Address Book is undoubtedly the core usage on the mobile phone and central for many startups (zyb, plaxi…), but I’ve always been a strong believer that it has and will be replaced by social networks. Let’s face it, my 2k contacts on my phones are just a pile of crap, lots are outdated, and quite a few would require a little search for me to remember who those people are. My friends are on Facebook, my business contacts on LinkedIn, this is my Address Book.
This morning at #leweb, both LinkedIn and Facebook confirmed they are eyeing on the phone address book space.
Facebook on Blackberry paved the way, with phone numbers and pictures updated from facebook, the experience has been live for more than a year now and as a user I feel it quite clear that that’s what we should all be experiencing in our phones.
Value is not the data, it’s the relationship between the users.

This new product from Google is quite stunning. The android app is available as we speak and analyzes a picture you take with your phone to perform a search on it. Basically it has some shape recognition algorithm that will either recognize special shapes (a book, the eiffel tower, a bridge) and some OCR algorithms to read what’s written on the object, and search for it.

Giesecke & Devrient, one of the leading provider of trusted solution platforms (SIM cards but also secured bank notes, passports and probably more) has acquired a minority share of Venyon, a NFC startup launched by Nokia.

Venyon was set up in 2006 and has established itself a position as a trusted service manager (TSM) on the mobile near field communication (NFC) market.

NFC combines smart card and contactless technologies for secure mobile phone applications. As a TSM, Venyon provides trusted services to provision and manage applications such as credit cards or transit tickets securely over the mobile network on the user’s NFC-enabled mobile phone.

“This move to acquire full ownership of Venyon is another key milestone in G&D’s strategy. It will enable us to continue to expand our position as a provider of secure mobile phone solutions ” from SIM and secure microSD cards through software to the secure administration of critical applications on the mobile phone,” said Karsten Ottenberg, CEO of Giesecke & Devrient. “The market for NFC solutions is expected to develop steadily. Venyon has built up leading service expertise in the NFC ecosystem, which will also be useful to us in other business sectors.”

NFC has been very slow to get real in Europe, following what I call the QR-Code syndrome of too many parties involved (banks, mobile operators, service providers, hardware manufacturers) all wiling to get the biggest part of this potentially big cake – but at the end of the day there still is no cake to cut…

This week Mobile Backup and Android gets all the hype,

• WaveSecure is one of the 3 winners of the Android challenge 2 with its application enabling remote location, lock, backup and wipe of your droid phone
• SugarSync introduces new APIs and an Android application to “sync folders between the SD card on your Android phone and your computers”

So why all the hype ? Answer is quite simple, your mobile is the placeholder of your mobile digital life, and your digital life having massively gone mobile since the iPhone shook up the market, that means a lot. Pictures, music, videos, contacts, calendars, emails, all those personal stuff on a very mobile platform, if you were to loose your device you might loose a lot of irreplaceable data and expose your life to third parties finding your phone. Being able to backup, lock, wipe and restore your phone has definitely a lot of value !

With all the fuss about Hadopi and controling illicit usage of the broadband connection, this was bound to happen, where there is a new regulation, companies build tools to enforce it. So did Detica with their CView deep packet inspection appliances to measure the level of illegal file-sharing on the network.

The solution yet does not enable tracking of a specific user’s usage an only give metrics on a network-wide level, yet I don’t see why this could not be applied to a specific user.

Virgin Media in UK is the first tester of the solution allegedly to get a measure rather than to act on illegal file-sharing.

The Power management space is definitely getting super-hot lately. Another day another announce with PowerZoa introducingtheir line of “cubes” which are:

Powerzoa cube is a smart plug that fits between your appliances and wall outlets. The cubes measure your energy usage and sends data to a personalized website where you can schedule appliances to turn on and off automatically, saving electricity, lowering energy costs and helping the environment.

While the website is hideous, it’s quite remarkable they had bot a power meter and a BPL chip fit into such a tiny package. We’re finally getting to what we were foreseeing with WaveStorm in 2007.

This was definitely the revelation at this morning’s SFR Player innovation exhibition : a holographic pyramid to stage your prototype devices. the magic is right there and it took us a few minutes to figure out the trick – yet the effect is quite striking!

As I was leaving SFR Player presentation this morning, something caught my eye in SFR’s flagship store : a small little weird mechanical insect. The Hexbug has ingenious sensors letting him sense chocks and change direction accordingly – baby loved it ! 14.99 and more fun than an expensive Rolly or Pleo. Gotta try it on the cat now…

Just stumbled upon this old screenshot of what we had been developing at WaveStorm in 2007, still feels very actual when you think about Google PowerMeter initiatives.