| Date | Title | Description |
| Sign up to see | Sign up to see | Sign up to see |
| Aug 31, 2014 | Startup Mentors — How Do You Filter Out The Good, The Bad And The Ugly? | In light of the recent brouhaha over the actions of a particular European investor who had a habit of attaching himself to accelerators as a ‘mentor’, it seems an appropriate time to do a quick rundown on the kinds of things entrepreneurs n... |
| May 10, 2013 | Russell Buckley Joins UK Government To Bring About Silicon Valley In The UK | Today in interesting moves comes the news that serial entrepreneur-turned-investor Russell Buckley – who was first employee at AdMob (which sold to Google) is joining the UK government to accelerate its policies around startups, mainly fund... |
| Feb 17, 2010 | Afilias buys ".mobi" domain, but will it help? | Alright kids, it’s time for a little game. Raise your hand if you’ve visited a website with a .com TLD today. Alright, good! Now raise your hand if you’ve been to a .net site today. Great! Here’s the last one: raise your hand if you’ve been... |
| Feb 15, 2010 | Is The .mobi Madness Finally Over? | From back when it was first suggested six or so years ago, we were quite skeptical of the need for a “mobile only” top level domain called .mobi. It wasn’t difficult to predict that devices would get better and wireless data services would ... |
| Dec 31, 2008 | Ten tech predictions for 2009 | Everyone’s predicting doom and gloom for the tech industry next year, and hey, who are we to argue? New Year’s Eve may be coming up, but when VentureBeat’s writers were feeling far from festive when we pooled our thoughts about the year ahe... |
| Dec 17, 2008 | Things That Won't Get Your Company Through The Recession: Limited, Hard To Use Free VoIP | The price of voice calling has long been moving towards zero, making the “cheap phone calls” business model a fairly unattractive one. But, as Om Malik points out, that doesn’t stop VoIP startups from traveling down the same path as previou... |
| Nov 21, 2008 | Verizon Wireless Tries To Grow The Mobile Web By Breaking It | Mobile data and web use has grown by leaps and bounds over the past year or two. One new stat says mobile data revenues are growing five times faster than voice (albeit from a much smaller base), while Facebook recently said it has 15 milli... |
| Oct 16, 2008 | Tagtext secures £1m from NorthStar Equity Investors | It’s so interesting how many social networks, struggling to monetise what they do while trying to scale (Facebook natch) almost always miss virtual goods and digital gifting as a model (an exception to this rule is Flirtomatic).
So I guess ... |
| Sep 2, 2008 | For Just The Cost Of A (Starbucks) Coffee A Day, You Could Save A Pay Phone Booth… | It’s been nearly a decade or so since the rise of mobile phones began to impact the payphone industry — and we’ve seen all sorts of creative attempts to save payphone booths in one form or another — from turning them into music download sta... |
| Jul 15, 2008 | Putting iPhone Sales In Perspective | We didn’t have much (well, anything) to say about the recent iPhone launch because it certainly seemed as though the rest of the tech press/blogworld had that one… um… thoroughly covered. However, with the glowing reports earlier this week ... |
| May 13, 2008 | Shoe Store DSW Sues Zappos For Activities Of Affiliates | There’s an interesting lawsuit coming out concerning the popular online shoe store, Zappos, that has built up a large business in part by being extremely focused on providing an excellent customer experience. DSW is a large shoe retailer wi... |
| Apr 11, 2008 | Why Offer 3G Service At All If You Limit Speeds To Less Than 2.5G? | You have to hand it to those UK mobile operators and their disdain for their own customers’ wishes. Remember how a top exec at 3 UK once declared that customers were “nuts” if they wanted to be able to access the full internet from their mo... |
| Mar 31, 2008 | Doctor Claims That Sending Too Many Text Messages Is A Sign Of Mental Problems | Remember the doctor pushing to add internet addiction as an official mental disorder? In a recent journal article, he’s now saying that one sign of such a disorder would be people who send lots of text messages. Of course, as MobHappy puts ... |
| Mar 19, 2008 | Verizon Wireless: Open In Name Only? | Verizon Wireless got plenty of attention a few months back for announcing that it would be opening its network. This was a bit of a surprise, as Verizon Wireless has been among the most closed when it came to allowing anyone to do anything ... |
| Dec 6, 2007 | AT&T Does Nothing, Convinces Reporter It Has Now 'Opened' Its Network | When Verizon Wireless announced last month its plans to “open” its network some people noticed very quickly that what Verizon Wireless was announcing didn’t sound any different from what GSM operators, like AT&T and T-Mobile already had... |
| Nov 6, 2007 | Would You Want Broadband-By-Soviet-Spy-Plane? | For many years, we’ve been hearing all sorts of bizarre and crazy ideas for different methods of offering broadband. A popular one tends to be with flying devices of some sort. For a while we heard all sorts of stories about hideous-looking... |
| Oct 31, 2007 | Frienemies? Now Verizon Wireless And Google Will Work Together? | There’s lots of talk in the news today saying that Google is pretty close on a deal to have Verizon Wireless be the first to offer Google’s new wireless bundle of software that many people are referring to as the “GPhone” (which still hasn’... |
| Oct 15, 2007 | Bluespam: Now Legal In The UK, Still Dumb Everywhere | Bluespamming — the process of sending marketing messages to mobile phones via Bluetooth — has been a pretty dumb idea from the start. You’re basically bothering people who are on the go and who don’t care to hear from and effectively invadi... |
| Oct 1, 2007 | Xero Really About To Be Bought? But, Why? | You may recall the bizarre tale of Xero Mobile, a company that was formed out of the ashes of Gizmondo, the UK gaming handheld provider whose spectacular failure revealed all sorts of sketchy details involving executives taking ridiculous s... |
| May 15, 2007 | Will Zander's Smoke and Mirrors Be Enough To Save His Job? | Motorola continues to struggle as it hunts for a device to follow up the success of the RAZR. Last week, the company’s CEO, Ed Zander, intimated that big things were in store from the company, and would be announced at an event today — in p... |
| May 8, 2007 | Sun Announces New Java-Based Mobile OS, Again Promises Write Once, Run Anywhere | A small company called SavaJe gathered some interest a few years ago when several big operators invested in it, supporting its development of a Java-based mobile operating system. It was widely believed that the operators were merely suppor... |
| Apr 11, 2007 | US Air Force Aims High With Bluespam | It seems that more and more brands and companies are trying to market themselves via Bluespamming — sending out unsolicited messages and requests for connections to nearby mobile phones via Bluetooth. Marketers that use the practice, of cou... |
| Mar 30, 2007 | ICANN Once Again Shoots Down .xxx TLD | The proposal to create a .xxx top-level domain for porn and adult content has been rejected by ICANN several times, as the group recognizes that it really isn’t a very good idea. ICANN has again rejected the proposal, saying the company beh... |
| Feb 28, 2007 | People With Cameraphones Killing Paparazzi Business Model | For quite some time, people have been setting up photo agencies to sell people’s cameraphone pictures to media outlets. While images and video from phones have, on certain occasions, been widely used, many of these agencies had previously r... |
| Feb 5, 2007 | Operators Plotting To Knock Google Out Of Mobile | When it comes to data and content services, mobile operators’ efforts are driven by control, whether it’s walled gardens or restrictive terms of service. In many cases, operators seek to lock things down and try to force, or at the very lea... |
| Jan 22, 2007 | Stock Analysts Don't Seem To Like The Changing Handset Market | Motorola last week reported its latest quarterly earnings, and investors and analysts were disappointed by falling profits, even though revenues were up and shipments of mobile phones grew strongly. Motorola’s inability to follow up the RAZ... |
| Jan 8, 2007 | .xxx Back Again: Registrar Promising Lots Of Porn, But No Spam | The idea of a porn-only .xxx domain has been an on-again, off-again tale that’s stretched over several years, and the last we’d heard about it was back in May, when ICANN rejected it following complaints from both conservatives and porn-sit... |
| Dec 21, 2006 | Well, That's One Way To Try And Boost Zune Sales | With Microsoft hard at work trying to spin low Zune sales into a positive story, it really seems to be struggling to find ways to boost sales. It’s trying — rather poorly— to market its way to success, but with an uncompelling product, that... |
| Dec 11, 2006 | Understanding Mobile 2.0 | Written by Rudy De Waele of m-trends.org and
edited by Richard MacManus. This kicks off a mini-series of posts on the topic of Mobile
2.0, which we will explore on R/WW this week.
On the eve of Le Web 3 in Paris – and one month after the We... |
| Dec 4, 2006 | Yr Bldg Is On Fire. Pls Lev Qkly. | There’s no denying that SMS alerts can be useful for some things, but it always seems a bit risky to use them for things that are truly urgent. That’s because they’re not all that reliable — plenty of SMS messages tend to disappear into the... |
| Nov 2, 2006 | Another MVNO Takes Aim At The Free-Cell-Service-With-Ads Model | A mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) called Xero Mobile is better known for its connections to the notorious Gizmondo gaming device, but its business plan is equally sketchy. It says that it will offer free phones and service to users, ... |
| Sep 28, 2006 | .mobi's Sales Yardstick Once Again Shows It's All About The Money | A number of new top-level domains have been introduced over the past few years, like .jobs, .travel and .eu, but unsurprisingly, they haven’t been particularly popular, except with domain squatters. Registrars and companies that promote new... |
| Sep 20, 2006 | Xero Trying To Convince Potential Buyers It's Worth More Than Its Name | Xero Mobile has attracted a lot of attention, not because of its plan to offer free ad-supported mobile phone service, but because of its numerous ties to the infamous Gizmondo. Not only do the two companies share a business model (a specta... |
| Sep 19, 2006 | Yahoo Dips Another Toe In DRM-Free Waters | Of the major internet media companies, Yahoo has been the most vocal in suggesting that selling DRM’d music wasn’t wise from a business standpoint. But, since the company has to bow to the content owners, it hasn’t been able to go very far ... |
| Sep 7, 2006 | Wall Street Figures Out What The Rest Of Us Already Knew About Palm | Palm yesterday warned that it would miss its quarterly sales target because of weak Treo sales, and investors responded in kind, beating the company’s share price down. This slowdown has been a long time coming, and it looks like Palm’s fai... |
| Aug 17, 2006 | Mobile-Only Domain Shows Its True Color: Green | Backers of the .mobi mobile top-level domain insist that such a domain is “needed” so people know they can access the internet from their mobile phones, and do so in a usable manner. As has been pointed out several times, a mobile-only doma... |
| Jul 27, 2006 | Mobile Operators' Different Ideas About Mobile Search | Mobile search is an area targeted by a lot of startups looking to take advantage of the high interest in it, as well as the perceived lack of attention it gets from big players like Google and Yahoo. What drives the interest from the startu... |
| Jul 13, 2006 | No, That Phone Isn't Broken, It's Just Unusable | From the “Not Surprising At All, Really” file comes a new survey out of the UK that’s found nearly two-thirds of the new mobile phones returned to a major retailer there as broken aren’t broken at all, it’s just that apparently they’re so d... |
| Jun 26, 2006 | SEC Decides It Wants A Bit More Info On This Xero Thing… | Many people have wondered why it took a car crash (and the subsequent report of stolen luxury cars, false identification, unlicensed weaponry and lots of other issues) before the folks behind Gizmondo were put in jail. After all, it was kno... |
| Jun 9, 2006 | Xero's Latest Plans: License Unproven Idea Internationally | Xero Mobile is the excessively hyped up MVNO play that many people believe is simply the second coming of Gizmondo — which apparently was something of a scam to enrich its founders. Xero has many connections to Gizmondo, and shares a basic ... |
| Jun 6, 2006 | Music Industry Doles Out More Free Advertising For Sites It Hopes To Shut Down | The entertainment industry’s been making a lot of noise lately about getting BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay shut down (briefly) last week, and has now renewed its jihad against Russian music site AllofMP3, maintaining that it’s ille... |
| May 15, 2006 | Edgar Bronfman, When Will You Ever Learn? | BusinessWeek has a fairly superficial interview with Edgar Bronfman that’s notable on only a couple points. First is his contention that things written about him in the press don’t bother him, which contrasts his later contention that “the ... |
| Apr 26, 2006 | With Cameraphones, Scorn Is Just A Snap Away | As the internet allows for the rapid diffusion of information and easy coordination of large groups of individuals, a rise in vigilantism seems inevitable. We saw this last year when Digg users helped to drive a sleazy online photo store of... |
| Apr 12, 2006 | Sketchy New Mobile Firm Does Sketchy Reverse Merger | Last month, the details started coming out on the latest in an incredibly overcrowded MVNO market, Xero, and they didn’t look pretty. The company appeared to be very closely related to Gizmondo, the failed gaming device provider, which incr... |
| Mar 20, 2006 | People Don't Want To Pay For Mobile Content | Despite uncertain consumer interest in mobile TV, operators are convinced that it will provide a big boost to that ever-important metric, ARPU. Even early efforts are showing that people won’t watch just anything because it’s on a phone, bu... |
| Mar 7, 2006 | Just Because It's Mobile, It Doesn't Change The Economics Of Content | Last summer, we wrote about the pending crisis in the ringtone market, which both music execs and mobile operator execs were so bullish about. The problem, it appeared, was that due to a little bit of success, both industries seemed to thin... |
| Feb 28, 2006 | Why Does Anyone Need Permission To Place Shift TV To A Mobile Device? | A week and a half ago, we noted that all of these hyped up fee-based mobile TV efforts were pretty much doomed, thanks to the rise of place shifting technologies from companies like SlingMedia and Orb (and, most likely, eventually directly ... |
| Feb 10, 2006 | Or Maybe That Mobile Phone Will Protect You From Germs | The great thing about technology is that, even when it causes problems, new technologies come along to help solve them. Earlier today we posted a story about mobile phones carrying germs as being a risk — and now we find out about new resea... |
| Feb 7, 2006 | Blaming Browsers For Poor Mobile Web Development | All things considered, mobile web browsing is a pretty poor experience, for any number of reasons. Poorly designed sites, frustrating navigation and of course, compatibility issues. Because of this, eWeek says that the mobile web still isn’... |
| Feb 1, 2006 | Mobile Operators — Now Empowering Stalkers | The concept of tracking people via their cellphones is a touchy one, and always raises privacy concerns. But most efforts aren’t as questionable as the new offering from a company in the UK which, after an initial approval via text message,... |
| Jan 30, 2006 | Google Says Slow Down On Mobile Ads | Advertisers are drooling in anticipation of unleashing advertising on mobile phones, but, in general, their approach leaves a lot to be desired. Unsurprisingly, mobile operators are looking to Google for leadership in the space, but it’s pr... |
| Jan 26, 2006 | Handset Market Booming | A new report says a record 810 million mobile phones were sold in 2005, a 20% increase over the previous year. Half of those sales were in emerging markets, underlining their strength, but quarterly earnings from Nokia also showed their dow... |
| Jan 23, 2006 | I Know… Let's Make A Shorter Song Snippet And Charge More For It! | Want to get a sense of how the recording industry thinks about things these days? We’ve already seen them misinterpret the success of ringtones into believing that people will pay more for mobile music, ignoring the very different way buyer... |
| Jan 17, 2006 | Brits Like Watching Mobile TV… At Home | The results of two mobile television trials in the UK have been released this week, and like previous efforts, they’re being spun to raise the level of hype surrounding the services ever higher. There’s plenty of reason to question the stat... |
| Jan 16, 2006 | When Technology Overwhelms | It seems inevitable that after the proliferation of some technology, there’s a backlash against it — or at least a news story somewhere saying there’s one. This time around, it’s the Washington Post talking up how some people feel so overwh... |
| Jan 13, 2006 | Google’s mobile homepage — the coin has dropped | Google yesterday announced the Google Personalized Home for mobile devices.
Like John Battelle, we’ve been frustrated with our Treo experience, and so were immediately intrigued by this latest Google Mobile feature, which promised to simpli... |
| Jan 3, 2006 | Separating The Content From The Device | With CES going on this week, two of the early stories coming out point out the obvious trend: media is getting more mobile every day. However, it’s not the way many mobile operators and content providers had hoped since it’s not tied to the... |
| Dec 23, 2005 | Plenty Of Wireless Stories To Unwrap Over The Weekend | Russell Buckley over at MobHappy asked me to submit a story to the end of the year “Carnival of the Mobilists,” which is an effort he helped organize to link to a bunch of different interesting blog posts about mobile technology every week.... |
| Dec 12, 2005 | 3G Subscribers Use More, Spend More | 3G users in the UK show a marked increase in their use of several mobile data services and spend an average of nearly 50 percent more each month on their mobile phone bill than 2G users, according to a new study. It’s not too surprising to ... |
| Dec 8, 2005 | Mobile Gaming Consolidation Continues | Consolidation in the mobile gaming space has been going on for a while, with companies seeing size as their greatest competitive advantage. The bigger they are and the more games they can offer, the more likely a carrier to do business with... |
| Dec 6, 2005 | So Much For The Mobility Premium In Music Downloads | When Sprint launched its mobile music download service last month, much of the attention focused on the $2.50 per song price. There were various justifications made for the $1.50 per track premium over the going rate for wired internet down... |
| Nov 23, 2005 | You Just Don't Understand Me, Man, Says 3 | In their report released yesterday about third-quarter handset sales, the analysts at Gartner said that 3G phones wouldn’t make a huge impact on Christmas sales — and unsurprisingly, UK operator 3 disagrees. A spokesman said the Gartner ana... |
| Nov 23, 2005 | Mobile Search Needs To Be Better Than Just Asking Someone | A couple of interesting posts by Russell Buckley at MobHappy help demonstrate some of the challenges that “mobile search” faces. First, there’s this growing assumption that mobile search is the same thing as local search — which Russell poi... |
| Oct 28, 2005 | Games Vs. Games | I made a couple of posts over at MobHappy about some panels on mobile games I went to at the Austin Games Conference yesterday. It’s a developers’ conference, really, so they were skewed towards creating games and how developers can sell th... |
| Jul 20, 2005 | The Return Of TheFeature.com…. Archives | I’ve been receiving a lot of emails from people who were upset with the sudden demise of TheFeature.com and the abrupt disappearance of the site. It was unfortunate the way it ended, and even more unfortunate that the site completely disapp... |
