GVSU Mobile Applications and Services Lab

“The ultimate competition between industry players is for control of the ‘ecosystem’ and user experience, and the owner of the ecosystem will benefit the most in terms of revenue and user loyalty,”

Ms. Shen said. “We predict that most users will use no more than five mobile applications at a time and most future opportunities will come from niche market ‘killer applications’.”

“A lot of consumers used mobile as a price-comparison shopping tool—mobile price-comparison and geolocation features show promise for retailers.”

The mobile-phone transaction increase supports the assertion that buyers shopping at brick-and-mortar stores were price-checking products with their mobile phones and then buying items wherever they were least expensive.

increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and create ongoing customer conversations

If the Droid sales keep their current pace, it should be able to surpass one million units sold before Christmas, let alone New Year.

is this the DROID you've been looking for?

Store revival in retail will require a monumental shift in the retailer’s mindset for overhauling customer’s destination shopping experience, personalized marketing, and even personalized merchandise mix.

Google introduced several other products at its event on Monday. The most ambitious, called Google Goggles, allows people to send Google a cellphone photograph of, say, a landmark or a book, and have information about the contents of the image returned to them instantly.

Google showed off on December 7 a prototype of its mobile tagging technology. The company is “QR” barcodes to more than 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. Mobile users can snap a picture of the bar codes and obtain information about that business — including reviews, coupons, and other information. (Smartphone users need an app on their phones that can read the QR codes.) In January 2009, Microsoft launched a beta of its own bar-code search technology, known as Microsoft Tag. It also introduced a free mobile tag reader. Microsoft, being Microsoft, couldn’t simply rely on the QR standard. Instead, it announed it was creating its own bar code technology that stores more information, more dynamically, offering more user choice. It’s cool that Microsoft Tag allows developers to determine the content and experience users will have by allowing choices of text, video, maps, discounts, promotions. But the lack of QR support is a deal breaker for some.

Nearly 20 percent of retailers plan to at least pilot an M-commerce project by the end of 2009, according to an RIS study published in May 2009 called "M-Commerce: Retail in Motion." This finding and others in the study were referenced by many media outlets and retail sources at the time, because it showed a surprisingly high level of interest among retailers for an emerging channel.

The promise here is simply massive. The peril comes in alienating people from the concept of free-form visual search because the engine is running only on one cylinder.  

Last week, Six Voices released Discover Rockford Michigan, the first of what it hopes will be a series of city-themed apps that provide maps, business directories, history, points of interest and other functions. The app was developed in conjunction with marketing and advertising firm Fluis Inc.

As the social economy swells and continues to flourish, many of us are abandoning the forums and systems where businesses held the illusion of control in favor of communities where we dictate the level of value we give and take. Accordingly, brands are turning in our direction. We are, after all, the keepers of social capital and with it, we make valuable decisions and also impact and influence the decisions of others.

If Microsoft is looking for a differentiating feature for a mobile platform, promoting .NET makes a heck of a lot of sense…particularly if Silverlight is supported in the next version of Windows Mobile (which based on this year’s PDC, seems to be turning into a development platform in its own right).

XBOX is confusingly closed. For the only true TV-attached device in the Microsoft product catalog, it is perplexing to me that XBOX isn’t trying to encourage third-party developers to make non-game network-capable apps that run on the XBOX (well, unless you are Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, or another “big” company).

If the iPhone didn't finish off Windows Mobile in the smartphone market, the Motorola Droid may. Windows Mobile is losing the last vestiges of its mojo

In August, according to AdMob, Windows Mobile had only a 4 percent share of the mobile OS market worldwide, down from 7 percent in February

So the Droid may not be the iPhone killer but rather the Windows Mobile slayer. Microsoft, of course, will always have the unassailable PC franchise. But, wait, isn't Android coming to Netbooks next year? Maybe the real battle royal for Microsoft is yet to come.

This document will cover the Restlet edition for Android, which is a port of the Restlet Framework to the Android mobile OS.

According to a new study from Pew Internet and American Life Project, technology does not lead to social isolation, as many often suspected. Instead, researchers found that online participation and mobile phone usage leads to people having larger and more diverse core discussion networks.

On average, a person spends 195 days of the year having mobile phone contact with others, but face-to-face interactions occur on about 210 days per year.

In addition, mobile users have around 15% more family members with whom they can discuss important matters and tend to have 25% more core network members who are not family members. Overall, those who use mobile phones have core networks that are 12% larger than those who don't.

What is the best way to use Restlet in Eclipse? Of course, you could manually use the JAR files in your Eclipse projects, but the most flexible way is to rely on Eclipse's plug-in infrastructure.

Droid vs. iPhone: Them's fightin' words

A couple of parting observations about the passion of the comments about this phone: They suggest the Droid has quickly emerged as the phone around which iPhone critics have coalesced. It's emerging as the preeminent un-iPhone or even anti-iPhone. The comments are further evidence that no community of observers takes a closer and more critical interest in how we test and assess than smart-phone fans. We've experienced that in the past, when we updated the methodology and presentation of our smart-phone Ratings (available to subscribers) in response to the changing nature of these devices.

Point Inside: Fact: stepping foot in a suburban mall can drain your vitality in a matter of seconds. And though I don't think a deep disdain for the concept of indoor shopping complexes and what they've done to the very fabric of the American town was the driving inspiration behind Point Inside, they're definitely onto something: With hundreds of mall maps that look a lot like those big directory signs, this app gets you in and out of your local mall as quickly as possible, all for free. Could use a few hundred more maps—some of my old tweenage haunt