On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008, it was impossible not to correlate the eloquence and optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in the USA about the future. Obama grasped the nettle full-on. "We are poised for progress," he declared, adding: "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing." As one blogger expressed it, though - and he is a former Goldman Sachs trader called Tyler Durden, so he ought to know wheref he speaks: "There was a massive pink elephant in the room called reality though." Durden's gripe is with what he deems to be the unreality of Obama's praising Google and Facebook so highly in an Ameri... (more)

Enterprise Mobility in Asia: News Round-Up

Welcome to Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly, an online newsletter that consists of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility in Asia.  Asia is predicted to be the fastest area of growth for enterprise mobility between now and 2016. Bharti Airtel has launched India’s first 4G Time Division Long Term Evolution network in Kolkata, according to the Economic Times.  Future LTE networks are planned for the Karntaka, Punjab and Maharashtra circles. Read Original Content and Read More Original Content A new system incorporated by the Bay Hotel in Singapore will allow guests to avoid check-in lines by using a mobile phone check-in system developed by UbiQ Global Solutions. Read Original Content Trunkbow, in cooperation with China Unicom, has deployed a new terminal-based mobile payment solutions platform in the Sichuan Province, with services ex... (more)

Omnichannel Digital Transformation By @TheEbizWizard | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

Omnichannel Digital Transformation for Everyone With the explosion of consumer technology options, digital transformation has upended retail more so than any other industry. From the retailer’s perspective, every device, every app, every digital interaction is an opportunity to communicate a brand, to present a value proposition, and most importantly, to drive home a sale. Perhaps the most important lesson these retailers learned from the dot.com explosion of the 1990s is that the web was first and foremost a marketing channel – a way of connecting seller to buyer. With this realization, retailers now had the appropriate context for extending multichannel retail strategies. After all, catalog, call center, and in-store were familiar, tried-and-true retail channels, and the web simply added one more. (See this article I wrote back in 2001 for some insight into the mu... (more)

Comdex Bites the Vegas Dust

The word came through the morning newspaper: there will be no Comdex this year. It has been "postponed" until 2005. I doubt it. Rather, this sounds like the death knell for the one event that described the arc of the personal computer business, from its informal, hippiefied beginnings in 1979, through an exuberant decade running from the late 80s through the late 90s, to some alarming wretched excess in 2000, to its swift and apparently fatal downfall in the 21st century. Let me clear about something right up front: Comdex never won any friends. For years it was a must-attend event for the industry, but one that was often dreaded, usually loathed, and tolerable only with solid expense accounts that covered rented drivers, golf, and nights at the Crazy Horse or Olympic Gardens. Remember the 80s? In the 80s, as the show started to gather serious steam, Las Vegas was... (more)

Can Opera Mini Help Operators Generate Revenue From Real Mobile Browsing?

Forget Web surfing only on advanced phones capable of running a browser; now comes Opera Mini, a small Java client capable of running on mid-tier and even low-tier phones - with the rest being taken care of by the remotely located Opera Mini server. With Opera Mini you don't have to have an advanced phone to surf the Web, which means that most people can use it with their existing phone," said Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "Installing Opera Mini is as easy as installing a ringtone," von Tetzchner (pictured) continued. "Users simply send an SMS or visit a link through their WAP browser to receive it, and they are online in an instant." Because Opera Mini enables Web access on low- and mid-tier phones, he adds, operators should be able dramatically increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) across their entire customer base. "It will stimulate the usage o... (more)

DIRECTV Integrates SMS Into Katrina Disaster Relief

DIRECTV has launched a dedicated 24/7 “Hurricane Katrina Information” channel that is providing vital information concerning hurricane Katrina relief and recovery efforts to evacuees in shelters across the Gulf Coast as well as to DIRECTV viewers nationwide. Since it went live, The Hurricane Katrina Information channel has been providing viewers with the ability to send text messages to family and friends separated by the hurricane and its aftermath – messages are scrolled across the bottom of the television screen on DIRECTV channel 100. To place a message on this channel for family and friends, viewers can send an e-mail message to [email protected] or send a text message via their cellular phone directly to text code “48433.”  Information available on the Hurricane Katrina Information channel includes: * Transportation infrastruct... (more)

DataCase iPhone App Video: Turn Your iPhone Into A Wireless Drive

After two weeks of all the iPhone apps I care to download, I can say this: most of them are useless. I use a few of them daily (Facebook, MySpace, Loopt, Phonesaber) and a few others occasionally (BoxOffice, Pandora, Twitterific). Most, though, sit unused after testing and are far from being “must-have applications.” DataCase, though, looks [...] ... (more)

Google Developer Advocate Announces Beta Release of the Android SDK

"If you're one of the many developers who were waiting for something a bit more mature," wrote Google Developer Advocate Dan Morrill yesterday on the Android Developers Blog, "this might be a good time to take another look." The occasion of his suggestion was the beta release of the Android SDK, Android 0.9 SDK beta. "The beta SDK that we're releasing today is the first big step on the SDK's road to compatibility with 1.0," Morrill noted, adding: "Since this is a beta release, applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0. However, the APIs are now pretty stable and we don't expect any major changes." He continued as follows: "Since we're now moving quickly toward 1.0, it may also help to know which direction we're headed. To help out, we've also prepared a development roadmap. This will be a living document, a... (more)

Google’s Voice Search Finally Hits The iPhone

Google’s search-by-voice application is finally available on the App Store. To grab it, visit this link (the page still shows the old version, but you’ll download the new one). The application was originally announced on Friday, leading to widespread excitement that quickly turned to unrest as the application failed to make its debut on the App Store. The delay led to criticism of Apple’s App Store approval process, which apparently leaves all developers in the dark - even Google. The app allows users to speak into their iPhones to submit queries to Google’s search engine, which can serve up both standard search results as well as movie showtimes, addresses, and other handy information. Voice detection seems to work pretty well, though it sometimes takes a few tries with long phrases and names (I was able to correctly search for the “answer to life, the universe, ... (more)

Smule Shares Its Awesome Audio Technology To Bring Cigarettes To Your iPhone

Smule, the company behind innovative applications like the Sonic Lighter and Ocarina, is easily one of my favorite developers on the App Store. The company has developed a suite of advanced technologies revolving around audio information, which allows it to share music on a global scale and (in the case of an app launching today) to use audio to relay information between two nearby cell phones. Today Nico Becherer, the developer behind the hit application Face Melter, has released the first third party application to use Smule’s core technology. The application, called Electric Smoke, allows users to play with a virtual cigarette. It may not sound particularly exciting, but the technology behind it is impressive - if you’ve got another iPhone handy with Sonic Lighter installed, you can use it to light your virtual cigarette. Using Smule’s ‘Sonic Modem’ technology, ... (more)

My World for a Cable!

You can probably feel my pain, when I say that one of the worst things to do when you have such a great mobile device at hand, is to rely on a larger heaver device aka the laptop, to do things that are day to day necessities. For the average mobile worker, email and access to PIM* data is the killer app, and any smartphone worth its weight (or lack of it) will be able to do that more than adequately. Companies like my own Sybase, have given me secure access to such email & PIM data with our iAnywhere Mobile Office product. The goal of this Mobile Evangelist is to have all my presentations at hand in an always available resource and this has become more of a reality with Apple's MobileMe service and the new MobileMe iDisk application for the iPhone. With these two at my command, I can share these resources with contacts through email, without even having them as attac... (more)