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Nokia Research showed off a bunch of next-generation technologies today at its research lab in Palo Alto, Calif. Among the goodies coming our way are real-time traffic updates, phones that can tell us what we’re looking at, and devices that morph their forms from watch to tablet to phone as needed.

This show-and-tell comes at an interesting junction in Nokia’s history. The Finnish cell phone maker is in the midst of transformation as it begins to focus more on open mobile platforms. Earlier this summer, it bought Symbian and pledged to make its mobile operating system into an open-source platform. It is moving to be more open as a way to fend off competitors such as Google’s Android phone software and Apple’s iPhone.

Consequently, Nokia has to be more open to collaboration in its research and development afforts, said Henry Tirri, senior vice president and head of Nokia Research, (pictured left) in an interview.

“We’re talking about going way beyond just replicating a computer on a phone,” he said. “We want to provide the user with the right context that they need at the time when they need it. This is the evolution of computing, and we can create it through the combination of technologies already in place.”

An example of delivering context through open collaboration is a highway traffic demo, Mobile Millennium, which researcher Quinn Jacobson (pictured at top of story) showed off. The project is a collaboration of California’s state transportation agency, CalTrans, Nokia’s recently purchased Navteq mapping division, and the University of California at Berkeley. Jacobson said that getting real-time traffic data (like what Dash Navigation tried to do) based on location information from drivers is possible with today’s technology.

The trafffic data is based on the GPS (global positioning system) navigation chips inside many cell phones, as well as sensor data from CalTrans on major arterials. To protect user privacy, the locations of individual drivers are anonymized and not recorded. On top of that, the data isn’t collected in residential districts. What emerges is a map that reveals the green, yellow and red zones of traffic for drivers.

Collaboration is the buzzword on a variety of projects. Nokia has more than 700 researchers at a variety of locations worldwide, including one that was just announced today in Los Angeles. Rebecca Allen, a former University of California at Los Angeles researcher who will lead the lab dubbed Nokia Research Hollywood, said that she will reach out to the entertainment companies in the region to work on mobile entertainment services.

Among the topics of interest is “augmented reality,” in which an image seen through a camera-phone display can be augmented with things that aren’t there. For instance, you could point your camera at a street in San Francisco and the screen could present you with the view of the same location before the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. A number of companies, including Hewlett Packard and Intel, are looking at creating services or games that can make the real world more entertaining.

Similarly, Nokia’s Point and Find project will let you point your camera phone at a building, and it will fetch you information about it. The technology comes from Pixto, a company that Nokia bought in 2007. Philipp Schloter, general manager of the program, says that the technology isn’t science fiction. He said that smartphones with cameras have all of the necessary equipment to carry out the identification task. For instance, it’s fairly easy to gather data on points of interest for tourists.

Normally, recognizing an image from a photo taken anywhere in the world could take huge amounts of supercomputing power. But with GPS data, the task is much easier because the Point and Find software only has to recognize images that might be on a particular street, Schloter said. The system could go far beyond the data you can get by pointing your phone at a bar code (apps available on the iPhone or Google Android T-Mobile G1). You can point at a hotel sign and get the rates. If you’re pointing at a movie poster, your phone could within seconds give you data such as movie play times and plot summaries. Nokia has been working with potential allies, like advertisers who could exploit the Point and Find system by offering coupons to users booking appointments via the software. The public beta for the service is imminent, Schloter said.

The most futuristic project mentioned was Morph, which envisions a day when nanomaterials will be able to refashion themselves. With materials like that, you can build a watch that could change itself into a phone or a tablet computer at a user’s whim. Here’s the video of Morph.

The mobile streaming video service Qik is on a roll. Back in June it added support for certain Windows Mobile devices, in July it added more phones and launched its public beta, in August, Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andreessen joined its board of advisors. Now it’s time to add another phone to greatly broaden its support again: BlackBerry.

The BlackBerry, made by Research In Motion (RIM), has long been one of the most popular smartphones in the world. Now, the millions of users running its 4.5 operating system and above on the BlackBerry Pearl 8120, the Pearl 8130 and the BlackBerry Bold. Will get to stream video live to the web. (Qik says support the newer BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 will be along shortly.)

BlackBerry devices join Nokia phones and the aforementioned Windows Mobile devices to make the service available on a pretty impressive range.

Of course, there are two hot devices that the service isn’t available on yet: The Apple iPhone and the G1 (T-Mobile’s Google Android-based phone). The G1 was just launched a few days ago, and only has some 60+ applications that users can download in the Android Market right now. More will come, and you can bet one of those will be Qik.

The iPhone, on the other hand, has been out since the early summer (the new iPhone 3G at least), but the problem with Qik supporting it has been that Apple has not yet allowed apps to use its built-in camera for video capture. Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy told me a couple months ago that the company had to build a video encoder from scratch to get it to work, since the iPhone doesn’t have one. They did that, and had it working on jailbroken (basically, hacked to run other applications) iPhones.

Now, it appears they have it working on non-jailbroken iPhones, both Digg founder Kevin Rose and blogger Robert Scoble have confirmed that they have seen it in action. There is no word on when the native app will be in Apple’s App Store (or if it’ll even pass Apple’s requirements for inclusion), but when Qik on the iPhone eventually joins Symbian (makers of Nokia phone’s operating systems), Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices, there are going to be a lot of mobile videos out there — and a lot of messages on the micro-messaging service Twitter reading: “I’m streaming live, come chat!”

Qik has competitors in the live mobile video streaming field including Kyte and Flixwagon. The company’s parent, Visivo Communications raised a $3 million round back in April. Since then, Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have also invested in the company.

Below see a video of Qik running on the iPhone.

Here’s the latest action:

Google starting to catch on to this TV ad thing? –It’s been almost two years since the search advertising giant made its first foray into television advertising. In order to grow, it’s going to need more time slots (inventory) to sell. It took a step in that direction this week, striking a deal with Harris Corp., a company that will help add and manage new inventory. Google TV Ads also made a deal with COREMedia, which will help measure the performance of direct response television ads. NewTeeVee has more.

CNN uses Facebook Connect to share debate comments — The cable news channel has an area on its site that allows users of the social network Facebook to use their logins to sign-in and leave comments about the most recent debate. Facebook Connect also made these comments viewable on both CNN.com and Facebook itself. Inside Facebook has more.

Flickr rolls out new homepage — The new landing page for the photo sharing site has been in testing for several weeks, but now all will see it. Basically, it looks more like a feed of information, like all other social networks have.

Nokia profit falls – The world’s largest handset manufacturer saw a 30 percent decline in profit in the third quarter. The reason? Competition and worldwide economic issues. The Wall Street Journal has more.

Will Wright weighs in on Spore DRM — The Spore creator wishes he paid more attention to it, but he didn’t realize it’d be such an issue. He also thinks this is part of the growing pains inherent to the transition from brick and mortar game sales to online, downloadable ones. Kotaku has more. Meanwhille, Gamasutra has Wright’s boss, EA chief executive John Riccitiello, talking about it.

The Weekly Standard discovers Twitter – The political magazine/site is clearly on top of things. The best line? “It’s an ingenious way of keeping in touch, particularly for people who need to expose as much of their lives to public scrutiny as possible.”

Glam hires a CFO — Former Shutterfly chief financial officer Stephen E. Recht joins the team.

A blogger has an idea — Allen Stern of CenterNetworks has launched CloudContacts, a service that allows you to send you business cards in and have them posted on the web accessible from anywhere. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me as I stare at a stack of hundreds of them which I will never go through — and then be annoyed when I need to find someone.

Brightkite for the iPhone looks great, is late — The service, which has a central focus on location, would have been perfect as a social network for the iPhone 3G. Too bad it took them this long to make an app while others like Loopt and Whrrl were ready to go on day one. See it in action below. Mashable has more.

Brightkite for the iPhone from Brightkite on Vimeo.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has not closed below 10,000 since 2004. Today it might. Well below. As of a little past 9 AM PST, the Dow is down just over 470 points to 9,854.59. The market is seeing a continuation of the bloodbath it saw last week when the Dow fell nearly 1,000 points.

The Nasdaq is once again doing even worse percentage-wise. It’s down well over 100 points today, off over five and a half percent. Many of the big name tech stocks are once again getting killed.

Today, Microsoft, which has largely been insulated from the massive hits its rivals have taken, is one of the largest losers, down $1.81 (6.88 percent). Apple is down $6.10 (6.28 percent), Yahoo is down $0.71 (4.44 percent), Sun Microsystems is down $0.42 (6.22 percent), Google is down $20.26 (5.25 percent), IBM is down $4.32 (4.18 percent), HP is down $2.51 (5.84 percent), Sony is down $1.17 (6.11 percent), Nokia is down $1.42 (8 percent), SanDisk is down $2.02 (11.04 percent), eBay is down $1.35 (7.13 percent).

I think you get the point.

While the reason for most of the tech losses can likely be attributed to the overall poor form of the market, eBay is leading the surge downward after it announced it would cut 1,000 jobs this morning. Its stock is at its lowest level in six years.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s price target for its stock has been slashed from $24-a-share to $21-a-share by Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay. The analyst feels the likelihood of a deal between Yahoo and Time Warner to merge the Internet giant with TW’s AOL property remains relatively low, according to CNET.

The online and DVD-by-mail service Netflix meanwhile is getting killed today (down over 10 and a half percent) because it cut its fourth-quarter revenue estimates thanks to the bad economy. We can probably expect a lot more of that in the coming days.

Update: The Dow is now down over 700 points as of 11:30 AM PST. Right now it’s at 9,620.34, which means it has nearly lost 2,000 points in less than a month. On September 8, the market closed at 11,510.74.

The Nasdaq continues to have even worse losses. It is currently down 154.42 points, right around 8 percent off (the Dow is off nearly 7 percent).

Update 2: After bottoming-out at 9525.32, the Dow rallied to close at 9,955.50 — “only” down 369.88 points (3.58 percent). It still could not get above the 10,000 mark at close for the first time in nearly 4 years.

The Nasdaq rallied a bit as well. After bottoming-out at 1,777.02, it ended down 84.43 points at 1,862.96 (a loss of 4.34 percent).

Here’s the latest action:

Health site operators plan to team up against WebMD — The merger between Revolution Health Network and Waterfront Media is valued at $300 million, and should help the combined companies take on with market leader WebMD. We’ve heard that Revolution was trying to sell for $400 million a couple months ago, but difficult times call for difficult deals.

Google rethinking its aversion to traditional advertising — The search giant has relied on partnerships and word of mouth to promote its products in the past. But company executives are now debating whether this is still the best strategy. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has even met with several Madison Avenue advertising agencies.

Nokia acquires email and instant messaging provider OZ Communications — The value of the deal was not disclosed. OZ says it has 5.5 million paying users.

After a bounce earlier this week, stock market plunges again — The Dow Jones Industrial Average, Standard & Poor’s and Nasdaq all took a dive today. Earlier, VentureBeat writer MG Siegler looked at the (dismal) performance of tech stocks.

Yahoo layoff rumors in full-swing — An anonymous tipster tells Silicon Alley Insider that Yahoo plans to lay off 3,500 workers, but SAI writer Peter Kafka says the cuts will probably be much smaller.

Facebook to open international HQ in Dublin — The new office will serve as the center of Facebook’s international operations, with a focus on Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Nokia reveals iPhone competitor and iTunes rival — The company’s first touchscreen phone will be called the 5800 XpressMusic officially, but I prefer its nickname, the Nokia “Tube.”

Dropped by potential buyer EA, game publisher Take-Two says it will go it alone — And Take-Two’s stock drops as a result.

Researchers find security holes in major web sites — Those holes could have allowed the theft of users’ money and private information from YouTube, The New York Times’ website and Metafilter, according to two Princeton researchers. The Times says it has fixed the hole.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says Zune coming to Windows Mobile — Plans to bring Zune music software to Windows Mobile phones indicate Microsoft probably doesn’t intend to create a separate ZunePhone to compete with Apple’s iPhone.

Skype messages under surveillance in China — A group of Canadian human-rights activists and researchers (pictured, left) revealed that Skype’s partner in China, Skype TOM, stores text messages that use words deemed subversive by the Chinese government. In a blog post responding to the news, Skype President Josh Silverman said Skype wasn’t aware that Skype TOM was storing the messages, athough he also argued that TOM has to play by China’s rules if it wants to do business there.

Europe faces its own financial crisis — In fact, European banks are in deeper debt than their U.S. counterparts.

A123 Systems files proposal for IPO — Lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems, which aims to sell into the electric vehicle market, has filed the initial registration statement required for an initial public offering. The number of shares to be sold or price has not yet been determined.

Nokia opens research unit in Africa — Aiming to keep ahead in Africa’s growing telecommunications market, handset maker Nokia has opened a unit to study which services will work best on the continent.

Calera succeeds in binding CO2 into cement — An initial pilot project by stealth-mode cement maker Calera, which was funded last year by Khosla Ventures, has successfully run a pilot in which it bound about half a ton of CO2 for every ton of cement it made. Usually, cement manufacturing is a huge emitter of CO2. The Scientific American has a profile, with more details. However, the biggest question — whether Calera can make cement cost-effectively — has yet to be answered.

Stealthy cloud security firm Confidela funded — An Israeli firm developing a “new security model in cloud computing, for use in tasks like online document collaboration, has raised a second round of $5 million, according to Globes.

Matrix Partners scores former PayPal exec — Dana Stalder, a senior vice president of marketing at PayPal, has defected to become a general partner at Matrix Partners.

Stealth material makers not in stealth at all — A pair of science teams have divulged the results of experiments in which they tested out so-called “cloaking” materials, which can bend and re-direct light. As usual for such experiments, the advances are being reported as a first step toward an invisibility cloak, but right now the materials are likely more useful for optical applications like magnification or refraction.

Legg Mason loses Massachusetts pension fund — Legendary manager Bill Miller, who runs the Legg Mason Value Trust, has been fired by Massachusetts’ state pension fund, which had $1.4 billion in the trust. Miller’s fortunes have sunk somewhat over the past couple years, as once-outstanding investments like Yahoo have fallen.

The one that got away — Riffing off Bessemer Ventures’ well known “anti-portfolio” of successful companies the firm declined to invest in, the Merc has a few more anecdotes of VC missteps.

Did Intel and Microsoft try to kill One Laptop Per Child? — A lengthy flashback to the rise and fall of Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC project, intended to put a cheap laptop in the hands of children in developing countries worldwide, is in the Times Online. Despite various setbacks, the Times notes that the OLPC has still sold over a million units to date.

While even the popular social networks nowadays aren’t making that much money (Facebook expects to make $350 million in revenues this year), the burgeoning field of mobile social networks could be big business shortly, a new report by ABI Research indicates. Specifically, location-based mobile social networks could earn revenues of $3.3 billion within five years.

This is great news for many of the location-based mobile networks out there now such as Whrrl, Loopt, Where and Plazes. Each of these networks have garnered various amounts of buzz recently; Whrrl, Loopt and Where thanks mainly to the iPhone 3G launch and Plazes thanks to its sale to Nokia. But there is still some question as to how this money will be brought in.

The most direct means of making money will likely be licensing and revenue-sharing models with the wireless carriers and handset manufacturers, ABI concludes. Loopt, for example, has deals with all of the major carriers in the U.S.

But more interesting (and potentially lucrative) could be an area that the report notes “holds a lot of promise” — location-based mobile advertising.

A source close to Loopt told us last month that a driving force behind its deal to make the use of GPS data more cost effective was that it is working on an elaborate location-based advertising system. The company is apparently putting a lot of stock is such a system taking off.

These location-based social networks should soon face serious competition from the current social networking leaders such as Facebook and MySpace. While the mobile upstarts may have a lead out of the gate with location technology, the more traditional social networks have huge advantages in terms of overall users. Adding a layer such as location on a mobile version of these sites is less challenging than building an entirely new user base, as Silicon Alley Insider notes.

[photo: flickr/pinkbelt]

The iPhone’s Safari web browser has ignited interest in browsing the “real web” on mobile devices, but it’s not the only mobile browser out there. Skyfire lets you see the web just as you would on your home computer but on a number of Windows Mobile-based devices. Today, it’s launching the beta version of its software for the Symbian platform as well.

Specifically, this version is built for the Symbian Series 60 (S60) platform, which is used on a variety of Nokia phones. Nokia recently purchased Symbian and plans to open the platform to spur development.

Skyfire mainly competes with the mobile version of Opera, Opera Mini, but Mozilla will soon be launching a mobile version of its Firefox browser as well. Skyfire claims it has an advantage in that, of all the mobile browsers on the market today, it’s the only one that supports “all Web 2.0 standards, including full support for Flash.”

It even notes in the press release that this means you can watch YouTube clips on your phone, and even cooler, Hulu videos. Hulu is the NBC and Fox-backed online video site that lets you watch premium television and film content for free.

The first 100 readers who go to this url: http://www.skyfire.com/sign-up/symbian/step2 and use the code Vbeat, will be let into the beta program. Note that this is only for US-based phones at this time.

Skyfire raised a $13 million second round of funding back in May led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. This followed an initial $4.8 million round. The company hired former Mowser cofounder Mike Rowehl to be its scalability architect last month.

Mobile giant Nokia has added $150 million to its venture division Nokia Growth Partners, with the goal of opening offices in China and India, as well as expanding investments in the United States and Europe.

This announcement more than doubles the investment division’s funds under management; it launched in 2004 with $100 million. Nokia Growth Partners says it’s interested in companies involved with mobile applications, location-based services (LBS), mobile advertising and music and entertainment — a pretty broad swath that covers most of the areas attracting attention in mobile technology and the mobile web.

Rick Simonson, Nokia Corp.’s chief financial officer, told VentureWire that the fund plans to make eight to 10 investments for the next three or four years, with a typical investment amounting to between $6 million and $8 million. Nokia’s particularly interested in companies that can help lower-end phones — which are taking off in emerging markets like China and India — evolve, he said. Nokia Growth Partners has hired someone from Finland to open its India office, and has also hired two investors in China. (And speaking of lower-end phones, it looks like Nokia has been cutting its prices, too.)

The firm’s previous investments include web video startup Kyte and VivoTech, a company that lets you make credit card payments using a radio frequency ID chip in your phone. Nokia’s investment activities aren’t limited to this investment division, either. As the name implies, Nokia Growth Partners focuses on later-stage funding, but Nokia has also invested in early-stage venture firms, including BlueRun Ventures and the Founders Fund.

A major question facing mobile developers today is how to distribute their content — where, in what form, and monetized in what way? Custom-built applications using Java, BREW and other languages, while once the norm, are giving way to mobile Internet deployments. But will the mobile device, like the home computer, become dominated by the web browser and advertising?

Yes and no, the panelists said at today’s “Mobile vs. Web” talk at MobileBeat, moderated by Om Malik of GigaOmni Media. The general consensus seemed to be that applications are being squeezed out by the greater accessibility of the web. “If you’re trying to address a broad audience and you’re choosing between Java and mobile web, at this point I’d say you’re crazy to do Java,” said Skydeck’s Jason Devitt.

There’s a hitch: Applications are favored by many because they’re more easily used to charge monthly fees. “You’d be amazed at how many people are willing to pay $2-3 per month for a premium application,” Myspace’s Brandon Lucas said of his own company’s mobile offerings. And later, he also admitted that those people are a source of long-term recurring revenue because they forget they’re being charged — something Mike Baker of Nokia called the “sleeping dog” business model.

But Myspace is also gearing up a big push into mobile advertising, which works better on web applications. Facebook, too, is expecting significant revenue from mobile ads, despite a lack of information on how advertising really works in mobile. “The industry isn’t spending time figuring out what the value of a click is on a mobile device,” Baker said. Advertising budgets for mobile are steadily fattening, but just as with the web, advertisers will sooner or later demand evidence of results — or else they won’t pay much per view, or click.

Despite the uncertainties, both MySpace and Facebook, represented at the event by Jed Stremel, are betting big on revenue from mobile advertising. Applications aren’t as good for that because ads tend to be hidden deep within the apps, making them less accessible. They’re still useful for conveying a unique, more full-featured experience than the web can offer. But for most mobile startups, web deployments will be the frontier of the future.

And as with the Internet, the economics will be in large scale. “We’re beginning the golden age of mobile,” Stremel said. “People will find a way to get tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of users, and monetize them.” Such wide-scale adoption would be nearly impossible for opt-in subscription fees, but ads would fit the bill.

To round out Skydeck’s contribution, the company also used the event to announce that it’s opening its public beta today. Skydeck, in case you’ve forgotten, collects data from your mobile phone about your calls and clearly presents a report (unlike your carrier). The company has its own call-based social network, and an API for third parties to access its information. If you want to check it out more closely, sign up here.

I’m pleased to announce the latest two panel additions to MobileBeat, our conference on mobile July 24.

They are Mike Baker, Nokia vice president and head of Nokia Interactive, and Rick Segal, partner at the Blackberry Partners Fund.

This rounds out our panels nicely. We now have the four major mobile platforms represented: the iPhone, Android, Nokia/Symbian and RIM/Blackberry.

Mike Baker (left) has an impressive record. He helped take Engage — a pathbreaking company in behavioral advertising — public in 1999. He was an investor for a firm called GrandBanks Capital. In 2002, he founded early mobile advertising company Enpocket, and sold it in Oct., 2007 to Nokia (amount was undisclosed).

Enpocket became a unit within Nokia that handles ads, via a product called “Nokia Media Network.” It’s now arguably the world’s largest mobile ad network, given Nokia’s huge reach across hundreds of millions of phones. The network handles ads for folks like Sprint, Intel, Viacom, Hearst and Reuters. After the merger, Baker wrote Nokia’s strategy for monetizing all of the company’s mobile services.

He’ll bring a refreshing perspective to the conference, and I suspect he’ll pour a bucket of cold reality over the iPhone hype — if moderator Om Malik lets him. Talk with Nokia’s folks — and a lot of other European and Asian telecom execs, by the way — and they’ll argue it’s all about reach. Even if Apple and Android succeed beyond their wildest dreams, they won’t have the penetration of Nokia’s Symbian OS within five years. Here’s why: Apple may launch its cute breakthrough touch-technology iPhone, but Nokia’s juggernaut can launch 20 such phones next year and open itself to apps as well, shutting down Apple’s advantage. But there’s no doubt Silicon Valley’s software expertise is driving innovation to the software side of the phone, and Nokia will acknowledge it’s a wake-up call.

Segal is a partner at JLA Ventures (scroll down), which put together the $150M Blackberry Partners Fund, to support developers of applications running primarily on the Blackberry. RIM is an anchor investor in the fund. Previously, Segal ran Canadian e-commerce companies Microforum and Chapters, and worked at Microsoft before that. He’s a board member at Paymentus, Planeteye (a travel comany we wrote about), HealthUnity, b5media, MusicIP Corporation, Sirit, and Truition Marketplace Solutions.

Like Nokia/Symbian, RIM is often forgotten in hype-ridden Silicon Valley, where software developers are madly in love with Apple’s iPhone, and to lesser, but growing, extent with Google’s Android. RIM has a formidable lead among business users and will be a force to reckon with. So I suspect Segal will also shake things up on our venture capital panel, which we’ve added now as the first panel of the day. But like Nokia, RIM’s strength is in hardware, and it will also need to adapt to the changes Apple has wrought.

Sales of MobileBeat tickets are moving quickly; go here to get yours.

Ringfree Mobility is seeking a round of funding to expand its mobile Internet voice calling solution for smart phones including the iPhone.

The company is entering a crowded space, as Matt Marshall wrote last week in a profile of a couple of competitors, Fring and Nimbuzz. But Ringfree Mobility believes it has a user-friendly solution.

The San Francisco company began beta testing its RF Dialer application in February. Like other voice-over-Internet-protocol services (VoIP), RF Dialer and its backend service, RF.com, enables cell phone users to make cheap international calls for pennies a minute. No software installation is required. The company’s motto is “call everywhere from anywhere with no hassle.”

The company believes it has simplified the process of using an iPhone or other smart phones. You sign up on its web site and can start making calls within a minute. You then put the web page icon for RF.com on the iPhone’s main screen. To make a call with an iPhone, a user clicks on an RF.com icon. A dial pad pops up. The user can select the type of call to be made from a pull down menu, with choices including Skype calls.

Here’s where it’s different. The choices on the menu also include GoogleTalk, YahooTalk, MSN Messenger, AIM, VOIP services such as Vonage or Gizmo, or an office phone system such as Asterisk. The RF Dialer is like a replacement for the iPhone’s built-in dialing application. Ringfree Mobility is not a phone company itself and so you can use any calling service you want with it. It doesn’t compete with the mobile carriers, and it also doesn’t compete with the VoIP service providers.

If the user selects the Skype service on the menu, then the user uses the iPhone keypad to type in the name of the person being called. Then the user clicks on the call button. The iPhone then makes a local cell phone call over the AT&T network to the RF.com media gateway. The gateway then goes out over the Internet and connects to the Skype service, which then connects the call to the person being called. RF.com reserves the data channel of the iPhone to find out pertinent facts such as which friends are online.

By contrast, other mobile VoIP services such as Fring bypass the cellular network and use the data channel to make an Internet call. But the quality of these voice calls is often poor, given spotty access to Wi-Fi networks needed to complete the connection.

Like Mig33 or iSkoot, RF.com works in tandem with — and not in competition to — mobile carriers such as AT&T since it generates voice calls on the carrier’s network. iSkoot, however, is Skype only, while Mig33 is a VoIP service provider.

Competitors include Hipsip, which we wrote about in April. Hipsip, which works only with Skype, can make Skype calls but for now requires that a user’s own computer running the Hipsip software be up and running in order for the calls to go through. Other rivals include Mobivox and Talkety.

The RF Dialer is available for the iPhone in beta mode and founder Marcelo Rodriguez (pictured below, right) says it works entirely within Apple’s permitted use guidelines. It is easily transportable to other web-based phones including those from Nokia, Samsung, LG, and Google’s upcoming Android mobile platform. PhoneGnome has already licensed the RF.com technology and a second major VOIP partner will be announced soon.

Ringfree Mobility is still exploring different business models, such as offering premium services or partnering with other VOIP service providers such as PhoneGnome.

Rodriguez was formerly CEO of VoIP news site Voxilla.com and managing editor of Miami Herald New Media. His cofounder is Eric Chamberlain (left), former chief technology officer at Voxilla. They formally incorporated the company in March, 2008. The company has four employees and has been self-funded to date.

[Disclosures: Rodriguez was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News years ago and occasionally edited stories I wrote when I worked there. He is married to Katherine Fong, a San Jose Mercury News deputy managing editor who is in charge of online journalism at the newspaper.]

Check out MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat’s conference on July 24.

Here’s the latest action:

More fallout from the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit — After a judge ruled that Google wouldn’t have to reveal YouTube’s source code but would have to open its user data for all to see, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote a post condemning the decision as a violation of privacy. Google lawyers are also on the case, according to The Wall Street Journal. The outcry in the blogosphere has been even bigger.

Chicken Little, the SSD-based MacBook Air prices are falling — Apple has quietly shaved $500 off the price of it’s slim MacBook Air drive with a built-in solid state drive (SSD). These are the drives that use flash memory and require no moving parts, allowing them to be more stable and in some cases much quicker. You can now get one for $2,398, according to AppleInsider.

Economic downturn hits Google? — The search giant is closing two of its offices, one in Denver and one in Dallas. Luckily, no Googlers are being laid off, they all have the option to be relocated, according to Google Blogoscoped

Activision-Vivendi Games merger likely to proceed next week — A judge has denied a request to halt the previously announced $18.9 billion deal. July 9 could be the close date, according to GameSpot.

Report: Baidu enters mobile search deal with Nokia — The largest Chinese search engine has a deal in place to pre-load its product onto Nokia phones, according to Forbes. Nokia recently bought the Symbian OS and announced it would open it in an effort to compete with the likes of Google’s upcoming Android platform. Now it has a mobile search partner besides Google as well.

Segway sales rising as gas prices do the same — Remember the Segway? Of course you do. Know anyone who owns one? Probably not. That may change soon as sales are on the rise with many people looking for alternatives to cars, according to USA Today.

Aussies living the tech lifestyle in San Francisco — The San Francisco headquarters of advertising agency Euro RSCG provides startups from Australia with office space, desks, broadband access and a telephone line on the cheap (around $600 a month), according to The Age. The idea is to help Australian companies better serve their American and Canadian customers, which often make up a large percentage of their user base.

Apple developing a whole multi-touch language — A new patent, uncovered by UnwiredView, reveals a wide range of gestures beyond the “pinch” and the “double tap.” The patent is called “gesture learning,” and interestingly it only shows left-handed gestures. A separate report says Apple has filed for 34 different multi-touch patents.

The CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger? is allergic to cats — Yep. Cats are a source of great income, but also a source of great pain, according to Valleywag.

As the buzz around location-based services (LBS) continues to grow, it’s often overlooked that for them to have any meaning there is one crucial component: A map. Today, Google signed a five-year agreement with Dutch map-maker Tele Atlas to provide maps to not only its Google Maps and Google Earth properties, but applications built on the forthcoming Google Android mobile platform as well.

With Apple’s new iPhone 3G (launching next week) gaining GPS capabilities and some big, recent Nokia purchases (U.S. map-maker Navtaq and location-based social network, Plazes), it’s clear Google’s soon-to-be rivals in the mobile space have location on the brain. Now Google does as well.

“When Google launches its Android program, Tele Atlas will provide maps for this,” said Taco Titiular, the spokesman of Tele Atlas parent company TomTom. He spoke to the Wall Street Journal.

Interesting as well is that the agreement will apparently allow Tele Atlas to get data from Google’s map users so that its maps can be improved upon. Google has a few map editing features in its programs including ‘My Maps’ and the recent ‘Map Maker’ for Google Maps as well as the ability to create new layers in Google Earth.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

One thing is for certain, Miss Teen South Carolina is going to be so happy (see video below).

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