This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.
Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.
The Android platform has its largest share in the US and the UK, but has a much weaker share in other countries. This could change in the near future as new phones emerge that run Android, such as the Nexus One.
Docomo and KDDI are the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, and account for 12% of the mobile browser share platforms.
Canada seems to like the iPhone and iTouch, with 86% of mobile internet users using this platform to access the internet.

Also interesting to see that in southern america Nokia still rules, and I have no explanation for Opera’s domination in Nigeria… any thoughts ?

Despite the Foursquare / Gowalla hype, Mobile LBS really isn’t a new thing. But, it seems like this time are buying it ! Yet there’s nothing innovative in Foursquare’s service. The confidentiality issues remain, but apparently the fact that firing up the application lets you win mayorships or medals or points somewhat make things acceptable by those who have been criticizing previous LBS service.
Yet the market, fueled by local ads, is a completely new territory to address which may be as big as Google’s Adwords. As usual it’s chicken and egg, nobody really invested in building up local ad networks while there were no real source of traffic for such ads, apparently this is starting to change. It may be the time to start reconsidering the viability of Local Advertisements, which will have special needs in terms of salesforce and sales mechanism that are very different from legacy Internet-based advertisements.
In France, “PagesJaunes” may be on of the few ready for this challenge, with an ability to list and upsale services to local business.

is limited to 500Mb… and I keep breaking the limit faster and faster !

The Mobile world has been forever a very fragmented space. Nevertheless, now you can start making some real bucks there : Mobile Ads is taking off, Mobile apps can be sold in one-click app-stores and delivered to a big mass of user in a glimpse… The mobile world is getting mature enough so that we can safely say that 2010 is going to be the year of all brands and generally all software getting mobile.
Innovative brands and solutions providers have already invested (a lot) to get in the mobile, often taking expensive and unproven approaches to get into the mobile.
I still remember Fauchon’s gold and silver eclairs being sold in 2005 (!!) from the mobile and that we built at Kamayo (that was really ahead of the curve but it was an impressive achievement for 2005 o have a big brand such as Fauchon go that road)!

The decision process on how to build mobile application isn’t much easier now than it was in 2005 but a few ground rules have become clearer now :

• When working with a major brand, a communication agency or an operator in most cases you will be compelled in supporting a very large number of handsets. Those guys usually don’t like to push a message to their customers that only a fraction would be able to benefit from. At a proof of concept phase you may be able to limit to one or two platforms but you will need to should you’re able to scale and support all platforms.
• If you’re an indie developer or a startup, you should focus on making money. Today making money happens in those platforms in that order :
  iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Java, Palm Pre
  You should address each platform one after another trying to do the best job you can so end-users see you care. More important than just developing a great app, you should spend time marketing it on the dedicated channels. You do *not* need to cover all platforms, actually it’s really a 80/20 strategy, most you money will probably come from the iphone or maybe android. So you should rather focus on one platform and do it perfectly than spend time on developing all platforms and not having the means to market them. From that prospective, Evernote is a perfect case to watch, they first did a cool iPhone app, then moved in a 1year time to android and blackberry and finally Symbian.

When it comes to massifying your production, it’s always the same story, either you use a tool to address all platforms or you use manpower. Both have pros and cons. Tools such as Streamezzo or J2MEPolish have become great over time but going for them binds your product to their IP and impacts your business model. This may not be acceptable in all cases and sometimes you may want to go in hidden areas where the tool may not go (yet).
In my opinion, manpower is a real option. There are lots of experienced developers and mobile companies out there that can help you reach all platforms at once at a relatively low cost. It all comes down to your ability of managing projects to make sure everything is on track in terms of time, cost and quality.

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 !

I’m playing again with DeviceAnywhere which I encountered first a couple years ago at Mobile World Congress. If you remember, Mobile Complete make appliances where they hook up a mobile, wire it to a computer and let you access this device from remote through a convenient application. One of the main advantage is that it lets you run QA tests on very heterogenous devices with various operators-related factory settings.
I must confess I’m pretty impressed by the amount of devices they are now supporting along with the number of native operator devices. Haven’t deeply looked at the pricing but it seems quite reasonable (couple bucks an hour) and totally worth the flexibility of the service.