A 2007 Nokia survey found that smartphone users use its voice features only 12% of the time. From a data bandwidth point of view users use WiFi 31% of the time. 52% of data traffic is browsing, 30% is multimedia, and 12% comes from messaging. From an application point of view, games account for 4% of app use. Games are played at home 30% of the time.

Yamake lets you create your own mobile mini-games that can be shared. The game types include picture puzzles (including your own photos), quizzes, top trumps, and other mini-game types. This will be launched by the end of the year.

Kay believes that the next killer game will use location technology (cell tower ID or GPS) in addition to the sensor data (primarily accelerometers now).

Nokia's Reset Generation game is a cross platform game that lets a person running it on a phone play with a person running PC via a server-side widget for the web browser. The widget can be installed by an end-user on his/her website. The widget is available for free and is considered an ad for the mobile game.

Forget The Blackberry 'Application Center.' The BerryStore Will Have Better Apps

They report that BerryStore provides software for multi-generations of Blackberries and cuts across carriers.

Five second boot mod for ASUS Eee PC

Here's what I've found on my unmodified netbooks.

Acer Aspire One running Linpus Linux Lite: 15 second boot time
Asus Eee PC 1000H running Windows XP Home Edition: 45 second boot time

Mozilla CEO John Lilly: Firefox Mobile Alphas coming 'in a few weeks'

This is good news, of course. But, folks it is an ALPHA release. So, let's expect too much from it. It will probably be slow and buggy. This is normal for an alpha release.

I restored the left button (under the trackpad) function last night. During the course of the day yesterday, I rebooted the system several times. The Asus seems to run warm while in suspend mode (unlike my MacBook which is cool while suspended). So, I shut off the Asus in between periods of activity. This didn't do anything to restore the left button. So, last night, with a mouse attached, I removed the trackpad using the Microsoft Windows Device Manager. This forced a reboot which re-recognized and re-installed the trackpad device driver. This restored the left button function.

I received a very odd email from Microsoft regarding their Microsoft Smart Watch (based on the SPOT technology) and the Live Messenger 9 beta yesterday. Why is it odd? Well, I received the email on October 6. It was dated October 3. And you can see from the text below that it talks about a beta that started on September 17, 2008 with a market date of February 10, 2008. I feel like I'm going backwards in time. If nothing else, note that they provide a (US) toll-free customer service number.

The panel discussed their various revenue models ranging from free/ad-driven to paid-for premium content. They also discussed the shift from the importance of being directly listed in a mobile carriers app list (on-deck) to independent marketing (off-deck).

They also discussed casual vs. core gamers. Related to this was the discussion about the multi-screen experience where a game, or some forms of a game, are available for the desktop computer, game console, and mobile platforms.

Assaf's group works with games, catalog assests, mobile networks (outside the U.S. -- Animax, AXN, Sony Entertainment Pictures), and original digital productions.

He spoke about launching the Afterworld 3 minute episodes on SciFi channel in Austraila with webisodes on SciFi.com.au and episodes downloadable the next day. He then described their current original digital show: Gemini Division (I've mentioned this in this blog over the last few weeks).

Afterworld had 130 episodes. Audiences found that to be too many episodes and the following dropped off after the halfway point. So, the Gemini Division will have 50 episodes.

The next digital production is "Woke Up Dead" starring Jon Heder.

Couple of keywords that stuck with me: Snack-sized, personal, relevant media. And, of course, "for free".

Matt Womer: The embedded web browser that doesn't look like a web browser will be part of the next killer app.

Ben Gibson: Mobile mail (Blackberry) has already been the killer mobile app. Next killer apps will depend on "collar" (user) types: Blue collor, white collar, gray collar, no collar. Video is going to be part of the next killer app. But, more bandwidth is needed.

Kurt Kruger: Smartphones need to provide a better end-user experience. Unified communications is part of the next mobile killer app. He asked how many in the audience already used a unified communications system. Almost no one in the audience raised their hand.

Someone in the audience asked if what we're really waiting for is an open wireless network on which a killer app can be deployed?

My take-away is that the big brands are still searching of for a mobile presence strategy. There is a huge need for good mobile metrics to drive advertising strategies and models. The problem is that the fragmented platform market ranging from feature phones (which dominate in pure numbers of units sold) to smartphones (which account for most mobile web and app users, of course) are difficult to measure.

WMWiFiRouter worked as advertised and provided my Asus Eee PC 1000H netbook with a link to the net-world. Unfortunately, I think my Dash is so underpowered for the task that WMWiFiRouter's menus stopped responding when the Dash was in use as a WiFi router. I was able to stop the router by navigating slowly to my Start menu and using the Task Manager to terminate the WMWiFiRouter process. I'll probably try it with Windows Mobile touchscreen (Professional Edition) smartphone next. It will probably work better on a platform with a faster processor.

I'm getting ready to go to the airport to catch a flight to San Jose where the Mobile Content & Marketing Expo is being held. I prepared a couple of Word documents to note down a couple of last minute changes (including a third panel I'm now moderating: B4 - How To Make Money From Mobile Content). I coped these documents over to my Windows Mobile smartphone to make sure I have instant access to them for review.

When my T-Mobile G1 (Google Android phone) shows up later this month, I'm switching from my Windows Mobile smartphone to it for at least a couple of months to get a feel for how it works. I've been using a Windows Mobile smartphone of one model or another since around 2002. So, I'm very comfortable with its features and have especially come to appreciate having Word Mobile and Excel Mobile. While going through this familiar exercise, I began to wonder how this will differ when using a Google Android phone instead of Windows Mobile.

On one hand, no desktop-phone sync will be needed since all devices will access Google Docs over the web. On the other hand, Google Docs' word processor and spreadsheet are nowhere near as full featured as Microsoft Word and Excel. I stopped using Google's spreadsheet because it can't do simple things like auto-modify a relative reference in an equation when copying it from one cell and pasting it in another.

I've been using Zoho's web office apps a bit more lately. And, I'm hoping they will have a good Google Android solution.

There's a lot of tradeoffs involved in switching from a conventional notebook to a netbook. Neither my Acer Aspire One nor my Asus Eee PC 1000H have a DVD burner or any optical drive, for example. And the smaller LCD display and keyboard come with the lighter weight and smaller form factor (both very welcome by my back).

Both netbooks have one very important feature that my MacBook (and the Dell Latitude D620 I used in my former day job) lack: A built-in SD card reader. Since I always carry a digital camera with me, this is one less thing to carry and worry about losing (an external USB card reader). And, as it turns out, both the Acer Aspire One and the Asus Eee PC have SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) card readers. Older SD readers do not work with SDHC cards. So, if you use a digital camera with SDHC cards, these two netbooks make great companions for the traveling amateur photographer.

I'm flying to San Jose Sunday evening to attend the Mobile Content & Marketing Expo. I've been traveling with either a 12" iBook or, more recently, a 13" MacBook for the past three or four years. This time, however, I'm taking my Asus Eee PC 1000H running Windows XP. You can see how much smaller it is compared to the Apple MacBook or my ancient HP Pavilion notebook (which also runs XP). The Asus Eee's small size coupled with its 6-cell 5 hour battery life makes for what I hope will be a good travel computer.

I'm trying to use only freeware or Open Source apps on this XP based notebook. Here's what I've got installed so far and a few things I plan to download and install before leaving.

- Firefox - web browser
- Google Chrome - web browser
- Thunderbird - email
- MozBackup - backup Thunderbird email profile & data
- GIMP - bitmap graphics editor
- Paint.net - bitmap graphics editor
- Avast! Anti - Virus Home Free Edition
- Microsoft Defender - Anti-spyware
- Adobe AIR - to run...
- Twhirl- Twitter client
- VirtualDub - installed but I might use Microsoft Movie Maker 2.1 instead

I'll probably also download copies of and install:
- Komodo Edit
- Notepad++

Asus shipped the Eee PC with Sun's StarOffice. I'll leave it on for now but will probably replace it with the the app it is derived from, OpenOffice.org, after version 3 becomes a production release (currently RC3).