Category: Mobile

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week has produced some eye-catching developments, from Microsoft’s unveiling of its new mobile OS to the Skype/Verizon partnership to increasing tension between Google and network operators. But the show’s overriding theme has been the ever-increasing data consumption across mobile networks — and the crush of companies looking to help carriers offload that traffic.

The surge in smartphone sales has fueled a dramatic increase in the demand for mobile data, which in turn has brought some networks to their knees. And as Stacey noted last week, that demand will increase exponentially over the next few years as phones become more sophisticated and connectivity comes to a wide range of devices. Which is why carriers are scrambling to find alternative ways to deliver data to users in ways that don’t bog down the network.

“Offloading is crucial for us,” Orange’s Olaf Swantee told Reuters earlier this week. “In many countries where we have a fixed network we try to offload directly.”

Swantee’s remarks were echoed this week by CEOs from both Vodafone and RIM, who used the event to warn that smartphone users will soon demand more data than networks can deliver. Of course, both companies have skin in the game: RIM is touting its gadgets as bandwidth misers that generate minimal traffic on the network, and Vodafone — like its competitors — is scrambling to find a way to get heavy data users to pay more. But that urgency explains why players such as Accuris Networks, BelAir Networks, Bridgewater Systems, picoChip and Tellabs (s tlab) unveiled hardware and software in the last few days designed to help network operators use non-cellular technologies to move data.

Many of the new products use gear designed for fixed mobile convergence (FMC)  through Wi-Fi and femtocells, and a few are beginning to include support for 4G technologies. Tellabs, like the 6-year-old startup Stoke, offers a gateway designed to offload Internet-bound traffic before it reaches the carrier’s first core gateway. And Kineto Wireless  markets a smartphone client that automatically routes traffic to Wi-Fi networks.

The need to offload data traffic has spurred a femtocell industry that until recently had seen lackluster activity. Wi-Fi’s massive worldwide footprint makes it the offloading technology of choice for carriers, and network operators can encourage their customers to ease network congestion by using voluntarily using Wi-Fi when it’s available. The carriers will have to do a better job of supporting Wi-Fi and creating a seamless experience for users, though, if they hope to fully leverage the technology, Informa analyst Thomas Wehmeier wrote this week:

“A key hurdle that we still see is the need to overcome the issues of authentication and providing a better user experience for the customer when switching between cellular and WiFi networks. The days of logging in and out of hotspots need to go if operators really want to offload greater proportions of traffic onto WiFi. That being said, it seems that even with today’s pretty average WiFi experience on a typical smartphone, consumers are favouring WiFi over cellular.”

That demand for Wi-Fi is something carriers must meet if they’re to keep their customers happy — and if they hope to keep their networks running smoothly — as femtocells and other alternatives gain traction in the market.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

• Everybody Hertz: The Looming Spectrum Crisis
• How AT&T Will Deal With iPad Data Traffic
• Metered Mobile Data is Coming and Here’s How

Image courtesy Flickr user nick blick.

Thousands upon thousands of people will be in Austin, Texas next month for the South By Southwest Interactive festival – and several different services will be competing to show you where you can find your friends at the big event. Only one app, though, is focused on displaying your location down to the level of where you are sitting!

SitBy.Us is a web and mobile web application that lets you peruse the SXSW panel, keynote and party schedules, check in to rooms and locations, identify where in the big crowded rooms and parties you are sitting. Then it lets you see which of your friends from Twitter are there too and where. The service is a little unstable right now, but it looks like the kind of thing that’s going to get slammed in Austin.

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SitBy.Us was built by a San Francisco/Chicago design and development shop called WeightShift. WeightShift has done work for Mozilla, WordPress and others and has a strategic partnership with leading design firm Happy Cog.

If you’re going to SXSW you’ll have a lot of options for sharing your location and plans: Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Gowalla, Plancast and probably others. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole lot of people are on SitBy.Us. Its use of your existing social connections on Twitter and its very unique value proposition make it sound like a whole lot of fun.

I found out about SitBy.Us from Portland, Oregon’s Josh Pyles. I’m going to figure out where he’s sitting in Austin and thank him.

You can make friends with the ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter, and thus find out where we’re sitting in Austin, via the RWW Team list. Sit by us! 🙂

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Email startup ReMail announced this afternoon that it’s been acquired by Google and there’s a pretty interesting story behind this cool technology that could inspire future developments in Gmail.

The news was announced by ReMail CEO Gabor Cselle on his blog today (we learned about it first via CenterNetworks). Gabor was a former Gmail intern and was YCombinator funded. There are even more interesting elements to this story than that, though.

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ReMail the app has already been discontinued from the iTunes App Store, but here are some ways it could impact Gmail in the future anyway. Cselle will now become a product manager on Gmail. The core feature of ReMail was full-text search of all the emails in your Gmail or other online inbox, even when you were offline. That wasn’t the only cool thing about ReMail, though.

1. The Reboxed application that sorts your contacts by priority was really interesting. It was like a little game that scrolled through your contacts, displayed two at a time and asked you to prioritize one over the other. Your individual ratings and the aggregate ratings of particular email contacts across all ReBoxed users were then used to bring emails from high-priority senders to the top of your inbox. It was a really fun little feature. While many data-centric startups would have just picked up email prioritization based on implicit behavior (whose emails you open and reply to) there was something to be said for allowing explicit rankings in a game-like setting. Whose emails are more important to you, your boss’s or your mom’s?
   
2. That Google just bought something that’s all about one of the iPhone’s core functions, email, is interesting. Sure, the app is shuttered now, but imagine if Apple had decided to buy ReMail instead. If Cselle was working on the iPhone’s native email application, that would have been better for Apple than this may turn out to be if he helps make Android’s email the best in the mobile world.
3. ReMail’s founder was previously a VP of Engineering at the very ambitious Outlook plug-in provider Xobni. He left Xobni and ended up creating something very different. Cselle says he had a “multi-step plan for global email domination” but received advice “that instead I should build something small, simple, and useful.” The end result? “It worked,” he says.
4. The man that gave him that advice and invested in his company, was Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail.
5. Finally, Google just acquired a native mobile app, built on another platform. Much has been made of Google’s emphasis on moving everything to HTML5 and the mobile web. But here’s evidence that you can build an innovative application in an entirely different direction and still capture the company’s eye. (Admittedly it probably helps to be super connected like Cselle was.)

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The demand for mobile broadband will surpass the spectrum available to meet it in mid-2013, according to Peter Rysavy, a wireless analyst. In a report on the looming spectrum crisis that was sponsored by Research in Motion for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Rysavy explains how the demand for bandwidth-consuming services used by more and more people will lead to a crappy user experience, or heavy-handed pricing (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) and limitations on mobile application from carriers absent new spectrum allocations.

He begins with data showing the increasing demand on mobile networks and lays out how much bandwidth a variety of services need, from up to 12 kbps for voice calls to 1-2 Mbps to stream HD YouTube videos. After illustrating the capacity crunch, he starts to tie it to spectrum. In many cities, carriers have 55-90 MHz of capacity, only some of which is allocated to data services. Even today, some providers such as AT&T have indicated they’re using up to half of their spectrum resources in heavily populated markets.

But more spectrum is only part of the issue. Operators have options ranging from more cell sites (either towers or even femtocells) to data offloading (sub req’d) to next-generation radio technologies such as Long Term Evolution to even antenna optimization. I detail many of these measures as well as AT&T’s spectrum shortage in a GigaOM Pro report published today called Everybody Hertz: the Looming Spectrum Crisis.

The Federal Communication Commission and Congress are playing a role in the spectrum issue, but it would be insane to think that handing over more airwaves will be enough, or that it will happen quickly. Useful spectrum for mobile broadband isn’t an infinite resource, so everyone from the developers building more resource-aware mobile applications to the folks in Washington allocating the spectrum and dictating regulations around mobile broadband will have to work together in order to make sure our desires for the mobile web are met.

Android has quickly become a force to be reckoned with in mobile, as anyone following Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week can tell you. Google has recognized that the future growth engine of the Internet is the mobile web — and the ad revenues that it generates — and it’s effectively laying the foundation for those revenues with the growth of its mobile operating system. And that’s making carriers very nervous.

Android was designed as a tool to make the mobile web accessible and enable Google to take its search and advertising business to the wireless world. And the platform continues to gain traction at an impressive clip. AdMarvel this morning became the latest mobile ad business to join the Android bandwagon, unveiling a toolkit at MWC designed to help developers deliver ads through their mobile applications. The new Opera Software subsidiary joins fellow mobile ad firm Smaato, which last week announced support for Android, as well as Greystripe, AdMob and a host of other competitors looking for a piece of the Android advertising pie.

That pie is getting bigger very quickly: AdMob recently said ad requests from Android devices had doubled in just two months, while Smaato reported Android’s clickthrough rates surpassed those of the iPhone in January. ComScore echoes those findings, indicating Android’s smartphone market share more than doubled from the third quarter of 2009 to the fourth quarter of last year. Those figures will surely increase, too, thanks to the fact that Android is now shipping on 60,000 handsets a day, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his keynote speech yesterday in Barcelona.

That remarkable traction has spooked network operators, which fear Google may already control too much of the mobile advertising market. Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao yesterday told MWC attendees that regulators must intervene and boost competition “before it’s too late,” claiming Google holds up to 80 percent of the mobile search and advertising market in Europe. Colao’s comments came a week after Telefonica Chairman Cesar Alierta said the telco might charge search engines for network use, citing the dominance of Google and other prominent web sites.

Those fears are justified in light of a report released yesterday by iSuppli. The market research firm said Google may actually reshape the industry, replacing calling plans with ad revenues as the foundation of the business.

“While all the facets of this multipronged strategy will not be successful, it is clear that Google is pushing toward the strategy of monetizing mobile search by leveraging its leadership in Internet search with relevant location-based services and mobile advertising,” Dr. Jagdish Rebello of iSuppli said in a prepared statement. “iSuppli believes that if the company executes this strategy correctly — by working with and not against the rest of the mobile value chain — the wireless industry will be well positioned to unlock the next trillion dollars of value by the end of this decade.”

That would be a huge win for all sorts of players in the value chain, from handset manufacturers to app developers to major media brands. But it might leave carriers on the outside looking in.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

• Why Android Could Fuel Mobile Advertising
• Report: Google’s Mobile Strategy

Image courtesy Flickr user the quad laser.

Location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Buzz are currently among the fastest growing new mobile services. All of these apps have one thing in common: they encourage you to share your current location with the rest of the world. By doing this, though, you are also telling people where you are not: at home. A new site, PleaseRobMe, plays on this theme and displays real-time updates from Foursquare users who broadcast their check-ins on Twitter.

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According to the trio of developers behind the site (Barry Borsboom, Frank Groeneveld and Boy van Amstel), “the goal of this website is to raise some awareness of this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.” There are also ads on the site, so the developers clearly also had something else in mind when they started this site. No matter the developers’ motivations, the visceral reaction to PleaseRobeMe on Twitter, shows that the developers have hit a nerve.

PleaseRobMe doesn’t show anything new that a regular Twitter search for the 4sq.com domain wouldn’t uncover, but it’s the first time that a service has made this information so blatantly obvious. We don’t think that a lot of thieves are actually trolling the Internet for information when people leave their homes, though we have already seen some burglaries where status updates may have played a role.

Besides robberies, there are also other reasons why you might want to keep your Foursquare profile private. Do you, after all, really want to tell your future employer that your spent all those weeknights at the local bar?

Privacy Concerns: The Limiting Factor for Location-Based Networks?

More importantly, though, this service highlights the privacy implications of regularly broadcasting your location. Some people are willing to take the risk and are perfectly fine with broadcasting their location and services like Foursquare reward these check-ins with virtual badges and real-world discounts for their most active users. For a lot of people, however, sharing location data takes online transparency one step too far.

Ultimately, the success of location-based networks will be limited if they can’t find ways to make users feel safe when using these services.

How to Stay Safe?

If you really feel the need to share your location with the whole world, then you have to accept the risks. This isn’t just limited to location-aware applications, though. Posting Twitter updates from your vacation also make it pretty obvious that you are not at home.

When it comes to location-aware services and geo-social networks, we prefer services that allow their users to send location updates privately to a select group of friends and trusted contacts. BrightKite – one of the older geo-social networks – for example, allows you to set very granular privacy controls on a per-post level. Of course, you could always resort to using a completely anonymous service like BlockChalk or a permission-based one-on-one service like EchoEcho, but with these, you can’t update your friends about what bar to meet them at either and the social aspects of these services are limited.

It would also be nice if these services allowed users to select the level of granularity of their check-ins. While this won’t discourage burglars (and doesn’t work for FourSquare-like apps), being able to just point to “Houston, TX” as your location instead of the actual hotel your are staying in could alleviate the fears of a lot of users.

The Dangers of Mixing the Virtual and the Real World

PleaseRobMe points out the dangers of location-based social networks. Services like Foursquare, Brightkite and Google Buzz bridge the gap between the virtual world of social networks and the real world, which is something we are not accustomed, to. It’s easy to think that the information we share online doesn’t have any influence on the real world, but PleaseRobMe makes it pretty clear that there can be real-world consequences to sharing your location.

What Do You Do?

What is your policy for staying safe on location-aware social networks? Do you avoid them at all cost? Do you think that the positive aspects outweigh the potential risks? Do you use a pseudonym and a fake avatar? Let us know in the comments.

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Despite apologies from Google, and changes to the inner workings of its Buzz social networking service, a high-profile privacy group has taken its complaints to the Federal Trade Commission. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has urged the FTC to open an investigation into Buzz.

EPIC in its complaint (PDF) charges that Google has contradicted its own privacy policy, engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices, failed to give up to 37 million Gmail users “meaningful control over personal information,” and may have violated federal wiretap laws.

Buzz has been scrutinized heavily due to privacy concerns in recent days, leading Google to make numerous changes to the service. EPIC’s opposition to Buzz isn’t its first disagreement with Google’s practices regarding the cloud. In March of 2009, EPIC urged the FTC to investigate Google’s cloud policies, and warned that the company had failed to safeguard the privacy and security of users.

Among specific requests that EPIC is making to the FTC, it is asking for it to compel Google to:

• Make Google Buzz a fully opt-in service for Gmail users;
• Cease using Gmail users’ private address book contacts to compile social networking lists;
• Give Google Buzz users more control over their information by allowing them to accept or reject followers from the outset.

Notably, EPIC’s complaint also quotes numerous bloggers who have written about the privacy issues surrounding Buzz, as well as a Yahoo Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, who wrote:

I am extremely concerned about hundreds of activists in authoritarian countries who would neveer want to reveal a list of their interlocutors to the outside world…many of their contacts are other activists…and democracy promoters.

Google may well have an international problem on its hands with Buzz, and other privacy groups are entering the fray. Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner is investigating the service, and The Electronic Frontier Foundation has leveled criticism against Buzz.

Related Post From GigaOM Pro: Where Google Buzz for Mobile Fails

For a while the consensus has been that the mobile web is the same as the PC web, in that a person should be able to access whatever content they can via a wired PC connection on their phone, without suffering through WAP browsers or limits. I disagree. The mobile web is still different than the wired web, and it’s far more important.

Which means that developers shouldn’t only think of the web in terms of a wired connection for a PC. Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said it best when he discussed the future of the mobile web during his speech at the Mobile World Congress today.

In essence, Schmidt was saying that in many ways, your smartphone is about to supplant your computer — with huge implications for content providers and operators. For while PCs are about content creation (blogging, graphic design, etc.), and both current-generation smartphones and future devices like the iPad about content consumption, tomorrow’s smartphones — or superphones — will be about both, and may even do both equally well.

So those developing applications with an eye toward consumption on personal computers over wired connections should stop thinking about mobile as an addendum to the web-based project and start thinking of it as a separate application in its own right. Note how your application uses data and how it will perform on relatively slower mobile networks. Good navigation is essential. Consider how your application (or web page) deals with connection errors and how it delivers data over a thin pipe, as Elizabeth Churchill, a principal research scientist and manager of the Internet Experiences Group at Yahoo, describes in the video below from a GigaOM event last October. The mobile section is about five and half minutes in, and hits on some really good design tips.

Other than the difference in the speed and stability of the connection, developers will also need to think about the platform. Will the content or applications be used on an iPad, a phone, inside a moving car? If everything has a connection, and multiple operating systems such as Android or the newly launched MeeGo are the framework for a variety of end devices, then the mobile web isn’t a singular experience, or screen, anymore.

For example. there’s no reason that my connected car has to offer the Internet in a web-biased format. Navigation in a car shouldn’t be mouse-based; it should be voice-based. Viewed through such a lens, it becomes clear that mobile connectivity sets developers free — free to play with different user interfaces, site navigation and experiences that will make surfing the mobile web a background activity in service of the user, rather than the primary one designed strictly to entertain.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d):

• The App Developer’s Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform
• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

Firefox Mobile for Android is inevitable, it’s just a question of when. While it’s still vague, at least we know it’s on the cards for late this year, with Mozilla’s VP of mobiles telling TechRadar the hold up is due to different code:

“Android has been built on a Java platform, whereas [Firefox Mobile] is based on C and C++ code. Until last year when [the Open Handset Alliance] released the NDK (native development kit) which allowed native code as part of the app, it was simply impossible.”

[TechRadar]

On a planet with around 6.8 billion people, we’re likely to see 5 billion cell phone subscriptions this year.

Reaching 4.6 billion at the end of 2009, the number of cell phone subscriptions across the globe will hit 5 billion sometime in 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The explosion in cell phone use has been driven not only by developed countries, but by developing nations hungry for services like mobile banking and health care.

“Even during an economic crisis, we have seen no drop in the demand for communications services,” said ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, “and I am confident that we will continue to see a rapid uptake in mobile cellular services in particular in 2010, with many more people using their phones to access the Internet.”

long with the surge in cell phones, demand for mobile access to the Internet has skyrocketed. The ITU expects the number of mobile broadband subscriptions to surpass 1 billion around the world this year, a leap from 600 million at the end of 2009. The organization predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers.

People in developing countries are increasingly using their cell phones for mobile banking, even those who have no bank accounts. But it’s in the area of health care that cell phones have made a difference in developing regions, believes the ITU.
“Even the simplest, low-end mobile phone can do so much to improve health care in the developing world,” said Toure. “Good examples include sending reminder messages to patients’ phones when they have a medical appointment, or need a prenatal check-up. Or using SMS messages to deliver instructions on when and how to take complex medication such as anti-retrovirals or vaccines. It’s such a simple thing to do, and yet it saves millions of dollars—and can help improve and even save the lives of millions of people.”

This story originally appeared on CNET

Before Windows Phone 7 was even an embryo of a concept, Windows Mobile was king: It powered nearly half of smartphones in use, a led the industry in features. Then, in 2007, things started to go wrong. Very, very wrong.

Silicon Alley Insider has charted Windows Mobile’s platform share, which is to say the proportion of users who were using it at a given time, over the last four years. For showing decline, figures like these are more telling than sales—they mean that, for years now, people haven’t been buying Windows Mobile phones nearly as fast as they’ve been ditching them.

More interesting than what it shows is what it projects: Windows Mobile 6.x phones have been collectively kneecapped by Microsoft’s announcement yesterday, and rendered spectacularly unbuyable outside of enterprise circles. In other words, that line—the one that dragged down past RIM in 2008, and that dropped past Apple last year—is going to keep plunging for the rest of this year, until Windows Phone 7 tries to haul it back up. And until then, it’s only going to get steeper. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Venmo is quite simple — it allows you to send payment to your trusted contacts by using SMS. “This is one of the first things I’ve done where my mom understands what I’m doing,” is how co-founder Andrew Kortina put it during an interview today. Kortina recently left his job at Bit.ly and took a bridge loan from Sam Lessin and other individuals to pursue Venmo full time.

Kortina is well aware that many people have tried peer-to-peer mobile payments, and that more powerful companies are trying to do so today (PayPal fits in both categories). Amazon, for example, bought a very similar Y Combinator startup called TextPayMe, and offers its functionality as an (albeit buried) Amazon-branded service today. “We have the audacity to redo it even though it’s been done many times. We think we can do it better,” said Kortina.

Where Venmo aims to win is by using social connections between friends. When you sign up you connect to Facebook and Twitter to broadcast payments (only the ones you choose) and look for other Venmo users among your email contacts. Then you send your Venmo contacts payments by texting Venmo something like “pay Sally $6 for the yummy burrito.” You can also declare a contact “trusted,” and allow them to directly pull from your Venmo account (which in turn pulls from your credit card or bank account) without your confirmation. Or you can Venmo someone $3 with the message “grab me a coffee” when you know they’re on their way over to your office.

Philadelphia-based Venmo, right now a three-person shop from Kortina and two of his former classmates from the University of Pennsylvania, pays a small fee on every credit card transaction and plans to make money by passing that on to merchants. Kortina said they intend the service to always be free for friends. One issue with this plan is Venmo designing itself for the casual spectrum of transactions. If you happen to be buying something at a store that has a point of sale system, you’ll just hand over your credit card.

Of course, the other big issue with Venmo is the privacy and security of tying payments directly to your phone number. Kortina said Venmo will allow a high level of user control over every transaction, therefore protecting users.

I’m sure it’s going to be more complicated than that, but I think Kortina may be right about mobile payments coming into their own. For instance, after the major earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, people donated more than $35 million through $5 and $10 text messages, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation (this was through a slightly different method of adding the payments onto users’ cell phone bills). And there’s also plenty of smart people working on the mobile payments problem — for example Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Square, which is targeting merchants with a point-of-sale hardware dongle.

Venmo today is available only by invitation from someone who’s already on the service, and Kortina said he expects it to be that way for a while. If you’d like to get in line for an invite, Kortina said to follow @Venmo on Twitter. (If you’re really nice to me, maybe I’ll let you send me some money. Just kidding.)

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Could Activist Style Micropayments Be a Real-Time Ad Model?

With the advent of Windows Phone Series 7, the highly competitive smartphone market looks to become hyper-competitive in 2010. While more choice is always good for consumers, for developers seeking a return on the investment of time and effort the right platform choice is crucial.

Windows Phone Series 7 remains largely an enigma for developers until the MIX conference next month. There will be a “marketplace” hub, but Series 7 will apparently not be compatible with Windows Mobile programs. Highly restricted multi-tasking appears similar to that in iPhone OS, and multi-touch will be required in Series 7, which is scheduled for release late this year.

But that’s then, and this is now. Colin Gibbs has prepared a report (subscription required) for GigaOm Pro on the seven leading mobile platforms to advise developers on which platforms are the right and wrong ones.

The seven platforms covered are Android, BlackBerry, Maemo (now MeeGo), iPhone, Symbian, webOS, and Windows Mobile.

Not surprisingly, the most vibrant platform at the moment is iPhone OS, with more than 75 million devices sold and a highly successful App Store. However, there are trade-offs for developers, most notably the closed nature of the App Store and an approval process that can be seemingly mercurial at times. Interestingly, it seems that the 70/30 revenue split at the App Store has become almost universal among platforms, with only RIM offering BlackBerry developers 80 percent of revenue. It should also be noted that Nokia’s Ovi Store takes carrier allowances for bandwidth out of the developer’s pocket.

Potential unknowns are also explored, such as aggregators like Verizon, which will subsume content from multiple platforms into its own store. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, an alliance of carriers and handset makers have also vowed to create an open technology platform that all mobile consumers could shop at. Adobe is also pushing Air as the new run-time development platform for every phone without a fruit logo that will let them install it.

Setting aside possible game changers in the future, the wealth of information on the seven major mobile development platforms does not conclude with a best choice for developers right now, because there isn’t one. That won’t change in 2010, or 2011, but it is arguable that there are platforms to avoid, and that’s where developers should start their decision process.

Read the full report on GigaOM Pro → (subscription required)

After complaining, cursing and trying to destroy Skype for the past few years, today the big daddy of the U.S. telecom industry, Verizon, decided to embrace the upstart. And it did so in good style — by hosting a heavily attended press event announcing their partnership at mobile industry’s biggest boondoggle, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If you just simply scanned the headlines, you’d see an old-school telco finally getting the religion. But then you’d also miss the full story: The degree to which fear of the iPhone was behind this Verizon decision.

First let’s get the basics of the Skype-Verizon news announcement out of the way:

• Skype and Verizon have built a new client especially for use on Verizon Wireless’s smartphones.
• The client allows unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls without cutting into your Verizon minutes.
• You can use Skype Out calling rates for international calls also without cutting into your Verizon minute bundles.
• You can also use it to send and receive instant messages to other Skype users.
• As reported earlier, the service is available on 3G smartphones with data plans, including the BlackBerry Storm, Storm2, Curve, Curve2, 8830 World Edition and Tour smartphones, as well as DROID by Motorola, DROID ERIS by HTC and Motorola DEVOUR.

Now here are a few things they didn’t tell you:

• The Skype mobile client won’t work over any WiFi-enabled smartphones. And that includes DROID devices. To me, that’s bogus.
• You cannot use the Skype client to make any calls to U.S. PSTN numbers. Those calls are routed over Verizon’s network, and thus in the process help generate the company more money. In other words, a leopard doesn’t really change its spots.
• Despite the company’s boasting, there are a lot of places where Verizon’s 3G network doesn’t quite work, especially as you start moving away from urban areas. In the words of Dr. Gregory House (of “House”): Everybody lies. (Especially phone companies, if I may add.)

What I like about it:

As Skype CEO Josh Silverman said, with this new client, your Verizon phone address book becomes more useful and makes inbound Skype calls easier. It makes using Skype IM and Skype Status messages more useful. I especially like this because it gives Skype a new opportunity to grow its revenues and bump up its profits. “I think we have seen an attitude change amongst operators and they are open to forming more relationships,” said Silverman, noting that his company was talking to other operators as well.

Which bring me to the elephant in the room: Why exactly is Verizon singing the Skype song? The answer is simple: the iPhone.

During the press conference and later in a conversation with the Verizon executives, I asked why they suddenly embraced Skype. They gave me some PR-sanitized answers about smartphone penetration, demand from consumers and whatnot. The real answer is the iPhone.

Ever since the iPhone launched, Verizon has gone on the defensive. It’s seen AT&T with its frail little network gain and then retain market share. Today, despite all the problems with Ma Bell’s network, customers are still signing up for the iPhone. Verizon needed a countermove. It thought the BlackBerry Storm would be the answer, but that’s like fighting a bazooka attack with a peashooter. And the company controlled access to its devices and network like the former Soviet Union embraced perestroika, aka Android. I’m not sure if even that has had the desired effect.

Which brings us to the Skype deal. I’ve been reporting on Skype for some six years, during which not at a single day passed when I didn’t hear some kind of anti-Skype remark from an operator, Verizon included. There was a visceral hatred for the Internet calling service, which essentially started eating the insides of their business. And when you have so much hate for a particular entity, you just don’t get up an embrace it — unless you’re scared of something. In the case of Verizon, that something is the iPhone.

The two companies started talking about working on something together roughly a year ago. At that time, the iPhone mania was at its peak and it’s fair to say that Verizon was a little spooked. When I asked one of its executives about the iPhone, he denied that the talks were a direct response to the device. But he did acknowledge that the competitive landscape had changed and that customers were making decisions based on applications. Skype is one such application — one of the most powerful and popular applications available for the iPhone. The growing popularity of Skype — 300,000 downloads a day — is a good reason for Verizon to team up with the company. If it can convince even a handful of those downloaders to use it via Verizon, it’s preventing them from using another phone.

The final proof of the fear of the iPhone: Neither Skype nor Verizon would not respond to my question of whether this deal between the two companies was an exclusive one. In other words, when I asked Skype CEO Josh Silverman if another carrier, say, T-Mobile USA, said it wanted his company to build a Skype Mobile client just for its service, would he do it, his non-answer pretty much said: Verizon is using Skype to fight off competition. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

AT&T, Verizon Grudgingly Move Toward Openness

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Portland, OR-based Urban Airship, a mobile messaging startup, has raised $1.1 million led by True Ventures, with participation from Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op. The news was first reported by Rick Turoczy of Silicon Florist. Urban Airship provides software infrastructure for mobile messaging services like Apple Push Notifications, which lets companies send news and alerts to iPhones and other mobile devices.