CTIA: Opera’s Jon von Tetzchner on Mobile Advertising and Adobe Flash

I spoke with Opera Software co-founder Jon von Tetzchner at CTIA today. Yesterday Opera announced that it had joined Adobe’s Open Screen Project, which aims to increase the use of Flash on all devices including mobiles.  I asked Jon what the alliance with Adobe would mean for Opera Users. He pointed out that Opera had long supported Flash in its desktop browsers, the Nintendo Wii browser and with Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile. He said that  Open Screen Project membership … Continue reading

CTIA: The Coming Tablet Revolution – It’s Not About the iPad

Yesterday’s “iPad and Tablets: Publishing and Entertainment” sessions at CTIA were an interesting experience. The main thing I took away from them is that some smart people with extensive mobile and computing industry experience believe tablets will be very big and will eventually largely replace netbooks and PCs. That was the message from several of the speakers including Zigurd Medniks who works with OEMs to adapt Android to a wide variety of devices and embedded systems. The reasoning is that … Continue reading

CTIA Day One Wrapup

Today was the first full day of CTIA.  I didn’t expect a lot of big announcements but I was wrong, there was actually a lot of news.  First up, Verzion announced its LGE rollout plans which are quite aggressive.  They plan to cover a third of the US population by year end with service lighting up in 38 cities and 60 airports.  PreCentral has the details including a list of the lucky cities and airports.  Verizon president and COO Lowell … Continue reading

Nokia Developer Day at CTIA

Update: The Developer Day presentations are now available online. I attended the Nokia Developer Day session  CTIA today.  The day long event started with  a mind boggling assortment of numbers demonstrating the the revenue opportunities that Nokia offers developers. Nokia’s much maligned Ovi Store as been redesigned  for better usability and app discovery. The improvements seem to be working. Traffic and downloads are up. The average visitor downloads 2.6 apps per visit, 8.5 per month for a total of 2.5 Million downloads per day. … Continue reading

A Busy Mobile Week Ahead in San Francisco

Mobile folks seemed to have figured out that San Francisco’s nicest weather is in late fall . At least that’s when most of the major mobile events seem to occur there. First came Mobile 2.0 and tomorrow marks the start over a week of mobile madness here in SF. Tomorrow I’ll be at GigaOm’s Mobilize. It was a great event last year and this year with its “The Future of the Mobile Web” theme and impressive line up of speakers … Continue reading

Carnival of the Mobilists #166 at WIP Jam

This week’s Carnival is at WIP Jam. It’s hosted by Caroline Lewko who has assembled a great collection of posts from the mobile blogsphere. Items include a look at the mobile privacy debate, LiMo, iPhone gaming, and an interview with Tomi Ahonen. Special congratulations to London Calling‘s Andrew Grill who won Post of the Week honors for his write up of last week’s Mobile Marketing Association event in London.  And thanks to Caroline for including my Ovi developer’s event piece. … Continue reading

CTIA: Mobile Jam Session

Today was the last day of CTIA and Caroline Lewko of Wireless industry Partnership (WIP) hosted a  Mobile Jam Session for Developers.  Caroline is getting famous for these events which she also threw this year at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and at CTIA in Las Vegas. I was at today’s event and I have to say the praise is well deserved. The Mobile Jam Session’s motto was “No ppt, no ties, no panels” which makes it sound sort of … Continue reading

CTIA Endorses 2D Barcodes

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