Author Archives: Dennis Bournique

CTIA Endorses 2D Barcodes

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Today the CTIA announced a “Camera-Phone Based Barcode Scanning White Paper” (PDF) at the morning keynote. There was a demonstration of scanning a bar code with a camera phone to launch a video on the handset. The white paper describes a somewhat complicated indirect access architecture where the code scanning application sends an identifier to a central “Clearing House” which routes it to a “Campaign Manager” associated with a particular service.  The Campaign Manager then sends a message to the handset application directing it … Continue reading →

CTIA: Day One

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I’m at CTIA in San Francisco today.  Just attended the keynote and Yahoo press conference. Yahoo made a couple of big announcements at the keynote today. OneConnect is live, only on the iPhone so far, but Java, S60 and Windows Mobile support is coming by year end. The Blueprint widget platform has been extended with runtimes that support creating stand alone mobile applications and mobile websites using the same Blueprint markup language as Yahoo Mobile widgets. The apps are free standing.  … Continue reading →

CTIA: Make you Mobile Site Visible With Meta Data

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I’m at CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment, the big, carrier centric trade show this week. Today was the pre-show conference day with multiple tracks on different areas of mobile.  I attended most of the “Mobile Web Strategies” track sessions.  There were a number of interesting panels and presentations but the one that most impressed me was by Bena Roberts, of Gomo News and Michael “Luni” Libes from Medio systems who announced a new meta data format designed to increase the … Continue reading →

Microsoft to Use InfoGin’s Transcoder

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InfoGin announced today that they have signed an agreement to provide data transformation services for Microsoft’s Live Mobile Search.  Microsoft had been using an in-house transcoding engine for Live Search. InfoGin has one of the best of the current crop of transcoders.  It partially converts Adobe Flash content by rendering Flash animations as animated gifs and allowing users to follow URL links within Flash. What I like best about InfoGin though is that they do not alter the HTTP User … Continue reading →

Content is King on Mobile Too

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I attended Mobile Web Megatrends today in Berkeley.  The one day conference was organized by Ajit Jaokar and included an amazing 18 presentations packed into one day of total mobile web immersion.  A highlight of the day was meeting a couple of mobile experts, bloggers and authors I’ve enjoyed reading for years, Barbara Ballard and Michael Mace. There were a lot of great talks and Q&A  at the conference.  It’s impossible for me to cover them all in even a … Continue reading →

Carnival of the Mobilists #140

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This week the Carnival is hosted by Judy Breck at GoldenSwamp. In the best blog carnival tradition, Judy has selected and linked to a dozen of the best recent blog posts on mobile topics. There’s always something for everyone at the Carnival and this week is no exception  with posts on topics as varied as mobile SEO, the evolving mobile ecosystem, Twitter, mobile broadband, mobile social networking, the role of mobile phomes in education, the US presidential election and NFC … Continue reading →

Nciku – Mobile English/Chinese Dictionary

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Nciku Mobile (m.nciku.com) is an English/Chinese, Chinese/English online mobile dictionary. It’s a simple but effective tool  providing translations of English words into Chinese and vice/versa.  Nciku supports entry and display of simplified Chinese characters and Pinyin, the familiar representation ( Beijing and Ni hao, for example) of Chinese in the Roman alphabet. In addition to literal translations to and from Pinyin and Chinese characters, Nciku provides phonetic pronunciation of English words and  examples using the translated words in sentences.  Nciku … Continue reading →

Just Go – Custom Mobile Travel Guides

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Just Go Guides, a new service from Portugal’s ApiApi, Lda offers a couple of mobile based alternatives to traditional paper or electronic travel guidebooks. One, JustGoGuides.mobi, is traditional mobile web based travel guide. The other is more innovative, an on-demand mobile travel guidebook publishing service. Just Go, which covers Mexican and Central and South American destinations, lets you create free custom travel guides for just the specific countries, cities and dates of your trip. The downloadable guides are offered as … Continue reading →