Treeduck

Voice over Internet Protocol service provider Vonage on Monday announced that it has launched its first mobile apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and BlackBerry devices.
Dubbed Vonage Mobile, the company's free VoIP app enables users to place international calls from their mobile devices. iPod Touch owners can do so by placing calls through Wi-Fi. BlackBerry owners will transmit calls over the cellular network only. iPhone owners will be able to place calls from Wi-Fi or through AT&T's network.
According to Vonage, its app will help users save up to 50 percent on international calling charges levied by carriers. After downloading the app, users need to enter an international number. They can also select a call recipient from their existing iPhone or BlackBerry contacts list. Those who receive calls will see the user's cell phone number on their caller IDs. Charges will be taken against the user's credit card, which they need to input when they first start using the app.
For now, Vonage is offering per-minute rates. The company said in a statement that by the end of the year, it will offer the Vonage World plan to users. Vonage World for home users currently allows them to make calls to more than 60 countries for $24.99 per month.
Vonage's app launch comes on the heels of controversy over whether Google's similar Voice app should have been denied access to Apple's App Store. The debate still rages on.
Vonage's new mobile app is available now in Apple's App Store and Research In Motion's BlackBerry App World. Both versions are free.
Originally posted at The Digital Home

Adobe Systems has garnered the support of mobile heavy hitters such as Google, Motorola, Nvidia, Palm, RIM, and Qualcomm for its new Flash Player 10.1 software for smartphones, Netbooks, and other mobile devices. The software company plans to announce the support Monday at its developer conference in Los Angeles.

Adobe's goal is to get Flash Player 10.1 accelerated directly on the chips in smartphones, Netbooks, and small laptops based on the ARM chip architecture, called smartbooks. To date, Flash video acceleration has not been available widely on mobile devices.
"It's critical to support in hardware because (Flash) video is really computationally intensive," Tom Barclay, Adobe senior product marketing manager for Flash Player, said in an interview. "Putting that on the hardware provides the ability to play it back fluidly...so you're not going to drain the battery on these devices."
Though Flash-based video is available on virtually all PCs, "the vast majority of mobile devices have been fundamentally closed," according to Barclay. "This means there is a single (device maker) or carrier or handset manufacturer that can stop technology from getting onto those devices. And that's one of the reasons why the Web as been so slow to be directly accessible from those devices."
Toward the end of getting Flash to run directly on small mobile devices, Adobe created the Open Screen Project. "The Open Screen project is about making more of those devices open. In particular, providing flash player for free in an open manner with the requirement that (device suppliers) make it open for developers," Barclay said.
Adobe also announced on Monday that Google has joined the Open Screen Project initiative. Handset manufacturers such as Motorola will ship Google Android based devices with Flash Player support "early next year," according to a Motorola statement. Companies such as Nvidia, Broadcom, Nokia, RIM, and ARM chip suppliers such as Qualcomm, are all participants in the Open Screen Project.
Conspicuous by its absence was Apple. "Flash is not available on the iPhone at this point," said Adrian Ludwig, group manager, flash platforms at Adobe. "So far, we haven't received the support that we need from Apple."
Apple aside, this is all part of an aggressive push by Adobe to get acceleration on mobile devices. More than 75 percent of video on the Web is delivered through the Flash Player, according to Ludwig. "Having the Flash player on your device means you're able to access all the content out there on the Web," Ludwig said, referring to referring to such sites as YouTube, the video inside MySpace, and Facebook, as well as Fox News and CNN.
Games are also a target. Ludwig pointed to Flash-based games played on social-networking sites such as Playfish and FarmVille.
A public developer beta of Flash 10.1 is expected to be available for Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS, and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh, and Linux later this year, Lugwig said. Public betas for Google Android and Symbian operating systems are expected to be available in early 2010.
RIM, Nokia, Nvidia, and Qualcomm announced their intention to bring Flash Player to devices, including BlackBerry smartphones, Nokia devices, Nvidia silicon, and Qualcomm chipsets, respectively.
Intel's Netbook technology, which is based on the Atom processor, will support the Flash Player directly on hardware by way of a Broadcom chip, according to Intel. "One would need Broadcom video acceleration to take advantage of the optimizations that Adobe is making on flash," an Intel spokesman said.
Nvidia will support Flash acceleration on its GeForce graphics processors, Ion chipsets, and ARM-based Tegra chips.
For its part, Nokia said that along with Adobe it is introducing a new Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) extensions for Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 software making the creation of mobile WRT widgets for supported Nokia devices easier. Qualcomm said that the first consumer devices ready to support Flash Player 10.1 will be smartbooks and smartphones from companies such as Toshiba and will be based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset.
Adobe is also working, in parallel, on the back end: where servers push the content out of the cloud. Barclay explained that servers need to adjust to the type of device that's playing back the video. "(If) the content was designed for a PC that's got very high resolution and very big from a bandwidth standpoint...the work that we're doing on the server side allows the content provider to detect your bandwidth and optimize the content on the fly so it doesn't need to deliver as many pixels as a high resolution because your device simply can't draw it."

Good news comes to TV-watchers with TiVo DVRs installed in their living rooms. On Wednesday, TiVo and BlackBerry-maker RIM unveiled a free TiVo app in that will let people control their TiVos from the BlackBerry smartphone.
The app will let TiVo owners see a guide of what's playing when, including browsing by category, popular shows, and daily picks. More importantly, it will program recordings while you're on the go.
TiVo for BlackBerry should be available starting now from the BlackBerry App World online, or on your phone, and from www.blackberry.com/tivo. If it's not, wait a few minutes and try again.
Also, check back with us for more details.
Originally posted at The Download Blog

Yahoo announced three new mobile applications Tuesday as the company continues to focus more on developing specific applications for the iPhone and other select smartphones like the BlackBerry.
The most widely publicized application to be announced Tuesday is Flickr for Mobile. This application is only available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. It's free from the iTunes App Store. And it allows users to upload, share, and tag photos and videos. Flickr already has a browser-based mobile app at M.flickr.com.

The official Flickr app for iPhone and iPod Touch offers search, browse, and upload features.
Yahoo also created two new mobile applications for a few BlackBerry models.
Yahoo Finance for Mobile works on the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as the BlackBerry Bold, Tour and 8900 series. This free application allows users to track companies, market indices, and news. It also lets users drill down into specific companies for more data. Yahoo already has a browser-based version of the application.
Yahoo also announced Yahoo Fantasy Football for Mobile. This application is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the BlackBerry Bold, Tour and 8900 series. Using this application, football fans can manage their teams from their phones, add and drop players, view match-ups and player stats, and get news and expert advice.
These new applications, which are specifically designed for the iPhone and a handful of BlackBerry devices, are part of the company's latest strategy to address the mobile market. Earlier this year, Yahoo shifted its mobile strategy to focus more on developing separate and distinct applications instead of creating services that fell into an all-encompassing Yahoo application.
"Before we had a one-size-fits-all approach to the application market," said Sandeep Gupta, senior director of mobile applications for Yahoo. "But the iPhone changed how consumers accessed applications. Now, they want to search for and download point applications. And we thought it was better for us to fit into this world."
Yahoo's primary goal with the strategy shift is to bring Yahoo's PC-based services to mobile phones. And in order to do this, Yahoo executives said they needed to develop and distribute applications like other developers, which meant adopting the iPhone model.
To execute this strategy, Yahoo is taking a two-pronged approach. It is offering browser-based applications for its more general properties, such as travel, personals, or some of its entertainment sites. But for more frequently visited sites, such as Flickr and Finance, Yahoo is creating native applications.
"Yahoo has a huge set of properties that we want to bring to all mobile users," Gupta said. "But we can't have customized application experiences for all of them. It's too much work. So we have created a broad experience for a whole host of sites. And we're creating a more customized app experience with a richer experience for certain vertical sites."
In February, the company announced the newly revamped Yahoo Mobile service, which combines all the organizational elements of Yahoo OneSearch, OnePlace, and OneConnect together in a single application. The redesigned service is a scrollable mashup of search, news, e-mail, social networking, finance, weather, sports scores, and other RSS feeds.
The company decided to offer the service to more than 400 mobile devices as a browser-based application. But it also built a version specifically for the iPhone. The app is free to download and is available on Apple's iTunes App Store.
Now, Yahoo has created three other native applications that have been customized for specific devices. Initially, these applications are only available on the iPhone and certain BlackBerry devices. The reason for this is simple. The iPhone and the BlackBerry currently have the most interactive mobile users, Gupta said. But he added that the company will eventually tailor these same applications for other smartphones, such as the Palm Pre and Google's Android phones.
"We're not waiting for these other devices to get popular," he said. "Work is going on. But it's a matter of priorities. There is a lot of investment needed to build these applications. And we have prioritized which devices have the most interactive users."
Originally posted at Signal Strength