Barcle is a recent entrant, launched in November 2007, in the crowded field of mobile web price comparison and shopping. They have 900 merchant partners including Best Buy, TigerDirect and B. Dalton. This week Walmart, the biggest US retailer, partnered with Barcle. The “Bar” in the name refers to barcodes. You can search by entering the 8, 12 or 13 digit number that appears under the UPC barcode on most consumer products. This is a great idea for mobile as … Continue reading
Image: Yahoo Yahoo has officially opened their mobile Widget platform to developers, including the ability to test and submit widgets. The announcement is on the Yahoo Mobile Developer Platform Blog. To get started, download the SDK from the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Home. It contains a Developer’s Guide documenting the XML based Blueprint language with sample code, examples and tips. The SDK also has a sample PHP script which dynamically generates Blueprint code for a Twitter Widget. For peer to peer … Continue reading
Found on the Mobile Web is an occasional WAP Review feature listing newly added and updated sites on the YesWAP.com mobile portal and WapReview mobile site directory. With these latest additions the directory and portal now list 1064 mobile sites. Sports Eurosport (m.eurosport.com) Eurosport Mobile has a new url and a redesigned and much improved site. The front page has been expanded from 5 headlines with daily updates to 10 headlines updated every few minutes and finally there is LIVE … Continue reading
Carnival of the Mobilists 110 has been posted at Mobile Messaging 2.0 by host Debi Jones. This week’s theme is the MWC (Mobile World Congress), THE mobile tradeshow which kicked off today in Barcelona. The Carnival has previews of the MWC and posts on the iPhone, application development, open networks and devices and a proposal for a multi-media Twitter. Take a look: Carnival of the Mobilists #110
It looks like VeloNews.com, the US based weekly print newspaper of competitive cycling has launched a proper mobile site. The URL is mobile.velonews.com and it seems to have replaced the old velonews.com/live_mobile site which carried live race reports from a half dozen or so of the bigest races each year but nothing else. The new VeloNews Mobile is updated constantly and mirrors the content of the Top Stories section of Velonews.com. One thing that’s great about VeloNews Mobile is that … Continue reading
It looks like mobile 2D barcodes are starting to catch on in Europe at least. When I was in Japan a couple of years ago they were everywhere, on handbills, maps, business cards, product packaging and in magazines. The idea is that you point a camera phone at a barcode and take a picture. Software in the phone decodes the image and takes you to a mobile website, downloads a ringtone or adds contact information to your phone’s address book. … Continue reading
There’s a lot of buzz about openness lately. Google is developing Android, an open mobile operating system. The three biggest US mobile operators have pledged to “open” their networks. So what does this really mean for users and developers? I can’t predict what the networks and device makers will actually do but I’ve been thinking a lot about openness means to me as a user and as a developer. This post is an attempt to define what I expect from … Continue reading
Opera made a significant upgrade to their Opera Mini server software last night. Here’s the changelog: Added a simple UI to the server-side preferences that exists. Go to ‘opera:config’ to configure some settings. Tweaked phonenumber detection, there should be somewhat fewer false positives now, but you can now also disable the feature on the opera:config page. Increased the default timeouts to 40 seconds from 20. Updated the HTML rendering engine to be similar to the latest Opera 9.5 weekly release. … Continue reading