Mobilize 2008 - 4G wireless and Ajax devices

Are your plans taking you to San Francisco in September? If so, don't miss the opportunity to participate in GigaOM's Mobilize conference which is taking place at the beautiful Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on Sep. 18. Here's the interesting list of speakers;

Ian Freed - VP of Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com
John Roese - CTO, Nortel
Fred Kitson - Corporate Vice President, Applied Research and Technology Center, Motorola, Inc.
Russ McGuire - VP of Corporate Strategy, Sprint
Lee Ott - Global Director, Yahoo! oneSearch, Yahoo!
John O'Rourke - GM of Mobile, Microsoft
Marc Davis - Chief Scientist of Yahoo! Connected Life, Yahoo!
Matt Murphy - Partner on iFund, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
John Forsyth - VP Strategy, Symbian Software
Dan Mason - Sr. Product Mgr, ESPN Mobile Web
Ted Morgan - CEO, SKYHOOK Wireless
Clint McClellan - Sr. Dir of Market Dev, Health & Life Sciences, Qualcomm
Rachel Hinman - Mobile Design Strategist, Adaptive Path
Jason Devitt - CEO, Skydeck
Ryan Block - Editor-at-large, Engadget
Rich Miner - Co-founder, Google's Android
Padmasree Warrior - CTO, Cisco Systems
Scott Richardson - Chief Strategy Officer, Clearwire
Richard Wong - Partner, Accel Partners
John SanGiovanni - Co-founder and VP, Product Design, Zumobi
Scott Raney - Partner, Redpoint Ventures
Jake Seid - Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Rick Segal - Partner, JLA Ventures
Paran Johar - CMO, JumpTap
Jeff Belk - Managing Director, ICT168 Capital, LLC
Rick Robinson - VP, Products & Services, XOHM
Vincent Rerolle - Sr. VP & GM, Linux Product Division, Wind River
Raven Zachary - Research Director, Open Source, The 451 Group
Greg Sterling - Analyst, Sterling Market Intelligence/Local Mobile Search
Gary Kovas - Vice President and General Manager, Mobile and Devices, Adobe
Ken Kershner - Senior Vice President of Engineering, Dash Navigation, Inc.
Michael Copeland - Senior Writer, Fortune
John Koller - Director of Hardware Marketing, Sony Computer Entertainment America
Ken Fisher - Founder and Editor-in-chief, ArsTechnica
Chetan Sharma - President, Chetan Sharma Consulting

And finally (I am late posting this blog), today is the final day for the $100 early bird special.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

MoFuse - Mobi-lize your blog or web in 5 seconds

This is a great new webservice from the MoFuse, Rhode Island, US startup company. In 5 seconds you can get a nice looking .mobi optimized blog or website (or if you like, you can of course create a new one). I decided to use this blog to make a .mobi version, works very well, I am impressed. MoFuse also generate your QR code that can be used by camera phone scanning software to launch your browser. See the result at http://tlidforss.mofuse.mobi/ and MoFuse screenshots below. David Berube, the founder and the staff have a done an excellent job. It's a pity, I have not got an iPhone yet, would like to use a real one instead of a browser emulator.

Hitta.se in 3D better than Google Earth

An update to Google Earth made me testdrive again the "Swedish Google" company Hitta (which means find in Swedish) and their new see your city in fantastic 3D views as if you are flying over the buildings and cars. The 3D engine used is provided by the Swedish startup company, Agency9, 3D Maps (tm) EX engine. To appreciate the quality you should testdrive it here. See a snapshot below.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Iterasi - Weave and share your own webhistory

I started using http://www.iterasi.com/ an excellent bookmarking service that also does complete web clipping of web pages you visit and would like to bookmark and share. Got the tip from Michael Arrington's http://www.techcrunch.com/ and I agree with Mike, this is definitely a convenient and useful service. I tested on my blog, see the result at http://www.iterasi.net/public/users/tlidforss and a snapshot below.

OculusAI - Computer AI for face recognition

Oculus AI is a Swedish startup based i Stockholm that recently won the Sweden Venture Cup award. OculusAI is a new company with a lot of promise in the image and video processing field based on the latest computer research in vision recognition.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Posterous - Revival of email by blogging

This is an interesting blogging services site, http://posterous.com/ You email, attach what you want and out comes a newly created blog for you. I like the simplicity of it. Not bad at all.
Posterous also has autopost service for Flickr and Twitter.

See a snapshot of the homepage below:


See my first blogpost and the resulting autolayout, http://tlidforss.posterous.com/

Tweetake - Take 2 speedy follow up on Twitter backup

This is second take on the new Twitter backup service from Tweetake. I just used this service and like it a lot, you get to choose, your Twitter followers or following (called friends on Tweetake) or all of your twitter info. I used the followers and friends and got right away, excel csv files to save with the twitter profile info and urls. An excellent little service that should really be a standard twitter feature.

Follow me on Twitter, http://twitter.com/tlidforss

MobileSorcery - Meet the sorcerers of mobile development tools

Mobile Sorcery is a Swedish startup company focusing on easily enabling making mobile phone applications for J2ME and Symbian environments even if you start out using your standard C/C++ library of software. Mobile Sorcery and the MoSync development tools have been used 100+ mobile devices. I have met with several of the guys behind Mobile Sorcery and I have seen that they live up to their promises. Mobile Sorcery as a company has roots from the mophun mobile game development areas.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

TerraNet - Wireless P2P using your mobile phones

TerraNet is an interesting wireless P2P communications company developing solutions for e.g. mobile phone to mobile phone communications using ordinary phones without the need to use radio basestations. This is a concept that has been explored and developed for quite some time in the WiFi area. TerraNet is a Swedish startup in Lund in Southern Sweden. I like this area, I think there is a lot of potential here, Red Herring has recently listed TerraNet as a company on their watchlist. I do think Anders Carlius, the CEO should have a chat with (if he has not so far) Francis DaCosta, founder of Santa Clara based Mesh Dynamics, a pioneer in mesh networking for voice and video using multi-radio wifi hardware. I met Francis at an early stage of development but I have seen what you can do with smart radio software when it comes to QoS and throughput. TerraNet is I think working on something similar using regular cellular/mobile phone radio technology. Keep an eye on the this company.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startups business services needs.

Infviz Labs - Making sense out of large amounts of data

Infviz Labs is a Swedish startup specializing in Microsoft based software environments for efficient data analysis tools. Pattern recognition and data analysis is the speciliaty of the software from Infviz. Infviz is based in Norrkoping in Sweden and part of Swedish initiative for startups in the eastern part of Sweden, Linkoping and Norrkoping. Infviz Labs are specialists on C#, .NET, 2D/3D presentation methods. Please have a look at the demo about Swedish counties, statistics and trend analysis demo, http://www.infviz.com/demo/index.html

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

imCMS - Role based open source content management system

imCMS is a powerful open source role based content management system that can easily be used to manage complex websites, intranets and works with mySQL and other webservice applications. imCMS is a product from imCode Partner, a small Swedish kind of startup (has been around since 1998) but kept itself small and nimble as a software startup. The company is based on the beautiful island of Gotland in Visby, Sweden and has a number of customers. Check out the software from the website, http://www.imcms.net/1273.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for help with contacts with Swedish startups and the Sweden market.

Tweetake - Easy backup of Twitter information

It is interesting to see all the new convenient Web 2.0 applications coming out. Since the rise and popularity of services such as Twitter, there is a real need for how do you backup your information including your friends and followers. Well, now you have a service, brand new, I have tried to use it earlier today but getting due to the number of requests from applications to use Twitter API, no luck in getting my backup. But I know there is a demand for a service like this so please try it, I will later tonight. Tweetake is the name of the service. Credits go to Nikki Pilkington and Alfred Armstrong. I can also really recommend Nikki for her Google SEO services. You should use them to really improve your search engine rankings regardless of website or blog.




I am now just waiting for some creative services around Google backup of common services (unless Google will do something, I have seen rumors about that for quite some time).


Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Neo Technology - A new mySQL company but noSQL

The startup company for today is maybe a sleeping giant. Neo Technology is probably not the most exciting name but I have feeling that these guys are onto something important in the area of database engines. Neo Technology is more known in the Java open source areas under the Neo4j logo and the community under which it is being developed. Neo Technology is focusing on databases that are much more efficient for semi-structured data than traditional SQL. Neo is a is a graph database based on an embedded transactional Java persistence engine storing data structured in graphs rather than in tables. For those readers that would like to read more technical details around this subject, read the whitepaper, http://dist.neo4j.org/neo-technology-introduction.pdf. In todays webservice and internet networked data world, the Neo database technology can become a significant improvement over the commonly used approach, a JBoss (r) webserver running using MySQL (r) database. The Neo Technolgoy company has been working on this for a number of years already, I know it takes a lot of time to fine tune the development of database engine, I was part of introduction of SQL based real time databases in telecom systems a long time ago. Neo Technology is a Swedish startup company.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

TwitterFeed - Auto feed your blog to Twitter

This is a great and convenient tip for you if you routinely like to twit in Twitter about your new blogposts. Sign up for TwitterFeed and in three easy steps you are up and running and TwitterFeed will take care of your Twitter blog post announcements. Really an easy and covenient service. You need an OpenID to register and if you don't have one, this site will help you get an OpenID url.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

YouNoodle - Your startup social and university networking site

Well, here's a Vator.tv competitor. YouNoodle.com has started with a bang taking off recently. YouNoodle has put together a nice social networking platform, easy classification of your social data. Not that obvious though in some cases where the information you provide will be displayed once you get to view your profile. I think getting the text from the "short bio" used as tag line to your name was not obvious to me at least. But I guess brand new beta services, you have to put up with some odd things.

Since I have recently covered and used for a little while Vator.tv, I have to conclude that from a social networking point of view, YouNoodle is better, I like the ease with which you can go from following company, contact and network and also join groups. Vator has somewhat stricter distinctions between startups, service providers and contributors on their site. I do like Vator's company information better though plus the push they have that you should provide a video pitch and/or demo. I guess time will tell which one that will grab the major share of users. One thing to consider is also, what's the key benefit each site is going for? What I am actually looking for is, do you provide a service just to facilitate and hoook up people and then leave it up to them to figure out what to do, or do you intend to enable and encourage an efficient exchange of needed services between all parties involved?

So far, most social networking sites fail to do the latter. The big danger in easy to use for everybody netwoking sites is the same all the time. You get way too many people that are somehow going to find the few that will make sense to communicate and do business with.

YouNoodle does have an interesting approach in trying to provide analytical tools to help your startup business. See the startup predictive tool, http://younoodle.com/predictor that will help you analyze what will your startup be worth in three years.

See home page of YouNoodle below and feel free to explore my page, http://younoodle.com/people/thomas_lidforss




Also, contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

Vator for your startup company- Use TV style networking

Here's a tip for all of you working with startup companies and have not found the Silicon Valley startup company, Vator.tv. You are missing an important opportunity to present, demo and get a following of people (investor and service providers) who are interested in your company. You can also find possible partner companies buy browsing other companies' video presentations and profiles.

See a snapshot of the home page below;


And, also see myVator page, and as you can tell from the right side of the page, I have not made my own video presentation yet. This post is just another reminder that I have to add this.



See, http://www.vator.tv/user/show/ThomasLidforss

Donya Labs - Simplify my virtual 3D objects

Donya Labs is a hot Swedish startup in Linkoping enabling speedy 3D generation in design tools for gaming, architecture and engineering. Donya has developed patented technologies that are addressing the need for simplification of polygons and mesh reduction without losing quality. They have two products, Simplygon(tm) that does the simplification without losing quality and XPRSS(tm) that is used for automatic creation of stand-in objects.

See a demo from VideoTrace using technologies from Donya(tm) for this video.

There are more cool demos of the superior impact from using Donya technology in your design on their blog. http://donya-blog.blogspot.com/

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services.

Cinside - See you but you don't see me

Cinside is a Swedish startup in Linkoping developing personal hand held motion detection radar products that can easily be used in cases where you have a need to "see through" a wall to detect a person on the other side. The company's CEO Dan Axelsson is targeting defense, police, emergency and security businesses. The small and easy to use product can detect a person up to 3 meters (100 feet) behind a 20 cm (8 inches) concrete wall. The product also supports wireless communication for remote monitoring of one or several devices.

See picture of the personal radar below;

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services.

Actiwave - Active wave processing for your sound systems

If you like your HDTV in your house, you would love to have an audio system enabled with Actiwave technology. Actiwave is a Swedish startup located in Linkoping. This comany has developed patented audio processing modules for efficient integration in audio systems. Among their patented features, daisy chaning reducing wiring need, acoustic compensation, self configuration, uncompressed digital audio. They also cover products for wireless transmission made at a similar cost as for a passive system. See audio processing module pictur below. I would recommend this company to any consumer electronic company into products for audio systems and HDTV/DVD solutions. An interesting note, Prof. Gianpaolo Evangelista is the research head.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for startup business services.

Ice.net - Digital reuse of Europe's no 1 mobile network

If you have seen ads for ice.net without knowing what it is, you are not alone. I thought myself, maybe just another MVNO company. No, this time it is the rebranded new CDMA mobile operator company which used to go under the brand Nordisk Mobiltelefon.

Ice.net is using what was once known as NMT, the best mobile network in Europe that started already in the late 70s and had from the beginning full support for roaming and handover throughout the Nordic region countries. NMT operated in the 450 Mhz frequency band when introduced and got because of lack of capacity introduced in the 900 Mhz band, better suited for small city cell sites providing better capacity. NMT got superceded by the introduction of digital mobile services based on the GSM standard in the 900 Mhz and later in the 1800 Mhz (850 and 1900 Mhz in North America). The analog NMT 450 system lived on for awhile until abandoned and spectrum relicensed. The new NMT.net now Nordisk Mobiltelefon with subsidiaries throughout the Nordic countries got into using this spectrum with the Qualcomm developed CDMA2000 standard.

So, as a result now you have a Swedish startup operator providing 3G CDMA 2000 based services in the 450 Mhz frequency band with the advantages of excellent coverage in rural areas where you in many cases cannot get the UTMS 3G services and also in a number of places NO fixed line internet broadband access. Ice.net also as a result provides fixed wireless services for internet broadband access.

See snapshot of coverage from company homepage.

PS. For international readers, see the 199 SEK/month which is approx. $30/month

Mobile Control Nordic - Wireless M2M and CDMA 450 Networks

Mobile Control Nordic is a Swedish startup answering an interesting question; How do you get to wirelessly control and monitor remote control products with good data thruput? You combine the excellent radio coverage of CDMA2000 based networks in the 450 Mhz frequency band with M2M data modems. This allows for 3G CDMA 2000 dataspeeds to remote locations.



Mobile Control Nordic is a spin off from DST Control, a control systems company in the aircraft, space and defense industry. Mobile Control has two product lines for data modem, one USB modem and one for embedded use.





Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

InView - Ippi an ancient greek mobile messenger

InView is a Swedish startup addressing the need for a convenient way to watch multi-media from mobile phones on a standard TV. This is made possible through the patented consumer interactive device called ippi(tm). Ippi works as a pre-paid mobile phone hooked up to your TV set with a remote control device. The stationary device has the SIM card, USB port, memory and microphone and docks with the remote control. This setup makes it possible for anybody to send an MMS message to you and just like you check for messages on a home voicemail, you check for message on your TV.

I like this concept, the only drawback is a lot of vacationer notice when they get back home after having sent MMS messages from their cameraphones and get the telephone bill, not good with todays pricing from mobile operators, that is something that has got to change. Within the European Union countries it is really crazy. Many countries in Europe are quite small so in many places you go through three or four countries in notime, thus making international MMS mobile phone messages.

As a fallback though, you can use the ippi box as a viewing connector to your mobile phone once you are home and view everything using the remote sitting back in your sofa.

InView as a company is a spinoff of Ericsson Business innovation. Contact Thomas Lidforss International for you business services needs.

QuviQ - Automatic test tools for your software

QuviQ is a small software test tool startup company. The software is written in the somewhat niche laguage Erlang. The CEO John Hughes has a long history in computer science at the Chalmers University in Gothenburg and the Erlang language. He has been awarded the software of the year award at the Erlang users conference. Quviq's product is to enable auto testing by focusing on users writing formal Quviq specifications instead of test cases. The Quiviq system is using contolled random testing against your code. The analysis of failure cases are also simplified by extracting information in such a way that analysis afterwards gets much faster. The QuviQ specification language, Erlang is open source but the QuviQ libraries are company proprietary.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

myFC - a planar and flexible developed high-efficiency fuel cell

myFC is a very interesting Swedish startup company combining "green- tech with high-tech" to provide the element needed for fuel cell based batteries for power hungry portable devices. Just read about heavy iPhone users using 3G wireless, WiFi, Bluetooth surfing internet and doing social networking and of course talk, you kill the phone battery in no time. myFC has developed a patented process for a flexi fuel cell called FuelCellSticker(TM). The product, myFC 1636 Chip is a 0.5-0.75W modular fuel cell for integration into electronic products like cordless chargers and/or other portable devices.

This is a perfect opportunity for a mobile phone, laptop and accesory product manufacturing company to develop something I think could become very popular. I have personally always wanted to have twice the capacity in laptop and mobile phone batteries, they never last long enough when you need to use them.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Locify part 2 - Twitter from mobile phone with geo tagging

Here are some Locify twitter application pictures.

Start up Twitter on mobile phone






Update your status "I'm here"













Check Twitter update for yourself

Get Twitter update for friends




Check friends.

Locify - Great example of how location is adding value to applications

If you have not heard of Locify and you have a Java capable mobile phone you are missing something. Locify is a service that has location enabled services such as twitter, wikipedia, geo-caching, fireeagle. You can design a new service or "locify" an existing one. The service works with most ordinary Java capable browser equipped mobile phones. Is of course to you advantage to have the mobile phone with built-in GPS but it works without. Locify applications also synch with the web.

What all of this means is that you can walk around in a city and get to look up and explore interesting places on Wikipedia, save interesting places, track and map your way and twitter about all of it to your friends.

Locify works with external through Bluetooth connection GPS devices, server side GPS, the built in GPS and without GPS. See the mobile waypoint example allowing you to save your way.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Adolphson and Falk - From here to eternity

This is a tribute to space exploration and mankind. Enjoy the soundtrack from the 80s and the images.

The Outlook Agent on an Industry Outlook Mission

It's time to introduce the industry outlook agent. He has been on a mission to find out what is going on in the mobile industry in particular. Here's a first taste of things to come.

The trend for 2008 is clearly,

• Location enabling of existing services
• Designing new vertical services benefiting from location information
• The big push for mobile social networking and community services that really can become enriched by using location information

Years ago, people in the industry talked about location based services and not very much has happened. This year, 2008, it seems like we are finally going to get the needed prerequisites in place for a wider commercial use in 2009. The dominating 2G GSM mobile networks and phones in use around the world were never designed having GPS like satellite navigation and positioning in mind. As a result, later due to emergency phone needs for 911 or 112 services required some kind of support for location information. Several different soluttions have been developed and kind of introduced, measuring time delay of arrival of radio signals from different cellsite towers, triangulation measurements based on radio signal strengths to simple just geo tagging of cellsites. When you are in a dense metro area, the cellsite radius is small enough to locate a user with a reasonable accuracy but in rural areas, just forget about the information, you cannot locate somebody like that. The other systems all require extra equipment to be installed in a radio network something few companies including consumers have been willing to pay for.

In North America, the situation has been different for about 60% of all digital 2G users, using the North American CDMA mobile phone standard which was by Qualcomm designed from the beginning to include GPS receiver capability to enable synchronization from cellsite towers.

As a result North American users have had turn-by-turn navigation services from their phones whereas the rest of the world have had to depend on stand alone GPS devices. The introduction of 3G (North American CDMA-2000 and UMTS/WCDMA) systems have finally resulted in GPS and its newer enhanced cousin assisted GPS to become widely available.

Now the roles can be reversed in favor of WCDMA users. One drawback in using CDMA 2000 devices is that you cannot use voice and data mode at the same time, a live data session gets suspended while you use voice whereas you can have several sessions in WCDMA devices.

The chicken and the egg comment about this is though that mobile operators outside USA charge way too much in most countries for mobile data use, so now when we have finally got to the point where most people can have devices capable of interesting and user friendly location enabled services, many people will not be able to pay for their use.

A big shift is needed for mobile operator companies, more about that to come in a follow up.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

VideoPlaza - Cool Interactive online video overlay advertising

This is a very interesting new Swedish startup creating solutions for online video advertising. Videoplaza does provide a solution for your video ad campaigns overlayed on your videos using Flash or Silverlight and works on JW Open source flash player. The users license the use of the platform for serving, managing and presenting ads. There is a flexible web campaign manager allowing to control (CPM, CPC, CPA or time and categorizing/tagging) and targetting your campaign. VideoPlaza is also hosting your ad content.

VideoPlaza has gained a lot of attention from big players and have got companies such as Warner Brothers, GM Opel, H&M and Swedish Cable TV channel5 as users. There are a lot of players in this space trying to do simple monetization schemes from text overlays on Youtube from Google to TV focused companies. The VideoPlaza team I think has got their eyes focused on TV quality ads but in an interactive online environment, good for them.

As always, when it comes to video demo, since I don't have embed code, I recommend you go to the website, http://www.videoplaza.com/ and play the demo. Use the ad control options and also think about pre-, mid- and post-roll of ads in a video plus try the full screen of ad on top of the playing video.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business startup services.

Kartena - Geopositioning for Transportation and Logistics

Following the trend of location enabling whatever you do, Kartena is a Swedish startup company based in Gothenburg that provides system solutions and products based on their Geosition Navigator (tm) product. Interactive tourist maps, mapping services for transportation and logistics optimization are areas targetted.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for startup business services.