Reading this made me think (again), why the heck can't phone makers get more creative?

Android PoliceAn Experiment: My Life With A Nexus 7 As My Phone

For example, they could make phones that can be split into two pieces (in many different ways), to solve the problems that the post and its comments talk about (of size).

Remembering Modu, Israeli modular phone startup mentioned on TechCrunch some time ago  ...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modu

Jolla's $260 million Meego revival plan

By Vasudev Ram


GigaOm post about Jolla's Meego revival plans and a $260 million alliance for it.

I had blogged about Jolla some time ago when the news about it first came out.

Jolla Mobile is founded by a team of senior people from Nokia.

Meego was the next version of Maemo, Nokia's Linux-based smartphone operating system, which they seem to have dropped work on a bit before their tie-up with Microsoft.

Now Jolla is planning to revive Meego and bring out smartphones based on it.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Jolla by ex-Nokia to make MeeGo smartphones

By Vasudev Ram


Seen via a tweet by @hnfirehose.

Related links:

A JollaMobile tweet announcing it

An article about Jolla on TheVerge.com . The article says that they have investors and are hiring top MeeGo talent.

Excerpt:

[ Jolla's Chief Operating Officer Marc Dillon, was with Nokia for almost 11 years, and was the company's Principal Engineer for MeeGo (formerly Maemo) from January 2006. ]

Hope their plans work out. I had investigated a Maemo-based phone, the Nokia N900, and it had some great features (such as a hardware QWERTY keyboard, 3.5 inch screen (good at that time), good Skype integration, xterm support (so you could do shell scripting as well as programming on the phone in any Linux-based language for which there was a Maemo port, ssh into servers, etc), but decided not to get it after all, due to Nokia discontinuing support for it, and also because it had some moderate hardware issues.

If Jolla can come out with some good MeeGo-based smartphones something like the Nokia N900, without messing up much on any point, they may have some good success. Such phones won't capture the mass consumer market though.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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"We had an ARM in our hands"

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/print.html

Cool story :) The ARM processor is used in millions of smartphones and other devices.

And the BBC Micro was a nice computer for its time. (The people mentioned in the story developed both of them.)

I had worked on the Beeb years ago when in college. It could be programmed in BASIC and had a nifty feature whereby you could include assembly language (for the 6502 microprocessor that it ran on), inline in the BASIC code, within square brackets, to do things that were not easy to do in BASIC.

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com

The man behind Android - Andy Rubin

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904253204576512720214351098.html

Interesting article.

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com

Blaast - next Skype or hype?

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

I got to know about Helsinki, Finland-based Blaast via Twitter.

This may be the best place to start checking them out - their about page:

http://blaast.com/about

Excerpts from their about page:

[
Most people aren’t connected to the Internet today but when they do finally get online, they’ll use a mobile phone.
...
Right now though, smart phones are just too expensive for emerging markets. That’s where Blaast comes in: we’re bringing mobile apps and a smartphone user experience to the next billion people.
...
Through a series of unique distribution partnerships, Blaast is working together with mobile network operators. In effect, this creates a unique subscription based app store offering, one which offers developers recurring revenues in addition to huge subscriber bases.
...
Blaast is funded by the founding engineers of Skype, Veturi Venture Accelerator and top European and Asian angels.
]

(Their technical model seems to be partly about splitting the mobile app functionality between the mobile device and the cloud (on the back end). And the apps are written completely in JavaScript, on both front end (device) and back end.)

Also check these links about Blaast:

Blaast Raises Funding, On Track For A Blowout Year:

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/03/02/blaast-raises-funding-on-track-for-a-blowout-year

Mobile Cloud Startup Blaast Raises Seed Money:

http://gigaom.com/2011/03/01/mobile-cloud-startup-blaast-raises-seed-money/

From that GigaOm post:

"The Wall Street Journal recently quoted ABI Research analyst Mark Beccue suggesting that the number of mobile phone users who access apps through the cloud will rocket from 42.8 million in 2008 to nearly 1 billion by 2014."

The Blaast Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/#!/blaast

Blaast is hiring:

http://blaast.com/jobs

Blaast developer site:

https://developer.blaast.com

- - Vasudev Ram @ Dancing Bison

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Using Google Analytics to filter for visitors on mobiles

By Vasudev Ram - www.dancingbison.com

As a side effect of commenting on this post by "A VC" Fred Wilson:

Mobile Reading Trends At AVC

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/mobile-reading-trends-at-avc.html

, I figured out how to use Google Analytics (GA) to filter for mobile devices, i.e. filter for visitors to your Analytics-enabled site who are coming to it from a mobile device (such as an Android, iPhone or iPad):

Go to left pane of GA -> Visitors -> Mobile -> Mobile Devices

That's it. It will show you statistics on mobile device-using visitors, with the break up by type of device such as Android, iPhone, etc.

Can be useful ...

Posted via email
- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises