Author Archives: Dennis Bournique

Mashable Goes Mobile – With a MashUp

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Peter Cashmore’s Mashable is a high-traffic news blog covering social networking, web 2.0 and mobile. I suspect the site’s name comes from “Mashup” – combing two (or more) web services to create a new site or service, think of TwitterVision which combines Ttwitter feeds with the Google Maps API to show Twitter updates as text bubbles on a world map.  Mashable does cover mashups, especially ones involving popular social networks. But Mashable is a lot more than mashups, with 20 … Continue reading →

Zeer – Food information and Shopping Lists

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This is an archived 2008 blog post describing the Zeer mobile webapp. Zeer shut down in late 2011. Zeer is a new web (zeer.com) and mobile  (m.zeer.com) site dedicated to groceries.  It’s full of information about branded food products. With Zeer you search for a product like “Corn Flakes” or “Green Beans” and get listings with  ingredients, nutritional information and user reviews.  Just about any branded edible or drinkable item seems to be indexed including alcoholic beverages. You can also … Continue reading →

Christian Science Monitor – Text-Only Site

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The Christian Science Monitor is a US based, independent daily news paper which is owned by the Church of Christ, Scientist. I’m not a religious person and even if I was I don’t think I’d be a Christian Scientist. I mean, substituting prayer for doctors and medicine when you get sick – no thanks. But I can’t fault the Church for publishing the Monitor. It’s a well respected news source which avoids sensationalism and jingoism and has long championed civil … Continue reading →

Carnival of the Mobilists at Mippin Blog

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Scot at the Mippin Blog has posted this week’s Carnival (mobile version). As always, it’s full of tasty posts on everything mobile. Post of the week honors go to krisse at All About Symbian for his great piece on how the capabilities of low end phones are the real indicator of how far mobile technology has advanced. Plenty of other good posts in this Carnival, which again lives up to it’s billing as “the week’s best writing on mobile”.

Opera Mini on the Samsung Instinct

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US CDMA carrier, Sprint PCS released its answer to the iPhone on June 20th. It’s called the Samsung Instinct (SCH-M800) and while it’s no match for the iPhone it’s still a nice device in many respects. With a large (but smaller than the iPhone’s) 3.1 inch touch screen with haptic feedback, no physical keyboard, threaded voicemail and SMS and a full-web browser, the Instinct matches some of the best known features of Apple’s phone and even has a few things … Continue reading →

Get Ready for the Olympics on Your Phone

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The 2008 Beijing Olympics are less than a month away, August, 8th.  There doesn’t seem to be much pre-Olympic hype as in years, at least here in the US.  But dedicated Olympics mobile sites are starting to appear.  I’ve found a dozen so far. The official site of the 2008 games Beijing2008.cn has a mobile edition in English at wap.beijing2008.cn/pams/s.do?p=507&lo=en.  It’s a “one size fits all” wml site but is quite comprehensive with news, schedules and free wallpaper downloads for … Continue reading →

Serve Mobile or Full Content to Full-Web Mobile Browsers?

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The distinction between the mobile web and the “full” web is getting fuzzy. We have millions of phones running full-web browsers such as Opera, Safari, S60Webkit and NetFront that can display almost any web site.  Not only can these browsers handle JavaScript but the latest S60WebKit can play Flash .flv videos in the browser and it plus Opera Mobile 8.65 and 9.5 do a decent job with AJAX pages. Web developers should be asking “Which version of my pages should … Continue reading →

Gizmo5 – Mobile Web IM, SMS, Email and Calls

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Gizmo5 has a new mobile web front end to their IP based Internet telephony and messaging platform. It’s sort of the Swiss Army Knife of mobile web based communications. Gizmo lets users communicate by IM on nine different networks and by SMS, e-mail and voice – all from a single integrated contact list. Gizmo5 is often compared with Skype. Both let you make free computer to computer calls and low cost calls to phones worldwide. Unlike Skype though, Gizmo5 is … Continue reading →