MobileCrunch |  |
- Seven States Oppose AT&T/T-Mobile Merger, AT&T Isn’t Worried
- RIM’s BBM Service Suffers Partial Outage In Canada, Latin America
- Wrap It Up: Photos From Our First TC Gadgets/Mobile Meet-Up
- The New Social Network: Who’s Nearby, Not Who You Know
- Square-Enix Working On Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy For Android
- HTC Vigor Renamed Incredible HD, Poised for October Release?
- Tethras Helps Developers Translate And Localize Their Mobile Apps
- Sprint’s Epic Touch 4G Officially Goes On Sale
- Android Voice Actions Now Play Well With Accents, EU Languages
| Seven States Oppose AT&T/T-Mobile Merger, AT&T Isn’t Worried Posted: 16 Sep 2011 03:13 PM PDT  "This proposed merger would stifle competition in markets that are crucial to New York’s consumers and businesses, while reducing access to low-cost options and the newest broadband-based technologies." So sayeth New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is joined by the attorneys general of six other states in support of the Department of Justice suit that sought to halt the pending AT&T/T-Mobile merger. And so the AT&T/T-Mobile craziness continues. The states that have come out in favor of the DoJ suit are New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. Even when facing mounting opposition, AT&T seems rather nonplussed about the whole situation. AT&T spokesperson Michael Balmoris has stated that “it is not unusual for state attorneys general to participate in DOJ merger review proceedings or court filings.” Translation: It certainly doesn’t hurt that AT&T can count on the support of 11 states who have publicly endorsed the deal. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming have all thrown their support behind AT&T and T-Mobile, presumably because they stand to benefit from increased wireless build-out and more jobs. The merger also received a spirited defense yesterday by a small contingent of 15 House Democrats (nearly all of whom received campaign contributions from AT&T), who encouraged President Obama to settle in favor of the deal. For the truly curious, only Arkansas, Georgia, and Kentucky overlap between the list of states that support the merger, and the states whom those 15 Democrats represent. After all this, AT&T has a only few more obstacles to face when the case goes to trial. Not an impossible task, according to Reuters: it just means AT&T needs to convince a few more people before a settlement can be reached.
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| RIM’s BBM Service Suffers Partial Outage In Canada, Latin America Posted: 16 Sep 2011 01:05 PM PDT  RIM, to put it mildly, has been having it rough these past few days. Among other things, they’ve failed to hit their quarterly revenue goal, sold far fewer PlayBooks than they had hoped, and potentially let their market share slip into the single digits. After all that, RIM didn’t need any more problems, but another one has popped up anyway: it seems that their BBM and email service is partially down in a handful of countries. A quick Twitter search shows that subscribers in Canada and Latin America seem to be the most stricken by the partial outages, with the Financial Post reporting that pockets of users on three of Canada’s carriers (Rogers, Bell, and WIND) have been affected. Meanwhile on the southern front, NTN24 states that the partial outage has affected people in Venezuela, Colombia, Panamá, Chile, México and Argentina. The outage may even be more widespread, as the Huffington Post reports that sporadic tweets from the UK and Egypt indicate similar service issues. Follow @BlackBerryHelp@BlackBerryHelp Research In Motion Some Canada & LatAm customers report BBM issues. Our support teams are investigating. We apologize for any inconvenience. ^HF RIM has acknowledged the outage on their official BlackBerryHelp account, but the feed has yet to offer any salient details. In fairness, this may not be an end-of-the-world scenario for BlackBerry users, but the timing for RIM is atrocious. While I’m sure they have teams fighting to find a fix, consumer confidence in the Waterloo-based company may dip even more as a result of today’s issues.
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| Wrap It Up: Photos From Our First TC Gadgets/Mobile Meet-Up Posted: 16 Sep 2011 12:52 PM PDT  It’s been a long while since we had a formal Gadgets/Mobile meet-up and I’m proud to say that this one, sponsored by Samsung, was a roaring success. We had people who drank far too much, people who ate far too many Cheez-Its (there were, sadly, no hors d’oeuvres so we made do with Hackathon grub), and people who won excellent prizes including Samsung Galaxy S II phones, Samsung tablets, and other goodies. We hope to have more of these things in the future where you guys can meet and greet TC G/M writers in your own home town and in your own special way. Thanks for making this one a roaring success, San Francisco, and we’ll see you soon. Here are a few highlights from the shots we took; we’ll update this post with Samsung’s own photos as soon as we hear back from them. The full-size pictures can be found in this set at the TechCrunch Flickr page.
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| The New Social Network: Who’s Nearby, Not Who You Know Posted: 16 Sep 2011 12:38 PM PDT  There’s a new concept for social networking services taking root, and it’s not about re-creating your offline social graph on the Web, like Facebook does today. It’s about discovering the people who are nearby you now – the ones you probably would like to meet. This type of discovery mechanism is already being made possible by a number of services, including the checkin apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, the automated discovery of nearby folks via Sonar and Banjo, the group chatting in Yobongo, and the micro-networks that emerge through LoKast. All of these companies are playing with the idea of location-based social networks, attempting to connect you to others around you through varying means. At this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, even more services emerged to compete in this space, too. The powerful capabilities of today’s mobile smartphones are allowing for a new kind of networking: social discovery services, not social networking services. Discovery services are focused primarily on highlighting the users within close proximity to you and connecting you to those who you might want to meet. Facebook, meanwhile, aims to connect you to people you already know. “Discovery” on Facebook is limited to searching for names or networks (e.g., schools, workplaces) where the introductions themselves previously took place. But there are ephemeral, ever-changing social networks that we participate in daily. These have been left largely untapped by Facebook: the people working out at the gym, shopping for groceries, playing basketball, taking their dog to the park, watching their children on the playground, and so on. They’re the networks you stumble into and out of every day, and they aren’t composed of your close friends, Facebook friends or otherwise. They’re just people who share your interests at that same moment in time. The guy ready for a pick-up game of b-ball. The coupon-clipper finding deals at the grocery store. A new puppy’s owners hoping for a doggie play date. A couple of standout apps from Disrupt hope to better highlight these types of networks by introducing you to the people you want to know. One, an app called Holler (iTunes), is based around interests and activities. You join a group (surfers, for example) and the app pushes notifications to you when others nearby are interested in the same thing. For now, the groups are pre-built by Holler itself, but it’s in the process of rolling out a system where users can build their own groups. However, there will be some level of filtering and control, so duplicate groups are not created. Holler is well-designed, with a clean and minimalist layout, which makes it easy to use from first launch. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem many other “social” apps do at first – not enough people are using it. To address the issue, Holler’s creators are thinking of exposing all the groups to the app’s users, not just those nearby, which would still allow for socializing around interests. While that may increase engagement, it takes away from the app’s core promise of proximity-based socializing – its mobile meetups on the fly. In a similar vein, another TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley company, Mingle, has built a mobile app that also aims to connect users based on interests. But in Mingle’s case, it’s about introducing yourself to others nearby, in the hopes that you two share an interest, instead of connecting around a commonly held interest like “shopping” or “exercise,” for example. Mingle users fill out an introduction card and post it to their current location. Others “mingling” at that location can see one another, and take the conversation offline, if desired. It’s what Foursquare could do, if it wasn’t so stuck on listing the “others here” with only an avatar and a first name, last initial (arguably useless information, unless those people are already real-life friends). A third app from the Startup Alley is a little more out there, but interesting. Called igobubble, this mobile app lets you leave virtual “bubbles” containing text, photos, videos, music and more at a given location. Others can come along later and find your bubble and interact with it, or even change it. You’ll see who has “touched” your bubble and can then chat with them in real-time. There’s more too it than that, but those are the basics. igobubble feels more art project than the next big hit in mobile socializing, but at least they’re thinking out of the box. Instead of just re-creating the structure of a traditional social networking site (with profiles, listed interests, avatars), it’s thinking that tying content to a location is the first step in enabling mobile social discovery. That’s certainly a different take. It’s not about who you are, it’s about what you did at that location. Other intriguing ideas in the location-based social space included Disrupt Startup Alley participant Evertale, makers of a mobile app that will map photos to locations for the purpose of instant scrapbooking and remembering old friends, and Audience Choice winner CardFlick, a contact-sharing app for nearby users. But have any of the new apps (or old ones, for that matter), really hit the nail on the head when it comes to social discovery? Banjo and Sonar are great, but feel more like tools than networks of their own. Yobongo’s chat seems a bit lacking without context. Holler’s mobile meetups can’t work if it can’t gather enough participants. Mingle feels more business-networking driven than social. igobubble is an interesting idea, but doesn’t have the execution down. It seems like each service could be a part of a bigger whole – a new proximity-based social network that puts location first, people and content second. A new network no one has yet been ambitious enough to attempt to design, so focused on a single niche or feature instead. Foursquare, at least, has the critical mass to get there, but is stagnating with its continued emphasis on the manual check-in. The company should be increasing automation for regular check-ins, building out user profiles and letting users connect via common interests surfaced by their regular activities. It should suggest new friends based on behaviors combined with “friend-of-a-friend connections.” At the very least, when a big group of friends check-in together, it should alert the users in the group who aren’t connected to each other of the missed opportunity. It should even consider letting users pick and choose add-on services to run within the app. Yobongo’s chat, CardFlick or Mingle’s introductions, and igobubble’s content sharing could all be Foursquare features one day, and not standalone applications, if Foursquare had a wider vision for its future. In the meantime, it’s fun to experiment with the latest and greatest in proximity-based social networking, thanks to the new TechCrunch Disrupt Alley startups mentioned here and others. Whether any of them will become breakout hits, however, will have to be left for the market to decide. Credit: Top image via Mingle Company: Mingle Website: minglesocialapp.com Mingle is a mobile product that surfaces human relevance within a proximity. Leveraging location, Mingle allows users to make introductions anywhere they go with hopes that it allows users to interact. Mingle goes beyond sharing interests, usernames or even checking in and provides a relevance graph to provide context in which users use to help them find interesting people. Company: CardFlick Website: cardflick.co CardFlick helps you create and share online business cards using your iPhone in one flick. 1 Click login with services like Facebook and then your card is prefilled with your contact using one of our beautiful themes Share your card with multiple people at a time just by flicking your phone or even email. New themes can be purchased in app. Customers are anyone who has a business to promote and wants to network without the hassle. Evertale is the self-writing scrapbook of your life. Relive your favorite memories in their completeness. Evertale automatically generates a scrapbook of the experiences you never want to forget, allowing you to turn back time and do it all over again. Banjo is a social discovery service that helps people explore social updates across multiple social networks. Connecting real people in real time, Banjo harnesses publicly-available information and delivers it to mobile phones in one integrated view. Foursquare is a geographical location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Users share their location with friends by “checking in” via a smartphone app or by text message. Points are awarded for checking in at various venues. Users can connect their Foursquare accounts to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, which can update when a check in is registered. By checking in a certain number of times, or in different locations, users can collect virtual badges. In addition, users... Yobongo is a mobile communication startup currently in private beta testing. They keys to the service are location, realtime, and identity. Igobubble is a mobile app that integrates location-aware social networking with continuously evolving digital content. Users use their smartphone’s to leave digital content like photos, videos, messages and more inside bubbles at any location. After users leave, their bubbles stay behind for others to discover. These bubbles are invisible to the naked eye but they can be found and viewed using the igobubble app. In addition, these bubbles evolve in real time and can be modified, moved and cloned. Bubbles... Sonar is a a mobile application that shows you how you are connected to the other people in the room. Sonar combines publicly available profile and location information to help you discover business contacts, colleagues, old friends and new ones at conferences, cafes, and bars. Sonar enables you take your online identity offline, to help you meet real people, in the real world.
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| Square-Enix Working On Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy For Android Posted: 16 Sep 2011 10:18 AM PDT  While they’ve pumped out over 30 iOS apps to date, Square-Enix is now looking to revive a few of their classic titles on an Android phone (hopefully) near you. While Nintendo has officially disavowed the notion of making smartphone games, their long-time software associate seems to have no compunction in churning them out. According to Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, Square-Enix is hard at work preparing a selection of RPGs for a 2012 launch in the Android Market. Among them is Chrono Trigger (my personal favorite), the 1995 time-bending fan-favorite that first debuted on the SNES. Also on the list is Dragon Quest: Monsters, a popular Enix creation that pretty much hinges on making those iconic blue blobs fight each other, and Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, the SNES Final Fantasy game that no one really played. Square-Enix will release the games through their own Square-Enix Gaming Portal, but hopefully they see a stateside (re?)release soon. These games will be a welcome addition to Square-Enix’s current Android line-up, which currently consists of two apps. I think Square-Enix, unlike Nintendo, has the right idea here: while it seems like Nintendo President Iwata thinks that smartphone gaming will sully Nintendo’s history, Square-Enix is using different platforms to reignite existing fanbases and test out some interesting new IPs. Square-Enix jumped headfirst into alternative gaming platforms years ago, with games like Song Summoner making an appearance on non-touch iPods of all places. It was a novel idea, and the end result was a refreshing gimmick on top of a classic Square-esque turn-based strategy game. Nintendo needs to realize that smartphone platforms aren’t where classic franchises go to die. It can be a place where new games and IPs can test the waters, and old ones can find a new audience. [via Recombu]
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| HTC Vigor Renamed Incredible HD, Poised for October Release? Posted: 16 Sep 2011 09:22 AM PDT  When the first shots of the HTC Vigor started making the rounds, I offhandedly mentioned that the funky backplate and red trim made it look like a new entry in Verizon’s Incredible series. As it turns out, that hunch may have just been confirmed, as a recently leaked release indicates that a very similar device called the Incredible HD is slated for an October launch. According to the details in the release, the Incredible HD is a new Verizon LTE device with a 4.3-inch screen, a 1.5 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and support for Beats audio. Coincidentally, these specs match up nearly exactly to those leaked alongside the original Vigor pictures. The release goes on to paint a very impressive portrait of the Vigor/Incredible HD: like the Runnymede, it will reportedly ship with a pair of Beats headphones, and the device will come with a whopping 48 GB of storage out of the box (16 onboard, 32 in a pre-installed microSD card). As compelling as the image makes the Incredible HD out to be, though, some of the details just don’t add up. The release lists the Incredible HD as having a WVGA display, which comes out to a resolution of only 800×480 — hardly what one would call HD quality. What’s worse is the fact that the spec listing contradicts itself: it mentions that the Incredible HD sports an actual “HD resolution of 1280×720″ right after it lauds the phone’s WVGA screen. While it could be a simple typo (1280×720 is occasionally referred to as WXGA, though not usually in the context of a phone), it could also be the work of a rookie forger mixing up their jargon. The Incredible HD, if real, looks to pack a real wallop when it supposedly ships on October 13. While it would certainly spice up the holiday season’s smartphone wars, the whole package almost looks to be too good to be true.
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| Tethras Helps Developers Translate And Localize Their Mobile Apps Posted: 16 Sep 2011 08:59 AM PDT  Tethras is launching its mobile app localization platform in the U.S. The company, which is based in Ireland, helps developers translate their iOS and Android apps into various languages. The company’s localization as a Service platform connects developers to a multi-region community of language translators. Tethras can help translate apps into over forty languages. And Tethras allows translators and developers to preview what a translation will look like within the app itself. Because Tethras is based in the cloud, updating and managing translations is an easy process and the startup’s offering can integrate with the app development process. You simple upload your app to Tethras’ platform, and you’ll get quotes on how much it will cost to develop the localized version. After upload, the number of words in the app are counted, and quotes are generated for forty-plus languages. Pricing ranges from $0.10 to $0.28 per word. As mobile app usage explodes internationally, especially in countries like China and South Korea, it makes sense for app developers to translate and localize their apps for these regions. Tethras should be able to capitalize on the mobile app explosion.
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| Sprint’s Epic Touch 4G Officially Goes On Sale Posted: 16 Sep 2011 07:50 AM PDT  After months of teasing, the long wait is finally over: Sprint’s version of the Samsung Galaxy S II has launched today, and is available for just shy of $200 with a new contract on Sprint.com. Though it happens to sport an unfortunately cumbersome name, the Samsung Galaxy S II, Epic 4G Touch stands firmly in the upper echelons of Sprint’s collection. It’s surrounded by devices like the Motorola Photon 4G and the Evo 3D, but hopefully Samsung’s handset will go without the sort of launch day issues that its high-end compatriots had. Some early Photon users, for example, faced a nasty bug in which the device muted itself every time a phone call was placed or received. Likewise, people who bought the Evo 3D around launch reported some sporadic overheating issues. While getting new hardware out the door is quite the operation, hopefully the long wait in getting the Galaxy S II means that all the bugs have been ironed out. Still, after having played with the device at Samsung’s official unveiling, the phone seemed to be in solid shape. While we’re waiting to get our hands on one for some more in-depth fiddling, the Epic Touch 4G seems as though it could be a dream come true for ardent WiMax lovers.
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| Android Voice Actions Now Play Well With Accents, EU Languages Posted: 16 Sep 2011 06:11 AM PDT  Stateside Android fans have had over a year to put Google’s nifty Voice Actions for Android through its paces, and while it’s always technically been available to foreign users, it only ever officially supported American English. Thankfully for our friends in the EU, Google has just announced an update to their Voice Search application that adds support for a bevy of additional languages. Though the update doesn’t seem to have gone live in the Market at time of writing, the update now lets users bark commands at their phones in British English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The full list of voice actions is reproduced below, but the mechanics of the app remain the same: hold down the device’s search button, or tap the microphone icon in the Google Search bar widget. Be warned though: don’t expect to join in the fun unless your device runs Android 2.2 or later.
Voice Actions was always uncannily good at interpreting input and transcribing messages, but now that it’s reached the world stage, I wonder how well it’ll do at working with dialectical nuances. It supports British English, for example, which encompasses a few neat dialects and accents — we’ll have to see if a Welsh accent or the warm Scottish brogue will throw Voice Actions for a loop. On the other hand, the new Voice Actions could be a novel way to help practice a foreign language: if your Spanish, Italian, or French pronunciation is good enough, Voice Actions should be able to accept your input, and you can give yourself a pat on the back.
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