GVSU Mobile Applications and Services Lab

For Apple (AAPL), the short answer is: The iPhone will continue to apply the Macintosh method—that is, controlling all or most of the user’s experience—with similar results: smaller market share, disproportionally larger profits than the separate hardware-software crowd. More on this later.

We consider a mobile ad hoc network setting where Bluetooth enabled mobile devices communicate directly with other devices as they meet opportunistically. We design and implement a novel mobile social networking middleware named MobiClique. MobiClique forms and exploits ad hoc social networks to disseminate content using a store-carry-forward technique. Our approach distinguishes itself from other mobile social software by removing the need for a central server to conduct exchanges, by leveraging existing social networks to bootstrap the system, and by taking advantage of the social network overlay to disseminate content. We also propose an open API to encourage third-party application development. We discuss the system architecture and three example applications. We show experimentally that MobiClique successfully builds and maintains an ad hoc social network leveraging contact opportunities between friends and people sharing interest(s) for content exchanges. Our experience also provides insight into some of the key challenges and short-comings that researchers face when designing and deploying similar systems.

A Survey of Platforms for Mobile Networks Research

Auditory contexts are recognized from mixtures of sounds from mobile users’ everyday environments. We describe our implementation of auditory context recognition for mobile devices. In our system we use a set of support vector machine classifiers to implement the recognizer. Moreover, static and runtime resource consumption of the system are measured and reported.

More and more companies are creating iPhone applications as a way to reinforce branding and to gain new customers. Some companies are even seeing increased sales thanks to iPhone apps. One of those is the Pizza Hut app [iTunes link] for the iPhone and iPod touch, which has now generated more than $1 million in sales according to MobileMarketer. The US-only iPhone app was first introduced three months ago.

Howto: Set up an Android Dev Phone Without a SIM Card

And, without further ado, we bring you the Droid vs. iPhone vs. Palm Pre vs. MyTouch 3G …

People have long shared product opinions with friends and family through word-of-mouth. Today, social media tools enable consumers to extend their connections and conduct commerce in powerful new ways.

Social network users are a highly coveted group of consumers. Across all age brackets, they were more likely than average to make an online purchase, according to a May 2009 survey by Anderson Analytics. What’s more, social network users are sharing recommendations with greater frequency than generally expected. A Q1 2009 Razorfish survey of social network users found that some 29% reported sharing their views online at least every few weeks, while 10% said they made such contributions at least every few days.

With the DROID, the company has perhaps created its most attractive and intriguing piece of technology yet.

The DROID is an odd and beautiful device.

Throughout our tests, we were consistently impressed with the tightness and speed of navigation on the phone. The DROID makes Android feel modern the way the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre are -- like machines designed for a pace of life that's increasingly more Twitter and less USPS.

Shares of GPS device makers Garmin and TomTom plummeted today through a combination of their quarterly results and the launch of Google Maps Navigation.

In this article we ‘ll review the present state of the market, the key App Store building blocks and where will the market be heading in two years.

And while technical openness was established 7 years ago, what was lacking all these years was commercial openness; the funnel between external developers and in-market handsets was so thin that very few software players could pass through. It took Symbian six years to reach 10,000 applications, while it took Apple only 6 months (see our earlier analysis). In the first year of operation, Apple’s App Store brought in 65,000+ apps, 100,000 registered developers, 1.5Billion application downloads and availability to consumers across 77 countries through 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices sold.

n this historical context, it is easy to see that App Stores are a developer-to-consumer merchandising channel; a go-to-market vehicle for allowing consumers to distribute and retail their applications directly to the end-consumers, while taking out the middlemen from distribution and retailing.

Anyhoo, more interestingly, mobile search is booming, with 32% of searchers with internet-capable cellphones now searching for local business information, an 11% increase from 2008. Some 60% of smartphone owners search either via their on-board browsers or via applications, and you can bet most of those will be iPhone users.

The study also shows that the most popular local content categories searched on mobile are directories (42%), maps (41%), restaurants (37%) and movies (30%).

I am excited to announce that the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).Android 2.0 brings new developer APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, you can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources. You can also give users a faster way to communicate with others by embedding Quick Contact within your application. With the new Bluetooth API, you can now easily add peer-to-peer connectivity or gaming to your applications. To get a more complete list of the new capabilities you can add to your applications, please go to the Android 2.0 highlights page.

Basics Of Social Media Roi

n fact, 84% of respondents said they don’t currently measure the ROI (return on investment) of their social media programs.

One of the biggest selling points of the Moment is its speedy 800MHz processor

The keyboard on this device is a series of contradictions. Actually, it really all boils down to one: it's generously large, hampered by a somewhat strange layout that makes mistypes a more frequent occurrence than they should be. On the left side, for example, Samsung has elected to make room for the Function key by pushing the letter keys to the right, meaning that A is further right than Z -- something that takes some getting used to. The space bar interrupts the lower row, placed between V and B, and the Enter key is to the right of the Up key, which is next to P in the top letter row. We're sure we could get used to all of these quirks, but why should we have to? Why couldn't have Samsung just come up with a more typical layout? Anyhow, once you get past that, the keys are generally easy to type on -- they're not particularly three-dimensional, but they're spaced far enough apart (and each one is large enough) so that finding them and hitting only the one you intend to is a pretty straightforward process, they're very clicky, and the dedicated numeric row is certainly a plus.

ShopSavvy on iPhone...

“Every Google phone works differently, and you have fragmentation,” he said. And indeed that is a common worry among developers who don’t want their applications to be incompatible with certain phones that have unusual screen sizes or features. But then again, Windows Mobile, which has been around for nearly 10 years, already has that same problem, and one of Microsoft’s chief goals in upcoming versions is to rein in the variations between Windows Mobile handsets.