New Florence. New Renaissance.

Cars as WiFi hotspots

"UConnect Web will be offered in most 2009 Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep vehicles starting in August. The in-vehicle router will cost $449, plus installation of up to $50. Mobile Web access for it will require a $29-a-month subscription, after $35 for activation, through provider Autonet Mobile.

The service could catapult Chrysler back into the race against General Motors and Ford Motor for advanced personal technology in cars.

Ford appears to have a hit in its Microsoft-developed Sync system for controlling personal electronic devices. Ford plans to introduce a built-in Internet system aimed at the contractor market in the new 2009 F-150 pickup when the truck goes on sale in late fall."

USA Today

iPhone 2.0!

Packed with new features - Longer battery than other 3G Phones. GPS. 3G 36% quicker than other phones. Much cheaper than other PDAs.

But just as impressive - lots of attractive new applications for enterprises. Better, more secure support for corporate email. MS Office document read capabilities. Several new  verticals apps. Typepad. Whole SDK ecosystem. Software distribution capabilities. Support for several Asian language scripts. GPS facilitating location aware services. Stacey at GigaOm has fuller list of applications.

No wonder, "35 percent of the Fortune 500 has participated in the iPhone 2.0 beta program. The top 5 banks, the top 5 securities firms, 6 or 7 top airlines and other industries such as entertainment and pharmaceuticals."

Photo Credit - USA Today

"A global army of Foneras"

"In Mr. Varsavsky’s approach, FON’s business is subsidized by non-Foneros — passing Web surfers who buy time for access to the network — which he can then share with FON’s customers. The approach is different from that of Boingo, a Wi-Fi aggregator based in Los Angeles that charges users a monthly fee for using hotspots while they are traveling.

Yet both FON and Boingo have faced significant resistance from Internet service providers that carefully restrict access to their customers, leaving the idea of a seamless wireless Internet based on Wi-Fi technology an unfulfilled dream so far."

New York Times

VoIP on mobile phones

Jason Harris at GigaOm provides a handy update on VoIP services on the go

Skype Mobile
3 Skypephone
iSkoot
Truphone
Fring
Talkonaut
Nimbuzz
Gizmo5

More Fixed-Mobile Convergence

Om Malik writes about Vodafone "Station" and how worldwide other carriers are pursuing similar strategies

"In US, T-Mobile has offered similar service for voice calls, piggy backing on other people’s broadband connections. AT&T which is going to be soon pushing a 3G version of iPhone will be a good candidate for offering similar boxes. Such a device helps them overcome coverage issues, and at the same time takes a load off their wireless backhaul network. More importantly, it makes it easy enough for them to sell a bundled service and take market share away from cable companies. When looked through that prism, now you understand why AT&T honchos are always talking about Wireless and why Cable Companies are ready to spend billions to go wireless."

The New HTC Touch Diamond

Could this be the iPhone Killer? PhoneMag has details on the new HTC offering.


TechDigest has comparisons between the Touch Diamond and the iPhone.

I currently have the AT&T Tilt, a HTC predecessor, and before that had the HTC 8125, so I would lean towards the HTC, but let's not forget iPhone 2 will catch up in at least some features such as 3G support, GPS, etc.this summer

Virtualization of Mobile devices

"Handset makers could use virtualization to more easily replicate the features found in one another's devices and confront the threat posed by Apple, which introduced the iPhone in 2007. Virtualization could also help cell-phone makers offer more features at a lower price.

Currently, programmers have to rewrite every application—be it a game, social networking service, or other feature—for each of the various operating systems...So Motorola could grab a Web-browsing application written for one system, an e-mail application for another, and calling features designed for a third OS, and elegantly integrate them onto one phone. That could significantly speed up the phone-design process.

Virtualization also helps a phone run with fewer chips. Today, mobile phones typically require a combination of a baseband processor, which enables the phone to communicate; an applications processor, responsible for running applications like e-mail; and a multimedia chip, which handles graphics, audio, and video. But a virtualized phone can accomplish all of the above with just one or two processors instead of three.

Virtualization software will help (enhance security by letting) operators give preference to "trusted" applications."

BusinessWeek

Yahoo! rolls out mobile voice search

"...technology from vlingo, a start-up based in Cambridge, Mass., would allow people who have BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series to scour the Web with their voice, using Yahoo's mobile search engine, known as oneSearch."

San Jose Mercury News

Sending video to a moving target

"LG Electronics and Samsung have both figured out how to send video to a moving target, like a headrest TV or a mobile phone. One key trick is overcoming a problem called dynamic multipath, the ever-changing ricochet of radio waves as they bounce off buildings and moving vehicles. This can cause the same television signal to hit an antenna dozens of times—which confounds the TV tuner and leads to a frozen or black screen. The new mobile broadcasts embed within the transmission extra code that the tuner uses to determine how the signal got jumbled and then re-create the original data. It works: Video played flawlessly during our road tests in traffic-choked downtown Las Vegas and on a nearby highway."

Popular Science

Mobility Life Cycle Management

Like PCs in the 80s, mobile devices are breeding like rabbits in enterprises. Beyond the obvious asset management challenge, these devices now come with separate price tags for all kinds of services - from voice to global roaming to navigation. As I wrote here, the TCO of the iPhone over 5 years could be a 5 digit budget number - most of it in carrier charges. Multiply that by an increasingly mobile workforce, not just in sales, and pretty soon you will see the term rogue spending replaced by nomadic computing.

So it was good to catch up with the folks from Visage which offers a SaaS product, MobilityCentral. It aims to help enterprises get a grip on the mobile madness - by individual or by group of individuals. While you can get slice and dice reports from the carriers, and you can hire telecom expense management firms to audit those bills,  MobilityCentral allows for much more carrier-neutral, pervasive analytics of the mobile spend and for related policy management.

Dennis Howlett also has a write up here. Prices list at $ 5 per user a month, with volume discounts.