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