wifitalk.ca

The CBC is carrying a story about a consortium of 24 international wireless carriers including giants AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefonica who have joined forces with hardware manufacturers Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson to provide an app store which will be ubiquitous across all carriers and platforms. Wind Mobile is Canada’s only participant.

The goal of this alliance is “to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that — from day one — will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest innovative applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world. In the immediate future the alliance will seek to unite members’ developer communities and create a single, harmonized point of entry to make it easy for developers to join.”

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/02/15/wireless-carriers-app-store.html?ref=rss#ixzz0fdEEx1P7

The current system of app stores (iPhone App Store, Google Marketplace, BlackBerry App World, Nokia Ovi World) seems to work well for consumers if you are only ever going to stick to one platform. However, what happens when you want to switch phones? Maybe you have an iPhone today, but tomorrow you want to go with an Android-based phone? Or what if your job gives you a BlackBerry? All of your purchased apps are now stuck on the old platform and there’s no way to bring them over, even if the same app is available on your new phone.

The current system is no friend to developers either. If a developer wants to reach the different platforms, they have to code up as many different versions of their app as there are platforms, often in different languages altogether. Different APIs, different rules, different features, and different platforms all need to be accounted for and supported.

Just about the only group that benefits from segregated markets are the established app stores. Forcing users to double-buy means that they get that extra cut  on the extra sale, however this is a double-edged sword. For an established app store like the iPhone’s, it provides user retention – someone who has spent $100 on apps isn’t likely to switch to another platform and lose access to their apps. For up-and-coming app stores it’s a rather sizeable barrier to entry. Why should a user with $100 invested in the app store switch to the new guy?

The app developers do get some benefit as well, receiving double revenues on double sales, however these aren’t expected to be very high, and if they are putting in quadruple the amount of work to develop and support multiple versions of their app, it’s of little benefit.

A big thanks to reader @ianmurchison for this tip.

It seems as though the integration of gizmo5 into Google Voice is steadily progressing, taking one more step last week. The gizmo5.com domain was transferred to google on 18 January 2010, and now gizmo5.com redirects to google.com/gizmo5.

Gizmo5 was a VOIP company which provided both software and a service which allowed users to make VOIP calls. Similar to the popular skype-in/skype-out service offered by Skype, gizmo5 allowed users to register a phone number to attach to their gizmo5 software or device for the purposes of receiving calls, and allowed users to use the service to make cheap calls out to regular phone numbers.

Back in November of 2009, google acquired gizmo5, adding the missing piece to google’s telecommunications services.

It looks as though google’s intentions are to incorporate gizmo5’s VOIP capabilities with google voice’s services to provide a full VOIP service on its Android devices. This means one could have a fully functioning phone through google on only a data plan – no voice plan would be required. Furthermore, due to google voice’s cheap long distance rates, one could conceivably get unlimited talk and text in North America on just a data plan.

@windmobile twitter account:

via @WIND_Chris Lots of interest in #NexusOne: Works on AWS, we’re chatting with them, confirming config works with WIND, more to come…

A few days ago I wrote how the Google Nexus One may be coming to Wind Mobile and now it seems we have some confirmation from Wind themselves that they are in talks to bring the Nexus One to their network and are in the process of determining if the phone will work for them. Stay tuned for updates.

Nexus One tech specs:

Cellular & Wireless

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