Category: Mobile

Sometimes when you see a well-made product with a high-value proposition, you know it’s going to sell. Whether it was my first BlackBerry Pager or the Titanium Powerbook — even my first pair of Joe’s Jeans — I knew they were all going to sell quite well.

I had that exact same (good) feeling about Nokia’s Ovi Maps, a free download app/service the company made available on Jan. 21. Last week, when I met with Tero Ojanperä, Nokia’s EVP of services, he was obviously pretty excited about the launch and adoption of Ovi Maps. He wouldn’t give me the download numbers, but his colleague Anssi Vanjoki, an executive VP at Nokia, was happy to reveal them.

Ovi Maps has been download about 1.5 million times, according to Vanjoki, who also recently claimed that the company was “averaging a download a second, 24 hours a day.” Nokia says that a million Ovi Maps apps were downloaded in the first week after launch alone. The top countries for the app are China, Italy, the UK, Germany and Spain. With 1.5 million downloads, it seems the idea of opening up the app as a platform for other developers wasn’t such a bad one.

One of the reasons why Ovi Maps has been successful is because it’s free, much like the increasingly popular Google and Apple mapping and navigation applications. The ramifications of this “free” move are clear when it comes to the fortunes of specialized device makers such as Garmin and TomTom. More importantly, these free apps will also severely limit opportunities for paid-for applications such as Verizon’s VZ Navigator, which sells for about $10 an app, and version 5.0 of which Verizon recently launched.

Comcast today reported fourth-quarter and 2009 earnings that showed remarkable subscriber growth against the backdrop of such a down economy. More telling, however, are the three big forward-looking strategic initiatives the cable operator plans to focus on this year: expanding its mobile broadband offering through Clearwire, deploying some type of interactive advertising and signing up carrier customers for mobile backahul. It will also complete the rollout of its DOCSIS 3.0 broadband, which can deliver speeds of up to 50 Mbps; expand its TV everywhere product, Xfinity; and attempt to close the joint venture with GE over NBC Universal.

Essentially Comcast, which is about to finish laying the groundwork for a fast wired network, is focused on reaping the benefits of mobile broadband. Along the way it will also use Xfinity, the NBC-Universal deal and interactive advertising as a means to forestall becoming a dumb pipe for users. I have no idea if all of those efforts will succeed, but I applaud it for looking ahead and seeing the future of ubiquitous and fast broadband as a necessary platform in a way some of its rivals may not.

Its priorities reflect the growing awareness of a converged communications world. It’s attempting to provide the underlying infrastructure of fixed and mobile broadband as a bundle for the consumer as well as find ways to monetize and control the content running over those pipes in a way that won’t draw an outcry from consumers or regulators. However, regulators are already scrutinizing Comcast’s control of NBC-Universal and will likely spend some time on Xfinity as well.

But if we step back and look at the big picture, it’s clear that Comcast understands both the opportunity and the threat that ubiquitous broadband presents to its business. For Comcast, 2010 is when it will finish laying the groundwork for delivering ubiquitous broadband, and when it will build up the arsenal of tools to answer the threat that an all-IP network represents to its core video delivery business.

Related GigaOM Pro content (subscription required):

A Closer Look at Comcast’s NBC Universal Acquisition

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Tyler Yip

SinglePoint this morning said it’s spinning off its mobile messaging business to Ericsson to focus solely on the quiet — but lucrative — SMS advertising segment. A longtime player in mobile marketing, the Seattle-area company gained traction with interactive text campaigns including those used by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and TV shows such as “Deal or No Deal.”

Mobile text ads have steadily picked up steam even as sexier offerings like in-app marketing or video ads attract attention. Text ads accounted for an astounding 88 percent of total U.S. mobile ad revenues last year, according to J. P. Morgan, ringing in $2.3 billion. And it will surge to $3.2 billion in 2010, J. P. Morgan pridicts. Veteran mobile companies OpenMarket and mBlox launched SMS ad platforms last year in an effort to tap some of those dollars, joining a host of others in the space. Look for some of the SMS ad guys to get picked up in the coming months as the bigger players — including perhaps Google — seek to fill the holes in their mobile advertising businesses.

Related GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d) research:

• What SMS Marketers Can Learn From the Ringtone Space
• Why 2010 Still Won’t Be the Year of Mobile Advertising

Image courtesy Flickr user Tom Legrady.

Whether it fails or succeeds, Google’s upcoming Chrome OS will be one of the biggest technology stories of 2010. As predictions of its future success in tablets and elsewhere proliferate, though, the hurdles that this operating system faces become clearer.

The Challenge of Tablets and Touch Interfaces. The developers working on Chromium, the open-source core of the Chrome OS, have already shown photos and videos of tablet concepts running Chrome OS, many similar in form factor to Apple’s iPad. (Google has only announced its intention to put the OS on netbooks, but is widely predicted to pursue tablets.) In the video below, courtesy of the Chromium Blog, you can see numerous interface concepts for how Chrome tablets might work with touch interfaces, including some that differ from how Apple’s iPad works. (Multitouch features are now on their way to Google’s Nexus One phone.) It’s worth remembering, though, that the iPad’s OS and interface components have been developed by and improved upon by Apple for years now. Google has less experience doing advanced interfaces for operating systems, and if it spreads out beyond netbooks with Chrome OS (GigaOM Pro, subscription required), that could matter a lot.

Chrome OS Has to Speak to Other Hardware. If Chrome OS does show up on a widespread basis in netbooks and tablets, and if some Chrome OS-based tablets are on a collision course with the iPad, then Google has to work carefully to deliver compatibility with other hardware devices that’s on par with what Apple and Microsoft typically offer. Since Chrome OS is based on the Ubuntu Linux OS and has worked with Canonical on OS development, it will take advantage of existing driver libraries and hardware compatibility software layers. However, people can get quite disappointed when their brand new, shiny hardware device can’t print, and Linux distributions don’t have the best reputation for exhaustive hardware support. As PCMag notes, netbooks now offer a pretty comprehensive level of hardware support, ranging from slots for multiformat card readers, to (in some cases) sophisticated video components.

Who Calls Google for Support? Contrary to what some may believe, Google does provide support for its product offerings, including for the paid versions of Google Apps. However, not many of us would cite frequent calls to Google’s support folks. But not only will it have to offer robust hardware compatibility, it also has to answer hardware support questions when things don’t work. Google is already facing this issue in trying to support its Nexus One phone, amidst criticism. How much will Google’s lack of experience in this area, compared to Apple and Microsoft, matter?

The Cloud Question. As I’ve noted before, Google is taking a big gamble with Chrome OS by asking people to work with all data in the cloud. The lack of ability to work with local applications, utilities and data is a decision that I expect Google to reconsider over time. After all, quite aside from the potential data security issues involved in cloud storage, don’t you have a few local utilities and apps that you love on your PC or Mac? Would you want a system that treated them as non-existent? As further evidence of Chrome OS’ blithe attitude toward jettisoning local software, if it  detects malware it will wipe the operating system completely, then re-image it.

Commitment to the OS. I’ve been a technology editor for long enough to remember the early versions of both Windows and the Mac OS. They were very stripped-down compared to today’s versions, and it took years of expensive development and commitment to improve them. Even with several years of OS development under its belt, Microsoft still stumbled with Windows Vista. Operating systems are complicated beasts requiring ongoing commitment. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has all but said that a big part of the reason for Chrome is that users of a Google OS will naturally feed into the company’s lucrative search-and-ad ecosystem. One has to wonder if that signals complete dedication to ongoing development of a world-class operating system.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see Chrome OS roll out, precisely because it takes some risks. There have already been many glowing reports about how the OS boots in seconds — even from a USB key — and more. However, in a world that seems to automatically embrace all things Google, it’s worth remembering that many projects at the company have fallen by the wayside. Chrome OS may well succeed, but Google’s going to have some significant hurdles to jump over first.

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

• Why Carriers Should Care About Customer Care
• Google Chrome OS: What to Expect
• What Google Must Do to Make Chrome OS a Success With Netbooks

Thumbnail tablet image courtesy of the Chromium Blog; in-post image courtesy of Google.

New York is the capital of media, advertising, and finance, but historically Silicon Valley and Boston have overshadowed the city’s efforts to encourage and fund technology entrepreneurs.  In the past two years, however, that’s changed — big time — especially when it comes to media-related ventures.

Since early 2008, at least several dozen web-based startups have made New York a hub of web innovation.  Startups like Boxee, Bit.ly, Foursquare, Daylife and numerous others have established New York City’s prominence as a nurturing environment for early-stage activity. Some seek to solve problems that are unique to an urban environment (Foursquare), or provide solutions that accelerate the disruption of incumbent New York media, including ad optimization (Quattro, Quantcast, Tremor Media. Others are participating in general startup trends, such as location-based activity (Outside.in, HotList), while still others are exploring entirely new forms of content and navigation (Boxee, Worldwide Biggies, Next New Networks, Someecards).

Why is the renewed activity in New York different from the last boom, of 2000-02?  Several things have converged to suggest that New York is becoming a larger — and more permanent — center of web innovation and entrepreneurship. The talent pool of software engineers, designers, and programmers has expanded significantly in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, a clustering of human capital that provides a pool of employees to staff startups. Meanwhile, opportunities for innovation in New York have surged as well. Disruption in the cable, television, newspaper, book, advertising, magazine, ad agency, ad network, music and finance industries accelerated during the 2008-09 economic collapse.  And web entrepreneurs are building products and services that provide consumers with better, faster, more convenient solutions than existing one, notably those provided by declining traditional media.

The scale of such an opportunity is defined by the revenue at risk.  Traditional media’s $100 billion-plus in annual revenue is vulnerable to smart web solutions, and the next several years will see a continuation of that shift.  For example, download sales of music, which began ramping up in 2003 and represented 40 percent of U.S. recorded music sales in 2009, are expected to account for 80 percent of such sales by 2014.

To be sure, there are startups in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley that see similar opportunities.  But the exodus of employees from the traditional media businesses in New York has provided a cadre of smart, experienced old media talent — which when combined with smart, new media engineering talent, is catalyzing business opportunities. And there is a growing community of successful serial entrepreneurs — among them Kevin Ryan, David Morgan, Chris Dixon, John Borthwick and David Rosenblatt — to provide the angel funds and mentoring that is so critical to creating a sustainable startup economy.

(Related GigaOM Pro Research: Developers, Meet Your Hungry New Market: The News)

Supply vs. Demand for New York-based Venture Capital

San Francisco-based angel investor Ron Conway allocated one-third of his 2009 investment funds to New York-area startups, centered primarily around urban social networking, real-time web services and content navigation.  Meanwhile Betaworks, a New York-based firm (for which I am an adviser) that combines techniques from seed-stage venture investing and agile software development, has invested in and nurtured a dozen New York-based startups — including URL-shortener Bit.ly — since launching some 18 months ago.

New York has fewer than 10 venture capital firms focused on the convergence of media and technology.  The best known, Union Square Venture Capital, has a policy to largely limit its investments to New York-area firms so that it can remain close to management and help guide each investment’s direction.  The other notable media-focused New York-based funds include RRE, Betaworks, Founder Collective (recently closed a $25 million fund), Greycroft (currently raising a new $125 million fund), Venrock, Bessemer, and Insight Venture Partners. Coming in from Philadelphia or Boston are First Round, ETF, Polaris, Spark and General Catalyst. First Round recently hired a New York partner to represent its interests in the city, and Polaris opened a seed camp in lower Manhattan.

The number of media-related startups have also increased in San Francisco and Boston since 2008. Indeed, New York’s emergence as a center of startup activity is not at the expense of activity in those two cities; rather, it reflects a change in business opportunities in New York, often unique to a dense urban environment, and in the maturity of web innovation generally.

Fertile Ground

Media-focused venture startups in New York attack the periphery of the incumbent media businesses with disruptive ideas often formed by executives formerly employed in those businesses, targeting innovation around their products and services. Or they fulfill consumer needs with new, web-unique products and services. Much of the media-centric innovation has focused on marketing/advertising platforms, publishing platforms and services, social networking among consumers and navigation/access to content. Examples include:

Marketing/Advertising Platforms: Tacoda (provider of ad-targeting services), Quattro (mobile ad network), Targetspot (Internet radio ad network), Scanscout (video ad network); Tremor Media (video ad network), BBE (video ad network), Oddcast (user-personalized viral marketing) and Simulmedia (improving effectiveness of TV promotions).

Online Publishing Platforms/Services/Brands: Daylife (publishing of contextually driven content matches), Associated Content (content selection based on search topic popularity, based in NY and Denver), Daily Beast (celebrity news), Huffington Post (news etc., based in NY and LA) and College Humor (comedy).

Social Networking Platforms/Services: Bit.ly (URL-shortener), Outside.in (hyperlocal information), Foursquare (location-based social networking) Tumblr (microblogging), Hot Potato (entertainment) and Meetup (facilitates local groups).

Content Navigation: Boxee (media organizer application), Adaptive Blue (socially-oriented content recommendations), Feedtrace (content popularity exposed with real-time web tools) and Fanfeedr (real-time sports data).

Talent Pool

Two things have broadened the talent pool of web-savvy entrepreneurs in New York in the past three years. First, software design advances and innovation in programming languages have made available user-friendly web authoring software tools, so that creative talent can code successfully without needing to know more complex scripting. This has broadened the field of startup talent beyond hardcore computer science engineers and allowed for more diverse backgrounds in business, design, marketing and conventional media.

Second, the pool of software engineering talent in New York has expanded.  Google’s New York headquarters employs more than 2,000 people on West 14th Street, and AOL’s employs about a quarter of that number on Union Square. NYU’s Tisch School of Interactive Telecommunications has seeded New York startups with design, engineering and computer science talent, and programming talent has come over from Wall Street.

Clustering

Silicon Valley and Israel emerged as centers of early-stage entrepreneurship in part due to an effect called “clustering,” in which a density of collaborative thinking reinforced willingness to take risks, provided an iterative refinement of ideas and catalyzed innovation.

Three centers of web innovation have since emerged in New York as we: Lower Manhattan is home to two centers, and Brooklyn to one.  An area bounded by the Flatiron building to the east and the Meat Packing district to the west benefits from relatively low rents, the presence of repurposed warehouses and Google, and includes Betaworks, Union Square Venture Capitol, Pinch Media, Medianet, Quantcast and many others.

The lower Broadway corridor, which runs from Union Square to Canal Street, and east to Hudson Square, also has seen a large influx of startups whose 10-40 employee staffs are ideal for the smaller footprint lofts and warehouses in the area, which includes AOL’s New York headquarters. Located here are NYU’s Tisch School of Interactive Telecommunications, Daylife, Quattro, Lime Wire, Open Road and others. And Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Dumbo sections also are home to many startups (Boxee, Outside.in, Drop.io, and others).

The concentration of activity in a dense urban environment has facilitated networking, community, idea exchange and casual interaction. For example, NY Video, an ad-hoc organization of 3,000 New York-based web video professionals, meets monthly to showcase and discuss emerging trends in the industry.  Each month local startups, content producers and media companies demo their latest products in front of 400 or so peers.

Opportunities and Exits

Some larger macro trends have also helped inject life in NYC’s startup scene. Capital requirements and risk, formerly barriers to digital media startups, have been reduced.  Talented entrepreneurs now have access to open-source platforms, outsourced software engineering, and sharply reduced costs for bandwidth and infrastructure. Innovative web products and services require relatively small amounts of capital investment to reach business proof points.

In the near term, the exit market will consist of mergers with other early-stage companies, or sale to larger media companies, many of which are headquartered in New York.  IPO exits will also be available when that market returns. Because New York web startups often target the vulnerabilities of large media companies, they often find themselves being acquired by their predecessors. Acquirers of web media startups are also often customers/clients/partners with which the startup has an established commercial relationship.

Between 2007 and 2009, the combined industries of television, radio, book and magazine publishing; cable; commerce; recorded music; advertising agencies and general media spent over $3 billion to acquire more than 50 early- and middle-stage companies. Acquirers included CBS (5), IAC (4), News Corp (7+), Hearst (5+), Comcast  (6), NBC (4+), Viacom (2), Publicis (1), WPP (4) and Walt Disney (10).  A second tier of media companies in the New York area, while less visible than the major corporations, has also been actively pursuing acquisitions.  Acceleration of the disruption of existing media’s more than $100 billion in revenue is likely to support a robust exit market in the next 3-5 years.  Obviously, New York companies buy innovative startups regardless of location, and attractive New York startups will be targets for any acquirer.  But the density of activity in New York provides important real-time intelligence to potential buyers.

The Bottom Line

New York venture activity will be an important and permanent part of the rapid evolution of the U.S. media landscape.  Venture capital funds in Silicon Valley, Boston, and elsewhere that want to be in the New York venture deal flow, and to closely manage their New York assets, should consider establishing a New York presence.

Paul Vidich, an adviser at Betaworks, also sits on the boards of ScanScount, MediaNet, and ReverbNation.

Image courtesy of Flickr user berk2804

Two startups making hardware for the mobile industry scored investments today: Pulsus, a Korean company that has a chip aimed at making handsets more efficient, has taken $4 million from Qualcomm Ventures, and SpiderCloud, a startup that helps with mobile offload, has gotten $25 million from a group of VCs.

As users, application developers and carriers bump up against the technical constraints around mobile broadband’s popularity, expect more and more hardware investments and dealmaking in the mobile sector. A venture partner involved in the $1.3 billion program to fund startups that will benefit Verizon’s LTE network has even detailed to me what types of companies he and other participants in the program are looking to invest in.

But back to today’s funding. SpiderCloud is building out hardware that allows for cell phone traffic to be kept on a proprietary local network, which the company has dubbed eRAN. So instead of all the mobile traffic that a business might generate in its building and send back to the web over the carrier’s cellular network, all the phone in the office can now communicate via a smaller in-house network that connects to the web using the business’ own web connection — it’s kind of like a femtocell in idea, but not in execution. Today’s infusion, from Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners, brings its total to $40 million.

Pulsus makes a mixed signal chip that converts analog signals to digital signals before it amplifies them. That allows a greater ability to modulate those signals for better sound quality but could also be used to increase the power efficiency of the handsets, possibly in  a manner similar to Quantance. It also makes a variety of other audio chips and its CEO has said it hopes to one day “be the Qualcomm of Korea.”

In a related move, today Austin chip startup Black Sand Technologies purchased an intellectual property portfolio from Silicon Labs, a mixed-signal chipmaker. Black Sand is building a power amplifier that will make some of the components inside mobile handsets cheaper to manufacture and will boost battery life on mobile phones. Black Sand raised $10 million last September.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Jurveston

This post originally appeared on Joe Hewitt’s blog. He truly does capture the essence of the iPad in this piece — I couldn’t have said it better. I was so blown away that I asked him if we could republish it and share it with our readers, which he very kindly agreed to let us do. Enjoy…Om

Most of the iPad reactions I’ve read have been negative, but I have been completely satisfied with what Apple announced. iPad is exactly the product I’ve been wishing for ever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints.

While the rumor mill was churning with all kinds of crazy possibilities for the Apple tablet, I mostly rolled my eyes, because I felt strongly that all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply to make an iPhone with a large screen. Anyone who feels underwhelmed by that doesn’t understand how much of the iPhone OS’s potential is still untapped.

I spent a year and a half attempting to reduce a massive, complex social networking website into a handheld, touch-screen form factor. My goal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the facebook.com mothership, but once I got comfortable with the platform I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the website! Of all the platforms I’ve developed on in my career, from the desktop to the web, iPhone OS gave me the greatest sense of empowerment, and had the highest ceiling for raising the art of UI design. Except there was one thing keeping me from reaching that ceiling: the screen was too small.

At some point I came to the conclusion that Facebook on iPhone OS could not truly exceed the website until I could adapt it to a screen size closer to a laptop. It needed to support more than one column of information at a time. I couldn’t fit enough tools on the screen to support any kind of advanced creative work. Photos were too small to show off to my far-sighted parents. The web required too much panning and zooming to enjoy reading. Beyond just Facebook, most of the apps I used most on my iPhone also suffered from these limitations, like Google Reader, Instapaper, and all image, video, and text editing tools. The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.

Opportunity

iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you’re a developer and you’re not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.

True, iPad 1.0 has a lot of limitations which make it hard to be compared to a laptop today. We’re not there yet, people, but does it really take that much imagination to see how we will get there? Apple clearly wants to increase its investment in iPhone OS and reduce its investment in Mac OS X. At some point in the near future, Apple will adapt iPhone OS to even larger screens, add multi-tasking, and release something like a laptop or iMac with the OS. When it happens, it will make perfect sense, because by then there will be orders of magnitude more iPhone/iPad apps on the App Store than there ever were for Mac OS X and Windows.

A Closed Platform?

Given my concerns about the way Apple runs the App Store, you might expect me to jump on the bandwagon screaming about how Apple is evil and iPad is the death of open computing. Nonsense. My only problem with Apple is the fact that they insist on pre-approving every app on the App Store. The store may not be open, but the iPhone/iPad platform itself could hardly be more open to tinkerers of all ages.

The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.

As a developer, it’s a bit sad losing the ability to come up with crazy plugins and daemons and system-level utilities, but I believe it’s a tradeoff worth making. What people are overlooking is that the Internet is an integral part of the iPhone OS, and it is the part of the OS you can tinker with to your heart’s delight. If you want to invent a new scripting language or background service or something, you’re still totally free to do that, but you’re going to have to run it on a web server. If you want total freedom on the client side, then write a web app. You’re simply no longer going to be able to tempt users into installing software that corrupts their computer.

So, in the end, what it comes down to is that iPad offers new metaphors that will let users engage with their computers with dramatically less friction. That gives me, as a developer, a sense of power and potency and creativity like no other. It makes the software market feel wide open again, like no one’s hegemony is safe. How anyone can feel underwhelmed by that is beyond me.

Joe Hewitt is a software developer who lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., and his accomplishments include Facebook for iPhone, Firebug, iUI, and early Firefox.

After spending years in beta, Mozilla’s Weave synchronization tool is finally out in a new version 1.0. Installable as a free extension for Firefox, Weave synchronizes your bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history and open browser tabs — keeping all your personal data encrypted.

I’ve been taking Weave for a spin, and have found it to be very intuitive. As is true of XMarks, which works with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari — but concentrates primarily on syncing browser bookmarks — Weave is likely to be especially appreciated by users who want to keep passwords, preferences and personal data uniform across multiple devices. The more mobile devices you use, the more you’ll like it. Weave is available in Firefox through the Tools menu, as seen below.

Once you install Weave (you need Firefox 3.5 or greater), you need to sign in and create an account, after which preferences you save will be stored in the cloud. For those who balk at having personal information stored online, there is an option for setting Weave up on a local server.

If you, as I do, favor Firefox (or the Fennec browser from Mozilla), Weave is likely to become your synchronization tool of choice, as it’s especially attuned to preferences that you set in the browser. According to Mozilla’s post announcing it, “future releases of Weave Sync will add support for synchronizing your browser add-ons, search plugins and other customizations and ultimately everything that makes your Firefox and Web experience personal.”

Augmented reality — the idea of overlaying relevant digital information on top of a view of the real world — is, in a word, futuristic. And while many people are excited about it, many are turned off by all this fuss with not much to show for it. Out of concern that early and incomplete AR demo products make a bad name for the technology, a new startup called QderoPateo is attempting to make an end-to-end platform for augmented reality. That includes building and releasing its own phone chipset, hardware and operating system, as well as APIs, applications, advertising sales and an AR industry consortium.

Yup, you read that right, a tiny startup is making its own phone — for a market that doesn’t exist yet. But I’ll go ahead and lay out QderoPateo’s idea, as it’s notable for its ambition alone. The company was founded by Steve Chao of China and Matt Gaines of the U.S., who had been working on similar projects separately and found each other online. They raised a Series A round — “several million” from CWG Wireless — before they had actually met. Under the QderoPateo name, they have designed a phone called the Ouidoo, partnered with a Southern Chinese manufacturer, and are working with China Mobile and an unnamed U.S. carrier. They hope to have demos in the spring launch this fall at the Shanghai 2010 World Expo.

“The market has branded many things as AR that aren’t,” said Chao in a phone interview, disparaging projects that use markers such as barcodes to inform a phone of what it is seeing. “The baseline is image recognition.” For the Ouidoo device, Chao promises 2GB RAM and an 8GB chipset with two dual-core parallel processors to handle interactive 3D images. The phone uses triangulation between accelerometers, gyrometers and GPS to calculate its user’s location 10 times more accurately than GPS alone, according to the company.

In the meantime, Qdero knows it

needs to get something into the broader market — and to that end, an iPhone application called WorldLenns that demonstrates its computer vision is due next month (see screenshot).

Along with fees for device use, Qdero is building out a platform for proximity-based marketing, and to that end its 30-member team already includes salespeople.

Clearly, QderoPateo’s plan is too ambitious to work — augmented reality stands a much better chance of becoming mainstream by being incorporated by powerful device makers — but I don’t fault them for trying to give us a glimpse of the future a little sooner than that.

Related research from GigaOM Pro (subscription required): Report: Augmented Reality Today and Tomorrow