July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Luis J. Salazar is the CEO and co-founder of Jobaline.

Any business owner knows how difficult it is to recruit the right help. Finding the right workers is one of the many challenges companies have long-faced, especially when it comes to filling hourly jobs. Companies from Starbucks to the local gas station rely on hourly employees, which represent over 59 percent of the US labor force and more than 74 million workers, reinforcing the notion that hourly workers truly are the backbone of business in America.

While potential solutions to this recruiting problem should exist within our mobile devices, statistics show that businesses are still struggling to catch up with demand, as only 13 percent of corporate websites have truly mobile versions.

The even greater challenge businesses face is that of a pervasive “digital divide” that separates employers from hourly workers. Most of the population of the latter relies on simple cellular phones and flip phones, and does not have access to smartphones or even personal computers to access web-based recruiting tools such as LinkedIn.

So how are employers supposed to reach the talent pool they need the most?

The hourly worker’s dilemma

Most of the inefficiencies that affect small business owners and corporate America, with respect to hiring hourly workers, are a result of the digital divide. Long associated with the gap between those who have Internet access and those who don’t, today the digital divide has expanded to include the lack of availability of mobile-friendly Internet solutions.

We live in a society of mobile phones. Eighty-eight percent of adults in America have a cell phone, while only 57 percent own laptops, according to the Pew Research Center. A recent study by Potentialpark in 2012 found that 26 percent of job seekers use their mobile devices for career-related purposes, and another 59 percent could imagine doing so.

But in the hourly jobs economy, the technological divide between job seekers and the recruiting needs of business owners is quite pronounced. According to Nielsen research in 2012, people making less than $35,000 per year tend to forego purchasing the $250 smartphone and $100/month data plans preferred by mid- and high-wage workers. Because hourly workers use a large portion of their earnings to cover basic needs, they tend to gravitate towards mid- to low-priced feature phones and cheaper plans that allow text messaging, phone calls and some basic apps.

In addition, 57 percent of hourly workers prefer phone calls to other forms of communication, and text messaging is another popular option — both for smart and not-so-smart phones. The Pew Research Center in 2011 noted that text messaging and phone calls are the preferred means of communication among all demographic groups. Americans send and receive an average of 40 text messages per day, and this number is two to three times higher among the hourly workers demographic.

A simple step to maximize mobility

A huge segment of the workforce isn’t leaving their “basic phones” any time soon. Companies that want to recruit these people will need to reach out not only through web sites, but through mobile means, such as text messaging.

Right now, there are a few steps in the right direction. The recent launch of LinkedIn Mobile signals a response to market demand for mobile solutions, but it does not address the issue of the digital divide. Facebook Zero is also promising — as it aims to give people with feature phones access to the social network — it does not present a holistic solution for matching employers and hourly workers. Classified ads on Craigslist are fairly mobile-friendly, but they’re just simple information-sharing units, without much engagement.

My company, Jobaline, aims to enable engagement with hourly workers — via text message on smartphones and simple feature phones — and to start where Craigslist ends. By supporting employers in connecting with and pre-screening hourly workers via text messaging, we hope to aid in removing the implicit discrimination of Web-based or smartphone-only tools, which only reach people with a certain level of access to technology.

The relatively small step of widening mobile access will help enable workers to secure jobs they wouldn’t otherwise know exist. The same kind of text- and voice-enabled technology that Jobaline has designed can also be applied to other vital elements of work, such as learning about the availability of and applying for healthcare insurance (but that’s another hot-button issue for another post!).

Companies and hourly workers must be on the same page — technologically speaking —  using solutions that enable engagement, much the same way that businesses are currently doing with professionals, for whom most mobile technology is currently geared.

Mobile access for job growth

Rather than focusing solely on improving online access, it is time to build interactive mobile recruiting technologies that reach people on all kinds of devices, even feature phones.

By developing technologies and policies that enable wider — even simpler — mobile access to recruiting capabilities that both employers and hourly workers need to survive, we can help bridge this gap, fill this digital divide, and truly put America back to work.

Luis J. Salazar is the founder and CEO of Jobaline, a simple, social and mobile jobs platform that matches employers with hourly workers. A longtime tech executive in digital media, mobile technologies, and software as a service, Salazar has held leadership positions at Yahoo!, Microsoft, WPP research (GMI), Xerox, and others. Originally from Venezuela, he is working to make a true social impact through developing innovative technology on the United States.

Top image credit: Thomas Kohler/Flickr

Facebook has for some time been focusing on getting its network into the hands of all Earthlings, be they tech sophisticates in urban centers or nomadic herdsmen in South Sudan.

“We want to give everyone in the world the power to share,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the company’s quarterly earnings phone call today. “The big question for us is, which areas are growing the fastest? … Whatever the form factor is going forward, we’ll be able to deliver.”

This has meant a big push to put usable Facebook applications on all kinds of phones, including feature phones, and today we learned a bit about the payoff.

As part of its earnings presentation, Facebook rolled out a new statistic that shows how well it’s doing on this front. It said it’s got a grand total of 189 million “mobile-only monthly active users (MAUs),” a number that’s been on the rise for a while:

According to Facebook, these users “are mobile MAUs that accessed Facebook solely through mobile apps or our mobile website.”

In all likelihood, if you go a full month as a Facebook user without touching Facebook.com on the desktop, it means one thing: You don’t have access to a desktop/laptop computer, and your phone is your sole connection to the web.

That means that nearly 200 million people are on Facebook every month without using a computer. These probably aren’t all super-hip young folks who are too cool for laptops; we’re likely also talking about people around the world who may never have access to desktop computers due to their prohibitive costs.

“We’ve sent a team of people around the world to see what they use, and we care about everybody, not just you guys,” Facebooker Peter Deng said to a room full of tech press and analysts in a recent chat on the company’s approach to mobile apps and the mobile web.

“Faebook really represents an opportunity to connect over 900 million people,” said engineering director Doug Purdy at the same event, “but we hope one day for it to be the entire world.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We told you about biNu last fall; it’s trying to bring smartphone apps to feature phones, even ones on spotty networks that can’t handle much data.

Today, the company announces it has brought cloud-based file sharing, walkie-talkie voice features, and even Snapchat-like “ten seconds of glory” self-destructing photo apps to all phones, including feature phones and low-end smartphones.

Oh yes, and the emphasis on the whole world of feature phone users has had positive effects on growth, too: biNu is up by a million members to a total of five million users worldwide.

“The vast majority of biNu’s 5 million active monthly users are based in the emerging world where lower-end phones are still dominant (and will do for some time) and are usually a person’s only connected device,” writes a biNu rep to VentureBeat via email.

“And there is clearly significant growth — and commercial opportunity — in this market.”

The startup’s MyMedia application gives all its users cloud storage and lets them share files via SMS, IM, or email both inside and outside the biNu network.

New social features announced with today’s release include a URL shortener, Flashchat (a Snapchat clone service), and Voicechat, a service for walkie-talkie connectivity and voice messaging.

Here’s a look at a few biNu apps in action on a range of devices:

“There are billions of people in the world who have never heard of Dropbox or WhatsApp, and it will be years until they have the devices and the networks to use these kinds of services,” said biNu CEO and co-founder Gour Lentell in a statement on the news.

“We decided to build our platform to reach where most people currently are, and will be for some time, rather than start at the top and move down.”

The two-year-old company took a $2 million round of funding in August 2012, the round was led by Googler Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures.

Image credit: James Cridland/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung’s just announced Rex, a new line of phones that combine smartphone-like features with feature phone-like prices and technologies.

The four phones each have color LCD screens, full touch interfaces, and apps for Twitter, Facebook, Gtalk, and other common social programs. A mobile browser also provides access to mobile web apps.

But those apps run on Java; the browser is Opera Mini; screen sizes are around 3 inches; and the phones’ camera resolutions are decidedly on the shallow end of the camera phone pool, ranging from 1.3 to 3.2 megapixels.

The good news is that these models will be affordable and useful for consumers outside the smartphone meccas of the developed world. While smartphones make up half the mobile market in places like the U.S., vast swaths of human beings in other parts of the world have different technological needs and networks.

“Feature phones continue to represent a large opportunity for mobile handset makers, especially in price-constrained emerging markets,” noted research firm IHS analyst Ian Fogg in a statement on the news.

“IHS estimates there will be 653 million feature and entry-level mobile phones shipped globally in 2013. Entry-level smartphones must compete with ever smarter touchscreen feature phones that offer many of the same social network, games, and mobile Internet benefits as smartphones, but at an even more compelling price.”

Samsung’s focus on feature phones is in line with other entities aiming at a global market. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia — all of whom place a significant emphasis on reaching audiences around the world — have taken care to maintain SMS features, improve feature phone access, and give careful thought to users on less-than-ideal cellular networks.

Here’s a look at the Rex lineup:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While we in Silicon Valley twiddle our thumbs over a panoply of smart devices, much of the rest of the world still uses feature phones, and the smartest, fastest-growing websites are those that still focus on feature phone users.

Take Wikipedia, for example. Earlier in 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation announced Wikipedia Zero, an initiative to make Wikipedia browsing free of data charges for the users who most urgently need access to information. The project also focuses on making text-only pages that will load quickly on less high-tech devices with slower network access.

Carriers in Asia and Africa have been quick to jump onboard, and today, the foundation is announcing significant growth as a direct result of the program, with pageview spikes in Niger, Kenya, and Malaysia.

For example, carrier Orange showed a 77 percent growth in Niger and an 88 percent growth in Kenya over a four-month period between June 2012 and September 2012. And in the same time period, Digi (a Telenor subsidiary operating in Malaysia) reported 42 percent growth in unique visitors to Wikipedia pages.

“These three data points make us really optimistic,” said Wikimedia mobile partnerships chief Amit Kapoor in a blog post on the news.

“They show growth, though we need to continually manage and measure to see if growth persists when we work with larger bases and also need to test what happens over time. We’ll share more data as we can, and we also hope to deep dive into a few markets over the next several months to learn exactly what type of partner marketing activity is most effective in driving the growth we described.”

Currently, in the United States, smartphones account for just half of all mobile phones, a stat that declines sharply when other countries around the world are added into the mix. And smartphone ownership is strongly linked to income, meaning poorer folks typically have less access to information, even though it likely has a greater ability to positively impact their lives.

Wikipedia Zero is currently active with 10 carriers around the world, and 22 more carriers are on a waitlist to get involved.

The foundation is also hard at work on a J2ME app. This platform, though practically dead in the U.S., is still huge in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Top image courtesy of erichon, Shutterstock

BiNu is a platform that brings smartphone app services to feature phones, a.k.a. “dumb” phones, reviled by the technorati but still widely used around the globe.

The startup’s premise is a brilliant one, one that promises to bring new heights of information, communication, and connectivity to some of the least-empowered areas on our planet; to that end, biNu has just taken $2 million from TomorrowVentures, the funding vehicle of Google’s Eric Schmidt.

The biNu cloud-based platform aims to drastically speed up Internet access on feature phones, thereby boosting the devices’ overall usefulness and ability to connect users. It works on Android phones as well as Java phones (yes, those still exist) and currently provides more than 100 channels, from Facebook to actual books, for its users. Users can also translate on the fly, bringing services instantly into their own local languages.

“Certainly, some people in countries like Australia or the U.S. who walk around and see iPhones everywhere don’t understand the scale of the problem and the opportunity,” said Gour Lentell, biNu’s CEO, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Lower-end smartphones and feature phones still outsell [smartphones] by about five to one.”

Even in the U.S. today, smartphones only account for about half of all mobile phones. While that number keeps growing, some of the people who could use smartphone-like access to information are still using feature phones; not surprisingly, smartphone ownership is still strongly linked to income.

Lentell noted that, around the world, feature phones are still some folks’ only way of accessing the web and all the information it contains, but due to the device limitations and the shoddy networks, the experience of these users has historically been poor at best.

“For many of our users, biNu is their first time online,” he said. “They are accessing books, health information, news, weather — information and education that simply weren’t available to them beforehand.”

One of the challenges biNu addresses is redesigning the most popular apps and content, from YouTube and Facebook to Wikipedia and the Bible, for small screens, numeric keyboards, limited memory and processing capabilities, and spotty cellular networks that can’t handle the data demands of smartphone apps. In addition to UI overhauls, biNu also processes all the app logic on the back end, transmitting only what’s needed to end users and extensively pre-caching and caching data.

Here’s a look at a few biNu apps in action:

Lentell talked with a couple of biNu users in Nairobi, Kenya, about their experiences so far. One said, “I’ve interacted with people that I never would [have]. [In] Haiti, Sri Lanka, Lebanon… you name it. BiNu has made me realize the world is just like a community, meeting people like that — amazing.”

Another user said, “I must visit biNu daily. I got a great friend here at biNu by the name Vicky [redacted] from Zambia. She’s far from me, but honestly biNu brings us closer. As a matter of fact, [I] have never met her, but I regard her as my very great friend.”

Other users talked about how much they’ve learned from reading dictionaries, news sites, and Wikipedia. Some spoke about the benefits of conducting financial transactions online or understanding other cultures from online socialization with far-flung new friends.

“There is a big race going on amongst content owners and online service providers to expand into the developing world,” Lentell continued.

“Anyone who sees how Facebook and the like are focusing on growth also understands that the biNu platform is assisting in the developing markets by bringing people online and giving them a great experience.”

Facebook’s number of monthly active users has grown into the hundreds of billions, and a lot of those users are coming to the service via the company’s feature phone app, launched early last year in partnership with a slew of international mobile carriers. Twitter, which has long upheld the importance of its SMS usage, also launched a feature phone app for Nokia devices just last month. Clearly, major social players with global ambitions are not leaving any stone unturned, even if that stone is a “dumb” feature phone in the middle of Mali or Ecuador or Kuwait.

“We are really proud of reaching 4 million active monthly users in such a short period of time, but there are still 4 to 5 billion people who don’t have advanced smartphones, so the potential is enormous,” Lentell concluded.

“We are focused on reaching more people, and also responding to the requests from our members to build out the biNu community with more ways for them to interact with each other.”

Australia-based biNu is a year and a half old, and this round also includes participation from U.S. and Australian private investors, including Paul Bassat, co-founder of Seek.com.

Top image courtesy of erichon, Shutterstock

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Not dumbing down the information network experience for the hundreds of millions of people still carrying around feature phones, Twitter has today released a native mobile app, consistent with its iPhone and Android offerings, for all Nokia Series 40 devices.

The brand new Nokia app, available now on the Ovi Store, introduces a native, fully-featured Twitter experience to a massive pool of people with Nokia S40 devices. Nokia said in January that it had sold more than 1.5 billion of these feature phones.

The application comes just two days after Twitter released new applications for iPhone and Android meant to bring parity between to its web and mobile products.

The Nokia release is also a part of a concerted effort on Twitter’s part to reach every person on the planet, and especially those with feature phones, a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Previously, Twitter updated its mobile web app. The company also just announced a partnership with MediaTek to bring the information network experience to more people in emerging countries.

Photo credit: Honou/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Troubled phone-maker Nokia is attempting to unload its luxury mobile-phone brand, Vertu, for a reported $265 million (€200 million), the Financial Times is reporting. Nokia is being advised by Goldman Sachs on the deal and is currently in talks to sell the brand to private equity group Permira.

For the baller who has everything but an iPhone, the bespoke Vertu phones are handmade in England and are rumored to smell like Italian leather, 50-year-old whiskey, and freshly showered butlers. The phones are made from the finest materials such as stainless steel, carbon fiber, and titanium. They are tricked out with exotic leathers (calf, ostrich, and alligator), precious metals (gold, platinum), and of course, rubies and diamonds. The London Symphony Orchestra makes all the Vertu ringtones, and it takes 15 days for the company to make a single sapphire-crystal display.

Most of the brand’s handsets are woefully outdated, mimicking top-of-the-line feature phone and Blackberry design from five-years ago. Vertu’s most expensive phone was the tacky $310,000 Signature Cobra, released in 2006. The dated tech would seem to show a brand that has been largely ignored in recent years, however in 2011 it released a touchscreen phone, the $5,000 Constellation, and earlier this year it launched a series of dragon-themed phones to celebrate the Year of the Dragon.

Unsurprisingly, the technology is not what makes Vertu valuable, according to the Financial Times citing a source close to the sale. Rather, the brand’s name has cachet among the rich and fabulous, and could be used to market to the coveted group internationally. That would make the brand a good fit for Permia, which currently has high-end companies such as Hugo Boss and Valentino in its portfolio. The Financial Times estimates Vertu’s annual revenue between €200 million and €300 million.

The sale is a logical move for struggling Nokia, which posted a $1.7 billion loss in the first quarter. Last week, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Nokia’s rating to “junk.” The one potentially bright spot for the Finnish company is decent sales for its Lumia smartphones — it sold 2 million in the first quarter of 2012.

In letting go of Vertu, Nokia is selling more than just overpriced, blinged-out handsets. The company also offers luxury services such as a 24/7 concierge service, city guidebooks for the jetsetters, and extra-special technical support that includes automatic data backups, and two (two!) complimentary repairs a year. The company has been around since 1998 and has approximately 600 employees.

Check out some of the stunning phones created by Vertu:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Research In Motion is reportedly attempting to sell itself after rejecting the former co-CEO’s plan to open up its network to carriers. But for some reason it is not pursuing the creation of a lucrative category between smart phones and feature phones — the super feature phone.

Less than a smartphone, but far more than a feature phone

What are you left with if you take a smartphone and remove the ability to install apps? It’s far more functional than a feature phone, with built in apps for e-mail, Facebook, and a camera. But it’s definitely not a smartphone like an iPhone or Android device. RIM’s range of devices are fully capable, with integrated apps and cameras, but suffer from a paucity of apps other than an attempt to integrate Android apps.

The key to the super feature phone is the ability to use cheap data plans in the $10-per-month range, rather than the more expensive full data plans required by smartphones. Not everyone needs a smartphone with a data plan. RIM should focus its devices on the feature phone segment, especially for armies of corporate workers that need access to email but not much else. RIM can easily compete with the players in this space, including Samsung’s Bada and Marvell’s Kinoma.

RIM should also ensure that the carriers do not sabotage a super feature phone plan by forcing a full data plan, like they did to the ill-fated Microsoft Kin and instead leverage the BlackBerry network.

A lucrative mobile device management future

RIM has always held a core competence in integrating corporate Microsoft Exchange e-mail and calendar servers in sync with its devices. RIM has attempted to expand into the integration of Google Android and Apple iOS devices with Microsoft Exchange with its Fusion product line, but those devices can now integrate out of the box with corporate e-mail and calendar systems.

Many corporations are implementing bring your own device programs where their employees can use off-the-shelf devices to access corporate resources. This shift has presented an opportunity for new mobile device management software (MDM) that ensure that corporate data can be wiped from lost handsets and terminated employees’ devices.

RIM should acquire a few of these MDM vendors, including Airwatch, MobileIron, and Zenprise and roll up this space. Although RIM’s stock has been hammered, it is still worth $7 billion and can afford to overpay for growing startups. This will enable it to have new, desirable products to sell through its enterprise direct sales force and channel partners.

Have some marketing fun — BlackBerrys are better sometimes!

BlackBerrys may not equal an iPhone, but it is a heck of a lot faster to type out a text message or call someone with a BlackBerry. There is a lot of potential for fun ads that show off that comparison with people in awkward situations that need to contact a friend quickly while their friends are still fumbling with touch screens. BlackBerrys could even become cool again.

Let’s face it: Apple and Android are never going to provide cheap devices that don’t require a data plan, and this is a huge opportunity for RIM.

This story first appeared on CNET and is published here with permission.

Photo credit: Sippanont Samchai/Flickr

Peter Yared is the CTO of CBS Interactive and was previously the founder and CEO of four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies. Peter began programming games and utilities at age 10, and has written for VentureBeat, BusinessWeek, AdWeek, and InfoWorld.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’ve finally reached the point where half of U.S. mobile consumers own smartphones — a significant moment that proves the smartphone revolution is more than just hype.

As of February, 49.7 percent of U.S. mobile owners have smartphones, according to the latest figures from Nielsen. Additionally, the research group found that more than two-thirds of new phone buyers in the last three months opted for smartphones over feature phones.

The big takeaway: The strong rise of smartphones will continue, and feature phones are on their way to becoming extinct (see graph below).

Nielsen notes that smartphone penetration has jumped significantly since February of last year, when it was only 36 percent. If growth continues at this rate, smartphones could account for 70 percent of all U.S. mobile devices by next year.

48 percent of smartphone owners have an Android handset, 32 percent have an iPhone, and 12 percent have a BlackBerry, according to Nielsen. Among new buyers the figures look similar, with 48 percent going for Android, 43 percent for the iPhone, and a misguided 5 percent going for BlackBerry.

Come next year, I suspect we’ll see Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform breaking out of the Nielsen “Other” category and gaining significant market share. RIM is on the decline, and the upcoming $100 Nokia Lumia 900 will likely pull some consumers away from cheap Android phones.

Smartphone picture via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Young or old, if you’re loaded, you’re far more likely to own a smartphone.

The finding comes from analytics firm Nielsen. The company surveyed more than 20,000 mobile consumers in the U.S. and found a strong correlation between age, income, and smartphone ownership.

Adults aged 24 to 34 showed the highest proportion of smartphone ownership: 66 percent indicated they owned a smartphone. Overall smartphone penetration in the U.S., according to Nielsen, was at 48 percent in January.

Nielsen also found that, in general, for all age groups, the more money people make, the more likely they are to own a smartphone. Youngsters 18 to 24, however, skew higher for smartphone ownership even at lower salaries.

“Older subscribers with higher incomes are more likely to have a smartphone,” Nielsen said in a blog post on the survey. “For example, those 55-64 making over 100K a year are almost as likely to have a smartphone as those in the 35-44 age bracket making 35-75K per year.”

Clearly, parents and grandparents with extra cash on hand are happy to get hip with the smartphone-toting times. After all, it’s what the kids are doing.

On the whole, consumers are opting to upgrade to smartphones over feature phones. In the past three months, more than 50 percent of people in search of a new device, under the age of 65, chose to purchase a smartphone. And if you look at the 25 to 34 age group specifically, the percentage of smartphone choosers is a whopping 80 percent.

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon, Flickr

The aspirational Android

Gadget blogs pounced on mobile-internet device maker Peek yesterday when the company announced it was killing off service for its devices running on T-Mobile. What they missed was a $15 million fund raise from Peek, confirmed by chief executive Amol Sarva to VentureBeat, as the company expands its business aggressively in Asia.

On January 30 users who had paid $299 for “lifelong service” on the companies bare bones email and Twitter devices were surprised to find that they no longer worked. CEO Sarva didn’t offer up much of an apology.

“Unfortunately we cannot maintain the network forever for a few users, so that end time has come. The networks are changing standards, protocols etc and the old units are now end of life,” he told Endgadget. “We have lots going with rapid adoption of our software by phone brands around the world, so Peek is flat out building for a number of platforms that our OEM customers are deploying like Android and Mediatek. We are not offering a Peek-made device to replace these old ones.”

Peek has pivoted from producing hardware to delivering a cloud platform that lets the explosion of mobile consumers in Asia run smartphone apps on relatively low-end feature phones. “Demand for this is very high as India and other markets have huge numbers of people wanting to use their phones with email, chat, web, social network and other Internet services,” Sarva told VentureBeat by email. “Yet most cannot afford expensive devices. Using Peek’s cloud platform and software, we can bring this to simpler devices.”

The company is partnering with vendors like India’s Micromax, whose ad campaigns encourage customers to believe they deserve an iPhone, even if they can’t afford it. “The biggest trend for us now is our suite of services for Android on the lowest-cost platforms. Android will be widely available on $20, 200 Mhz phones very soon — but not in the form being designed in Mountain View and not with Google’s web services,” writes Sarva. “As more people can afford qwerty and touch screen phones, and as our partners install Android on these phones, our software makes it possible for high performance apps. Peek’s mail app is 10x smaller than Google’s Gmail app on Android.”

It’s not clear yet whether Peek’s American customers will demand compensation for their “lifelong service”, but the news that the company is still very much in business and flush with capital is certain to irk Peek patrons who found that their devices suddenly stopped working.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

2009-era Nokia feature phones

Not content to let its feature phone software stagnate, Nokia is apparently working on a new low-end mobile operating system called “Meltemi,” which will allow the company to sell more capable phones in emerging markets.

News of the Linux-based Meltemi, which is the Greek word for winds that blow across the Aegean see from the north during summer, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

For Nokia, Meltemi is a sign that the company isn’t forgetting about low-end devices, a segment which represented about 47 percent of its device sales last quarter. It’s also a strong hint that the company isn’t willing to be entirely on another company’s platform. Nokia recently abandoned its plans to develop the MeeGo operating system with Intel (though it is releasing a single MeeGo device for some reason, the N9) in exchange for adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform.

Meltemi will allow Nokia to continue innovating with low-end feature phones — which is important, since consumers in emerging markets expect smartphone-like functionality from their feature phones, a source tells the WSJ. Developing a new OS will let Nokia offer those devices at cheaper prices than if they used Windows Phone 7, which requires beefier hardware and licensing fees to Microsoft. As the WSJ points out, Meltemi could be Nokia’s equivalent of Samsung’s Bada platform for low-end phones.

The new software will completely replace Nokia’s S40 software in feature phones, according to the mobile site Boy Genius Report. “Nokia’s vision is seemingly to build an operating system with capability that reaches well beyond “S40,” but that can function on similar low-cost hardware,” writes BGR’s Zach Epstein. “This new platform will be fairly capable, but our understanding is that it will not be a full-fledged OS intended to compete with the likes of Android, iOS and Windows Phone.”

Nokia will still develop inexpensive Windows Phone devices in some markets, BGR says. That will likely happen with Microsoft’s recently announced “Tango” version of the OS, which offers a stripped down experience for low-end hardware.

Nokia has yet to confirm Meltemi’s existence, but a spokesperson told BGR in a statement “our Mobile Phones team has a number of exciting projects in the works that will help connect the next billion consumers to the Internet.”

A new study indicates there’s a dramatic shift to “smartphone culture,” where people are using social networks and downloading media such as games on their phones, according to Magid Media Futures: Mobile 2011. Among the findings, smartphone users spend more on virtual goods in games than social networking users do.

“We are seeing a smartphone culture radically change the way we interact with content and media,” said Mari Baker, chief executive of PlayFirst, which makes a wide variety of web, social, tablet and smartphone games. “This is a big wave of change and it gives us confidence in the platform.”

For years, American cell phone usage lagged behind that of Europeans and the Japanese, but that seems to be changing at long last.

The survey was conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates and sponsored by casual game firm PlayFirst. The survey reports that nearly half of non-smartphone owners are considering buying a smart phone to replace their feature phones in the next 12 months.

Smartphone ownership grew 35 percent from 2010 and the installed base is expected to reach half of the U.S. population in a few years.

About 45 percent of smartphone users play games on their phones. Smartphone owners are three to five times more likely to play games, use social networks, and access the internet from their phones, in comparison to traditional feature phone owners.

Magid found that among those who play games on their phones, the majority use the phone as their primary gaming device. Of those who do not play smartphone games, 55 percent said they may start playing in the next 12 months. One third of smartphone gamers who have not spent money on smartphone games say they may start in the next 12 months.

In 2010, only 10 percent of respondents said they were interested in buying in-game virtual goods on smartphones. This year, the number is 46 percent. Smartphone users spend more money on games and they spend more money, in comparison to social networking games. About 13 percent of smartphone gamers have bought virtual goods on their phones, spending an average of $67 last year. By comparison, social networking users spend $25 a year. About 8 out of 10 social network gamers have not spent any money over the past year in social games.

The survey was conducted online and included 2,482 people, of whom 2,051 were between the ages of 18 and 64. Data were collected from April 15 to April 20.

See below for some charts from the study.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

55 percent of U.S. consumers who purchased a new phone in the last three months bought a smartphone, according to data from Nielsen’s May mobile consumer survey.

This marks the first time, at least according to Nielsen’s data, that smartphones have outranked feature phones (often known as “dumb phones”) in sales. And with smartphone sales speeding up, there’s little chance this trend will be reversed anytime soon. Last year, only 34 percent of U.S. consumers reported purchasing a smartphone.

Overall, about 38 percent of U.S. consumers own smartphones now, and 62 percent own feature phones, according to Nielsen’s data. Android is still the most dominant mobile platform, with 38 percent of smartphone owners running Android devices. But the research firm also notes that Android’s growth seems to have plateaued over the past few months. Android jumped from holding 21 percent of new purchases in November to 27 percent in February, but it hasn’t grown beyond that figure since then.

Apple’s iPhone, on the other hand, continues to be a rising star among new smartphone buyers. After accounting for 10 percent of new smartphone purchases in February, the iPhone has jumped to 17 percent as of May. The Verizon iPhone’s launch was likely a driving factor in that growth, so it’ll be interesting to see if Apple can keep snapping up new users for the remainder of the year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Snaptu confirmed this morning that it has been acquired by Facebook. The social network reportedly paid as much as $70 million for the Israeli startup, which makes apps for feature phones.

The deal shows that Facebook is serious about extending its social network across the entire globe and that most of the world accesses the internet not via smartphones or PCs but through old-fashioned feature phones. To cover the whole market, Facebook needs its app to run on the least expensive phones on the market.

The purchase price wasn’t officially disclosed but the Israeli media came up with the estimated price. Facebook worked with Snaptu earlier this year on a Facebook mobile app for a broad range of feature phones, now numbering 2,500 devices.

“We soon decided that work as part of the Facebook team offered the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development,” Snaptu said in a blog post today. “And joining Facebook means we can make an even bigger impact on the world.”

The deal is expected to close within a few weeks. Snaptu said it will work on offering richer and more advanced Facebook apps on virtually every mobile phone.

“Snaptu is a startup run by a highly innovative collection of engineers and entrepreneurs, who we already work closely with to offer a Facebook mobile application for feature phones,” Facebook said in a statement today. “As part of Facebook, Snaptu’s team and technology will enable us to deliver an even better Facebook mobile experience on feature phones more quickly.”

Snaptu was founded in 2007 with backing from Sequoia Capital and Carmel Ventures. Gartner reported that in the third quarter of 2010, smartphones were 19.3 percent of the market, or 81 million units of a total of 417 million.

[photo credit: Tech N' Marketing]

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to the top 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. Request an invitation.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Facebook has already established itself as the most popular application ever on the iPhone, but now it wants to expand mobile usage to people who don’t own fancy smartphones.

Last year, Facebook launched Zero, a mobile website that was stripped down to lower bandwidth usage, and which was free thanks to deals with mobile operators (as long as you didn’t view photos). Today, Facebook announced a new app that supposedly improves the experience with “an easier-to-navigate home screen, contact synchronization, and fast scrolling of photos and friend updates.”

Once again, Facebook has cut deals with operators, in this case so that users can use the app without any data charges for the first 90 days. And if you look at the list of partners (which you can view in Facebook’s blog post), it’s pretty clear that launching the app is really about expanding Facebook’s international presence, since the carriers are located in countries like Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the Dominican Republic.

The app was created with Snaptu, a Sequoia Capital-backed startup that focuses on bringing online experiences to lower-end Java phones.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you thought you were safe from hearing more about Microsoft’s ill-fated Kin phones, think again. Verizon is apparently gearing up to offer the phones a second chance on its network, except this time in a stripped-down feature phone capacity, according to a leaked Verizon road map revealed by mobile site PPC Geeks.

As easy as it is to ridicule the Kin phones (even Microsoft employees hated them), they could actually make decent feature phones — devices that sit between smartphones and “dumbphones”. The problem is that they should have been feature phones from the start. Instead, Verizon marketed them as smartphones and paired them with expensive data plans. Since phone buyers could pay the same $29.99 monthly data plan for a killer Android phone like the original Droid, it’s no surprise the Kin phones died an early death.

With feature phone data pricing, perhaps somewhere between $10 and $15 a month, the Kin phones can actually appeal to the youth demographic Microsoft completely misread the first time around. The phones will be losing the data-heavy “Loop” feature — which automatically uploaded users’ pictures and other media to a personalized website — Engadget reports.

Still, the phones will be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s Zune Pass, which offers users unlimited access to music for $15 a month. At this point, the Kin phones are more like Windows Phone 7-lite, as they should have been from the start.

To make money from them, according to Patrick Mork, an executive at a leading app store for feature phones, app makers need to create Java-based apps that are free to download, and that make money from ads rather than through an upfront price.

“There’s been a perception out there that you have to be a fairly large brand, or you have to have very deep pockets, in order to succeed in an app store,” said Mork, GetJar’s vice president of marketing, told me in a phone interview. “But developers are realizing that if they want to grow internationally. they have to have a free app. It’s much easier to start with a Java app and then move to Android and iPhone than it is to go the other way around.”

Mork cites the example of Israeli startup Snaptu, whose eponymous suite of apps for Twitter, Facebook, news-reading (there’s a TechCrunch app), and other mobile services are one of GetJar’s top ten downloads. Snaptu apps make money by serving mobile ads through a collection of networks — BuzzCity, Millennial Media, Inmobi, AdMob, Amobee and others.

Java, more specifically the J2ME mobile version of Oracle’s software platform (it was developed by Sun, which Oracle now owns), works on most low-end phones worldwide. These phones are uncool among technophile Americans, but popular in other countries where people make less money and wireless carriers don’t subsidize the price of BlackBerrys, iPhones and Droids.

The biggest problem with Java is that it doesn’t really work on smartphones. Java’s creators envisioned it as a “run-anywhere” programming language, not restricted to specific hardware or operating systems. But years later, Android phones don’t support J2ME out of the box, and Apple demands that apps be written with Apple’s own non-Java software tools.

One reason is that apps written specifically for one type of phone, “native apps” in developer-speak, can take advantage of many software hooks not available to Java programs designed to work on a much wider array of phones. So, developers who start out in Java may still need to create separate versions of their apps for iPhones and Android phones. And BlackBerry phones, where Java apps frequently lock up my late-model BlackBerry Curve with error messages that require a reboot.

Still, Mork says that many GetJar customers — some of whom pay GetJar to place their free apps prominently, so they can make money off ads to those who download them — began as smartphone developers, then “realized that they needed to broaden to feature phones if they wanted to make a profit.”

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Early-bird pricing is available until May 15. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.