MobileCrunch |  |
- Siri Ported To iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G
- Classy: Google Is Running Zagat Ads Against Mobile Searches For “Yelp”
- It’s Time For Google To Let Google Voice Live Up To Its Promise
- Nokia Vs. The Industry: A Look At The Global Battle Over Mobile Advertising [Infographic]
| Siri Ported To iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G Posted: 29 Oct 2011 11:06 PM PDT In a moment as historic as Alexander Bell’s call to his assistant, an iPhone hacker wrote on Twitter that he had successfully ported Siri to the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. He wrote “Actually, it just worked,” informing the world that he had completely ported Siri to the iPhone 4 and that more versions are on the way. The hack requires a jailbroken device. By copying the app onto the device, the iPhone 4 can call up Siri and, more important, connect to the Siri servers. You can follow these instructions to install the app yourself and it seems to currently also work with the iPod Touch 4G although those instructions are forthcoming. Mark Gurman at 9to5mac interviewed Steven Troughton-Smith, another iPod Touch/iPhone 4 hacker, answering a few questions about the feat:
We’ll give it a try this weekend and report back.
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| Classy: Google Is Running Zagat Ads Against Mobile Searches For “Yelp” Posted: 29 Oct 2011 05:52 PM PDT  If you search for “Yelp” on Google from your mobile phone the top paid result, even above the organic result to Yelp.com, takes you to Zagat. I am only seeing this on mobile searches. While it is a common practice for companies to advertise against their competitors’ names in search advertising, in this case it is Google itself which is bidding for that search term and taking the top spot. A classy move. Google bought Zagat last September to shore up its local reviews for Google Places, which is its answer to Yelp. Google Places and Yelp have a contentious history, with Google borrowing liberally from yelp to help build up its local directory. Now with Zagat, Google finally has a large corpus if its own review, in addition to the ones people are slowly adding to Google Places. By redirecting some of the people who are looking for Yelp to Zagat, Google is keeping up its pattern of punching Yelp in the face every chance it gets. Remember, at one point Google almost bought Yelp back in 2009. But that didn’t work out, and the gloves have been off ever since. (Sound familiar, Groupon?) Google is really hitting Yelp where it hurts. During an antitrust hearing last September, Yelp revealed that 75 percent of its traffic comes from Google in one way or another. A big chunk of that is from organic search. If Yelp is not the top spot when someone searches for “Yelp” that could have some impact on Yelp’s traffic. Yelp might have to respond by bidding on its own name on AdWords. One way or another, Google’s aggressiveness in pushing Zagat is going to cost Yelp. Another company founded in 2004 by two former PayPal employees. Yelp is a local reviews website covering the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands; Yelp drew an audience of more than 50 million unique visitors in March 2011. Yelpers have written more than 18 million local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists. ZAGAT.com features over 30,000 of the best places to eat, drink, and stay worldwide. The site is published by and based on the renowned 30 years, Zagat Survey (a survey-based restaurant guide). ZAGAT.com provides access to ratings and reviews for restaurants, nightspots, hotels and attractions in hundreds of cities worldwide. It features menus, photos, virtual tours, updates on the latest openings and closings with ZAGAT BUZZ and connect with other ZAGAT.com members in our bustling Discussion Boards. Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....
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| It’s Time For Google To Let Google Voice Live Up To Its Promise Posted: 29 Oct 2011 04:07 PM PDT  Last week TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote a post highlighting the fact that iPhone users can get a surprisingly good experience using Google Voice if they’re willing to switch to Sprint. Google Voice on the iPhone typically has some hurdles, mostly because Apple won’t let the native Google Voice app ‘take over’ the dialer the way it can on Android (not to mention the fact that the iOS GV app is notoriously buggy). But Sprint has done some unique, deep integration at the carrier level that minimizes these issues. His post got me thinking about my experience with Google Voice since I began using it exclusively in November 2009. My conclusion: there are a lot of areas for improvement. The latency and occasional cutouts range from mildly annoying to infuriating. Text messages sometimes seem to arrive much later than they should. And MMS simply isn’t offered for most people (Sprint just launched support, but none of the other carriers do). But a few hours later, as I dealt with my carrier T-Mobile dropping two calls in succession, I realized there’s one simple feature that Google Voice could easily offer that would do a lot to make up for all of its quirks: VoIP support. Between my home network, work, and coffee shops, my phone is connected to Wifi for the majority of each day. Wifi, as it happens, is really good at transmitting VoIP calls. Oh, and Android has supported native VoIP calling since Gingerbread was released last winter. So why am I still at the mercy of my carrier’s cell towers again? It isn’t a matter of getting the feature working with Google Voice. Google Voice’s Gmail integration, which lets you make and receive calls from your computer, is done over VoIP, so the infrastructure is obviously there. In fact, Google actually had a functional Google Voice VoIP app for Android that was being tested internally by Google employees a year ago. But for some reason it never saw the light of day. That reason is pretty easy to guess: the carriers would throw a fit. Ever since Android started to take off with the Droid launch, Google has been in a balancing act between appeasing the carriers and giving users what they actually want. Case in point: Android devices support native hotspot functionality, but the carriers can disable it (unless you pay them more money). Or, a more recent example: up until now it’s been impossible to delete carriers’ pre-installed apps (also known as crapware) from your phone, which is utterly ridiculous. Beginning with Android 4.0, you’ll be able to disable them. Not delete them, mind you — they’ll still be taking up space on your phone — but the phone won’t ever let them launch. Hooray…? Update: A commenter points out that these apps are baked into the firmware (i.e. Google can’t delete them entirely, though the prevalence of these apps seems like a big compromise in the first place). Anyway, the point is that Google is treading lightly when it comes to improving Android in ways that could impact their relationship with the carriers. Google cares a lot more about getting as many Android devices as possible into users’ hands over the next few years than it does about giving them WiFi hotspots. And to boost that market share, they need the carriers on board. Which brings us back to Google Voice. If Google were to enable Google Voice calling over 3G/4G connections, users would have very little reason to purchase their ‘voice minutes’ any more. This would obviously agitate the carriers, and isn’t going to happen any time soon. But Google could make another feature compromise: let us make and receive calls over our Wifi networks with Google Voice, and still use our ‘minutes’ whenever we’re on the go. Some people may downgrade the number of minutes they buy, but they’ll still need a voice package. And the carriers will wind up with fewer infuriated customers, who’ll actually be able to make phone calls from their offices and homes without having their signal drop. Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information.... Google Voice is a free Internet service that uses VoIP technology to link phone numbers together. GrandCentral was relaunched as Google Voice on March 11, 2009 with new features, including voicemail transcriptions and SMS managing. Users of Google Voice are able to select a single U.S. phone number, from various area codes. When a Google Number is called, any or all of the user’s phones may be set to ring. Which phone(s) ring can be set based on...
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| Nokia Vs. The Industry: A Look At The Global Battle Over Mobile Advertising [Infographic] Posted: 29 Oct 2011 08:00 AM PDT  Mobile advertising as you’ve likely heard, is hott right now. (With two “t’s”, yes.) According to comScore, mobile advertising spend is projected to hit $2.5 billion by 2014, with $2.7 billion projected in mobile ad revenues for this year and $6.6 billion by 2016. What’s more, in August, 84.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, and that number continues to grow. In the U.S., the bigs in mobile OSes, Android, iOS, RIM, Symbian, and Windows, are duking it out for market share, with Android presently leading the pack. You can check out our post (and infographic) on the battle between iOS and Android for mobile advertising dominance here. In Europe, the numbers for smartphone usage are very similar to the U.S.: As of July 2011, comScore reports, 88.4 million mobile subscribers (in the EU5) were using smartphones. Of the top smartphone platforms in Europe, Symbian led the way with 37.8 percent market share, with Android grabbing the second spot at 22.3 percent over iOS at 20.3 percent. But what about the other players? Until Apple overtook it back in June of this year, Nokia was the largest manufacturer of smartphone devices by volume in the world. Earlier this year, Nokia loudly announced plans to replace Symbian and MeeGo with Windows Phone on most of its high end devices. The Finnish manufacturer has always had a wide array of products, but it’s struggled to find a foothold in the U.S. And, what’s more, it’s taken its fair share of heat in the press over the last 6 months. The company’s new Windows phones won’t be hitting U.S. stores for at least a few more months, but as Chris pointed out earlier today, “these Windows Phones will be the first high-profile Nokia launches in years”, and no one is more aware of this than Nokia, which is struggling to maintain its relevance. As U.S. President of Nokia Operations Chris Weber said earlier this year about the company’s renewed focus on the U.S. market: “The reality is if we are not successful with Windows Phone, it doesn't matter what we do elsewhere.” But, there is some hope. As Johnny Biggs wrote a few days ago, with Windows Phone, Nokia just may be poised to make a big comeback. Taking Apple’s table scraps and pushing RIM down may prove to be a good strategy for Nokia going forward, especially (as John points out) two familiar brands — Microsoft and Nokia — are better than one — RIM. Nokia has been successful in Europe because its phones, stores, and service were local, useable, and cheap. If they can capitalize on brand recognition and first-time smartphone buyers, it just may work. What’s more, thanks to a nifty infographic from inneractive, the mobile ad mediation platform, we have evidence of more good news for Nokia, and it comes in the form of mobile advertising. As you’ll see below, Nokia’s absolute ad requests (which are what makes mobile advertising tick) continue to grow month-to-month, and when it comes to click-through-rates (CTR), Nokia has been consistently outperforming the rest of the industry (abroad), which includes the likes Android, iOS, and RIM. As the infographic astutely reveals, with high ad requests and CTRs, this makes for a lot of happy Nokia developers and advertisers. Whether this trend can continue has Nokia moves its Windows Phone-powered devices into the U.S. remains to be seen, but, at the very least, it’s certainly a silver lining. Without further ado, a look at global Nokia ad requests, CTR, distribution, and top countries: (We’ll be updating with comparable fill rates and eCPM on Android and iOS for top European companies soon.) Nokia is a Finnish multinational communications corporation. It is primarily engaged in the manufacturing of mobile devices and in converging Internet and communications industries. They make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more. Nokia is the owner of Symbian operation system and partially owns MeeGo operating system.
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