1. You couldn’t just ring/text whoever you’re meeting and ask them how far away they are, you just had to wait and hope you were in the right spot and had remembered the right time? 2. You actually picked up the phone and spoke to your friends, rather than having a conversation via SMS – or better still, you have a conversation in person! 3. There were no ads at the beginning of movies reminding you to turn off your phone, or better still the phone belonging to the person who forgot didn’t go off in the middle of the film! 4. People didn’t feel the need to interrupt a perfectly good constructive in person conversations by tending to a small ringing device in their pocket/bag 5. You took for granted the peace and quiet of leaving your home/office and not being at the mercy of a phone 6. Words were spelt correctly and in their entirety! 7. It was common courtesy to break up with someone, fire someone, or quit your job – in the very least via a phone call rather than via SMS 8. Most computers weren’t even hooked up to the internet! 9. Having a conversation on a cordless phone meant staying within a certain radius of the base 10. Kids rode BMX’s!

It is fair to say that mobile phones have changed our lives in a BIG way! Mobile phones are fast becoming the personal computing device of choice amongst all sectors of the community.

I had quite a difficult time coming up with the above list, trying to remember what our lives were really like before the era of the mobile phone. Fast-forwarding from that point however, the days when the primary use for mobile phones was for just making calls are rapidly disappearing into the distance behind us also!

The not-so-humble mobile phone is now your gateway to the rest of world, apart from the obvious communication purposes of your phone – you can do your banking, browse the internet, buy products and applications, Facebook, tweet, get directions, share pictures and videos, the list goes on and on…

With our reliance on using mobile phone technology – how do we need to integrate this into how we promote ourselves to our customers?

The real question I want to leave you with is this one…

What do people see when they try to access your website from their mobile phone?

Do you need to discuss you mobile web needs? Contact Get-online-now.biz today to discuss.

Oh, and I would love to hear any inclusions you might have for my above list!

People who don’t even speak the same language will soon be able to have live conversations and Google phone cameras will translate items like foreign restaurant menus in seconds, the search giant’s chief executive said today.

But Google’s constant stream of innovations is puzzling analysts and frightening telco reps, who are unsure whether the company is a friend or “frenemy”.

In his keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said the company had shifted its focus from desktops to mobiles.

“Now our programmers are doing work on mobile first, and that is in fact a change … [our] top programmers want to work on those [mobile] apps,” he said.

Mobiles become ‘your alter ego’

Schmidt said the super-fast built-in chips in modern phones and the ability to share number crunching with powerful servers in the online “cloud” meant “the phone is no longer a phone, it’s your alter ego … it’s fundamental to everything that you do”.

He noted how Google phones could already perform voice recognition and translate spoken phrases into different languages, “so why can’t I just talk on the phone to someone who doesn’t speak my language?”

“It’s coming,” he said, before remarking on other powerful mobile apps such as one that can diagnose a user’s cough via the phone’s built-in microphone.

Google demonstrated the recently launched Google Goggles app, which lets mobile users take a photo of a building, landmark or other object and then perform a search on it through Google.

He said the company would soon extend this by offering “optical character recognition paired with real-time translation”. As an example, Google performed a scenario whereby the user can take a photo of an item on a German restaurant menu and have the text translated within seconds.

“It’s like magic – all of a sudden there are things that you can do that it never even occurred to you would be possible,” Schmidt said.

He said our mobile phones now know who we are, where we are and could recognise patterns in our behaviour, so an “interesting and maybe worrisome” next step was “applications that not only know where I am but predict where I’m going”.

In a dig at Apple, Schmidt unveiled Adobe Flash support for Google’s Android platform by demonstrating videos on The New York Times website. Apple was forced to modify its advertisements for the iPad that included the website following revelations that the ads showed Flash content, which isn’t supported by the iPad.

Schmidt predicted that in three years, if not sooner, smartphones would pass global PC sales – “a remarkable achievement”.

“Mobile web adoption is proceeding at eight times faster than the equivalent point 10 years ago for the desktop,” said Schmidt.

“Half the new internet connections are for mobile devices. From a Google perspective, there are more Google searches on mobile than on desktop in emerging countries like Indonesia.”

Google reducing telcos to ‘dump pipes’

During a question and answer session following the keynote, Schmidt was forced to defend Google against claims by telcos that the company was forcing them to become “dumb pipes” providing little more than bandwidth for Google’s appilcations.

It was claimed Google, with its network-intensive applications like YouTube, benefited from operators’ networks without contributing anything to building the network infrastructure.

At the same time, Google was increasingly competing with the telcos by releasing apps such as Google Voice, which allows users to bypass the networks to make voice calls. It also sells its Nexus One phone directly to consumers online, bypassing the mobile operators.

The company also announced recently that it was building an experimental fibre-to-the-home network in parts of the US that could potentially offer a blistering 1Gbps bandwidth.

By comparison, the upcoming National Broadband Network is predicted to offer about 100Mbps.

But in an invite-only round-table discussion after the event, Schmidt said Google was purely experimenting in an effort to see what was required to bring networks up to 1Gbps, which could pave the way for more exciting applications and convince telcos to upgrade their networks.

Schmidt said definitively that Google did not intend to compete with the telcos or to build infrastructure. He did not believe Google was a threat to the telcos and in fact said the opposite was true.

“We believe that a lot of the growth that is occurring in the operators is because of the growth of sophisticated applications,” Schmidt said.

“Operators want Google to build apps that will drive people to use [their] networks.”

[Article by Asher Moses]

Asher Moses travelled to Barcelona as a guest of Samsung.

Source: smh.com.au

Do you want to harness the power of mobile marketing and promote your business? Find out how!

Using mobiles for just calls and texting is a thing of the past, as a third of Australians now check emails on their handsets and more than 70 per cent access mobile entertainment and information services.

In spite of the global financial crisis, the use of mobile phone services has continued to grow in the past year as more Australians buy internet-enabled smartphones, the 2009 Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index reveals.

Released today by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, the exhaustive survey of 3710 respondents found 36 per cent used email on their mobiles in the past 12 months, and, of those, almost half used email daily – a growth rate of 80 per cent over the previous year.

In last year’s survey, just 7 per cent of respondents accessed social networking sites from their handsets, but this figure has jumped this year to 32 per cent, with half of those accessing the sites daily.

General web browsing is also on the rise, with 21 per cent of respondents visiting websites on their mobile phones at least once a day.

Half access information services such as news, weather and movie times on their mobiles at least once a month.

Half of Australians used or bought entertainment services on their mobiles at least once a month, with games, ringtones and music downloads the three most popular categories.

In an interview, the report’s author, Dr Marisa Maio Mackay, said the results showed Australia had moved well beyond the tipping point in the consumer usage of mobile services.

Accessing the web, video, music and information on mobile phones was now well and truly mainstream.

The survey showed mobile phone service use was now “a commodity as opposed to a luxury for many Australians”.

Mackay, the director of research at m.Net, said much of the growth in mobile phone services was due to the launch of the iPhone, which “raised the standards in terms of usability across all handsets”.

Of the respondents, 9 per cent owned an iPhone.

Nokia was again the most popular brand, with 47 per cent owning a Nokia phone.

Sony Ericsson was second on 12 per cent, Samsung was third with 11 per cent and Motorola dropped from second place to sixth place on 5 per cent.

Aside from the growth in smartphones, another factor that has led to a jump in mobile internet use is the growth in adoption of faster 3G phones.

More than 63 per cent of respondents stated they had a 3/3.5G handset, while 16 per cent didn’t know.

Mackay noted that more Australians appeared to be comfortable both with making payments from their mobile phones and with mobile phone advertising, which she predicted would lead to a surge in investment in content services over the next year.”

- Asher Moses 29.09.09 smh.com.au

Find out how you can use mobile technology to promote your business – contact Get-online-now.biz to get access to Go Codes Mobile Marketing