Crawling Only on One Branch

By Chandra Challagonda

We proudly say that we are living in a world of high mobility. However, during one of my intercontinental flights I started to wonder why don't we have WiFi and mobile connections generally available on flights? Then it didn't take much time for me to realize we don't even have power sources for passengers on most the flights… It’s been 130 years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone but the concept has since remained the same, although technology behind it has changed and new features have been added. The telephone became wireless and now it even includes much of the computing power too. We have seen a lot of open hardware and software concepts in this area developing faster than any other industry. But the whole communication world is revolving around the wireless phones.

All said and done, it is all great and we have done good progress, but are we directing the innovations in a limited way? The communication world of innovation power and energy is focused on the telephone. No one, so far, has really focused efforts to bring the kind of the innovations which were done in the 19th and 20th century. Such as the major leaps like inventing electricity, combustion engines or the telephone. All we are doing is making existing innovations more efficient, trying to squeeze more from existing technology, increase profitability and push down the costs for development, production, licenses and components. But I think that this telephone's innovation branch is so exhausted that it cannot take many more features, although improvements and efficiencies are still possible. Is this the reason why mobile connectivity is not pervasive on flights?

Could it be the reason of cost? Are we caught in a classic Innovators Dilemma? These days we value technology and innovation that can be afforded by the masses. So are new technologies only thought of if we can see large imminent volumes?

I think that we have been proceeding long enough on this branch and we need something new, like some inventions which came to life during the 19th or 20th century. If Alexander Graham Bell had thought about only money then I am sure he wouldn't have invented the telephone, he would have invented sugar syrups. Let's think really hard, not focusing on volumes or cost, and we may come up with a real discontinuous innovation that will give a new branch to the tree! That is what we need. And I am thinking hard about it already, are you ?

First Jamendo application on Android

By Magnus Ingelsten
Here is another Android application developed by Teleca. It’s very cool with a cultural value add. Teleca engineer Lukasz Wisniewski at Teleca in Poland created and delivered an application to Jamendo for Android devices that makes the Jamendo, music 2.0 platform, under Creative Common licenses, available for mobile phones.

The Jamendo Player gives access to 20.000 albums available for free by the application. As Lukasz says: -“As a member of OHA (Open Handset Alliance), this is a great opportunity to show our skills and expertise in the new emerging platform. We believe that Creative Commons music for mobile phones will get massive and well deserved attention now that we have brought Jamendo services to Android users.”

The Jamendo Player for Android includes several features such as an interactive user interface, attractively designed and easy to use with features such as search, favourites download playlists and most listened to। Other key functions of this innovative application are streaming music and radio, checking the most popular songs, viewing reviews, downloading to memory-card, sharing and music recommendations with friends over SMS.

Jamendo is a major shift in the music distribution giving more rights to musicians and listeners. We are happy to participate in this change by delivering Jamendo Catalogue to Android users. The Player is available on the Android market through your phone.
For more information see http://blog.jamendo.com/2009/06/02/jamendo-available-on-android/

Google I/O Digested

By Robert Kempf
It is now one week back that I attended the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I had great expectations on what Google and the developer community would present and was excited about the possibility to meet the massive number of 4000 developers in one place. I was really positively surprised about the quality of the event and had to digest a bit what I saw and heard there…

Did you watch out the Google I/O keynote speeches on YouTube? If not, you should definitely do that!
http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions.html
The focus for day one was around HTML 5. With the new possibilities HTML 5 possesses it will make the Browser the center of gravity of all your devices irrespective of whether you are using a PC, Netbook, MID or a regular mobile handset. People already started asking: Do I need anything else other than a browser on my device? Is it still necessary to install applications on my device as I did for three decades now or can I just download and start them instantaneously in the near future? We will see…

The second day keynote revealed the big surprise: Google WAVE which will be open sourced and facilitate social networking and communication even further. The development of WAVE is all about a company being innovative and looking for new paths of accelerating innovation by a large open source community. It seems Google looked around on the market and the current solutions provided and combined them into something new, appealing which everyone wants to use. Looking at WAVE the parallel existence of Email and Instant Messaging applications seems to be outdated quite soon. The basic elements supported by WAVE are not completely new, we know most of them from online collaboration tools, Email and IM clients – but they show a thought through approach of integrating existing solutions into something which wasn’t there before and which includes some new key differentiators which everyone was waiting for. The presentation was really impressive, in particular the translation robot who eases the communication between groups with different native languages.
Apple has shown this ability of being innovative in the sense of enabling a new dimension of user experience and Google is now doing the same with WAVE. I am looking forward to check-out the WAVE with my Sandbox developer account.
And last not least: thank you Google for the MAGIC, the magic atmosphere at this event and the Android HTC Magic phone every participant of the conference got for free :)

Everyone loves an App store.

By Andrew Till
What a couple of week it’s been in the applications world. With the iTunes and Android Market stores enjoying ever growing success two of the largest players in the industry, Nokia and Vodafone, have launched their new applications stores as the battle to lead the next wave of industry growth intensifies.

Both companies clearly have aggressive growth and deployment plans which will undoubtedly stimulate significant competitive responses from across the market.

The interesting thing about these two launches is that they are both supporting a very broad range of handsets. Unlike the current iTunes and Android stores which currently have a limited number of devices variants connecting to them the Vodafone and Nokia stores are both supporting in excess of 50 different handset models. The challenge for content stores has always been the management of fragmentation and ensuring consumers get the application or media that is right for their specific handset. If these new stores have resolved this challenge then we may finally have a strong challenge to Apples dominance in the content space.
The other exciting dimension to the Vodafone launch is its support for iPhones.

I for one will be watching closely to see if they are able to penetrate the iPhone user base. And I am sure there are many other operators and content companies who will be doing the same.

oFono – Open Source Telephony.

By Andrew Till
Last week Nokia and Intel made an interesting announcement about their collaboration for an open source telephony solution. We at Teleca always like to see new innovative projects being launched and have been considering what this may mean for the future.
Firstly there is nothing in the announcement that suggests this project could not be supported across multiple platforms. So while it may initially look like a Maemo focused solution it’s also possible that we will see S60 device also embracing the approach.

However the real excitement is that this is opening up new parts of the platform to the developer community and should enable new innovative applications. In addition the new oFono platform should also support new methods of applications interacting with the telephony stack thus enabling developers to find creative ways to minimise battery power or exploit multiple radio environments.
And it should not stop there.

If oFono is successful then there is no reason why, as an OSS project, it could not be leveraged by other platforms especially those that are Linux based such as Android or uBuntu and hence it maynot be limited to just traditional handsets. But also MIDs, Notebooks and why not for car infotainment systems?
The mobile world evolves through innovation and initiative and that is what creates opportunities, for us and for You.

Battleship game for Android, born by passion

By Artur Kulik, Roman Prominski and Emilian Szyburski

It was an after-hours learning project that became a real-life application. Our gang, Artur, Roman and Emilian at Teleca Poland, wanted to get familiar with the Android platform. So we started from scratch, using emulators, SDK and resources from the internet to create something that could help us understand and become knowledgeable in Android software development.

We felt it was important to to touch several aspects of the platform with audio, imaging, connectivity, middleware and more, to get a complete overview of Google's mobile system. The exercise started out as a small proof-of-concept project, and quickly became a full-blown entertainment application ! Then we took the chance to put it (well tested though…) on the Android market in order to get comments from the users.

Overwhelming response
We received an overwhelming response from the people that downloaded our ‘Battleships’ application and liked it! There were greetings. There were improvement suggestions. And there were rants from users that lost against the phone in the naval action (..oops) For us it was not only the learning experience on the development side but we also realized the potential in the application market. The feedback we received provided priceless information on user experience, behavior and expectations.

Top 20
The “Battleships” application quickly became a Top 20 application on the market and got more than 50,000 downloads in the first four weeks.


Download Yourself
Download the application from the application market with your G1 or similar phone (look for Teleca Poland publisher) or alternatively check http://www.cyrket.com/package/com.teleca.bs for user ratings and score.

So enjoy the battle game to fight against the war tactics of Teleca :)

Platform competition stiffens

By Hasse Annerfeldt
The playground for mobile OS/SW platforms has really increased in the recent 12 months. Instead of focusing on a few platforms we have seen the number increase. While we have seen Symbian gain an early lead leveraging its very strong position in terms of history, maturity and close relation to Nokia new platforms are now challenging it. What we have seen that Apple with the iPhone introduced a new era showing that offering products and services, that many operators and handset vendor’s have been struggling to achieve, is compelling to consumers. Apple starting from zero has got a large group of mobile phone users, enthusiastic and thrilled, over the user experiences it brings to them. They have also showed that it is possible to make money from music and application downloads which has been on every operator’s agenda for a long time. The success for this new Apple world has not yet been shared by the other handset vendor’s.

Google with its dominating position in the internet space with services and content is now filling a gap when creating the Android platform. An open source based project, has created a platform that will be highly integrated into services on the internet, copying Apple success for a potentially broader audience.

At the end of this year and beginning of next we will be able to see if S60/Symbian and Windows mobile can reclaim the initiative with new business models, increased openness and services that bring them into parity with the Open Handset Alliance model and Apple.

This should lead to a very compelling Christmas and new year sales season as the focus firmly shifts on to experience and service innovation which can only benefit all involved in the mobile industry from handset vendors, through to service companies, such as Teleca, consumers and independent application developers.