Written on May 28, 2008 – 1:07 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Swedish start-up Squace has introduced a new way of browsing the internet on your mobile. They’ve developed a service that allows users to browse without typing. Instead of a list of headlines, Squace shows a grid of little squares.
Each square is linked to a Web service such as a newsfeed, web site, game or widget. When you hover over one of these squares, a pop-up revealing the connected content and share feature appears. With a click, users open a new page with the desired content. According to the founder, Aage Reerslev, it’s a “game-changer”.
He might be right. Mobile browsing isn’t easy for not so tech-savvy people and Squace has been putting quite some effort in developing a new way of intuitive browsing. The company was founded in 2006 and privately funded by more than 30 private investors. While developing the service, it was thoroughly tested. In a study by the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, participants were asked to solve 10 information-searching problems. With Squace, they did it with up to 88 percent fewer clicks in nine out of ten problems, and up to 78 percent faster in eight out of ten problems, compared with a leading carrier’s mobile Internet portal and software.
Although the statistics are impressive, I’m not totally feeling this new way of browsing yet. Especially when it comes to news, I prefer to see a list of headlines. It’s quicker for me to scroll to list like this than to hover over a dozen squares. Yet the sharing function does gets me excited. With a few clicks, my friends receive the content I want to show them. Also, I can easily bookmark interesting pages. But of all of this is only worth it if my friends join. How can I lure them into the world of Squace? Maybe they would come and check it out if I could put a widget with my shared Squace items on my blog. Solutions like these will help Squace to become viral. There’s your new top priority, Squace team.
I hope you like that post!
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on May 18, 2008 – 2:40 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When something happens in my life that I find noteworthy enough to share with family, friends, business relations and “weak ties”, I post it to Twitter. Sometimes words are not enough and I post a photo using Mobypicture. So my sharing needs are full-filled. Yet the majority of people lack this fulfillment, mostly because they don’t use Twitter. For those folks, Ian Kilpatrick has built BeenUp2. (Update: Layton Wedgeworth is also one of the site’s founding fathers.)
On BeenUp2, users can send photos of life’s special moments to their profile by using a phone, e-mail or an old-fashioned uploader. There’s also an iPhone app for all you hipsters out there. As soon as the pic is live, the “chit-chat” can begin as other people may post comments on your photo. Sounds familiar right? Twitter for visually-minded people?
There are some differences though. For example, when you’re an active Twitter user, your messages and photos just disappear in a dull older/ newer post archives. BeenUp2 however, creates a diary for those nostalgic moments. There’s also a geotag feature which makes it possible to browse around the globe. But to be honest with you, Flickr already offers these services. And when it comes down to the archives, there’s probably already a Twitter app for it (if not, I guess now there’ll be one pretty soon).
If somebody came up to me and asked where he could share special moments, I would tell him to adopt today’s standards and sign up for Twitter, which he should connect to Flickr by using a service like Mobypicture. Even though BeenUp2 is really easy to use, it’s just one service too many. The web is already cluttered enough. Like Lani from KillerStartups noted:
Will users grow tired of the same pic/video sharing/ social networking offers currently flooding the market?
There is a large group of people who think that the future of the web is in mobile. Mobile applications, mobile websites, mobile gadgets and mobile technologies. Although I agree that mobile is an interesting market I’m just not that excited by it. Sure, everything will become mobile. But everything will also become bigger, faster and more interactive.
There are some opportunities there but as far as I can tell this is just a natural extension or next step for the web and not a whole new phenomena that changes everything. In a way the iPhone is a nice illustration for this. It has a ‘normal’ web browser and there is no need to enhance (or dumb down) your website to make it look good on this device. And sure, location based information is cool. But how cool is it exactly? The examples (”find a restaurant near you!!!”) are often dull and not very scalable (how often do YOU actually need to find a restaurant near you?).
Still, a lot of people are going to make a lot of money with new mobile applications and I’m sure that right now I just miss the imagination to see where this is all leading us to. I wouldn’t be the first:
‘In the 1980s, McKinsey & Co forecast a world maket of 900,000 phones by the year 2000. Today, 900,000 handsets are sold every three days’.
Here is a nice video that illustrates the evolution of mobile phones since 1985. Besides the cute images there are also some great quotes, like the one above, in there:
Oh, who can tell me (without looking it up in the IMDB!) what the first movie was that featured a mobile phone?
Written on May 17, 2008 – 6:30 pm Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Despite being a tech geek I have not used a mobile phone more that about 10 times in my entire life (shock horror). They just never really interested me but I guess it says more about my social ineptness than it does about mobile phones.
But an odd correlation, I had the same feeling about computers as they went through the Microsoft business tools era (Word, Excel, Quickbooks et cetera), as a developer back then computers just didn’t get me going, so I spent the nineties in electronics making audio products.
Mobile live stream battle on SXSW 2008: Scoble vs. Pistachio
Despite being an early hacker on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum at about age 14, computers really only got interesting for me with the arrival of the Internet, then when broadband arrived I got ‘really excited’.
But in the last few months something has changed the landscape so dramatically in the mobile market that I see a paradigm shift similar to the above where an entirely new species of mobile device evolves which is much more attractive than has been previously seen. Obviously I’m not alone having these thoughts, as we sit here thousands of others are having the same realizations, not least those emanating from Adobe’s crystal ball.
So after teasing Sarah Lacy I’m checking out the comments of Arrington’s interview with Lacy which was streamed live through a mobile via Qik and looking through, there’s loads of trolls getting into a twist about the quality of the stream. Being a bit of an expert in the sound department, immediately I see obvious errors and solution.
Written on May 13, 2008 – 1:44 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The guys from Skype have a bad day today, as two mobile industry experts from a Dutch town called Rotterdam launched a mobile application that brings free mobile VoIP calling to 500 hundred different types of mobile phones. Wow! This means that users can make calls around 50 countries and just pay for their local data usage. So you’d better use a flat-rate data plan.
The new Nimbuzz mobile VoIP application works worldwide on Nokia Symbian Series 60 devices when connected using a 3G or Wifi network - with a Windows Mobile offering for release in June. For GPRS/EDGE connections, or when using Java-enabled phones, Nimbuzz also offers its “hybrid-VoIP” solution, which counts for the 50 countries.
Co-editors Boris and Patrick at Nimbuzz’s HQ in Rotterdam
Although the Skype-bashing part is the most interesting, I gladly tell you that Nimbuzz’s app also includes conference calling, instant messaging, chat and group chat, and photo and file sending across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber and ICQ, plus 23 social networks, including Facebook and Myspace. Founder Evert Jaap Lugt received VC and strategic funding since 2006 by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype investor), Naspers/MIH (Tencent, Mail.ru, Gadu-Gadu, Mweb, Sanook, Tradus) and Holtzbrinck (StudiVZ).
My expectation that for a while, this service will remain a niche thing - they now have 500,000 beta users -, yet after some enthusiastic “you gotta try this” conversations, the masses might pick it up. I know that for a lot of people downloading and installing a mobile app is still little too much to ask, but when Nimbuzz users tell them they can call for free, they’ll probably give it a shot.
The most interesting question here is: what will Skype do? Launch a similar new-and-improved service? Might Nimbuzz become really successful and Skype’s mother company eBay take the advice of their ‘Disruptive Innovator’ Rolf Skyberg - make Skype the third pillar in the eBay empire -, then an acquisition could be in sight. Don’t you also just love to speculate about the next (mobile) web?
Written on May 5, 2008 – 5:12 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Associated Press - one of world’s largest news wires - will launch a service on Monday that brings local news stories to your phone. AP teamed up with 100 newspapers to update readers about the latest developments in their local area by using ZIP/ postal codes. The PR circus is focused on the iPhone, as AP and Apple also took care of an iPhone-optimized widget (see iphone.com/webapps).
“We are excited to offer the first comprehensive mobile news web app and to have been selected by Apple as a Staff Pick. With a new generation of mobile devices on the market, like the iPhone, the time is right for AP to introduce a product that brings together our members’ local news brands with AP’s unrivaled coverage of international and national events,” said Jane Seagrave, AP’s senior vice president of global product development in a statement.
At first you might think, “what else is new?”. Yet existing services like Google Mobile News don’t offer you local stories in such a sophisticated way. And they weren’t smart enough to jump on the iPhone-means-free-publicity train.
Earlier today I wrote a story about the rise of mobile TV. I noted that other news services make 100-second news broadcasts on a phone quite useless. Well… AP just announced another one.
Written on May 5, 2008 – 10:50 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The New York Times business section opens today with an interesting story about mobile TV. For those of you who think this is a service born for the niche - except for Asia, you seem to be mistaking. Alright, in the US it is: Verizon Wireless has been offering this service since March 2007, but it has fewer than 100,000 paying viewers. However, some European countries have adopted the service entusiastically — in Switzerland, 40,000 people watch news broadcasts on a daily basis, and a million Italians pay 19 euros a month to watch a dozen mobile TV channels.
Several American and European investors have started to expand the infrastructure on which mobile TV relies, which the New York Times describes as “special transmission towers that beam to tiny receivers in the mobile phones.” In the UK, France and Germany, mobile video services like these are on their way. AT&T is shaking things up in the US by launching a mobile TV service as well.
These rapid developments exceed the expectations of experts. A year ago, research firm Screen Digest predicted that the adoption of mobile TV services in the UK might have to wait until 2012, due to a shortage of spectrum. The new infrastructure might speeds things up.
The big question remains though: who will watch mobile TV? People stuck in traffic jams or public transport? And still, when caught in a situation like this, wouldn’t you prefer an episode of Seinfeld or anything but a news broadcast? I suspect that people have already found their sources for news: the TV bulletin in the morning, mobile news sites, screens in public transport and for that matter, the newspapers. Who would want to pay another 20 euros for 100 seconds of news broadcasts?
Written on April 20, 2008 – 11:00 am Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post by mobile marketeer Peter Evers
After Russell Beattie’s post about the end of Mowser, a mobile transcoder, last Monday, a lot of bloggers reacted fiercely on his controversial viewpoints about the end of the mobile web. As a mobile marketing professional I feel kind of obliged to write about my view on the future of the mobile web.
Let’s start with a short recap about what happened this week. On Monday Russell Beattie, founder of Mowser, an application that transcodes normal websites to mobile websites, announced that Mowser has stopped. In this very personal article Russell came up with different reasons for the end of Mowser, such as lack of funding and personal debts but mostly Russell’s lack of confidence in the future of the mobile web. Russell states:
…I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to. In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I’m tired of wasting my time…
With this kind of powerful expressions, the commotion he caused in the blogosphere doesn’t come as a surprise. Almost every mobile blog I’m subscribed to wrote about it. Especially the articles at MobHappy, MobileMarketingWatch and mocoNews.net were worth reading, But what is Russell actually saying? If you read his text carefully you might have understood that the thing he isn’t confident about is browsing mobile-only websites on two-inch screens.
I can say that I don’t believe in mobile-only websites with no or little PC presence too. If a website is only visible on a phone and not or hardly available on a PC, people probably will not know about its presence.
Written on May 28, 2008 – 1:07 pm
He might be right. Mobile browsing isn’t easy for not so tech-savvy people and Squace has been putting quite some effort in developing a new way of intuitive browsing. The company was founded in 2006 and privately funded by more than 30 private investors. While developing the service, it was thoroughly tested. In a study by the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, participants were asked to solve 10 information-searching problems. With Squace, they did it with up to 88 percent fewer clicks in nine out of ten problems, and up to 78 percent faster in eight out of ten problems, compared with a leading carrier’s mobile Internet portal and software.
On BeenUp2, users can send photos of life’s special moments to their profile by using a phone, e-mail or an old-fashioned uploader. There’s also an 
Written on May 17, 2008 – 7:25 pm
There is a large group of people 
Written on May 17, 2008 – 6:30 pm
Written on April 20, 2008 – 11:00 am
After Russell Beattie’s 
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
Twitter
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
