It’s a summer block party!

Mobile Monday and BostInnovation have teamed up with Downtown Crossing for an open outdoor networking event.

It’s a hot and steamy summer out there in the city, cool off with some live music, enticing performances, cold drinks and mobile technologies at our summer block party!

July 22nd starting at 5pm, we’ll be on the pedestrian Summer Street by Downtown Crossing beside Macy’s for an evening of open networking.

Click Above To Register!

This one isn’t just another tech event, but a party featuring live music from In Like Lions and the Cirque de Soleil performers!

Cash bar, appetizers, and entertainment provided thanks to the Boston Phoenix.  Common down for a crazy party with amazing performances and mobile networking!

Where: (outside) Summer Street by Macys
15 Summer Street, Boston, MA

When: Thursday July 22 5:00pm – 8:00pm

Tickets: FREE!

Mobile Monday is taking over the MIT Museum for a night of mobile exhibitions, food, and drink on June 7th.  We’ll have two cash bars and dozens of mobile demo booths within the museum exhibit halls.  Come see the newest Boston mobile companies and meet new people in Boston’s fast-growing mobile community.

If you are an early stage Boston mobile startup and want to exhibit, you can request a free booth here.

Date:  June 7th, 2010 — 6.30pm to 9pm

Location:  MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA.  Transportation:  Red Line Kendall Square.  Parking info.

Cost:  $0

Register here to attend the event.

Exhibiting companies include: Vendee, Papa Products, Raizlabs, Goby, MoreMagic Solutions Inc., Two Forty Four AM, LiquidBits, Isabella Products, Adva Mobile, Apperian, Appswell, Bovine Games, Skycore, EZMobileMarketing, Hello Vino, ID8 Mobile MoGo Talk, Illume Software, Inc. iZUP, Pixibility, mJetz, uGuideMe, SwiftMobile, Delfigo Security, Peekaboo, PRX – Public Radio Exchange, Sayagle, Springpad, Tweetworks, Zazu, and many others.

If you have questions, please contact Itay at itay[at]momoboston.com or Matt at matt[at]momoboston.com.

Many thanks to our sponsors!

Premier Sponsor: Blackberry Developer Program

Super Apps deliver compelling user experiences by leveraging the unique capabilities of the BlackBerry® Application Platform. Seamlessly integrated, contextualized and efficient apps that help people do what they love, every day. Think you have what it takes to develop the next Super App? Enter the BlackBerry Super App Developer Challenge for your chance to win from $1.5 million in prizes that will help your app succeed! Learn more at http://www.blackberry.com/developers/superapps

Silver sponsors:

Join us for a Mobile Monday discussion about financial services and mobile.

Hosted by Bank of America, you’ll hear from financial services leaders about the intersection of the mobile and financial worlds.

Panelists include:

In addition to his Banking Transformation capacity at Bank of America, Marc B. Keller acts as an Executive-in-Residence at MIT’s Center for Future Banking. He works on business development and strategy to determine Bank of America’s new business models and strategic approaches to consumer finance across the BAC enterprise, including emerging payments and mobile commerce initiatives. At MIT, Marc also advises the Next Billion effort to expand financial services via mobile telephony to the underserved both in the US and in the developing world.

Matt Calman – Senior Vice President and R&D Executive, Bank of America

Also a member of the Innovation team at Bank of America, Matt Calman leads the Center for Future Banking, a joint venture between the bank and the MIT Media Lab focused on rethinking the human financial experience. His organization also includes the Gateway Innovation Lab and the Innovation Enablement Team. Calman joined the bank in 1986 in Corporate Trust and has led teams in information technology, strategy, and process design. He founded several industry workgroups focused on business and technical standards for emerging image transaction processes. In his current role, Calman brings together cutting-edge research at MIT with strategies and innovation capabilities across the enterprise. He also leads an innovation team for China Construction Bank, building innovation labs and teams in China. Calman has authored more than 30 U.S. and foreign patents and was named Bank of America’s first Inventor of the Year in 2008.

Chris Musto – General Manager Financial Services, Keynote Competitive Research, Keynote Systems Inc.

Chris leads the Keynote Competitive Research program.  In this role, Chris oversees two dozen annual competitive benchmarking studies in North America and Europe covering over 35,000 user sessions and technical monitoring of roughly 1 million task simulations across 200 leading financial services, retail, search, travel and other sites annually.  In addition, Chris oversees Keynote Scorecards for Financial Services, a fact-based competitive benchmarking service. Chris joined Keynote in 2005 with the acquisition of the Watchfire benchmarking and website assessment services business unit.  His areas of focus include best practices in online customer experience, identifying the online interactions that drive successful sales and service outcomes, and the integration of the Internet into an overall delivery strategy. He has been cited in leading media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Bill Hartman – Director of Research, Essential

Senior consultant leading Essential’s research efforts in product and service discovery and definition, Bill Hartman maps strategy opportunities and drives development agendas. Expert in the translation of user and channel inputs into design requirements for hardware, software, web interaction, device interaction, and service development projects.  Bill consults to clients in a wide range of industries but most recently led a multi-nation, ethnographic study including the use of mobile in financial transactions. He also led a co-creation study among young adults to develop a strategy for LifeTuner, an online community sponsored by the AARP to increase financial literacy.

Aaron MacPherson –Practice Director with IDC Financial Insights

Aaron McPherson is a practice director with IDC Financial Insights, responsible for the strategic direction of research in payments and security.    With the onset of mobile technology his research has grown to encompass mobile and he brings the insight of many conversations with industry leaders to our community.  Previously, Mr. McPherson was a principal in the Consumer Financial Services Group at American Management Systems (AMS), a leading technology strategy and implementation firm. While there, Mr. McPherson developed implementation strategies for CRM initiatives at a top-ten North American bank as well as a leading online bank. Before joining AMS, Mr. McPherson served as a financial analyst in the Executive Office of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

When:  Monday, May 24th from 6 to 9 pm

Where: Bank of America auditorium at the first floor of 100 Federal Street, Boston, MA.

Accessible by the Red Line (South Station or Downtown Crossing) and Orange Line (State Street), as well as several buses (link). This location is wheel-chair accessible. Parking is available at Post Office Square and other public lots in the surrounding area.

Register now to reserve your spot

Note:  Registration closes at noon on Friday May 21 so we can clear all participants with security.

Cost: Free

Many thanks to event organizers Dave Micalizzi of KMDM Inc and Lisa Handalian of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch who are our Mobile Monday ambassadors to the financial world.

Refreshments are compliments of Essential Design.

Mobile Camp Boston keeps getting bigger and better.  Every day we’re getting amazing new volunteer speakers and attendance is at record levels.

Sign up to reserve your spot at Mobile Camp!  It’s free to attend and free to present.

Here’s a sampling of the sessions you can expect:

Joel Angiolillo of Verizon Wireless:  Mobile User Interface Standards and Guidelines: Are they a good idea?

Anthony Hand of Motorola:  MOTOBLUR and Android UI.

Heather Menery of Jumptap:  Targeting ads in mobile through geo-targeting and demographic-targeting.

Erica Pierantozzi of the Travel Channel:  Developing mobile as a brand and best practices for acquiring mobile users.

Jeremy Halpern, Managing Director of Evolution Advisors LLC – How to finance your startup.

Doug Levin of CE Fusion Center:  All about Venture Funding.

Ramesh Kumar of 2ergo:  Future of mobile coupons and mobile commerce.

Noah Tye:  Programming for Android in Scala.

Richard Kasperowski: Control UI and Scrum/Agile for mobile development.

Raj Aggarwal of Localytics:   How to measure your app with mobile analytics.

Laurie Cutts:  Best practices for marketing and promoting mobile applications.

Heather Sears of Mobile Synergies: How mobile technology is transforming the urban experience.

Riche Zamor of Social Contxt:  Mobile strategies and applications for nonprofits.

Mobile Camp is free thanks to a generous sponsorship from Verizon Wireless.

Mobile Monday free events at @ CTIA

Cocktail Reception at the Hard Rock 5.30pm at 3/24

Mobile Monday Cocktail Reception on March 24th

Mobile Monday is holding a Cocktail Reception at one of Vegas’s top venues, the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.  The reception will be Wednesday, March 24, 2010 from 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. at the Body English nightclub.

Platinum sponsor:

Additional sponsors:

Mobile Monday CTIA show floor

Mobile Monday lounge and stage at CTIA

On the show floor, March 23rd and 24th from 3 to 4pm, at the Las Vegas Convention Center − Exhibits Innovation Stage, North Hall.

Click here for more information on Mobile Monday CTIA.

Mobile Monday takes the stage at CTIA – literally.  For the first time Mobile Monday will host live interactive programs on the showfloor. Executives, visionaries and developers will share insights on emerging technology, trends and opportunities in the mobile industry.

Come here how Mobile technology changes how we live, work and play.

March’s Mobile Monday Boston (#momobo) featured nine startups from both the Boston area and the UK, as UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) promoted its Mobile Technologies Mission to Boston campaign. The firms that presented included:

Fluent Mobile

Micah Adler, CEO led off by positioning UK-based Fluent Mobile as a firm focusing on app store optimization (ASO), marketing mobile apps to ensure they’re discovered within the app store, with interaction between the app store, search and discovery, and mobile advertising.  The company’s also developed its own app, Fluent News, to aggregate your news feeds.

Textaurant

Joshua Bob, founder and President of Boston-based Textaurant described the startup as an application provider focused on reducing your wait time at upscale casual restaurants, and eliminating the need for restaurants to use expensive pager-based systems. Their waiting list management solution extends table occupancy rates, and the firm hopes to tap into the more than 140,000 upscale casual restaurants in the US such as Chili’s and Olive Garden.

i-Migo

UK-based i-Migo, led by Saban Demirbasa, is a mobile security solution for mobile devices. Utilizing the Bluetooth 2.0 stack with EDR, i-Migo creates an audible alarm if you become separated from your mobile device within a certain range. The monitoring device is located on the person, can back up personal information on your mobile device, and monitors the location it over the air (OTA). If you mobile phone or laptop is out of range, it creates an audible alarm on the device, can put the device into lock down mode, and can send an OTA signal to the service provider as well to identify the theft.

Apollo Mobile

Rolfe Swinton, co-founder of UK-based Apollo Mobile presenting the firm’s Re4ctor mobile application platform that focuses on unlocking the potential of the 4.5 billion mobile phones around the world, 65% of which are not smartphones, but basic feature phones with web browsers. Apollo Mobile offers services such as data analytics, mobile commerce and payments, social media, video and audio synchronization, and targeted advertising to a full range of feature and basic mobile phones.

hello vino

Rick Breslin, CEO of Boston-based hello vino presented his Boston-area firm as a mobile wine recommendation engine for both consumers and wine industry establishments. The application’s  available on iPhone, other smartphones, and as a text-based app for feature phones, and includes 4 million brand recommendations for wine and food pairings. It also works with wineries to get their varietals discovered by consumers.

Celtra

According to Mihael Mikek, CEO, Celtra’s focus is on improving the mobile advertising experience going forward, to make it more immersive, interactive, and fun! It has developed a mobile marketing platform behind the ad itself, and standards-based, cross-play, media-rich, native-capable, preloaded, and easy to create and reliable cross-platform mobile advertising content. Celtra supports iPhone and Android, and soon BlackBerry smartphones.

Tattu Mobile

Andy Press, COO of UK-based Tattu positioned its mobile division as a provider of mobile hardware solutions, providing products for mobile operators and major brands for over five years. He specifically highlighted the firm’s line of mobile phones with solar charging capabilities for emerging markets in Africa and the Caribbean, its mobile health solutions, and Android-based tablets.

Fluid Pixel

Stuart Varrall, Director at Fluid Pixel described the UK startup is a company focusing on mobile games and application development, coming from a rich history of work on gaming consoles. The firm specializes in working with brands that don’t have an in-house iPhone development team. Fluid Pixel’s also done work with Adobe on its Flash-based Animentals viral pets game that is cross-platform (web, mobile, desktop), and with IGT to develop its Cleopatra Million 21 game.

USTWO

Julian Ehrhardt, described London and Malmo, Sweden-based USTWO as a user interface design agency that can take the user experience from concept to design to implementation. The company works across a wide variety of mobile device platforms including mobile phones, digital cameras, sat nav, digital photo frames, in-car entertainment, laptops, mobile TV, and M-health applications.

Mobile Monday Boston had a very rich set of companies this month, to compare and contrast some of the development work being done on both sides of the Atlantic, and to highlight the work of UK Trade and Investment. Additional commentary on the evening’s presenters can be found at NewDigitalCafé.

Today, Mobile Monday Boston published a report evaluating the 100 Massachusetts mobile and wireless companies that saw activity in venture capital funding and acquisitions in 2009. The data reveals that mobile has now been billion-dollar a year sector in Massachusetts for the last two years, despite recent drops in venture funding fueled by the current economic climate. Read the report here:

On Monday, March 8, Mobile Monday Boston and our generous sponsor UK Trade and Investment are hosting a demo night for the hottest mobile companies from the UK and Boston. It will be a fun event where you’ll get to interact with some cool companies in mobile you might not otherwise get to meet.

Think of how much fun we’ll have coming up with amusing cultural differences! Will I embarrassingly imitate an English accent on stage? You’ll just have to come to find out.

Registration is required.

Monday, March 8
Doors at 6:30, event starts at 7:00pm
Intercontinental Hotel Boston, 510 Atlantic Ave.

UK Companies

Apollo Mobile
Apollo has developed a cutting-edge mobile content management platform RE4CTOR which uniquely enables real-time user interaction with most types of content (audio, video text and image).

Tattu Mobile
Tattu creates, develops, manufactures, and supplies niche consumer electronic products.

i-migo
Compatible with any Bluetooth-enabled phone with SyncML, i-migo is a portable device which backs up all data on the phone, and notifies the user if their phone goes out of a 10m range of the i-migo. This prevents the phone being left unattended and at risk of being lost or stolen.

Rummble
Rummble makes it easy to find people and places nearby you’ll love. Rummbles enables users to find personalized recommendations for a location very quickly. Instead of a traditional search, Rummble uses an algorithm that creates a personal ‘trust network’ for each user by calculating who they trust for different types of content.

ustwo
ustwo is a creative design studio based in London and Malmo specialising in pioneering graphical user interfaces that drive the services and products of some of the world’s leading brands.

Boston Companies

Textaurant
Textaurant aims to create a dialogue between restaurants and patrons through the use of technology. Beginning with text messages that update patrons waiting for a table, and extending both before and after the meal, Textaurant connects restaurants with their customers for a more satisfying experience.

Fluent Mobile
Fluent Mobile, a pioneer in mobile content organization and delivery, develops applications that bring the speed, reliability and convenience of desktop Web browsing to handheld devices. The creators of Fluent News.

Celtra
Celtra’s “software-as-a-service” provides a web-based, easy-to-use, on-demand platform for integrated mobile marketing. Celtra gives clients a wide range of creative flexibility, improved mobile distribution, and world-class optimization and analytics tools. Celtra offers managed services in addition to their SaaS platform for agencies and brands that need a deeper contribution for their mobile marketing campaigns.

BarMax
A start-up company bringing bar exam prep to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Creators of the famous $1k iPhone app.

Hello Vino
Available on any mobile device, Hello Vino is a free wine pairing and recommendation guide that assists the beginner wine consumer with advice in the store or restaurant. Using a simple, step-by-step question and answer process, Hello Vino delivers wine recommendations based on your meal, an occasion, favorite tastes and flavors, or a country and region. Hello Vino will provide a specific brand recommendation for the perfect bottle of wine – anywhere, anytime. www.hellovino.com

We’re pleased to announce that MobileCampBoston3 will be held at the MIT Tang Center (E51) on April 3, 2010 (9:00AM – 5:00PM). MobileCamp Boston is an un-conference dedicated to the mobile industry. Instead of having an agenda planned out ahead of time, you and other attendees decide what will be presented and discussed.

Over the past 2 years, MobileCamp has grown from a local affair to a mobile web conference that has attracted participants from Europe and Asia. This year will be our biggest yet.

To register, go to the website at http://barcamp.org/MobileCampBoston3. You can follow updates concerning MobileCamp on twitter @mobicampbos. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Keith Erskine at keith.erskine@padpaw.net.

It is quite clear that many people have either a love or hate relationship with the Apple. The Cupertino, California-based brand announced its new iPad tablet device earlier today, and I think there are more lovers than haters at the moment.

It is sleek, it is stylish, it has the expected cool factor. Yes, it looks like a big iPod Touch. It is also missing things like a camera, Flash support, true GPS (unless you get the 3G versions), multitasking capabilities, and there is still a debate if you can do Skype on it (you can do VOIP now on 3G), since Skype is on the iPhone. Will AT&T or Apple prevent people from running Skype on it? I think there would be uproar!

The pricing was surprising. Apple usually leaves room under it for others but this time it did not. Or if it did, it’s not much room. It’s basically a space between $249 (higher end smart phones) and $499. The new price point “wasteland.” The A4 size iPad comes with 10 hrs of battery life from its 25WHr lithium-polymer battery, and starts at $499 with 16GB of Flash storage, which was an eye opener but I don’t think there is much margin there. At $599 you get to 32GB and at $699 you get to 64GB. Download a few HD movies and you are pretty much going to fill up the 32GB model. All those models come with WiFi. 3G connectivity is a $130 addition per model- $629, $729, and $829 respectively. It’s AT&T, despite all the pre-launch rumors about Verizon. The data plan is either $14.99 per month for up to 250MB, which is a useless price point because you will use that up in a week, or $29.99 for unlimited data. The question is if it’s really unlimited data? Some carriers unlimited plans are not really unlimited. And the 3G is unlocked! It’s a pre-pay plan and AT&T is throwing in free access in all of its WiFi hotspots (like Starbucks).

But an unlocked iPad won’t run on T-Mobile’s 3G network, because T-Mobile is the AWS band running at 1700MHz. The iPad is UMTS/HSDPA running at 850/1900/2100MHz. Yes, it will run on EDGE! But trust me, it will crawl! Many people are thinking that the WiFi version will be good enough with the proliferation of WiFi today. They may be right, especially for non-techies. And iPad does appeal to the non-techie crowd. It’s hitting the sweet spot of pop culture- music, photos, videos, surfing, and a little productivity thrown in.

I think the iPad is going to push the market in several different segments at once. Steve Jobs thanked the creators of the Kindle and said, “We are going to stand on their shoulders.” It’s too bad that Apple pushed Amazon into quicksand first. Apple usually decides whom they want to compete and compare themselves to. Steve Job’s other notable comment was “iPods, iPhones and most Macs are all mobile devices – Apple is the largest mobile device company in the world, now. Larger than Sony’s mobile device company, bigger than Samsung’s, in terms of revenue it’s bigger than Nokia!” That was an in-your-face wakeup call to the folks in Finland and Asia! Apple always decides whom they want to chase, and then they shift to a new thing/competitor/segment. The have the tightest hardware and software integration out there, and the most control over both— bar none!

One thing the iPad does really well is function as a big iPod Touch. iTunes is great on it. The second thing is that it’s a better ebook reader than anything else out there. Yes, it has a premium price point compared to Kindle and nook but iPad does so much, much more. And it’s in color. The third thing that it does well is that it plugs into a new keyboard dock. This means you can use it for most of your day-to-day work, as a primary device, and do email and use other productivity apps. This is one thing you can’t do with an iPhone or an iPod, they were too constraining. It’s not a great platform for CS4 or PageMaker. It’s not supposed to be. Again, it delivers in the key core areas of- music, ebook reading, photos, video, games, and the overall online experience. These are elements that Steve Jobs focused on in his speech today. There may be no reason to buy a MacBook Air going forward.

The iPad clearly bridges the gap between a smart phone and a notebook. I have met with countless device OEMs and semiconductor vendors who have tried for years to do this, with netbooks and MIDs (mobile internet devices), and it took Apple to really define the category for everyone. Apple didn’t want to produce a cheap netbook. That’s the approach that all the other laptop vendors as well as a few smart phone vendors such as Nokia took. There is a market for netbooks. Not everyone is bought into the cult of Apple, because of their price points. But the price gap between iPhone and MacBook has narrowed thanks to iPad.

iPad will go toe-to-toe with higher end netbooks ($399 and up) but there will still be room for cheaper netbooks ($199-$299) at Walmart and the price clubs, and heavily subsidized black and white ereaders if the content providers want to keep supporting those other ebook file formats. Apple is supporting the ePUB format. Amazon and Barnes and Noble will need to seriously reconsider their strategies, especially if Apple gets the boatload of titles that everyone is expecting, and applies pressure on ebook pricing like they did with music, TV shows, and movies. They have McGraw-Hill and the textbook market is sitting at their feet. So the iPad for education, especially higher-ed could be big! Watch out if someone cracks the DRM on textbooks! A couple of textbooks today cost more than the iPad. It depends on how close tightly the content is ties to the device.

No camera. And it seems to be the biggest downer to a lot of people. I just don’t think they could get it into v1.0. However, those developers who downloaded the SDK today reported that it has code support for a camera (there’s an “aha! moment”). So a camera will be there at some point. No USB to plug in a web cam either. No iChat. No messaging. We’re not going to hold this thing up to our head to make a call. But it does have a microphone and a 3.5mm jack. It is a shame that you can’t do video conferencing on it. Maybe there is something in the SDK on that, for down the road.

As far as supporting file formats, the iPad supports a bunch, including .doc, .docx, .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .xlsx, .rtf, .xtx (see what I’m getting at?). They launched a new version of iWorks today too, and have a custom keyboard on the iPad that works with the software suite. And individual iWork apps will sell for $9.99 each.

No GPS except in the 3G models. I would argue that assisted GPS in the WiFi-only versions is good enough for most people. Assisted GPS does navigation quicker. We can argue about the better part of the equation. The iPhone already has good GPS apps for it, and they will port to the iPad.

I think the iPad is one of the most impressive version 1.0 products ever announced. Does it do everything? No! Are there things missing that many of us would have wanted? Yes, of course!

But Apple planted a seed— an heirloom seed for everyone to look at, and maybe buy. There are many different usage models that are going to emerge around this device:

• The leanback mode for entertainment, web surfing, and home automation and control.
• The education mode for not only K-12 but higher-ed as well.
• The gaming mode with its bright LED-backlit ISP display— OLED still costs way too much for these price points— and ability to use multitouch to control in-game elements. Gaming on iPad is going to put even more pressure on Sony and Nintendo in the portable game player space.
• The specialty mode, such as an aeronautical solution that can be used for navigation. Someone might put a rugged cover around it for certain environments. I don’t think it’s going to be a pure consumer device. The iPhone isn’t if you starting looking at the applications out there.
• The executive solution mode because it is a killer presentation device for a road warrior who is on stage a lot.

Will it cannibalize Apple’s MacBooks? Time will tell. But some people today said they might consider the iPad when they go replace their existing notebook.

Like the iPhone, Apple has another product that has the potential to be really big, and again, wake up the industry. It will spur competition, and innovation. People will still need a phone-like device (and increasingly those are smart phones) and they’ll need some other mobile device for a better experience. iPad pushes that second envelope.

I just liked the name “Canvas” better!