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Category: General

By Payam Dastmalchi on August 10th, 2009

Interview with Razia Ahamed of Touchnote

touchnote-logo

Touchnote is an exciting web start-up that has generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks. They were recently declared as Best Mobile Service at MobileBeat 2009 conference and have inked several key partnerships to help facilitate its growth. Touchnote’s mobile application was launched at the Ovi store at the end of May and is absolutely one of my favourite apps. The application allows users to create and send greeting cards directly from the phone to anywhere in the World. I recently interviewed Razia Ahamed of Touchnote to learn more about the application and plans moving forward.

Tell me about your company. How long you’ve been in business? What is the core focus of the service?

Touchnote is an online and mobile service that lets you design and create your own physical photo-cards. The core focus of the service is to bring digital photos to life in the form of real printed photo cards. Touchnote launched its service online in October 2008 and launched with Nokia in May 2009 to bring the first mobile application to deliver a physical personalised product.

What can users do with Touchnote mobile app on Ovi? Are there any significant limitations with the mobile app vs the web site?

  • Using the Touchnote application, users either take a photo or select one from their photo gallery…
  • They then write a message…
  • Tell Touchnote who to send it to (they can pull the postal address from their address book or enter it manually)…
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    By Payam Dastmalchi on August 07th, 2009

    Ovi Categories July vs. August

    As a follow up to my application category post last month, I wanted to do a quick comparison between the current state of applications in the store vs July 2009.

    As somebody commented on the previous post, using N97 as a metric was probably not a good idea since it is a new device and many developers don’t yet support it. So for this study I decided to compare between N97 and All phones supported by Ovi store so you have a clear picture of what is available in Ovi.

    Here are few key takeaways:

    • Ovi store for N97 grew by 3 percent in August with total number of 1290 titles vs 1249 in July. That is about 1 new application a day added to store.
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    By Payam Dastmalchi on August 06th, 2009

    Welcome to OviApplications, Yash!

    5e4a20e81a1a448392664664724d87ca

    Today, I would like to welcome Yash Maheshwari or better known as alsiladka to many of you on Twitter as a writer to Oviapplications. Yash was one of the first people to reach out to me and help me with posts and application reviews and I am pleased to have him on board.

    Yash is currently studying Law at Symbiosis International University in Pune and has also completed a diploma in Cyber Law along with his studies. Currently, he is also doing a certification course on Cyber Crime Investigation. He is not new to the Symbian S60 platform having started using S60 phones with Nokia 3250, followed by N73 and presently using the N85. He has a passion for trying out new technologies and applications and has been involved in Beta testing for several highly profile applications from various developers. He was also just recently named as Nokia Beta Labs Contributer of the month.

    Yash will focus on in-depth, hands on reviews of Symbian applications and other related news and commentaries. He can be contacted at Alsiladka [at] oviapplications.com.

    Welcome,Yash!

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    By Payam Dastmalchi on August 05th, 2009

    Is your smartphone one of the top selling phones in Q2?

    smartphones_front

    The research firm IDC has compiled a preliminary list of the top-selling smart phones in the United States in the second quarter and the list seems to be accurate with what we say in general public.

    You need to realize that this list ONLY counts vendor sales to carriers and channels rather than direct sales to end users and that these numbers will be finalized by IDC at the end of this month.

    Here is the top 10 smart phones in the US in Q2:

    10- HTC Toch Diamond – CDMA offered by Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless

    9- HTC Touch Pro – CDMA & GSM offered by Sprint, Verizon, AT&T

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    By Payam Dastmalchi on August 01st, 2009

    Interview with Antti Lammi of RaceChrono

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    I recently interviewd Antti Lammi, Founder and Owner of RaceChrono. This is an exciting interview as Antti shares his experinces developing the application and future product roadmap.

    1. First, tell me a bit about your company. How long have you been in business? How did you get started in it?

    I started writing the RaceChrono software in early 2007. This was just for hobby without much ambition. After some months me and my friend realized there could be business potential, so we founded RaceChrono Oy in early 2008. RaceChrono Oy is currently a small start-up owned and financed by its founders.

    2. Talk about RaceChrono and what does it exactly do?

    RaceChrono is a GPS based lap timing software. The software gives the user immediate feedback of laps and to provide a way to analyze the laps without transferring any data to a computer. The software is particularly aimed towards recording and analyzing laps in motor sports, but it has also a lot of users for example in down hill skiing, bicycling and horse racing.

    RaceChrono is currently available for Symbian (S60 2nd, 3rd and 5th editions) and Windows Mobile phones. We have also plan on doing Windows CE version very soon. Currently we are thinking of Android and Maemo platforms too, but not considering iPhone platform right now as it does not support connections to standard Bluetooth GPS receivers.

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    By Payam Dastmalchi on July 29th, 2009

    Interview with Asif Ali of ZestADZ

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    Mobile Advertising industry has always been of great interest to me and I’ve followed the trend closely. According to a recent report by Juniper Research, Mobile Advertising will reach $5.7bn by 2014. It is obvious that many advertisers are starting to use this medium to reach consumers but there have been questions as whether application developers can make significant revenue from displaying ads within their apps. To find out more about the state of the industry and learn about avilable programs to Symbian Developers, I interviewed Asif Ali President and Co-Founder of ZestADZ, a leading performance based mobile marketing platform.

    • First, tell me a bit about your company? How long you’ve been in the business? Private or VC funded?

    Mobile-worx is a leading mobile marketing firm. We run ZestADZ – A Leading Performance based mobile ad network with strong presence globally. We currently serve more than 500m ads per month. We’re a privately funded company and in business for more about 3 years now and of that about 2 years in the Ad network business.

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    By Payam Dastmalchi on July 22nd, 2009

    Review: Blackboard for Nokia 5800

    Blackboard for Nokia 5800 is a simple drawing application simulating a blackboard. The application can be downloaded for free from the Ovi store.

    bboard

    Features:

    This is a very simple app. There are four touch control buttons: info, chalk, sponge and exit. Chalk is used for drawing and sponge for erasing. Sponge leaves wet trails simulating reality.

    Actual drawing is done overlaying partially transparent PNG image on top of the background graphic. The erase functionality works just like erasing a blackboard in real life and does not clean neatly and leaves behind a mark. The information key is just rather a small box with the current version and company name.

    Conclusion:

    Blackboard for Nokia 5800 was developed by a Finish based Offscreen Technologies. The company has developed an end to end, integrated development environment for Symbian S60 3rd and 5th edition GUI application developments called Origo IDE. This unique empowers developers to quickly write codes in UI based environment compared to those created with C++.

    Using such technology, Offscreen has been able to develop several high quality touch applications for S60 devices. Blackboard for Nokia 5800 is a simple app that many could find it handy for quick note taking and fun drawing projects.

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    By Payam Dastmalchi on July 18th, 2009

    Oviapplications Weekend Hits 7.18.09

    • Symbian Foundation launches Horizon apps store. Through this program, developers will get help building applications for Symbian devices and getting them in global marketplace. [VentureBeat]
    • On another Symbian news, Nokia sells off Symbian professional services to Accenture. This is another smart move from Nokia to distance itself from Symbian so other manufactures feel comfortable adopting the technology. [Accenture]
    • Another expensive Nokia phone will hit the shelf in U.S. On Friday Nokia announced the availability of 8MP Nokia N86 in the coming weeks. The company claims that with this phone, consumers will be able to replace their point-and-shoot digital cameras. [CNET]
    • In an interview with ComputerWorld, Nokia’s Product Manager for the US, discusses some of the challenges that the company has faced in NA and their plans to rectify its position. [ComputerWorld]
    • Google believes mobile app stores are a dead end and that unlimited data plans are the future. Google’s VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra also declares that web apps will win against native mobile apps. [WIRED]
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    By Payam Dastmalchi on July 16th, 2009

    Nokia’s Q2 revenue numbers

    Nokia has just released their Q2 revenue numbers and as many expected they are hurting to say the least. Nokia’s operating profit was down 66% to 380 million euros compared to 1.1 billion euros last year ( wow, imagine that) with net sales dropping 25 percent YoY to to 9.9 billion Euros. Ouch!

    The good news for Nokia is that they seem to be still selling tons of smart phones with Nokia 5800 XpressMusic being the most popular phone with 3.7 million units being sold this quarter alone. Nokia’s E71 device has also received a great response with a total of 5 million units shipping out. Nokia said that its smartphone market share rose to 41%.

    In a statement, Nokia also said that it expects mobile device volumes in the third quarter to be approximately at the same level or slightly sequentially. The company also said it expected some delays and shortage in the third-quarter launch of new smartphones due to supply constraints.

    Nokia shares fell 12% in early trading Thursday.

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    By Payam Dastmalchi on July 16th, 2009

    Only 2% of Ovi apps use LBS

    As a follow up to my post yesterday about the state of LBS available in the Ovi store, a new study done by Skyhook Wireless reveals that Nokia Ovi store has the smallest ratio of available apps to LBS apps with only 2% of Ovi apps using this feature.

    The report which analyzed the trends by looking at all the location-aware apps from Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Marketplace, Blackberry App World, Nokia’s Ovi Store, and the Palm App Catalog shows that $0.99 is the most popular paid category, and only a handful of apps sell for $6.00 to $8.99. Some location apps sell for $9.99 or higher in both stores. Most of these high-priced apps are navigation or sports-related like golf and sailing.

    According to the report, there are currently 23 location-aware applications in the Ovi store and there is a about 43/57 split between paid and free apps. The average price of an app is $3.11 with Utilities and social networking services being the most popular category in the Ovi store.

    Now the real question is why are developers afraid to integrate more LBS apps for Symbian platform. Nokia has been committed in this space with several high profile acquisitions including the $8.1 billion takeover of Navteq so it is surprising to learn that we haven’t seen any innovative products come out.

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