Category: Mobile

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) unveiled a completely new smartphone operating system last month that in no way resembles its past corporate image. The new Windows Phone 7 fits somewhere between Bing’s visually appealing user interface and the consumer friendliness of a Zune music player.

But to make the necessary leap required to compete with Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft had to start from scratch. In a New York Times story detailing Microsoft’s overhaul of its mobile division, Terry Myerson, the VP in charge of Windows Phone engineering said: “To be entirely candid, the iPhone opened our eyes as to some things that needed to be done that were not in our plan…Some execution had really gone astray.

While Microsoft still has a long way from regaining lost market share in the mobile space, it’s definitely showing a commitment to starting over with a clean slate.

Microsoft separately confirmed today that any previous phone running its older Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system will not be upgradable to Windows Phone 7. That includes the well-received HTC HD2, which has nearly all of the required specs for the new OS. However, it has five buttons—and all Windows Phone 7 devices going forward will be limited to three, reports APCmag.com. Natasha Kwan, Microsoft’s Mobile GM in the Asia-Pacific region told APC that “Because we have very specific requirements for Windows Phone 7 Series the current phones we have right now will not be upgradable.”

The new Windows Phone 7 operating system will likely be more consistent because Microsoft demands it of its hardware manufacturing partners. Despite current Windows Phone owners likely being disappointed by this news, it shows just how serious Microsoft is about remaking the division. In the NYTimes story, other moves were detailed, including bringing some of Microsoft’s top talents from around the company to the mobile division. In addition to shifting internal resources, it also hired people from companies like Nike and Procter & Gamble who could bring different perspectives. One of the hires included Myerson who came from the Exchange group. Another was Joe Belfiore, who worked on projects such as Windows XP, Media Center and Zune.

The initial perception of Microsoft’s Windows 7 after Steve Ballmer announced the high-level concepts in February at Mobile World Congress was that it was going to be an immediate hit. Sites like Gizmodo and Engadget practically salivated. Engadget’s first impression consisted of this conclusion: “This really is a completely new OS—and not just Microsoft’s new OS, it’s a new smartphone OS, like webOS new, like iPhone OS new.” Now Microsoft will just have to deliver on these promises. Next up, it will detail more of its vision at Mix, a three-day developer conference in Las Vegas from March 15 to 17. Stay tuned for all the details.

Related

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The data is starting to roll in for the full Vancouver Olympics. NBC hasn’t been to provide some of the stats we’ve asked for—the number of video streams served the night the first USA-CAN hockey match aired on MSNBC against ice dancing, among them. But the numbers we do have tell any number of stories, as you can see in the accompanying chart. For instance, NBC’s press release compares Vancouver’s mobile stats to those from Beijing in 2008 and the online stats to those from the last Winter Olympics, Torino 2006. Granted, the Torino mobile comps would be close to meaningless given the tremendous shifts in the landscape while the Beijing comparison shows a significant sequential change.

If you compare the online stats, however, the trajectory turns down. The number of video hours served for Vancouver is just about a third of the 9.9 million hours delivered for Beijing—and the number of streams is off by 30 million. Compare it to Torino and Vancouver shows massive gains: 45 million video streams served compared to 8.4 million, 46 million uniques over 13.3 million. It’s not a sleight of hand; the Summer Games traditionally draw a bigger crowd across media and online is no exception.

Plus, NBC only streamed two sports live from Vancouver (curling and hockey) for roughly 400 hours, compared with 2,200 hours of live events from Beijing. Even adding in the 1,100 additional hours of highlights and full-event replay/VOD doesn’t match the amount of video available two years ago. As was the case for 2008, access to live coverage and VOD was limited to pay TV subscribers whose providers made a deal with NBC Sports; this time, NBC said its potential reach covered 95 percent of pay TV households.

NBC could have throttled the numbers up any time it chose by lowering the wall. When access was opened for the USA-SUI match last Wednesday, NBCOlympics.com delivered more than a half-million streams.

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Apple has enlisted the patent court and the U.S. International Trade Commission in an effort to kneecap Google. The company this morning filed a lawsuit against HTC — which makes Google’s Nexus One, among other Android handsets — claiming the Taiwanese manufacturer has infringed on 20 of its patents “related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.” But the move may have more to do with Android’s rapid growth than actual patent sins.

Apple is no stranger to the patent court, of course. The company became wrapped up in a nasty tangle with Nokia after the Finnish manufacturer sued Apple late last year in an apparent effort to collect royalties from every iPhone sold. But today’s filing appears to be an attempt to slow Android, which has gained remarkable momentum in recent months. HTC offers the widest array of Android handsets of any manufacturer, as Kevin noted at jkOnTheRun this morning, and its Nexus One is the latest handset to be dubbed a potential “iPhone killer.” Throwing a legal hurdle at Android’s most prolific manufacturer appears to be an effort to slow Google’s roll in mobile.

And Apple’s decision to file in both the patent courts and with the ITC ensures that the lawsuit could result in an injunction barring HTC from importing its phones to the U.S. The ITC can halt imports of an infringing device into the U.S. if patents have indeed been infringed, and it doesn’t have to abide by later court rulings either. That’s a pretty big stick to swing at HTC and Google.

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Image courtesy Flickr user attack the darkness.

Twitter may be working on the imminent launch of its own advertising platform, but that hasn’t stopped others from rushing to profit from the social network. A Twitter ad service called 140proof announced today that its ads will now be integrated into the iPhone and Android mobile apps from HootSuite, a Twitter tool that many businesses use to manage their social media marketing campaigns. Unlike some other advertising options for Twitter, which have seen celebrities paid to endorse products in their posts, 140proof ads are messages posted to a user’s stream by the company in service of a specific targeted ad campaign.

140proof, which is based in San Francisco and backed by a $2 million investment raised last summer from Blue Run Ventures and Founders Fund, said that its algorithm aims ads at users based on their profiles and other public data. Other Twitter advertising services include Ad.ly, which has gotten some press attention for paying celebrities such as Kim Kardashian thousands of dollars to endorse products to their followers, as well as Magpie, Assetize and IZEA.

The question all of these services will inevitably confront — including Twitter itself, once it launches its own platform — is how users will react to a wave of advertising in what was once an ad-free social network (in the case of 140proof, of course, you can simply not use HootSuite’s mobile apps and you won’t see them). Many of these services are only just ramping up in what will undoubtedly become a much bigger campaign to bring ads to the Twittersphere. So what will you do when ads start appearing in your Twitter stream?

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To all those companies and developers focused exclusively on iPhone apps: Watch your back. The Android platform is catching up, and none too slowly.

As Android’s growth continues to explode since the release of the Droid, only the most foolish of app shops are not planning to expand beyond Apple’s walled garden. One developer, in fact, wrote that his app, which was showing modest, double-digit daily sales late last year, now reports that his app is making $13,000 a month.

When that kind of opportunity exists for a single app, why would developers put all their eggs in one basket, a.k.a. the “Jesus phone”?

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A few weeks ago, we told you, “As of December 2009[…] 4 percent of all smartphone owners now use a phone running some version of the Android OS. That’s an increase of 200 percent since the previous survey released in September.

“Respondents were also asked about their plans to purchase a smartphone in the future. Among those who planned to purchase within the next 90 days, 21 percent said they would now choose Android.”

It’s this growth that helped fuel the success of Eddie Kim’s app, Car Locator.

In a blog post today, the developer revealed that his Android app “started as a little side-project while I was vacationing with my family, turned into a few extra bucks for lunch money every day[…] has continued its upward trend and is now beyond my wildest fantasy of what could have been possible. “

Car Locator is a pretty simple application: Users save their location when they park their cars, and the app navigates them back to their cars later. The app was available in free and paid versions with varying feature sets. The paid version originally sold for $1.99, and the price was later increased to $3.99. Kim has done no marketing for the app, but it did win third place in Google’s Android Developer Challenge 2.

When Motorola’s Droid was released, Kim saw his first major spike in sales:

“In the first 2 months, the app saw sales of about $5-6/day. Nothing too fancy,” he wrote. “But starting November 7, there’s been a significant uptick in sales, peaking on November 9, where the app saw $44 in sales. Sales have since settled to about $20/day, but it’s probably too early to tell if this will hold.”

Little did Kim realize that his sales had just begun. To date, the free app has been downloaded 70,000 times, with paid app sales at about 10 percent of that figure.

“The application was netting an average of about $80-$100/day, until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine’s Day. Too bad I didn’t have a Valentine’s date this year – we would’ve gone somewhere real special!” (Catch that, ladies?)

Kim also stands by the Android platform, saying, “Some may be quick to point out that a featured Android application is only able to net $400/day, while top iPhone apps make thousands[…] However, I still think that Android is only a fraction of what it will eventually become. Each release of a new Android handset gets me excited, as it means a wider reach for the Marketplace.”

Folks, if you’ve been longing for a much-hyped app to make its way to the Android Market, forward this article to the developers and marketers in charge. There’s money to be made there, and the userbase is only getting bigger.

Discuss

The mobile OS running on this old Toshiba TG01 looks like Windows Phone 7 and it mostly acts like Windows Phone 7. But in reality it’s a clever user interface skin covering up Windows Mobile 6.5.

Put together by a fellow named LeSScro, this interface tweak can make older WinMo phones pretend that they can handle Windows Phone 7 and will hopefully be made available soon. [Pocket Now via Mobile Crunch]

The European Commission has approved the much-needed 50/50 JV merger of France Telecom’s Orange UK and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile UK, subject to them giving away a small chunk of radio spectrum – creating the UK’s largest mobile network, with 30 million customers, or 37 percent of the market.

The combined operator, which may get a new name after 18 months, will instantly have significant clout in mobile telephony – but what’s it mean for the fast-growing mobile internet market..?

—O2 has a data network rival: Right now, O2 users are responsible for more UK mobile internet traffic than any other network (after all, it’s the largest operator and has enjoyed iPhone for some time). T-Mobile is really languishing on internet users despite a high-profile campaign. But pooling T-Mobile and Orange will mean the combined operator contributes nearly as much UK mobile data as their rival.

—T-Orange takes the lion’s share of web visits. When you consider unique users to mobile internet portals, here’s where Orange/T-Mobile will pip ahead, on GSMA data…

Orange already gets roughly the same amount of traffic going through its mobile web sites as Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) and O2; when this 19 percent is combined with T-Mobile’s six percent, this will put it ahead of the rest of the pack. comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) says the combined presence will make it the third-largest mobile web property owner behind Facebook and Google (NSDQ: GOOG). Facebook in December 2009 had nearly five million unique visitors, while Google (and related sites like YouTube) had 4.6 million.

—T-Mobile could finally get aboard the internet. T-Mobile has built out less of a mobile internet portal presence over the years than its competitors. This is in contrast to Orange, which owns mobile ad agency Unanimis and has strong ambitions, like other mobile operators, in monetising its traffic in the face of commoditized voice and data pricing.
—Integrate or separate?. But this combo almost sounds like trying to combine Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and Google, with Orange playing the part of Yahoo and T-Mobile playing Google: “T-Mobile has made their portal lightweight. They have made it very easy for people to leave,” a mobile analyst tells me. “Orange has presented itself as much more of a media company. They’re much more about keeping an their audience on their sites and monetising that.”

Cable operators are looking for ways to enter the wireless business as consumers disconnect their landline phones in favor of cell phones, and seek ways to connect their laptops while on the go.

Cox Communications is building its own cellular network from the ground up; and Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and Bright House have invested in Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR) to gain access to the company’s high-speed broadband network. And now, Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) is cooking up something entirely different: it is testing a new mobile phone that can work with Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

In the company’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call, Cablevision’s COO Tom Rutledge answered questions about how it intends to roll out wireless services. He said the cable operator, which serves a small footprint in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, is trialing phones that switch between WiFi and cellular networks. “The test is so far proving to be good and consistent with our view of what is possible and gives us some hope that we will be able to launch additional products using the Wi-Fi network that will look like what some people think of as cellular telephone.”

The technology sounds an awful lot like UMA, which is used by T-Mobile USA, and allows people to roam between WiFi and the cellular network without even knowing it. UMA allows carriers to offload traffic from their more capital-intensive cellular networks to local area networks that are often paid for by the consumer in their own home.

For Cablevision, it’s a pretty good fit since it has invested heavily in building out a WiFi network for its customers in the areas it covers. To continue offering cellular coverage outside of that WiFi area, it would have to either lease capacity from a wireless operator, or build its own cellular network. According to an AP story, Rutledge said: “We haven’t made those decisions (about whether to build a cell network or lease capacity), but the latter outcome would be a less capital-intensive, higher-return business.”

Related

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Thumbplay has hired an exec away from Apple’s iPhone ranks to bulk up its team as it attempts to transform the ringtone company to a full-track music download service for the phone and PC.

Pablo Calamera, who oversaw the launch of Apple’s MobileMe cloud services, will serve as the company’s CTO starting March 8. The Thumbplay subscription music service, which claims to have more than 8 million tracks licensed from the four major record labels and thousands of independents, will be generally available in beta starting Thursday. Initially, it will be available on the Blackberry, but will eventually launch on Android and iPhone. Release.

Most recently, Calamera served as Director of Apple’s MobileMe, which enabled iPhone and Mac users to sync contacts and other data to the cloud, so that it could be accessible on the computer or phone. While MobileMe supports “millions of worldwide active users on a daily basis,” the launch was considered rushed and full of bugs. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) ultimately gave customers a 60-day extension.

Prior to Apple, Calamera was the Senior Director of Service Engineering and Support at Danger for five years, where he lead the service engineering team for the Sidekick. He also spent time at NotifyMe Networks, AT&T (NYSE: T) Labs and WebTV Networks. In a release, Calamera said: “Thumbplay has an incredible talent pool, and they have done a remarkable job in building robust, feature-rich services that deliver beautifully across multiple platforms. This is a very difficult thing to do, and I have been consistently impressed with the energy, smarts and creativity on display.”

The addition of a CTO comes as the company’s executive team has undergone a number of changes over the past year. Its Founder and CEO Are Traasdahl recently stepped down to serve as chairman, and co-founder and CMO Evan Schwartz was promoted to CEO. Thumbplay’s previous CTO left a year ago in March.

Thumbplay may need all the help it can get. While its history of marketing and selling ringtone subscriptions will likely help, consumers have yet to adopt full-track subscriptions on a large scale. In this model, consumers are allowed to download all the music they want, but as soon as they stop paying for the service, all their rights to the downloads disappear—in other words, they rent the music and don’t own it. Thumbplay charges $10 a month for access to the service, and says it charges another $0.69 to $1.29 per track if a user wants to own it.

Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) has updated its mobile application for the iPhone and iPod Touch to enable customers to update their DVR settings remotely, including the ability to search and schedule new recordings, cancel recordings and sort TV listings by category.

The free application, which launched last summer, extended most Comcast services, such as access to email, voicemail, address book, TV listings, to the phone. With the addition of remote DVR functionality, the application does a good job of replicating most of Comcast’s services—that is, except for watching TV. In the coming months, Comcast says it will launch an app for Research In Motion’s Blackberry devices.

The update will be available in iTunes as of today, however, not all Comcast customers will have immediate access to the new features. Rather it will become available as Comcast rolls out its new Program Guide, which is now available to roughly 3.1 million homes.

In a blog post today, Cathy Avgiris, Comcast’s SVP and General Manager of communications and data services, said the app was downloaded more than 100,000 downloads in less than a week after launching last year, but one of the most requested features was being able to program the DVR from a phone. Avgiris wrote: “Comcast Mobile applications are part of our vision to extend the accessibility of our video, voice and data products by making them available anywhere and on any device.”

Other features include: push alerts that indicate when new Comcast emails and voicemails have arrived; the ability to forward pictures and voice mails as an attachment; mark unwanted emails as spam; and access external (POP/IMAP) email accounts.

Rosum, a company that offers a way to use broadcast TV signals to derive location, today said its technology will be used (PDF) in a new chip from mobile TV chip maker Siano. The Alloy chip is aimed at providing location and timing information for femtocells, people and inventory tracking, and local ads via mobile TV. I think it’s an idea that’s doomed to fail because the overall market is too small.

Rosum has been selling the idea of using broadcast TV to determine location for a while. But we already have two methods of measuring location — GPS, which uses a satellite signal and a database, and Wi-Fi triangulation as used by Skyhook. Do we really need a third?

Wi-Fi location information is faster and works better in urban areas where GPS signals have a hard time penetrating. GPS works where there are no Wi-Fi networks, such as in rural areas or along highways. So what does Rosum’s broadcast TV solution have to offer? Rosum says it’s for areas where Wi-Fi networks aren’t able to penetrate, such as deep inside buildings, or where there are a lot of networks that may confuse location, such as in highly urban areas. However, Wi-Fi still seems to work well even in those situations.

There’s also the issue of putting a separate broadcast TV chip inside a device. Wi-Fi chips are already embedded in many handsets and devices, and provide a primary function outside of delivering location. GPS chips are also becoming more common for mobile devices that don’t have Wi-Fi, or that offer navigation. However for many devices, using Wi-Fi alone will suffice.

But Rosum’s primary function is location, and relies on grabbing broadcast TV signals.
So to take advantage of the Rosum solution, a device would have to need a broadcast television signal and not need Wi-Fi or GPS. How often does this happen? I can’t think of a reason to add a broadcast TV signal-detecting chip to a femotcell, but I can see a reason to add Wi-Fi. I can see Rosum winning customers among device-makers wanting to add location to the mobile televisions that will use the Open Mobile Video Coalition’s standard for mobile TV, but that’s a young and small market.

For now, I’m highly skeptical as to Rosum’s chances for making broadcast signals a third source of location information. Yes, location is hot, but between Wi-Fi and GPS, broadcast TV looks more like a third wheel.

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The Sports Illustrated (NYSE: TWX) swimsuit issue’s Midas touch continues: three weeks after launch, SI has delivered nearly 570,000 downloads of its ad-supported “freemium” Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2010 app—and, according to SI.com Managing Editor Paul Fichtenbaum, converted roughly 10 percent to paid users at $1.99 a pop. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s about $113,430 in revenue for 57,000 upgrades. That compares with about 30,000 paid downloads for the premium-only Swimsuit 2009.

Ten percent is good but you’d almost think the number would be higher. For their $1.99 upgrade to Swimsuit 2010 Premium, users get nearly 50 additional videos, including some exclusive footage, and much more of the coverage from the magazine (the Olympians, etc.) Granted, it’s a much smaller format than the magazine; it’s also much more portable. Maybe if SI sold a Boss/Significant Other version that showed up as something else…

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If you work for the U.S. Army and spend all your spare time hacking the iPhone and Android or fooling around with HTML5, this is a contest for you: The Army’s Chief Information Office is launching a competition aimed at mobile and web apps, with cash awards totaling $30,000 and the chance to get your application the military seal of approval. The contest is a joint venture with iStrategyLabs, and is based on that company’s successful Apps For Democracy project, which was a joint venture with the Washington, D.C.’s Office of the CTO in 2008.

iStrategyLabs founder and CEO Peter Corbett describes on the company’s blog how the contest will work. It starts with a press conference and media (and blogger) roundtable on March 3 at the Pentagon with Lieutenant General Jeffery Sorenson (the Army’s chief information officer) and runs until May 15th. A total of 100 teams will be selected to compete for one or more of 40 cash awards totaling $30,000. Awards will be announced in June, with public demonstrations. The competition comes with a software repository (forge.mil), a cloud-based development sandbox, a collaboration space designed around an Apps for the Army group on MilBook (the Army’s version of Facebook) and a Twitter hashtag: #apps4army.

Corbett says the idea for the project came from O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly, who said on Twitter after announcing the competition that he had hoped to get the rest of the U.S. military involved as well, but wound up only getting the Army on board. The Army has been making some significant strides in the areas of social media over the past year or two, including the launch of CIO Sorenson’s Twitter account, which the lieutenant-general posts to himself (in contrast to many other government departments). It also recently released a surprisingly forward-thinking social media policy.

Lt.-Gen. Sorenson said in a statement released by the Army today that “We’re building a culture of collaboration among our Army community to encourage smarter, better and faster technical solutions to meet operational needs. Soldiers and Army civilians will be creating new mobile and web applications of value for their peers — tools that enhance warfighting effectiveness and business productivity today. And we’re rewarding their innovation with recognition and cash.” Or, as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark described it in a blog post: “A lot of people in the Army know stuff and want to serve more effectively.” Well said, Craig.

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Post photo courtesy of iStrategyLabs, thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser

Ever wonder how the people in your neighborhood are feeling? How about those that work downtown? Are people really happier on a Friday than a Monday? A new mobile application called Glow will tell you. Designed for the iPhone, this app lets you share your feelings using a simple star-based rating system that you manipulate using a swiping gesture. Once you’ve added your “feeling,” it’s displayed a map so you can see how those around you feel, too. The feelings on the map are represented by glowing colored orbs that range from blue (happy) to red (unhappy). In addition, an augmented reality street view lets you see those same feelings layered on top of real-world photos.

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How to Glow

When you first launch the app, five stars appear on the screen. Drag your finger across the stars to rate how you’re feeling at the moment. As you move from one star to five, the colors change from a darker red to a bright blue. Five stars represents you at your happiest while one star means you’re unhappy. Your feeling is then geo-located and tagged to a map. You can zoom in and out and around on the map to see how others in your area are feeling, too. If available, you can switch over to street view to see a sort of augmented reality view which superimposes feelings on top of the actual photos from that location.

For now, the application is limited to the iPhone. And because it was only released a couple of weeks ago, it suffers from the same problem that plagues most newly-launched social media websites: not enough users. That’s unfortunate because the concept, though simple, is definitely intriguing.

But Where’s the Sentiment Analysis?

That said, we wish the app would do even more. A sentiment analysis engine, for example, could analyze tweets and/or public Facebook updates to depict the overall feelings in a particular locale without having to rely on manual updates from iPhone users. These sorts of “feeling” algorithms are already in use on a number of services, including real-time Twitter search engines Tweetfeel and Tweet Sentiments, social media search platform SocialMention, Waggener Edstrom’s trend-tracker Twendz and several others. While it’s nifty that Glow lets you add real-time feeling updates to a map, not including an optional social layer that extracts feelings from social sites and services is an unfortunate (and potentially dooming) omission for what is otherwise a fairly clever concept and implementation.

However, despite its flaws, Glow is a great example of the new and unique types of applications that mobile phones and their location-awareness features make possible. We hope that future updates to the app will take this concept further and provide us with a true analysis of the feelings around us…even from those who don’t use Glow.

If you’re interested in trying Glow on your iPhone, you can download the app here. (Note that if you try to locate the app via the iPhone’s search, you should use the company name “Heckacopter” as the keyword – there are just too many apps with “glow” in the title!)

Discuss

Mobile giving campaigns are already under way for relief efforts in Chile, which experienced a massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake Saturday morning. Americans can text the word “CHILE” to one of several short codes to donate $10 to the American Red Cross or Salvation Army, among other groups, and can donate any amount by texting the word “CHILE” and a dollar amount to the short code 27138. Whether or not the carriers will speed up the delivery window between the text and the actual donations as they did for Haiti is another question.

Donating via text has been around for more than two years but attracted national attention after users donated more than $41 million following January’s devastating earthquake there. While that figure shattered previous text-giving records, at least some of the Haiti contributions were surely driven by the novelty factor. So it’s unclear whether the tremendous success of the Haiti campaigns are indicative of how much we’ll continue to use our phones to give. Readers, what do you think? Let us know in the poll.

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Image courtesy Flickr user Globovision.

Wade Roush wrote:

March 2010 is Mass Mobile Month, a celebration of mobile technology innovation in New England. Who says so? Xconomy and the 22 other local organizations that have banded together to highlight the remarkable string of mobile-related events happening around town in March. Actually, the fun started in mid-February and will continue into early April—but today, the 1st of March, is the perfect moment to call attention to the initiative, and to remind everyone about the wealth of learning networking opportunities coming up in the next few weeks.

The roster of Mass Mobile Month events this month is long and growing. If you check out the full list, you’ll see that there’s something for everyone, from an anime film screening to a showcase of UK mobile companies to a scholarly meeting on virtual and augmented reality technology. And of course, we hope you’ll sign up to attend Xconomy’s own big event, Mobile Madness: The New Future of Computing, set for March 9.

There are two big mobile events happening this very night. Unfortunately they’re at the same time, so you have to choose one or the other. The first is a screening of “Summer Wars,” a much-talked-about Japanese anime film about cell-phone-toting teens; the screening is on the MIT campus and is sponsored by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program.

The second is the 25th Web Innovators Group meeting at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. One of the three “main dish” presentations at WebInno will be given by Kathleen Gilroy, CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Swift Mobile, and two of the “side dish” companies are also mobile startups, Textaurant and GeoLenz. (I’m scheduled to moderate a panel discussion after the main show, featuring three serial Web entrepreneurs from the Boston area: Performable’s David Cancel, Gather.com’s Tom Gerace, and Full Circle Media’s Steven Kane.)

Back when we were setting up the Mass Mobile Month effort a few weeks ago, I briefed the organizer of the Web Innovators Group meetings, Venrock’s David Beisel, about our plans and suggested that as one way of highlighting the month, he might make a special effort to recruit speakers from mobile startups. He enthusiastically agreed and was able to include not one but three mobile companies.

To make things even cooler, Gilroy suggested modifying Swift Mobile’s existing apps, which are designed for event producers and convention center operators, to create a new app highlighting the month’s events. That’s what the company has now done, and we’re expecting the Mass Mobile Month app to be approved by Apple any minute now. Gilroy plans to demonstrate the app tonight at Web Inno, whether or not it’s been approved.

As a final bonus for the inaugural day of Mass Mobile Month, we’ve got a fascinating guest essay in the Xconomist Forum section from Jonathan Michaeli, former vice president of marketing for Boston-area startups Gather.com and PanRaven. It’s a close look at Research in Motion’s BlackBerry line of mobile devices, which still have a leading share of the smartphone market but are widely seen as less innovative than competing devices from Apple and makers of Android phones. Michaeli argues that RIM has a window of time—but only a narrow one—in which to reinvigorate the BlackBerry brand, and that Boston area companies like Vlingo and Nuance Communications may be able to teach the company a thing or two.

I hope you’ll attend one of tonight’s events and check out many more of the month’s great happenings. You can also help spread the word about Mass Mobile Month via your blog, Twitter, or old-fashioned word of mouth. The hash tag is #massmobmonth. If your company or organization wants to become a supporter of the initiative, there’s still time; just write to me at [email protected]. See you around town!

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