Merry christmas & Happy New Year!

Year 2008 has been very interesting from Mobispine side. Somehow we can say we have become a real company with real customers and real revenue as well! Some positive takeways from this year is:
- increased the number of customers, currently +25 mobile operators as customers
- Three companies have been acquired and merged into Mobispine
- No of employees is now around 25 (a year ago we might have been 15..)
- Revenue goes up and shall go up even more for 2009 of course

In my opinion this is great progress from a company such as Mobispine with growth anbitions.

We don't know exactly what is waiting for us in 2009 when people talk about financial crisis, economic downturn etc. The only thing I know personally is that everything is possible. If you want something really bad you will most probably get it. The sky is the limit and with good products and good team you can always reach customers and do deals. It is just a question of number of calls, meetings, proposals etc.. So my guts feeling is that we will do even much better next year if we continue to work as hard as we are doing now (or even harder of course!)

I want to thanks all the fantastic employees we have in Sweden, Romania and Ukraine! We are very delighted that you want to work with us and build this company. We also want to thank all our fantastic customers. Without You we would not be here, we would not even be alive as a company. I also want to say thanks to all our shareholders who believe in us and have had the patience so far.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

/ Joakim

PS Thanks Andrei for the picture!

Mobispine a company presentation

We want to share with you the basic concept of Mobispine such as:
- Who we are
- What we do
- Who we sell our stuff to
- Our business model

Enjoy the reading and let us know if you have some ideas.

MMS for iPhone, Q & A's

No comment

First native MMS app for iPhone under development

As you know, Mobispine is always working on innovative ways to respond
to market demands. We noticed there was a lack of an MMS on iPhone and
spotted an opportunity to test our wits. I'm happy to say that once
again, the Mobispine team came up trumps!

We're currently the only company ready to sell MMS on iPhone to global operators -- who will then offer the service to end-users. The service is integrated into operators environment with MMSC, provisioning and is to be approved by the App store guys of course.

Right now, we're offering the MMS on iPhone service to its many global operators who have the rights to sell iPhones in their markets. We're excited about the chance to enable MMS for iPhone users.


We're confident that operators will find the service easy to use and
profitable with an opportunity to expand messaging usage, improve subscriber retention and hopefully increase revenue. The service will also increase customer loyalty and recognition as the brand is displayed on the user's phone. The application is white-labelled and will be branded for each operator and distributed via the App store.

We're sure that iPhone users are awaiting this service with bated
breath! We look forward to delivering innovative technologies that
differentiate operators and ultimately satisfy iPhone user's demands
for expanded features.

As always, thanks for your support and let us know what you think.

Mobispine facts & strategy

I feel we are a very ambitious team really trying to create value for our customers by delivering attractive products. More and more customer have been attracted by us lateley and we have decided to serve these mobile players such as: operators and handset manufacturers really well. Those are our customers. Our goal is to help them increase the ARPU (revenue) and the value in their handsets, mobile networks and at the end make consumers happy.

In order to summarize what we have done the last months in regards to creating a stronger company I summarize below:
We have done 3 company acquisitions:
- NewsAlloy - very exciting technology for web-based RSS-readers
- General Wireless, leading provider of software/applications for desktop messaging, More than 20 mobile operators use this technology today
- MyScoop, exciting company with services for creating communitys around photos/videos and storage of media

These acquisitions and our product development has created an exciting portfolio of Value Added Services for mobile players such as:
- Desktop messaging product suite - Outlook, standalone desktop clients, Vista gadgets, soon Mac etc...
- Mobile RSS news reader, Iphone, java, wap
- Photo/video communitys for sharing & storing of media from mobile and PC's

I personally love this portfolio of services and we see proof points from our customers that we are on the right track as the feedback gets more and more positive and also more and more orders coming in :). Thanks!

Currently we employ some 25 people in three countries, Most of us are techies dealing with development, testing or some other engineering tasks within the company. Next step for us is to find some top-notch business peple so we better could cover growth areas such as: APAC, Americas. We always look for dedicated Sales people who is able to to do business and make the customers happy.

Thanks to our employees, all our customers and all other hang-arounds for supporting us in this journey. My personal belief is that we have not even reached 10% of the company potential so please keep on working hard!

Take care!

WS 1.0 is (soon) here

Maybe some of you remember my blog about some new eSMS clients. Well, i wasn't lying. In a couple of weeks (maybe faster) we do the final polishing on the first version of the web service API that we promised you. It's not acctually that complicated, it's all only about sending SMS. It would be cool if some of you guys would like to try it out and come with your opinions. We could provide you with a number of free SMS and in return you could come with constructive criticism about the functionality. Those interested could send me a mail: marko.salonen@mobispine.com and as subject "Testing WS 1.0".

In the first version we don't support MMS, that will come in version 2.0 but lets take it a step at a time.

Other cool stuff is the gadgets and widgets. We did a small change when we prioritized and instead of Google widgets we focus on Vista and Mac gadgets.
Basically these have the same soure code base and easy to work with. Our client developers are working hard on those and soon they can be taken in use.

I hope you guys allready tested the current clients. If not, go here

Getsatisfaction with Mobispine

Here at Mobispine we get some emails, calls, IM's from users around the world telling us what they think about what we do and what could be done in other ways.

We love the feedback (good or bad) and want you to continue doing so but what’s more important, we want everybody else to hear your voice as well. If you believe that we have solved a problem for you and made your life a bit easier we want to make that publicly available for everyone to see.

With that said, we invite you to log on to www.getsatisfaction.com/mobispine and write something, good or bad, about Mobispine and our products. To start we have this forum open for our RSS-based news reader product but I am sure we will see the other products there soon as well. It doesn’t have to be something long with some in-depth analysis, a few sentences is perfect and in return we will be eternally grateful :)

Have a great weekend!

Appstore here we come!

Finally our News reader is available on the Apple Appstore. The last couple of weeks we have been developing and working on publishing our app and now you can test it yourselves, here is the iTunes link:

Mobispine News Reader

You can also search for "Mobispine" in the App store.

We really want your feedback on the app, what is missing, what do you want, what could be done? write a comment or send feedback to feedback@mobispine.com.

---

Here is a photo of Per Lundberg, the developer of our iPhone app together with Andrew Boddy, CTO of Mobispine, great work guys!

eSMS for the future

We have not been that active with blogs but that doesn't mean we have been lazy.
New orders are coming in and new installations to be completed and new releases to be made.

Internally we are working hard with the roadmap to provide you new clients and new possibilities to send messages. Antoher project we are working on is something we call Amorella (Yes, that name comes from a big ferry). This project has as target to rewrite parts of eSMS solution with newer technologies. Things get old and needs to be taken care of even though they work well, we can't just leave them as they are. It's like rearranging furniture even thought that old couch feels extremly comfortable.
Two big technological desicision has been made in this project and the first one is about what web server we use.
We started to use Glassfish in our installations instead of Tomcat and we are extremly happy about that! Glassfish provides us stability, security, modularity, everything you might want or we want!
Another big desicion is to use the Spring framework when rewriting the code. Spring is like magic! It's easy and extremly powerful and i enjoy every day i get to implement something in it.
These technologies and motivated developers will give us even more stable and stronger product!

Mobispine nominated as most promising company in Nordic

Hey,
Just want to thank everyone inside the company and outside the company who is supporting us in our continuos journey of creating user-friendly mobile Internet & mobile messaging products. Thanks to the feedback we get from you we succeed to create something good most of the times.

We have now been nominated as one of Nordics most promising high-growth companies which is very stimulating of course. Our CEO, Dusyant Patel will go to Copenhaguen in October 20 to present our offering and pitch at the Nordic Venture Forum.

Good job all involved!

Service icon trouble

Hello!
Monday and we are back. As a result of last weeks troubles some of our service icons (logos for your favourites) have gone missing. If you find that your favourites are missing icons please post a comment with the name and url and I will fix it, hope you all had a great weekend.

We're back!

We're back! Thanks to the efforts of Svante, Silvian and Joacim.
At about 13:00 our free Mobile News Reader was available again.

Joacim and Svante identified the disk to be excluded but needed non-the-less to rebuild the database server from reformatting disks to loading the backups and configuring other sundry systems.

We have lost some blog images and news articles may appear old until our data refreshes itself.

During the rebuild we've switched to RAID10 (RAID 1+0) for our database. We were also building an alternate database on a virtual machine which proved much slower. What we do with that has to be decided.

Some people will have seen the new website in the last couple of days but
We'll be running the 'classic' website until we straighten out all the functionality.

We gained experience and I have a list of action points. Silvian has a bunch of ideas on hot-backups that will reduce recovery time in the future. It is a genuine coincidence that we'll use a backup system called Bacula ("It comes by night and sucks the vital essence from your computers") and that Silvian lives in Transalvania.

I think that its not just our colleagues who are hugely grateful to the guys who fixed this, but also our enthusiastic users.

Mobispine Outage

Disk crashes happen, in this case it seems to be the RAID controller.

This affects the Mobile News Reader, not the eSMS products

We were a small company and now we are medium sized business. Fortunately we have the redundant hardware in place but regrettably our recovery process has not been established.

In non-technical terms we can say 'growing pains'; we can be very thankful for our recently acquired General Wireless hardware and the guys we recently hired here in Romania.

This embarrassing situation is forcing us to build a replication database, something I'd much rather be doing while the system is on-line. In addition, we are trying to recover the broken server: which of these options is completed first is not known at the moment.

We installed new hardware 3 weeks ago; that infrastructure has proved very valuable.

Dell are asking us to run a lot of diagnostics before starting the warranty process... either way its their hardware that is broken!

Next job for me is to schedule the tasks and people for the weekend :-(

---

In other Mobispine news... "duplicate SMS sending bug" and "impressions count bug" were fixed yesterday... so the software teams are pleased... but some of us will be working the weekend.

Server troubles

Hello everyone!

We are currently having some troubles with our servers, we are all working hard on getting us back online so you can continue using Mobispine as soon as possible! Thank you for understanding :)

New news reader is out! Please give us feedback!

Yesterday, we released some smaller improvements of our mobile news reader version. Currently we have the news reader in three formats: Java, wap and Iphone. We look for great ideas about what could be improved, changed or modified in order to do it better. Some things I am thinking about we should fix the near future are:

• Recommendations, meaning users get recommended news and news sources according to previous behavious
• See No of new/unread articles in the bookmark list. This will save time for users who only open the bookmark with content if updated recently
• After reading an article and you go back you should not come to the top of that list, but rather to that specific position in the article list (IPHONE)
• Always have more recommendations to see in Explore/"Category"
• Make it possible to do "feed imports" from Google Reader, Bloglines from Iphone/wap as well

WHAT ARE YOUR IDEAS

/ Joakim

First Mobispine customer for Microsoft Vista gadget

We are so happy to announce the first customer, one leading European operator who signed a deal with us for buying the new exciting product, Microsoft Vista gadget. The Vista gadget is used for sending SMS's directly from the PC to mobile phones. The product is part of the existing eSMS (executive SMS product suite) that is currently in use with +20 European mobile operators today.

“We are extremely glad to have this Windows Vista product in place and the response so far from operators has been tremendous,” says Dusyant Patel, CEO, Mobispine. “Our philosophy is to work tightly with operators and really develop new features that are requested”
/ Joakim

Gadgets and Widgets

There has been some questions about the gadgets and widgets. Here are some answers to these questions.

The Gmail plugin is a t Widget that can be used anywhere on google sites after authenticating to Google.We used the term Gmail plugin because some operators with customized Gmail sites for they customers, requested this kind of application.

Vista gadget is first planned to come as extra client with current eSMS clients. In the case of Desktop version of client, you would acctually have three possibilities to send SMS/MMS:

• From the desktop client
• From the internet explorer plugin
• From the vista gadget
  

Next step is to provide the possibility to have only one vista gadget.

New eSMS clients

If you are a customer to some of these operators you can send SMS from you computer, and in some cases even MMS.
Currently you can download a standalone client or outlook client, all running in windows.
In the future we plan to implement some new clients for windows and other plattforms.
For example:

• Vista gadget
• A Gmail plugin
• Mac and Linux clients.
  

Another thing we are planning for is a web service making it possible for all developers to implement their own SMS clients. All traffic would be sent through your operator with your number as sender and all SMS charged in your monthly bill.
Dont worry if your operator is not in the list, you will be able to use the web service as well.
Planned release is in October and we are discussing its requirements.

If you where to develop a client using this web service, what functionality would you like to have in it?

Server move & integration being conducted

The physical move has been done, we're now configuring and rationalizing. Exchange (email server) will be created next week. Next week to move CVS and Mingle and Virgo Test to a virtual machine.

/ Andrew

PS Can you see Kent in one of these three photos?

Get your Google Reader bookmarks in Mobispine

Good news for you guys who already use a web-based RSS-reader on PC. We now support Google Reader which is the most popular RSS-reader around for PC's.

How does it work?
Simply upgrade to latest version of our java software in your phone by checking for upgrade under "options". When you have downloaded latest version you will find the settings for import of bookmarks under "options" and "Mashups". Try it and let us know if you like it. Maybe some changes are needed in the language in the java client. Magnus?

/ Joakim

Brilliant business people - Eastern Europe?

Mobispine expands thanks to the feedback we get from users and partners and we therefore would like to strengthen our team and presence in Eastern Europe with some brilliant business people!

If you know someone who loves mobile technology and have these skills let us know:
- Passion – We love people who love what they do and love their customers.
- Strong drive – We expect you to create opportunities yourself.
- Mobile technology skills - Knowledge of mobile value added services, mobile operator technologies.
Extensive personal networks – We love people with extensive networks into mobile operators in Eastern Europe.
- Speaking 2 or more major languages from the region such as Russian, Turkish, Polish, Romanian etc is always an advantage. Good English is a great start.

More info can be found on this link or send us an e-mail at jobs AT mobispine.com

Hardcore Mobispine developers...

I like this photo, full of Mobispine developers, all standing still in one single photo. When not doing photo modelling they deal with different kind of problem soving and software engineering in our office.

The people in this photo are from left to right.. Andrei, Ioan, Dorin, Marko, Alex, Bogdan, Marius, Silvian, Calin. It would be cool to see if any of thee people is a real Ninja in any subject!

/ Joakim

Mobispine wants to get stronger web presence

HI!
We just finalized the acquisition of NewsAlloy, a web-based feed-reader which was one of the pioneers in the early days of RSS some years ago and we are excited about that. Our goal is to offer a more seamless product offering to users so you can access the content also from the web in case you are nearby a computer.

Users no longer have to settle for the difficult-to-use RSS feeds that other vendors offer for PCs and mobile phones. By joining forces with NewsAlloy, we can offer speedy and simple access to RSS feeds on both the PC and mobile phone. We believe all RSS users will find this technology a welcome change from current offerings.

We recommend you users try out the NewsAlloy service and as always all feedback is more than welcome!

All the best,
Dusyant Patel, Mobispine AB

PS If you want to read the full press-release about the acquisition please check this link or this great article from RCR News. Thanks Colin Gibbs!

Mobispine moves forward

Hi there,
This friday we released a new version of mobispine which is available for download and upgrade. Existing users simply click Options and SW upgrade in the mobile J2ME client and you will have the chance to download latest version of mobispine.

What is new?
- Some UI improvements (especially on the wap service)
- More content, now more than 300,000 RSS-feeds accessible
- Youtube videos can be watched if they are embedded into blogs and RSS-feeds
- More languages and better languages support

The java client is now available on: English (of course), Spanish, Portugese, Russian, indonesian, Swedish, Romanian and CHINESE as well.

It's gonna be interesting to see what people in China is doing, what they are reading etc.

Let us know if you have any idea of other languages we should cover or if you have ideas of good content, or RSS-feeds

/ Joakim Hilj from Mobispine

We welcome our new VP Engineering

As we enter our integration with General Wireless there is a critical need to focus attention on key areas of our core business. For this reason the company has decided to announce a new VP Engineering.

In order to further enhance research and development for the new integrated company, Andrew Boddy will assume responsibility as Vice President, Head of Engineering and Technology. This is vital to make the Mobispine team fully integrated into General Wireless Team. Johan Mårdfelt will be supporting Andrew Boddy in this vital integration process.

Please join us in welcoming Andrew Boddy. We wish him good luck in his new position and look forward to working together in the future.

/ Dusyant Patel, CEO Mobispine

This guy Fred is petty cool

You can now watch Youtube videos that are embedded into blogs and different RSS-feeds in Mobispine. This is one example of a fun Youtube video that we embed into our blog.

If you blog yourself, try embed some video in your blog and watch it from the mobile as well.

Have fun and let us know how it works!

Top thumbed news sources

For two weeks you have been able to rate the sources you were reading with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down feature and we are very happy to see many of you are using it. Let's have a look at who you like or dislike!

First the best: the top news sources since the launch of thumbs up/down are:
1. Lifehacker
2. SkySports - Premiership
3. TechCrunch
4. Jokes4all
5. CNNMoney - World business news
6. MSNBC - Technology & science
7. The Times.co.za - Sport News
8. The Times.co.za - Breaking News
9. Xbox 360 Fanboy
10. Gizmodo

Swedish entertainment site Tjuvlyssnat made the top spot for other language sources with an amazing 100% of thumbs up.

On the thumbs down side we weren't surprised to find sources that deliver feeds with very little content. Yet we weren't expecting the Perez Hilton blog to have only 72% of thumbs down. What is wrong with Perez Hilton?

At the bottom end of this ranking we find another Swedish news source: Dagens Industri. We can only hope they increase the amount of information in their RSS feed soon to give higher satisfaction to mobile readers.

Keep your thumbs warm and we'll be able to give you more info!

Mobispine: Featured web app and Staff pick on Apple.com

The Apple web apps site has posted Mobispine as featured web app and selected it as a Staff pick!

We are very pleased that Apple likes our work and hope that more people now will start experiencing Mobispine.

Head on over to Apple to check out what we are talking about and if you have a iPhone try it yourself, type in: iphone.mobispine.com on your iPhone.

If you don't have a iPhone go to m.mobispine.com in your mobile browser to try out Mobispine.

Description of Mobispine for iPhone:
A news reader for your iPhone. Find, bookmark and read news that matter to you.
- With Mobispine you can Find, Bookmark and Read news that matters to you
- Over 200,000 local and international sources
- Search and explore categories
- Fast iPhone environment & experience
- Collect your favorite news in one place and read more

It is free to use, No account needed, get started right away!

Show of with Mobispine on your iPhone

We are big fans of the iPhone at Mobispine. Although it isn't available in Sweden yet (apple has just signed a deal to bring the iPhone to the Nordic countries) we have one at the office we keep fighting over. The experience is really different and in a country where it isn't released it's great to show of!

For the past weeks our iPhone has been grounded at the office because we have been adapting our WAP page to it. You can now read your favorite news on your iPhone, and doesn't it look great!

The first version will be available later today as will all the new features mentioned in the two previous posts. Expect some improvements to be made so take part in them by sending us your feedback and ideas.

Thursday = Upgrade day (2)

We implemented the feedback function a few weeks ago and noticed you liked to talk. Well you will have a new way of expressing yourself from Thursday by giving some thumbs up or down to articles and news sources. You will be able to see how the Mobispine community has reacted to all the articles. Doing this will also help us identify spam feeds and improve the experience for everyone so get your thumbs ready for some clicking and start looking for the thumbs on thursday!

Some of you might be using our new WAP page which was released a few weeks ago. We have been improving it so you can get more of the application's features and enjoy a nicer experience. Yet to get all features we still recommend the application. Anyhow if you are a WAP fan we will be expecting your feedback as the feedback feature will be one of the adds on.

More to come later this week, stay tuned in!

Thursday = Upgrade day

After weeks of sweat and hard work we still have a few days to go to make it to Thursday and release a new upgrade that will improve your mobile news reading experience. Here is a first taste of what you can expect.

A big improvement has been made on the search. We have to admit our search results weren't really good... Thanks for your feedback on this, it helped us go through all our bugs and fix them. The search should make it much easier to find the sources of news you are looking for and bookmark them.

Another bug that some users have reported is that they had articles in double (or more) in the categories. This is happens with big news sources like the BBC which has the same articles in different feeds. For example BBC World and BBC UK can both have an article about the terrible events in Burma. Fortunately this will be fixed by Thursday.

That's not all... but I have to get back to work ;-). I'll tell you more later this week.

Mobispine bought General Wireless

General Wireless? You probably have never heard of them but use their products regularly. If you use a PC to mobile messaging service it is most likely powered by General Wireless as they have partnerships with many operators.

We are all very excited about this deal at Mobispine. I can already imagine how we can integrate these services in Mobispine to offer new features but I'd like to know what you would like. Do you have any suggestions?

Unlimited Data Plans Drive More Mobile Web Usage

US Smartphone users spend more tha 4,5 hours per month browsing the mobile web whereas  their British counterparts spend 2,5 hours per month surfing the mobile web. The discrepancy in the duration is due to the relative popularity of flat-rate data plans in the US, 10,9 % of users have an unlimited data plan in the US versus only 2,3 % in Britain.

Another factor might be that full QWERTY keyboards are more popular in US than in UK.

It is also interesting to see that US users are increasing their year-to-year numbers of browsing the mobile web and number of pageviews have increased with 89 % and 127 %. All the above numbers come from a recently released report from M:Metrics.

In Mobispine we also like when users have flat-rate data plans and nice phones with big screens ad keyboards, but never forget that the goal with mobispine is to create a really good user experience for average phones without nice data plans.

/ Joakim, Mobispine team

WAP me

Hi!

I need your help :)

This last thursday we released a new version of our WAP site (m.mobispine.com) and now we really need some good feedback on it.

Send me a comment about anything: design, content, usability.. what is good, what is bad, what is missing etc.

Looking forward to reading your comments, please send them to wap@mobispine.com.

Have you updated your Mobispine?

Some of you might allready have updated to the latest version of Mobispine, released yesterday. If you haven't check these pics out!
Search is now easier to find! You'll be able to search faster for your latest news.
You can also add manually an URL from your bookmark view.
Other changes have been made, I'll let it up to you to discover them. Don't forget to let us know what you think and want (options -> feedback).

Translating Mobispine in 47 languages

You can read feeds in 47 languages with Mobispine. It's great to have so much diversity!

Still we have a great challenge coming up: translating the application to all these language. This blog is meant to announce to all none English speakers, and particularly Indonesians, Russians and Spanish speakers, that the application will soon be available in a language they speak. But as they don't speak English they won't understand this post...

So for all people who are not native English speakers and understand this post: we are looking for help to translate Mobispine! Send me a mail at adrian@mobispine.com! Translation goes pretty fast if you are fluent.

From tomorrow the application will be available in Swedish already!

Read your news on Blackberry now!

Many friends and people were requesting a Blackberry version of Mobispine. Here it is! The new version of Mobispine is Blackberry compatible. Spread the word to your friends that are on Blackberry!

Get down!

The new version is nearly ready. We have to take our system down for an hour to put everything in place.
Sorry for stopping feeding you with your news during that time but we hope the new features will make it up to you.

For most changes you won't need to download the application again to see them. If you are of the really curious type and need the latest features first do check it out.

Don't forget to keep sending us feedback and letting us know what you want!

All your news on our new WAP page

Thursday is new features day. So what will change in Mobispine?

We have been working on many small features. You will notice your news will be updated more frequently which should make it more interesting. If you really like a feed and would like to get the new articles more frequently bookmark it. Are you already a Facebook user? The status updates of your friends will look better. For those sending us feedback without a message you will also notice it isn't possible anymore as we would rather have you expressing something :).

The main change is you will be able to read news from the Mobispine WAP portal. You can see a preview bellow.
It doesn't have as many features as the application itself but don't hesitate to check it out and send us some comments.

Mobile Internet booming in Europe

Read in ComputerWorld some days ago exactly what we are seeing at Mobispine. They, or actually the research firm Forrester Reearch Inc sy Mobile Internet is about to boom in Europe now.

In a new Forrester report published this week, the number of people in Western Europe accessing Internet services using their mobile phone is predicted to triple to reach 125 million by 2013. In some countries, including the U.K., adoption will be even faster, predicts Forrester.

Currently, under half of 3G phone owners use mobile Internet on their phone. "To drive the mobile Internet, operators will need to push flat-rate data plans, increase the number of relevant services and applications, and introduce new devices that provide a better user experience."

We at Mobispine like their analysis for obvious reasons and we try the best to make the mobispine service widely available for people all over the world.

Great mobile feedback

We have received feedback from over 100 countries since the new feedback function was launched nearly two weeks ago. You have been sending many interesting comments about problems and good ideas through the feedback function. Quite a few of you had questions about how to add feeds and the share and read more buttons so I will answer them bellow.

You can't add feeds from your mobile yet unfortunately. If you can't find one of your favorite news sources go to the Mobispine homepage (here) and paste the link to the feed you want in your mobile in the box on the bottom of the page. If you sign into your account from our homepage you can directly add your feed to your bookmarks. Otherwise use the search function on your mobile.

You probably saw that the buttons that were at the bottom of each article have moved. They haven't disappeared thou! When you open an article an "Actions" button appears at the bottom left of your mobile's screen. Click on it and a menu with all the previous buttons appear.

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Keeping posting it, it keeps us busy!

Interact with your news

"News is shifting from being a product — today's newspaper, Web site or newscast — to becoming a service: how can you help me, even empower me?" Readers are looking for more in news than knowing about the latest events. They want to interact with their news: find what they are looking for, "react to it, sort it, shape it".

These quotes are extracted from the interesting news and media industry report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (pdf ). Giving you readers these interaction tools is very important but it is also a blurry area especially when we come to mobile news readers. What interaction should we integrate in Mobispine?

The report states 39% of Americans chose friends and neighbors as an important informational source. I find this statistic low!

The news I get from my friends is often great. With guys from Mobispine we share a lot of interesting stuff on mobile phones. With other friends I get different news, youtube movies, etc. They are filtering news from all there is on the internet for me and send me only the best. Then we can discuss the news and exchange. News is a great social enabler so I'd say friends are my top and favorite source of news.

"Lies, damn lies and statistics". All Americans don't use Mobispine (yet!) and you readers come from all over the world. I would like to know how you Mobispine news readers consider the information you get from friends. How do you want to interact with it in your mobile? Let's make this a little less blurry!

Facebook status updates

We have been struggling with the facebook API. We would like to enable you to get the news from your friends and know what they are doing from your mobile but facebook makes it difficult to get information out of their system.

Still, today we did it! You can get your friends status updates in your Mobispine bookmarks! Uninstall and reinstall the Mobispine application from your facebook account to get this new feature. You can't do this from your mobile... facebook limitations again.

Many of you are not using facebook. We have had comments about integrating with Orkut and are looking into it. What would you like to do with Orkut? If you are reading this on your mobile send us suggestions through the feedback function.

Mobispine will be down for an hour

We were offered some entertainment today. The building we see from our windows has been taken down. Why didn't they use explosives? We would have posted the video then...

Mobispine is going down too... but just for an hour so we can release our new features. You will be out of news for an hour later today. Once we are back up, download the latest update and tell us what your mobile news looks like.

Be ready for the next release!

The rush before the Thursday's release has just started! Here is a taste of what will be improved:

As promised you will get more photos (see previous post).

The information presented to you in the Explore categories should also be improved (longer articles, more photos and videos). We have been testing this a bit this week and it looks much better!

Yet, we can't test it for all countries. If there is anything you like or dislike you will be able to use our new feedback function in the option menu. Anything you send or any comments on this blog I can guarantee we read and take very seriously. With the feedback function we give you the power to change Mobispine!

Enjoy!


Suspicions arise around Per as UK metropolitan police launches its new media campaign

Per is a developer here at Mobispine. He has 12 SIM cards and 5 mobiles on his desk. Is he an undercover agent responsible for the communication of a Swedish terrorist organisation? The latest media campaign from the UK metropolitan police suggests he could be.

Per is doing great work improving the quality of the content on the application for our next release so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt for know. Yet if we see him doing weird things around his house or taking too many photos we might call the metropolitan's police hotline! Check their website out for more posters:

Cheers Adrian from Mobispine

What makes mobile Internet successful

We got some good feedback from Erik at newspaper Mobil according to how to create an excellent user experience in mobile phones for Internet. According to his article both Mobispine and Opera Mini succeeds in creating a good user experience for navigating mobile Internet!.

Here is a link to the original article

Thanks Erik!

from Mobispine team

News via old-fashioned goes down heavily accordning to new report

A new survey releases this week by We Media/Zogby stated that more people than ever before turn to Internet for reading news. The survey found out that almost half of the peopel in USA (48 %) cite the Internet as their primary source of information compared to 29 % for television, 11 % for radio and a small 10 % for traditional newspapers.

There was also a large difference among age groups where only 7 % of people between 18-29 get news from newspaper as a primary source.

In Mobispine we see similar trends and we see Mobispine just as another part of Internet, the mobile part where people easily can read personal news from mobile phones.

/ The Mobispine Team

Updated website - import your feeds

New account page on our website - try login and import some feeds..

We have just released our new website. You might have noticed the new home page. But for the best changes check out your account pages. You will find your login information on your mobile in Option -> Settings -> My Account. Did you know you can import your bookmarks from other feed readers there as well.

The Mobispine Team

Want more pictures in your mobile phone?

We are working on getting more videos and photos into your news. In 1-2 weeks time you will see photo previews on the left of the screen. Would you like to get more articles with photos? We are planning on rating articles with pictures higher so let us know!

/ Cheers Adrian from Mobispine

Social media in Mobispine

Do you like social networks? 

We have done some cool mashups with websites such as Flickr (photos), Last.fm (music), Facebook (sharing news between friends) and others..

Wanna try it out? To give it a shot you simply open the application and try Options -> Settings -> Mashups. You can there activate the mashups with different social websites.

These things are really in beta so let us know what you think and any ideas we can improve it. You reach us at feedback@mobispine.com 

/ the mobispine team

Mobispine goes to Barcelona- wanna meet us?

Next week from monday to thursday is the big "Mobile World Congress" in Barcelona. We will of course be there meeting lots of people from early mornings to late evenings. We always look for opportunities, new partnerships and also user feedback.

Please contact us if you happen to be around and we would be happy to meet up"
Send e-mail to: sales@mobispine.com for announcing your interest and we will get back to you instantly!

Cheers
Joakim Hilj & Dusyant Patel from Mobispine

Major Indian newspapers talks about RSS and how to use it for accessing the web

This major newspaper in India has an interesting article about how to access the web in a smarter way, what is RSS and how to use different news readers on your phone and on your PC.

Summary:
As the World Wide Web evolves, its huge bank of information grows as well. That could potentially confound people, but thanks to technology developing further, the accessibility of content to us as readers or users is becoming more and more easier. Thanks to newer technologies like XML syndication and applications like RSS, ATOM amongst others we can get the information we seek, from the sites we want, at our convenience on our computers as well as our cellphones.

In other words, suppose you are a gizmo freak but you don’t really have time to browse ten different Internet sites a day, all you need to do is subscribe to the XML feeds which can be in the form of RSS or ATOM and have updated content delivered to your computer or cellphone without you having to visit any site. Saves precious time and is very convenient too.

RSS feeds on your cellphone
Your cell can be literally a bank of information on your chosen topic. High end phones like Sony Ericsson K790i, the Sony W Series and some Nokia models already have a built-in RSS reader which lets you decide the content fetch frequency besides other features. For those phones that do not have RSS capability, you could simply download small applications like Mobispine, DeliciousMona or News-lite and turn your tiny phone into an encyclopedia. Happy reading!

Fulla article is available here

Anemonenallen on a Road Trip

Found this guy at our local lunch restaurant at Söder, in Stockholm. He asked to be taken to a new place so I left him at Viking Pizzeria in Karlskoga.

The teddy was from a kindergarten in Sweden. They track its way through Sweden by people sending updates about its whereabouts. Well, now it has been at Mobispine!

/Peter

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New version out

Lately we got a lot of people downloading Mobispine so have had to make some changes to keep up with you guys. But now you can download a faster Mobispine!

Happy new year all mobispiners

Sorry for the delayed greetings. We hope 2008 will be a fantastic year for all of us who care for Mobispine. Our mission is to continue work hard with the following tasks

• Content - Present better and better content available to users worldwide. The goal is to always have local content available for people
• Personalization - we try to implement intelligence in the system that can present interesting content to the users according to user profiles.
• Performance - last month we have got lots of new users downloading the app and our systems have a hard time to keep up with the requirements.

We are aware of that the response times are kind of slow and that it takes a while when starting the mobispine app and we apologize for that. Lots of the techies work hard to make the situation better. Hopefully we will see some improvements within some days already.

If you have any feedback you'd like to tell us about just e-mail to us: feedback@mobispine.com

Take care!
the mobispine team