The mobile phone comes into its own

By Paul Taylor

FROM THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Twice a year, the Demo conference, held this time in San Diego, California, provides an early glimpse of the gadgets, gizmos and services that will vie for consumers’ attention, and sometimes their wallets.

The conference, structured around six-minute “pitches” by each of the 67 companies launching products, is attended mostly by technologists, venture capitalists and corporate development managers looking for the next big thing.

The event also highlights trends in technology. For example, the shift towards web-based consumer applications, the adoption of consumer-style interfaces for business applications, the increasing pervasiveness of social networking and the evolution of the mobile phone into much more than a device for voice communications.

So, focusing on mobile phone applications, here are some of the products and services unveiled at Demo (www.demo.com) that caught my eye.

Most people now have at least three phone numbers – home phone, office phone and mobile, yet still miss important calls and struggle to manage multiple voicemail services.

California-based company GrandCentral (www.grandcentral.com) believes it has the answer with a new unified communications service that provides users with a single number, regardless of how many phones they have, and a single place for checking voicemail.

Users sign up for the service over the web, selecting a phone number of their choice and linking all their existing phones to that number. Callers are divided into four groups – co-workers, friends, family or “other” – and that determines which phones ring when they dial, and in what order.

Using the web interface, users can adjust many other settings – such as blocking calls from certain numbers – and you can also set up different voicemail messages for each caller group. Other features include the ability to record calls and replace the ordinary phone ring with an MP3 music file.

GrandCentral is offering a free service for up to 100 minutes a month and an unlimited service for $15 a month.

3jam (www.3jam.com) takes SMS text messaging and turns it into a much more useful multi-person medium, enabling mobile phone users to send a text message to multiple recipients and their replies to be received by all. The service, which is free, is ideal for co-ordinating groups of friends or co-workers, or corralling the family for an event.

If you do not own a smartphone but want to send and, perhaps more importantly, receive mobile e-mail, Flurry (www.flurry.com) has a possible solution. Flurry effectively turns any mobile phone – even a fairly basic device – into a BlackBerry-style mobile messaging device capable of sending and receiving e-mail and RSS (Real Simple Syndication) news feeds. Mobile phone users first set up the free service on the website, which sends a personalised download link to their handset. The download includes a clear and simple interface to the mobile e-mail service.

There were also a handful of companies such as Eyespot (www.eyespot.com) showing off new ways to manipulate, manage and share digital still images and video clips captured on camera phones and bridge the gap between the mobile phone and social networking/user-generated content sites such as MySpace, Flickr and YouTube.

But two other mobile phone applications that caught my attention are both trying to use the camera phone for more than just taking fun images. As the name implies, ScanR (www.scanr.com) turns a camera phone with a 1Mp (megapixel) sensor or better into a portable scanner (for the moment ScanR only runs on a smartphone running Windows Mobile 5.0 but the company promises to support more handsets in the future).

ScanR’s server-based software then processes images of documents, whiteboards and business cards extracting the text and delivering a digital file to your e-mail, contact manager or fax – the company claims its business card accuracy is better than dedicated card scanners including CardScan, the market leader.

In the entertainment segment, Mercora (www.mercora.com/) showed a remarkable service that lets mobile phone users stream high quality digital music stored on their, or their friends’, PC hard drives over the 3G airwaves directly to their Windows Mobile 5.0-powered smartphone.

Outside the mobile telecommunications field, other personal technology products and services stood out. iLighter (www.ilighter.com) is both simple and elegant. This small PC desktop application turns the cursor into a virtual yellow highlighter pen enabling users to quickly capture information from web pages, save it automatically and then share it if required. Effectively, it replaces the physical-world highlighter and Post-It note.

Meanwhile, Dash (www.dash.com) showed off a networked GPS car navigation unit that combines satellite-based GPS navigation with a Wi-Fi or cellular phone “uplink” that sends data from other Dash users back to Dash anonymously, enabling the company to calculate the speed of traffic ahead and route Dash users around problems.

But one of the companies that caused the most buzz at this week’s Demo conference was a UK-based company called Moixa Energy (www.moixaenergy.com) which was showing off its rechargeable USBCell batteries. These clever little energy packs – already available in the UK in several sizes including AA cells – do away with the need for wall chargers and simply plug into a standard PC USB (universal serial bus) socket when they need recharging.

paul.taylor@ft.com

Paul Taylor tackles your high-tech problems and queries in his Gadget Guru column

SOURCE: THE FINANCIAL TIMES