Artificial ignorance

A few days ago, Sarah Perez reported that Pandora was available on Windows Mobile. I was pretty excited to see this, only to find out later that the application was not supported on my new Palm Treo Pro. However today, my colleague Eric Strait pointed me to this CAB download. I just tried it, and it worked fabulously. I’m not certain this is an "official" Pandora release however.

Pandora is a beautiful application that is essentially an internet radio station with multiple channels. Pandora is a Valley crowd favorite, and has risen to the top of the list of the most downloaded applications on the the iPhone. Continue reading

One of the most impressive DEMOs I’d seen at DEMO last year was Skyfire’s. For those of us who have had smartphones with limited web browsing capabilities (like Pocket IE with Windows Mobile), Skyfire will forever change the way you use your smartphone. Today Skyfire announced that it has opened up its beta to all US residents.

Here’s a demo of Skyfire in action:

The mobile-based video streaming company, Qik, has announced support for even more Windows Mobile devices. Over the last few days, Bhaskar and Jackie announced support for the following devices:

• AT&T Tilt
• HTC Touch Dual
• HTC Touch Diamond
• HTC Touch Pro
• HTC TyTN II
• Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
• HTC Mogul
• HTC Vogue
• Samsung Omnia

Qik’s decision to support Windows Mobile based HTC devices is a very smart one – earlier this year, HTC announced that they had shipped over 2 million units of their Touch line of devices. Also, around 18 million licenses of Windows Mobile were licensed in Microsoft’s fiscal year ending June 30, 2008. Continue reading

Technology is taking an active position in politics today. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, for example, has been on the cutting edge using tools such as Twitter and (live) streaming announcements. Back in November 2007, Obama had announced the position of a “Chief Technology Officer”. From VentureBeat:

“Obama’s CTO … would ensure government officials hold open meetings, broadcast live webcasts of those meetings, and use blogging software, wikis and open comments to communicate policies with Americans, according to the plan.”

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Citizen journalism is a growing phenomenon. The ability for us to use our phones to take pictures or shoot video using devices such as our mobile phones, and to instantly share them with the world is really quite something else. The Mars landing recorded live from mission control by US Congressman John Culberson, or the opening of the World Economic Forum or videos taken at SxSW in Austin, are examples of videos that were streamed live from mobile phones.

Qik is one of the leading live mobile video streaming platforms. Qik enables anyone to stream video live from their mobile phones to the web, from anywhere in the world. Today, Qik is announcing support for the Motorola Q and the Samsung Blackjack, Windows Mobile phones. Continue reading