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Los servicios de geolocalización como Foursquare, y otros que tienen un origen o presencia regional, como Nextoo o Tooio, cuyos detalles se van a conocer en el evento MobileTrack el próximo 13 de octubre, están ganando creciente popularidad entre los usuarios dispuestos a compartir su ubicación con su grupo de contactos.

Pero además, la mayoría de estas plataformas permiten a marcas y empresas atraer clientes a sus locales. El sitio Mashable, especializado en medios sociales, clasificó algunas de las formas en que los negocios minoristas pueden ofrecer promociones basadas en geolocalización.

1. Premios, pero bajo verificación.
El problema a resolver es cómo la marca o el dueño del local verifica el registro de la persona. Como en el caso de los cupones, lo difícil no es entregarlos, sino controlar quién y dónde se cambian. Una opción es montar sobre plataformas ya existentes un sistema que vincula los premios a la verificación. Un ejemplo es el servicio SCVNGR, que en la pantalla de inicio de la opción de acceder a través de un código bidi. La idea es poner estos códigos en el local para que los clientes que quieren el beneficio deban ir al lugar si o si.
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El HTC PTV 350, tiene el tamaño de un pequeño marco de fotos y, en realidad, es lo que es, un marco digital de pie abatible con una pantalla táctil de 3,5”, fabricado por la taiwanesa HTC. Su peculiaridad reside en el nombre que claramente vemos serigrafiado en la caja, FLOTV, y en la leyenda que lo acompaña: “Televisión personal. Ahora la televisión va donde tú vas. Concédete un poco de tiempo a ti mismo para disfrutar de tus programas favoritos. Para ver las noticias de última hora, deportes en directo, magazines de moda, programación infantil… cuándo y dónde quieras. Ya es oficial, la televisión ha abandonado los edificios.”

En los laterales, la relación de las cadenas que se reciben (ahora mismo 16 y soporta hasta 24). Cuando abrimos la caja, encontramos una batería, el adaptador, un cable USB, auriculares, funda, una guía de inicio rápido, el contrato y la garantía.
Y entonces podemos desplegar el pie, abrir la trasera (deslizante), insertar la batería y ver (que no abrir) la cuna de la SIM. A los lados de ésta, descubrimos claramente los altavoces que nos indican que se trata de un terminal estéreo.
Sobre el marco -negro y cromado- dos botones y cuatro leds verdes que nos señalan, al presionar uno de ellos, el status de la batería. Al sostener el otro, se enciende el monitor.
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Facebook users can now register at http://facebook/username a custom URL for their own profile. Saying http://facebook.com/albertcuesta over the phone it’s obviously easier than http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=645002665. So far, so good. However, the new system is leaving mobile Facebook users out in the cold: checking http://m.facebook.com/albertcuesta from a cell phone (or any other browser, actually) gets an error page. This is not exactly good policy given the growth of social network mobile usage. Hopefully the FB guys will eventually sort it out, but it will always be an afterthought.

Anyway, vanity URLs are being assigned on a ‘first come, first served’ basis and no approval requirements, so you better rush for yours.

It had to come. IP telephony makes calls so cheap that there already are companies such as JaJah that give them away. In the US they already offer free calls between cell phones. You only have to register and no headset or a microphone are required.

Under its funny name, JAJAH joins Skype and other new companies that laugh themselves off phone carriers. What Jajah is offering are free calls between its registered users, using regular phones.

How does it work? First you register on their web site. Then you enter from which and to which numbers you want to call. In a few seconds, your phone rings and a voice announces the connection is being made.

That is, the callback system we have been using for years from phone booths, but via a web site.

Prices vary from zero to 52 (Euro) cents per minute, depending on where you live. Zone 1 covers the US, Canada, China, Singapore and Hong Kong. Zone 2 covers most of Europe, as well as other countries such as Thailand, Argentina or Venezuela.

Which calls are free?

The only free calls are between registered users. If a registered user calls a non-registered phone number, the call has a cost. The news is that Zone 1 users can also call for free from their cell phones. True, they must install a Java program in their phones, and it only works with Nokia, Motorola and Samsung devices with the Symbian operating system.

Users in Zone 2 (including Spain) pay 15 to 28 cents per minute if they use their cell phone. Not cheap for calling another cell phone within Spain, but a bargain when calling cell phones in other European or American countries. Calls between landlines in these zones are quite cheaper at two cents per minute.

All of the above prices are exclusive of VAT, but there is no cost for setting the call up. Jajah pays for the free calls with the revenue from the paid calls, and it also limits the duration of the free calls. It also offers some interesting plug-in programs to call directly from applications such as Outlook and Firefox, to send SMS and business accounts.

The rates are slightly higher than SkypeOut’s, Skype’s system for calling to fixed and mobile phones from a computer. The major difference between Skype and Jajah is that the latter uses the computer just for entering the phone numbers. Calls are made with regular phones, thus not requiring any fiddling with headsets or microphones.

For starters, Jajah gives 50 cents of credit, that you can recharge via credit card, funds transfer or the Moneybookers and PaySafeCard systems. PayPal is not accepted for obvious reasons: PalPal is owned by eBay, and eBay also owns Skype.

Some examples

Calls within Spain

• Between Jajah users: free
• Fixed to fixed: 0,02 €
• Fixed to mobile (or the other way round): 0,15 €
• Mobile to mobile: 0,28 €

Calls from Spain to the US

• Between Jajah users: free
• Spanish fixed to US fixed: 0,02 €
• Spanish fixed to US mobile (or the other way round): 0,15 €
• Spanish mobile to US mobile: 0,28 €

Not a single month goes without Google mobilising another of their web services, by releasing a light version adapted to the smaller screens and slower connections of mobile phones and handheld computers. Now it’s the turn of the Google News news aggregator.

(este artículo también está disponible en español)

The mobile version of Google, the popular Internet portal (calling it just a search engine falls quite short) has just added a new option to its home page for mobile devices: now it’s the mobile access to Google News, the service that gathers continuously the stories from major news outlets in each country (that’s 4.500 news sources in the US, 700 in Spain and Germany, 500 in France) and displays their headlines on a home page, grouped by sections.

The new access to Mobile Google News is located just under the search options and just above the mobile version of the Gmail webmail. The home page of the new service displays the three main headlines, followed by the sections menu (US, World, Entertainment, Sport, Sci/Tech, Business and Health), with an option to expand each section to display their first three headlines too.

The best part is that, unlike other mobile news aggregators, the links in Mobile Google News don’t take the user to the regular web pages of the news sources, but directly to their mobile versions, which further streamlines ‘light’ browsing using a small screen and a slow connection.

Google News’ new mobile version is available only for U.S. news sources, but not yet for localized versions such as Google Noticias, that aggregates Spanish media. Therefore, any user who has configured his/her mobile access to Google in another language must switch it back to English. Hopefully this limitation will be solved soon…

eReader’s program provides a simple way to create multi-platform e-books on Windows and Mac desktops, but its feature set is too limited for a commercial application.

(este artículo también está disponible en español)

Among the many available e-book formats, one of the most popular is eReader, previously known as Palm Reader. Its documents are relatively compact, they can be password-protected, it has DRM (Digital Rights Management, i.e. copy-protection) and there are native viewers for the Windows, Macintosh, Palm OS, Pocket PC and Symbian operating systems, so the same document can be read on multiple platforms.

There are several ways to convert an existing digital document into an eReader e-book. In this story we covered some of them. However, there’s another one, allegedly the easiest and most straightforward: using the eBook Studio software program, sold by eReader in versions for Windows and for Mac OS X. Both of them are identical in their look and functionality. We have tested the Macintosh version. It is a commercial application that sells for US$ 30. Demo versions are also available, but they insert a clearly visible ‘demo’ watermark on all pages of the finished e-book.

eBook Studio displays a single window, intended to mimic the look of the document on the screen of a Palm OS handheld. A top row of buttons allows to apply the basic styles (bold, italic, underline, strikeout, superindex, subindex) to the selected text, as well as alignment (left, center, right, indent). You can also insert page breaks, internal hyperlinks, tab stops and horizontal rules, besides marking text segments as headers, up to five levels deep, that the program will use for generating the document table of contents.

Pictures can also be inserted, either from an existing file or pasting them from the clipboard. eBook Studio will save the pictures in PNG format. Anyway, they must be smaller than 148×158 píxels or 64 kB. Otherwise, the viewer will display an icon and the user will have to tap on it to display the full picture.

You can also insert a book plate, that is, the code that displays the owner’s name on encrypted e-books, purchased via the DRM system of online bookstores such as eReader.com.

Finally, you can edit the five information fields (title, author, publisher, copyright and ISBN), that appear when opening the e-book in the eReader viewer.

The text can be typed directly on the editing window, it can be copied and pasted from other applications, or it can be imported from existing text, RTF or HTML documents. In these cases, most of the text styles and internal links, if any, are preserved.

Weak points

eBook Studio uses internally the PML (Palm Markup Language) format. Actually, what the program does is turning into PML tags the attributes we apply to the text. Once the document is completed, the ‘Convert to e-book’ function generates the table of contents and creates the PBD-format file that we can distribute for reading. However, should you ever need to edit it again, you must keep the PML file, because eBook Studio is unable to open directly the PDB files it creates.

Moreover, a function is conspicuous by its absence: the creation of footnotes. Yes, eBook Studio is unable to leverage one of the most powerful features of e-book reading, which is the viewing of embedded notes. Therefore, eBook Studio can be enough for editing novels and other linear-reading works, but it’s clearly insufficient for creating technical or business e-books, or any other kind that resorts to page-footer references.

Finally, it’s also surprising that the preview function of eBook Studio is only able to display how the e-book will look on a low-resolution Palm OS screen (160×160 pixels). If you want to know how the page breaks and layout will look on other devices (320×320 Palm, Pocket PC), you’ll have to assume it or generate the PDB file and actually view it on the target device.

Conclusion and alternatives

eBook Studio provides a basic feature set that would be appropriate for a freeware application, but is clearly not enough in a commercial program. Those users wanting to edit e-books will do well by exploring alternate solutions, such as direct PML tagging (either manually with a text editor, or using some Microsoft Word macro, such as word2pml.dot) and the free Dropbook converter (available for Windows and for Macintosh) also from eReader, that generates the PDB e-book from the tagged text. Unfortunately, this is the only option for anyone requiring advanced features such as footnotes, in their e-books.