile start ups seen in Sweden recently included Neonode, which produces limited edition touch-screen handsets operated by gesture. Swipe your thumb to the right to start dialling, and to the left to end it.

Gesture is the next big thing in user interface design, according to Jonas Lofgren, marketing manager of the company. More obviously useful, is the fact that a phone number can be dialled by touching the number keys with a finger. A stylus is not needed.

Also of interest was a language-learning tool from Vocab that encourages the reader to repeat difficult words like exacerbate (long and abstract) more often than easy words like dog (short and easy to grasp).

It also lets the learner study words in a context that interests them. For example, they can look at a news story from CNN.com and the learning tool will pull out the words and phrases that they need to know.

The company plans to introduce a service in the UK in 2006 but at present the languages available are Swedish/English, Swedish/Russian, Swedish/German and Swedish/Spanish. The service is web-based or can be downloaded to a mobile phone.

Other mobile companies showing their wares were Ocean Observations, which has done soon good branding work for companies like Hutchison’s 3 3G network (it designed its appealing icons) and Samsung, the mobile handset maker. Mobilico showed a mobile poker game which lets you play against other players.
http://www.neonode.com/
http://www.oceanobservations.com/
http://www.vocab.se/company.html (in Swedish)
http://www.mobilico.net/