The official mobile DivX player, DivX Mobile, has received a major update which adds support for DivX’s video on demand service.
DivX Inc. (the company) makes DivX (the video codec) which allows for high-quality video compression with relatively low file sizes. DivX Inc. have launched a VOD service that allows participants to download movies in DivX format from several partner content suppliers.
The mobile version of the client software - which until now only offered playback of locally-stored content - runs on Symbian S60 and UIQ devices. Version v.90 also includes numerous bug fixes.
The app is available free (alongside a windows program that will let you convert other formats to DivX) although you will need to register with the company to be able to download it.
Stuart wrote last night about Skype’s launch of a native Series 60 mobile application, and how it calls a local-rate number to initiate calls. But now the company has announced full details of its plans, and how to get the beta application for your phone.
The beta client works on around 50 handsets from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Motorola, and it includes chat, group chat, presence, and the ability to receive Skype and SkypeIn calls. In eight countries (including the UK), making Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls is also included.
It’s very much experimental: “These are still the early days for making Skype calls on mobile phones,” says Gareth O’Loughlin, general manager of mobile and hardware devices at Skype.
Continue reading ‘Skype beta includes SkypeIn and SkypeOut - here’s how to get it’
Good news, vodka-lovers. Smirnoff is apparently going to invest more heavily in its mobile activities, following the success of its existing mobile site, which has been visited by 90,000 unique users since it launched last October.
According to New Media Age, the site will be expanded to include options to upload your own photos and videos to share with friends and other users. Although it’s good to see a big brand getting the mobile bug, this move into UGC is questionable.
Will users really want to share their content through a vodka brand’s portal, rather than YouTube, Flickr or Facebook – all of which are now easier to upload to from your phone? We’ll have to wait and see.
Orkut? The small green fella who wished he could fly? Nonono. Orkut is Google’s own social network, which isn’t very big in most of the world, but is very big indeed in Brazil and India (which as anyone with a spot of geographical knowledge will tell you, means millions of users).
Anyway, it’s just gone mobile, at the logical address of m.orkut.com. Features include profiles, friend lists and updates, accepting and denying friend requests, and personal messaging. It doesn’t support the Communities forums - apparently one of the most popular features on Orkut - or videos though.
In the countries where Orkut is big - particularly India - going mobile is a big deal, since it opens the way to sign up people out in the countryside who don’t have regular access to a net-connected PC. However, Orkut will face competition from some of the mobile-only social networks who’ve also been targeting these ‘emerging’ markets.
UK firm Censorit has been quick off the mark following the recent Byron Review, which looked at child safety and new technology, and spurred calls for more content filtering.
The company has launched a subscription-based filtering service aimed at web-enabled phones, portable media players and handheld games devices, which will let parents protect their kids from inappropriate content.
The phones angle is interesting, since Censorit is targeting handsets with built-in Wi-Fi, which get around the age-restrictions imposed by the mobile operators on their own networks. In theory, say, a child surfing the mobile Web through Vodafone can’t access porn and gambling sites, but if they switch to their phone’s Wi-Fi connection, they can. Continue reading ‘Censorit launches web-filtering service for iPod Touch, PSP, DS…’
If you haven’t come across the Webby Awards before, it is the leading international awards body, honoring the best and brightest of the Internet. The awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences which is a 550 strong group of Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities who select the nominees and winners each year. Indeed, among the judges this year are David Bowie, Matt Groening and Jamie Oliver.
Of course, falling under the rather large umbrella of the internet these days is the mobile web and the Webby Awards has an entire section with several sub-categories devoted to it. The nominees have just been announced and the winners will be announced on May 6th. Nominees include Cellufun in the ‘GAMES’ category, Yahoo Mobile Web In ‘LISTINGS AND UPDATES’ and Reuters Mobile in ‘NEWS’. The full list of Nominees can be found here.
In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet, the Nominees are all eligible to win a People’s Voice Award, which as you might expect is voted for by you, the people. The voting opened yesterday and closes on May 1st so get over to the Webby Awards People’s Voice page and make your voice heard.
Course you do, you just didn’t know that such a thing existed. And why should you? Though online storage sites and services are nothing new, they have been skipped over in the potentially massive mobile space where storage is of much more concern than in the PC market.
Enter humyo.com a new mobile compatible online storage service that offers up to 30GB for free. Not only that, but you can share your space with friends, make use of automatic file synchronizing to avoid duplicates and even embed a humyo media player widget on your blog or personal website (we are hoping that means social networking sites like Facebook too) that streams content such as photos and music from your online archive.
How about three cheers for common sense? This is a fantastic idea as far as we are concerned and makes even more sense for mobiles than PCs. In fact we are pretty startled that nobody has gotten to this sooner so kudos to the folks at humyo for taking the first brave steps towards mobile. As mentioned before signing up is free and all users are entitled to 30GB of storage. As mobile phones become increasingly connected perhaps services like humyo could spell the end for expensive memory cards - who knows?
[Thanks to Marc for sending this in]
Say we’re behind the times and we’ll say just keep reading. But in the case of PocketSurfer2, the handy web-based device from wireless services/printer company Datawind and we might admit to some tardiness.
Launched before Christmas in the UK at the recommended retail price of £180, PocketSurfer2 is a mobile web device that lets you surf for free via GPRS for 20 hours per month. Traffic over this amount is charged at around £5 per month.
Perhaps the closeness comparison is the wi-fi-only Nokia N810 Web Tablet, which with a touchscreen and QWERTY keypad, retails for £280 (although PocketPicks recently picked up the earlier touchscreen-only N770 on eBay for £80 plus P&P).
As for PocketSurfer2, it’s a closed device that uses Internet Explorer as the browser on a Linux-based OS with some proprietary special compression sauce from Datawind combining to offer a “full internet experience” - at least as much as you can have on a 640 x 240 VGA backlit colour screen (i.e. it involves some side-to-side scrolling on most web pages).
Continue reading ‘PocketSurfer2 - the GPRS web device - Germany bound’
Doom, gloom and Armageddon are not topics exclusive to street corner demagogues and David Ike. They are also increasingly becoming the preserve of tech companies and researchers looking to utilize mobile phones as civilian-based surveillance tools.
One of the most recent is Purdue University who are developing radiation sensors designed to fit inside mobile phones. The small cheap sensors will be built into mobile devices with the idea that if enough of them detect radiation around the same area, they might help to pre-empt a terrorist attack.
Sounds a little Orwellian and fraught with complications if you ask us; how would such a system be policed and what about all of the false positives that would inevitably ensue? Still, if some people would feel safer with this tech in their phone then presumably they will soon have the choice.
(Via InfoWorld)
Apparently mobile IM adoption is set to triple in Europe over the next five years. A new report from Forrester Research suggests that mobile IM usage will grow from its current eight percent adoption rate to a much more substantial 24 percent by 2013.
That will push the subscriber base up from 26.7 million to 80 million and is apparently thanks to the familiarity that young people have with PC based IM applications combined with the continuous introduction of more IM capable handsets.
The inevitable upshot of this is that SMS revenues will suffer with a prediction that up to 13 percent of SMS traffic will be displaced by IM services in the next six years. Even so, it is not all doom and gloom for the humble SMS as the same report suggests that there is growth in that market too, with traffic expected to climb from 190 Billion messages in 2007 to 233 Billion by the end of 2013.
Big numbers indeed but it is about time that overpriced text messaging had some decent competition.
(Via mocoNews)
Recent Comments