Digital Trends and Leif Iverson was gracious enough to have me on their podcast last week, and we took the opportunity to talk:

• How To Read e-Books On Your iPhone
• Apple Tablet: Latest Updates
• CTIA 2009: Best Of Show

Digital Trends has also updated with a great new look, and more gadget content than you can shake an accelerometer at, so be sure to check it out.

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TiPb on Digital Trends: iTablet, eBooks on iPhone, and CTIA

Yahoo! oneConnect wasn’t the only news to come steamrolling out of the CTIA Keynote yesterday, and TiPb senior editor Dieter Bohn was there live to capture it:

The big story is BluePrint — it offers a very quick mobile services development platform based on XML. Basically it’s a large set of XML setup you can program a mobile app in and it will display very nicely on different platforms — iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, etc. They are opening it up for anybody and anybody can distribute however they’d like. Yahoo would prefer you use Yahoo’s ads on your apps, but not requiring it.

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Live From CTIA, It’s Yahoo! BluePrint! (And Pics!)

While our own Dear Leader is off live-blogging in San Francisco (no, sadly not for Apple but for CTIA oh, so close by), he hasn’t forgotten us, and indeed has just sent in word from the field of Yahoo! oneConnect for — what was last year’s “device unmentionable” — the iPhone.

“Pulse feature is sweet!”

And just was is the pulsey sweetness of which Dieter speaks? Yahoo! says:

Yahoo! oneConnect’s “Pulse” view (pictured, via Business Wire) combines the social activity of the web with mobile phone contacts, providing consumers with a dynamic overview of what friends are up to.

oneConnect looks to be all about combining contacts, SMS, social status messages, and activities into one integrated view. Your social heads-up display, as it were. Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Yahoo! Connected Life, PR-speaks:

“The iPhone has ignited and captured the imagination of what a mobile phone can do. The rich feature set of the iPhone enables the best way to experience oneConnect. The powerful combination of Yahoo! Blueprint, the mobile platform, and the iPhone SDK, was leveraged to create this unique experience of oneConnect for millions of iPhone users.”

Preview’s available now, for FREE, via iTunes!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Yahoo! oneConnect Preview Hits the iPhone!

Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, gave a great talk today. His talk actually dovetails perfectly with what I wrote last night, that all of these “walled garden” methodologies have got to go. My notes from the talk have been posted up; you’ll see them refined into a story at BerryShack and Crackberry soon enough, I’m sure.

I’ll dig a bit deeper into his talk later today, but the highlight for me is that Moskovitz knows that as computers get smaller, they’ll eat into mobiles. Mobiles will have to become open like computers, or people will start using computers instead of mobiles. As computers miniaturize, that’s just going to be a fact of life.

figure 1: this image from Moskovitz’s talk shows the nature of the computer world versus the nature of the mobile world. In the mobile world, everything is locked. Carriers try to monetize various kinds of data over their own network, the OS is locked to everyone, and the hardware is similarly locked, which isn’t what people really want (witness the energy put into hacking openness into the iPhone). The locked-in aspect of the mobile world is also what leads to people thinking of their mobile phone as jsut a landline that they can take with them wherever they go, instead of a mobile computing device. This is a barrier to smartphone adoption.

figure 2: this is Moskovitz’s picture that depicts the collision that’s going to occur in the mobile world as the computer world miniaturizes to the point where the computer hardware makers can put their software and services onto mobile-sized devices that have full computer power.

The other great part is that Moskovitz gave a warning to everyone attending: open up your platform or become obsolete, either by Apple’s hand or Google’s hand. Pick your poison, really. Both of them are looking to either destroy or warp the industry, and to do it from within.

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CTIA: Facebook Talk

There is something seriously wrong with the wireless industry. The CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment is emblematic of the issues that plague the wireless industry. It’s seriously like a microcosm of what’s broken in the wireless world.

From the press side of things, this conference is a wash so far. Sony Ericsson is not there, even though there is a Sony Style store right across the street. Even Palm, located in nearby Sunnyvale, isn’t there. Facebook might have a good talk tomorrow, and Microsoft’s announcement of Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, though it screams entertainment, is clearly aimed at the enterprise. They had nothing to announce for entertainment; one of the key things that will make anyone actually want to have a smartphone. Sure, if the IT department hands you a smartphone as part of some massive rollout, maybe your average featurephone user wouldn’t turn it away.

Aside from a few game companies, MobiTV, maybe AOL, and the maps companies (TeleAtlas and NavTech), there really wasn’t anything at this conference that would offer any significant value to the actual consumer. No breaking news, nothing earth-shattering, nothing truly compelling. I’m sure that the Blackjack II will excite its fair share of Windows Mobile users, but to what end? It’s essentially a tech specs and OS upgrade (that Blackjack owners should have received by now anyway). MobileFocus could be a different story, but if MobileFocus is the story of entertainment and gadgets, what’s wrong with CTIA?

And this is a shame. Mobile content should be a huge affair. Mobile is going to provide one of the screens that people use to view their content, to listen to their music. “Wireless IT and Entertainment” is CTIA’s tagline. That “and” is an important part of everything — it’s supposed to indicate that Entertainment is to be found somewhere.

Perhaps most tellingly, Apple, with the iPod, iPhone, and the iTunes store, is not listed as a partner for any of the kiosks I visited. Apple is not here in any official or unofficial capacity, except perhaps as the metaphorical graffiti on the other side of the wall. Oh, and the flagship Apple store a few short blocks away. No one is trying to cash in on the iPhone’s success, no one is trying to ride its coat-tails. Apple and the content owners don’t show up at this conference, which makes this CTIA event a lot like an abandoned ghost town. The iPhone has been announced for nine months, out for three: and there’s nothing out there that even remotely answers the challenges and problems it brought.

It seems like the point of this conference is to try to team up and see how their bricks can help build up the “walled garden.” We were continually lambasted by criminally bad ads prior to Ballmer’s keynote from groups that are scared brainless of the kind of regulation that might actually make consumers’ mobile world not suck. The calls for regulation that crop up with increasing regularity are there for a reason — the wireless world is broken right now, and I don’t think the usual suspects know how to fix it.

Mr. Largent, tear down this wall.

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CTIA: Lipstick on a Pig

We just finished watching the day 1 keynote by Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO), and Dieter has posted the details up on WMExperts.com. It was a fair keynote; Ballmer was better in person than I thought he would be. His stage voice and personality are both ridiculously brash.

He had a lot to say about Windows Mobile, this of course being a mobile conference. He didn’t have a lot to say in regards to competition with the iPhone. Windows Live Search, Microsoft’s one-stop app for personal searches, crashed on stage. The presenter handled it quite well, there will be no horror stories of 5 minute waits for devices to reboot, etc.

The biggest news of his keynote is that Microsoft is bringing all of the parts of Windows Mobile phones further into their domain network structure. Windows Mobile devices will be further managed by the network administrators. They can push applications out, settings, practically the entire phone experience. It looks like it will be quite popular with the enterprise; but not by any means at the cost of the iPhone. No, this isn’t a shot across the iPhone’s bow. It’s a direct hit on Blackberry. I’ve said over and over in our Treocast podcasts that RiM plays a very dangerous game in the mobile space — they compete directly with Microsoft, and their job just got a lot harder.

It’s curious to me that Ballmer never really even mentions Google. Thinly-veiled insults are hurled their way a fair amount by both Ballmer and former Seahawks player / former U.S. Representative / current CTIA president Steve Largent, but Microsoft curiously has the decency to mention Yahoo!. Anyway, we’re off to the show floor. I’ll be posting more later.

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CTIA Ballmer Keynote