Tag Archives: Gears

KeyToss – Best Mobile Hotel Search and Booking Site Yet?

Posted on by

I’ve been pretty dissatisfied with most of the mobile hotel search and booking sites I’ve tried. I don’t know what it is about this category but hotel sites always seem to have serious usability problems; unnecessarily complex search forms, illogically sorted results, listings for hotels that turn out to have no availability, “bait and switch” pricing or prices buried several levels deep making comparison shopping unnecessarily complex. This week KeyToss launched a new mobile hotel booking service at  h.keytoss.com. I’ve covered KeyToss before. … Continue reading →

2008 Mobile 2.0 Event San Francisco – Part 2

Posted on by

Updated: Added link to slides from presentation by Taptu’s Stefan Butlin – 13-Nov-2008. This is the second part of my wrap up from yesterday’s Mobile Web 2.0 event.  The first part covered the morning business track.  The business track continued in the afternoon but I chose to attend the afternoon developer or “Builder” Track. Caroline Lewko started things off with a welcome and some tips on marketing applications. Caroline urged developers to sell through as many channels as possibe and … Continue reading →

Mobile Browser Based Applications

Posted on by

Last week at both Mobile Web Megatrends and the CTIA Mobile Jam Session a major theme using the browser and mobile web technologies as a replacement for Java, BREW and native mobile applications. Many of the developers attending both events who have been doing Java and native applications expressed frustration with the economic and technical inefficiencies of the mobile application model.  They mentioned platform fragmentation that requires hundreds of versions of an app to support even a fraction of the market, … Continue reading →

Google Gears Opens Up Mobile LBS

Posted on by

As promised in May at Google I/O, Google has added a geolocation API to Gears. It supports IE, Firefox and Mobile Internet Explorer. When the latest Gears is installed on a compatible phone, the API provides JavaScript methods to retrieve the device’s current location using Cell IDs and/or GPS. Gears provides a standards compliant way to share your location with mobile websites, opening up all sorts of possibilities for location based mobile web services. The announcement is on the official … Continue reading →

Google I/O Wrapup

Posted on by

Photo by SeanOsteen Some rights reserved. The two days I spent Google I/O were an exciting whirlwind of running from presentation to presentation, and much to my surprise, eating! I didn’t think I’d ever praise the food at a tech conference but as a couple Googlers pointed out, with Google the food is always good. The usual conference fare is a box lunch consisting of a sandwich, apple, bag of chips and cookie. Not for I/O though, Google set up … Continue reading →