An unofficial source had this to explain:

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.” That means [blogname].blogspot.com will continue to exist, but it’s not clear if the users from that specific country will still be able to access it. Blogger will start to use country-specific domains, just like many other Google services. If you’re in Australia and visit google.com, you’ll be redirected to google.com.au, but you can opt-out by clicking “Go to Google.com” or visiting google.com/ncr. The same option is available for Blogger: “Blog readers may request a specific country version of the blogspot content by entering a specially formatted NCR URL. NCR stands for ‘No Country Redirect’ and will always display [blogname].blogger.com in English, whether you’re in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere. For example: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr – always goes to the U.S. English blog.”

iPhone 4 is currently available in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 16GB model and $299 (US) for the 32GB model. See more HERE

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I remember thinking, when I first started using Skype back in 2004, that here’s a small, nimble company that will drive a massive wedge into traditional telephone service business models.

From a user perspective, the model is dead simple and highly compelling – free phone calls via your computer to other users of the service, and very low cost calls via your computer to ‘normal’ telephone numbers, literally anywhere on the planet.

Skype (and its later competitors) has changed the way millions of people around the world communicate where prohibitive costs of using a phone service are no longer a huge barrier – a barrier erected by the big telecommunications operators.

Arguably, Skype has played a not insignificant role in the changes we’ve seen in the past few years in many countries, notably in Europe and North America, with those very same telecommunications companies, what they offer, and how they price it.

Parallel to all this are continuing advances in technology, especially the rapid growth in broadband internet penetration in many countries and changes in people’s behaviors in terms of what they want, how they want it and when they want it.

This is especially the case with the so-called digital natives, the younger generation who dictate change through their own insistent and influential behaviours.

There’s no better way at the moment to drive this point home about changing behaviours (and expectations) than The Rise of the Mobile Super User, a thought-provoking 49-page white paper written by Will Harris and available on free download from Edelman.

These reflections were going through my mind yesterday during the press launch of the Skypephone (pictured above), a joint offering from Skype and UK mobile operator 3, which I attended.

It says to me – this changes everything.

We’re moving up a big notch, from broadband tied to computers and so the geographical restrictions on the things you can do (like make and receive free phone calls), to broadband untied, on mobile devices.

Some would argue that this isn’t new – you can get net access on mobile phones already, and have been able to for some years; and, depending on the device, install and use Skype.

True, but not like this.

Not an offering from a mobile operator – one of the perceived ‘bad guys,’ if you can take that expression in positive context – that gives you a device that’s centred around Skype which simply lets you connect with people in whatever way you choose: free via Skype, as well as with any other mobile phone on a cellular network.

No, what 3 and Skype are doing with the Skypephone is driving another wedge firmly into the next generation of communication – mobile.

I can’t think of anything that would have prevented any other mobile operator – Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile, Orange… take your pick – from doing something like this other than maintaining the high pricing status quo.

Skype would be willing – in the briefing, Skype acting CEO Michael van Swaaij quipped that Vodafone can call him any time for talks.

But who in their right business mind would offer a handset and associated services that includes making and receiving calls for free via their network? A crazy notion, isn’t it?

Well, if it’s crazy, then welcome to the asylum!

It gets better when you think of business use of a product like the Skypephone.

One of the questions I asked Kevin Russell, 3’s CEO, in yesterday’s press briefing was how he saw business opportunities for the Skypephone, given that it’s being positioned right now as a consumer product.

His said if (I’d day more likely ‘when’) 3 were to target businesses, it would be the small- to medium-size business sector (which is a classic Skype business target).

But he mentioned anecdotally that his first sale of a Skypephone was to the CEO of a large company who wants to communicate with his 10,000 employees.

That’s the thin edge of a very wide wedge.

I was also interested to hear Kevin say that experiential marketing and word of mouth will play significant roles in 3’s marketing and communication of the Skypephone and engagement with users and influencers.

So don’t expect any 30-second TV spots. Instead, look for blogosphere and related online commentary.

Following the press briefing, I spoke with John Penberthy-Smith, 3’s marketing director. Our conversation included this topic.

That interview will be posted soon as an FIR Interview podcast (and I’ll add a link in this post when it is).

The Skypephone goes on sale in the UK on November 2 for £49.99 (talk about affordable) on pay-as-you-go, and free if you take out a contract.

It will roll out elsewhere in Europe and Australia in the coming weeks. There are no current plans to offer the phone in the USA.

I have not one but two Skypephones to play with for the next three months, courtesy of 3. Review to come (taster: this is one very cool gadget!).

Meanwhile, you can follow what other Skypephone players are doing with their phones at 3mobilebuzz.

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“[W]e’ve published a large amount of new high-res imagery around the world,” writes Matt Manolides on the Google LatLong Blog.  “[T]his release has mostly aerial (higher-resolution) data, as well as some medium-resolution imagery for large swaths of land.”

It’s at this point that skeptics might raise an eyebrow; what, exactly is “large”?  After all, Google claimed to have hit 130 countries in its last update, and 54 in the one before that.  If a person made the bad assumption that there was no overlap, this would leave very little of the world left over.

Manolides lists regions in a large number of counties, states, countries, and continents, however, once again giving the impression that a lot of work went into this.  Also, he states that there is now “2.5m imagery for the entire countries of . . . Tunisia, UAE, Jordan, Syria, Lebannon, and Israel.”

So, yeah – get out your glasses and eat plenty of carrots.

The last time Google made a major map-related update, I calculated the percentage of the world’s nations that were involved; 54 out of 192 equaled about 28 percent, and I was impressed.  This go-around, Google hit 67.7 percent, and in some small, non-literal way, my jaw hit the floor.

Of course, coverage in these countries is not uniform.  And the pictures of a whole lot of the rest of the world remain in fairly low resolution.  Still, the update, which involved 60-centimeter (or about two feet) satellite imagery, seems quite impressive.

I have to say “seems,” though, because the high-resolution imagery is rather hard to find.  On the Google LatLong Blog, Matt Manolides, a GIS specialist, provided clues leading to 11 updated locations.  The rest are sort of catch-as-catch-can, but on the Google Earth Blog, Frank Taylor and his readers are discovering a lot of them.  Try the cities of Vladivostok, Russia, and Canakkale, Turkey, for starters.

Lastly, there’s one more piece of news that came out of the LatLong Blog post: Manolides promised that a Google Maps will “follow shortly.”

Google Maps Adds Over 1/4 Of World’s Countries

All right, so the exact percentage is 28.125, but it’s still an impressive accomplishment.  “We’ve more than doubled our coverage of Latin America and are now mapping three times as many countries in Asia as before,” noted Dave Barth, one of Google’s product managers, on the Google LatLong Blog.

Barth goes on to list all of the 54 countries that were added; we’ll just hit some of the highlights here.  Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam were the nations that most easily caught my eye.

Unfortunately, there may not be a lot to be seen at some of those locations within Google Maps.  “We have better detail for some countries than others,” admitted Barth, “but this is just the beginning.  In coming months, we’ll be working tirelessly to add more detail to the existing countries in Google Maps, and we’ll also be adding new countries to the list.”

It’ll be interesting to discover what sort of tally Google arrives at when counting the world’s nations.

If you’re not quite sure how oneSearch will change the way you search for pizza, we have a refresher from the US launch.

oneSearch is designed to make searching for and finding information as quick as possible for consumers by providing relevant results right on the page such as news headlines, images, business listings and more as well as easy navigation to other web sites. Effectively, oneSearch anticipates the type of information you are looking for, and does away with the arduous task of navigating ten blue links in a mobile browser (see the “pizza” example, right).

Not quite sure why, but Yahoo seems to be mostly focusing on the UK launch.

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While I can’t deny that it drives quite some traffic, it’s still broken as hell, and those of you who are creative might want to check out my previous post on the subject, and do your thing with it Blatantly running that script will get you banned (manually btw), but there are more subtle ways of getting unique votes without having to push the user to a "vote" button.

More on this in a few days…

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“Open-source software’s transparent nature and low-cost will make it more popular among developing countries such as China and India (see India State: Linux In, MS Out). Marten Mickos, CEO of open-source database company MySQL, says the fast-growing BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) will be breeding grounds in 2007 for interesting open source startups because of the large market and talent. “China and India are so large together, like they have become the physical goods factories of the world, the same will happen with open source,” Mr. Allison says”

While I hope that Falguni’s prediction materializes, a conversation with my cousin in India a few days ago made me wonder for a second.

My cousin works as an IT Admin for a very large American bank with operations in India. His group develops and manages applications, (along with the related OSes and hardware) for use in the bank’s Indian operations. This isn’t an outsourcing operation. I figured they’d be using lots of open source like LAMP, Tomcat or Geronimo to keep costs down. They weren’t. They’re using a lot of Microsoft technology. When I asked why they weren’t using Linux, he asked about how secure Linux and open source in general was. To be honest I was a little surprised that (1) they weren’t using more open source products and (2) he questioned the security of Linux vs. Windows. Note, this is based on a sample size of 1 (well 2 because I’ve heard similar things from another cousin when I asked about Java or PHP vs. .NET, and MySQL vs. Oracle usage), so take it with several grains of salt.

Upon reflection, I shouldn’t have been too surprised:

1] I’ve heard about how important MCSE and other Microsoft certification is in India

2] Microsoft continues to invest heavily in India. Microsoft also benefits from Indian outsourcing companies working for overseas customers with investments in Microsoft technology. If the overseas customer is outsourcing work on Microsoft technology, then Indian outsourcing firms need employees with Microsoft skills.

3] I came across this post from Christopher Blizzard who writes:

.. students who are in schools to which we suggest that they get involved in open source software in India often ask “how will doing work in open source software help me get a job?”

Remember that many of these students are becoming the highest earners in their (extended) family by securing an IT job. This sometimes means that they are, wholly or in part, supporting their parents and siblings through these IT jobs. As a result, they’re very focused on taking steps that will directly result in “a good job with a good company“. Why contribute to an open source project when I can be studying, (which is what classmates are doing)? Sure contributing open source code is good experience, but good exam results often play a larger role in securing a job in India. And yes, one can argue that if you contribute a lot to, say, kernel.org, you may get a job with a commercial Linux distro vendor, but that’s an edge case scenario today.

Maybe the increasing penetration of open source in North America & Europe will drive the need for more open source skills within Indian outsourcing companies. As a result, students will have an incentive to work on open source projects while in school. As this happens, some will surely decide to found an open source-based venture, or decide that such a venture is “a good job with a good company“. It’s also good to see commercial open source vendors like Red Hat hiring more Indian staff. And from a personal standpoint, we have a sizable team of IBM India employees working on Geronimo & WAS CE development & support. Oh, and let’s not forget about the buzz from Indian Government agencies adopting Linux, which should drive more interest for working on open source projects.

The future is definitely bright for open source innovation from India and other emerging countries, but there’s plenty of work to be done yetit’s going to be a fun ride indeed!

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

Well, there just happens to be a piece of the Internet that I bet you haven’t made the leap to yet and it is going to be BIG. This new space is mobile search and mobile Internet surfing.

I know, I know, mobile Internet use has been around for a while, but even now it is very much in the infancy phase of development. After all, it was only over the past year that a W3C working draft appeared that allows web designers to create mobile sites compatible with the many mobile phone browsers. I have tried to use the search and navigation abilities on mobile phones and I have not been impressed; clunky is a nice way to put it. That said, there is no question in my mind this is a market that will explode over the next couple of years. To back up my lofty claim here are just a few of the notable headlines on the build-up to mobile search and advertising published over the last 30 days:

Vodafone and Yahoo to Launch Advertising on Mobile Devices (Yahoo)

Mobile technology is way ahead in Europe and Vodafone is currently “the largest mobile telecommunications network company in the world by turnover and has a market value of about 86 billion (November 2006)” ( according to Wikipedia ) . Yahoo has signed a deal which will provide Vodafone users with carefully targeted advertising in exchange for cheaper phone options.

Google Testing Mobile Ads in Eight More Countries (MarketWatch)

“The ads apparently will appear whenever someone in those countries use a cell phone’s Internet capability to access a site or to search via Google’s engine.” The article also states that Google is ” also going after the $11 billion that advertisers are expected to spend on mobile marketing by 2011, according to a recent report by the telecom division of Informa Group.”

Google and Microsoft in Mobile Search Race (Financial Times)

This article notes that ” Google announced a deal to put its search function on 3mobile’s handsets”, and “Sprint Nextel, the US carrier, said it would place Microsoft’s search engine on its mobile phones.”

So we know from the articles above that the mobile web is poised to really take off. However, did you know that it already has to some degree? For example:

Google Mobile has an option that will only provide results from sites that were created mobile-friendly. ( link )

On November 28, 2006 the Webby’s, which are labeled the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, added a new category specifically for the mobile web: ” Webby Awards Join With dotmobi To Launch Webby Mobile Awards. ”

In short, there is a huge amount of positive growth in the mobile marketplace and I recommend taking a slice of it before your competition does. So what do you need to do? Get a dotmobi domain, build a mobile version of your website and promote it by adding it to various mobile directories and sites.

1. Get a .Mobi Mobile Domain

Just this year a consortium of major players including Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia sponsored a new domain meant specifically for a new mobile web: .mobi . Opened for general registration as of September 26, 2006, the .mobi top level domain “is the first and only top level domain dedicated to delivering the Internet to mobile devices” says the official ” What is dotmobi? ” page).

The idea of the .mobi domain is to create a mobile version of your website so that users can simply type in your .mobi address and be assured of a streamlined viewing of your company website on their mobile device. It really is quite brilliant in my opinion and it has a good chance of becoming a popular address with such monsters as Google and Microsoft on the list of supporters.

If you wish to register your dotmobi domain here is a list of registrars provided by the dotmobi website. From what I can tell, however, GoDaddy is providing the best annual .mobi registration price of $15 per domain (min. 2 yrs).

2. Build Your Mobile Web Site

Designing for mobiles is not exactly new but as it is still new to me I cannot provide a great deal of first hand knowledge. That said, StepForth will be creating our own mobile site in-house so I know my Senior Designer and I have a learning curve ahead. Fortunately, to this end, a little research and patience led me to some great resources that I recommend. The following sites will take you in the right direction:

- MobiSiteGalore.com : if you are looking for a simple cookie cutter approach to creating your mobile website you can develop it for free using this website’s mobile compliant website builder. I watched the demo movie on how a website is created and I must say I am very impressed with its functionality.

- Official .mobi Development Standards : If you would like to custom design your mobile website so that it stands out from the rest then this is the site for you. Develop a mobile website to meet .mobi guidelines at the .mobi development website . The .mobi development site appears to be designed to make the move to mobile as easy as possible – thankfully! The development site even offers a free course to put your designer through so that he/she can understand the needs of a properly designed mobile website. In short, I am very impressed with this website and I expect it to provide all that StepForth needs to get our own mobile website online (it will be stepforth.mobi when it is complete).

Additional Mobile Resources

Here are some sites that provide some great additional information but they would likely be a bit too technical for the average site owner. These are, however, great for your designer to check out:

- Mobile FAQ: a mixture of general and specific questions for understanding the mobile phenomenon and designing a mobile site.

- W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group: this is not light reading but your designer may find it interesting.

Check Your Final Product

Once your mobile website is complete you need to verify that it is completely mobile compliant. The .mobi development site provides a ” MobiReady Report ” which will check your site for compliance. This is a great way to be sure that your designer has done a good job and that your website will be as compliant as possible across the wide range of mobile products available.

3. Optimize Your Mobile Site

Optimizing a mobile site is only slightly different than the average website. The basics of optimization remain true; be sure to create great Title Tags, Description Tags, headings, navigation, and focus your content to match page targets. The only difference is you will have less screen real estate to work with so try to keep your optimized content concise – no one wants to read useless information on his or her mobiles. After all, you can be reasonably sure that the time a visitor is willing to spend on a mobile site to find information will be significantly less than their standard visit from their home computer; thus the word ‘mobile’. In short, you will have very little time to convince a visitor to stay at your website.

Google Optimization Note: create a Google Mobile Sitemap so Google can ensure your mobile content is properly noted and categorized as mobile friendly. Will this help traffic? I would think so, here is Google’s message verbatim, ‘ by using Mobile Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the mobile web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our mobile index.’ ( link )

4. Promote Your Mobile Web Site

The mobile Internet is composed of a growing exclusive group at the moment so it is important that your new website get as much visibility as possible. Here are some great tips and resources to help you do that:

- Submit your mobile site to Yahoo! Mobile for free

- Use PRWeb.com to send out a press release about your new .mobi website. Show the world that your company is cutting edge and strives to provide multiple solutions for accessing your products/services.

- Publish your mobile address on your website, business cards, and any other promotional materials. If you don’t tell your target market that you have a mobile site they won’t know to use it.

- Tell dotmobi about your site and it might just get some free publicity by being featured or becoming a case study.

In Summary

I think the .mobi domain is a fantastic way to provide a unique presence specifically designed for the mobile world. The fact that mobile phones are ubiquitous simply reinforces the need for the informed website owner to get their own mobile site setup ASAP. At the very least I would recommend picking up a .mobi domain of your own so that it is not snatched up when the inevitable rush to the mobile web becomes a reality.

Other Excellent Mobile Content

The following are some sites that I came across throughout the creation of this article. I found them very interesting and well worth noting:

WAPReview.com “It’s all about the mobile web”: this site is well written and includes some great tips and stories that you may find revealing – I know I did. Here is a particularly good posting that attracted my attention: ” Mobile Web (un)Usability ”

Open Gardens : a blog that discusses the latest innovations in wireless mobility.

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Ross Dunn is the CEO and founder of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc., an SEO firm that has been providing expert services since 1997. Rosss considerable experience in the world of search has made him a respected writer for countless publications and an SEO consultant for small business and Fortune 500 web properties.