Vic demo @ MWC 09: The browser is the platform

I will post more on my thoughts on the Mobile World Congress, but I did want to share this video of Vic Gundotra's demo of Google Maps on the Palm Pre...



Google has been talking for a long time of the browser as the platform... Wekbit + HTML 5 plus millions of iPhones, Android, Pres (and yes eventually Nokia's) make this statement a reality.

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• HTML 5 and Gmail (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
• HTML5 Enabled Gmail: What Does it Mean (mashable.com)
• Google Maps on Palm Pre; Gmail on iPhone (ajaxian.com)
• Google demos offline Gmail for iPhone, Android at MWC (engadget.com)

Google Adwords supports iPhone and Android

Today Google's mobile team announced the ability for all of our Adwords advertisers to target their desktop ads to high-end (Android and iPhone) devices.

There is a lot of speculation about how many advertisers Adwords has. The point, however, is that what is arguably the front end for the broadest online advertising platform now enables all of its advertisers to deliver appropriate ads (and deliver associated ROI).

I believe that one of the primary issues with mobile advertising has been the challenge of educating broad-based advertisers about how to discover the medium, create appropriate ads for the medium and track said ads' performance. That all goes away... Think about the implication of 10+ million iphones with Google ads and 30x the search usage of a typical device across many, many advertisers...

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• Mobile Advertising Set To Go Big This Year?

iPhone surpasses Windows Mobile

Endgadget reports that iPhone has surpassed Windows Mobile sales.

Back in May, 2007 Ballmer stated "the future of the mobile handset business will primarily depend on software influence rather than hardware."

Android, RIM, Nokia open sourcing Symbian...I am not sure the world of dollars-a-pop mobile OSs supports Ballmers assessment.

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Top mobile searches

AOL and Yahoo released information on the top mobile searches of the year and as I've stated publicly before, many of them are "directional" queries using a search box to reach a destination...in these cases social networks as a destination.

Moconews summarized the news and highlighted AOL's top queries as being MySpace, AIM, iPhone, MocoSpace and Facebook.

Yahoo's top queries were MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist, "movies" and "weather."

What does this teach us?
1) That mobile users want to find not browse
2) That people want to get their pokes, PMs and winks from their social graphs on their phone (see success of new 3 phone with facebook)
3) That I spend way too much time reading news about mobile....

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Apple app store most downloaded apps

Moconews reports that Apple released a list of the top iPhone app store apps... Happy to report that Lightsaber made it to the top. A great example of the self-selection of geeks who are actually buying and using the iPhone!

Mobile advertising piece in Venturebeat

Venturebeat put together an interesting post on mobile advertising and the effects of the downturn.
Their point is that the iPhone is driving growth (as Admob, Google and other have touted publicly), and that advertisers are transitioning from "testing" the medium to actually planning spend against it.

Having interacted with dozens of agencies and advertisers over the past year, I continue to feel that mobile is seen as "experimental" for now, but with everyone eyeing iPhone, Android and other "true-web" phones to see how quickly they get a significant install base.

If you can have 100 million devices that leverage the technology (banner ads, tracking, analytics, targetting) of the web AND provide location based targetting and a deep personal attachment for users, then we have a compelling medium.

As always, I am very bullish on mobile and I am glad to see others begin to agree.

Google mobile app with voice

In case you have been hiding under a technology rock you might not have noticed that this week Google launched an update to its Google Mobile App for the iPhone with voice support.

This is what Fortune said: "For tech bloggers, this was bigger than Obama."

To summarize what this is: Install app on your iPhone, click on nice blu Google logo, bring iPhone up to your ear, speak query, marvel as Google brings the result back to you.

What is happening behind the scenes: Using the accelerometer it determines that you are bringing the phone to your ear, and starts listening for your query. It takes your query (with some fairy dust to take into account the noise around you) and brings back results in the usual web-based format.

The media went mad on this. The NYT had a big article on it on Friday (before it launched) and bloggers picked it up

Google's iPhone app gets a voice: Yours
Google. iPhone. Voice search. Awesome. (If it works.)

As the application did not launch on the Apple store some even started speculating on some conspiracy:
Google Speech recognition app for iPhone delayed by Apple?
Even Google Gets Shafted By Apple's Ridiculous App-Approval Process

And then Monday, all was well as Apple made the app available and we posted our official post about the app along with a video by the Product Manager that built it, Mike LeBeau who is now world famous and has his own Facebook fan club:

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Mobile browser test

If you have heard anything from Google on mobile over the past year, it has probably centered on the importance of the browser (and unlimited data plans) in driving true mobile internet adoption.

Gizmodo just did a great test on the major Smartphone browsers side by side. In summary, the iPhone gets a not-undexpected A- with the Android G1 coming in second with a B+. Nokia rounds out the Webkit browsers with a B-. I was surprised by his B-/C+ for the BB Bold (no way!) but highly supportive of the big fat F for pocket Internet Explorer.

SGN ifun app - links mobile/social apps

I am in tech geekdom heaven... I just installed and played with SGN's new application for the iPhone (iFun Golf). To the consumer, this simple iphone app allows you to use your iPhone much like a Wii controller to swing a golf club. The difference is that you are using your iphone to control a game on your PC screen.

On the backend, it's social network apps (SGN's) meets social paltforms (Facebook Connect) meets iPhone apps. Throw in a few ads (powered by Admob) and an ability to buy games and new courses (via Paypal from the device) and it's a VC's social network monetization dream!

Zynga just launched a phone version of its Live Poker game also connecting the iPhone user to players using the app via social networks.

Geekdom, web 2.0ish heaven indeed!

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Mobclix and iPhone apps

I came across Mobclix a month ago. They had just succesfuly presented at TechCrunch50 and were selected as finalists for Seedcamp as well

A good idea with brilliant timing, their service enables data analytics for iPhone (and eventually other platforms) applications.

Given that Apple provides such limited information to developers (and the industry in general) their dashboards are like gold. Borrowing from Admob's playbook they are becoming *the* source for insight into Apple apps.

9to5mac has a post on Mobclix as well outlinging the distribution of apps by category:

• Games: 1,027 (31.4%)
• Utilities: 476 (13.5%)
• Entertainment: 407 (12.4%)
• Productivity: 240 (7.3%)
• Education: 213 (6.5%)
• Books: 202 (6.2%)
• Reference: 191 (5.8%)
• Travel: 184 (5.6%)
• Healthcare + Fitness: 176 (5.4%)
• Lifestyle: 158 (4.8%)

I think these guys might be onto something... its no longer enough to know the install base of Symbian vs WinMo vs J2ME enabled handsets... its about the use that each platform will drive.