Webware

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There's no real killer app yet for retrieving listings information on your mobile phone, but there could be soon.

On Aptil 11, FreeMobile411 launches the consumer version of its carrier-offered services. Visting FreeMobile411.com from your mobile browser gets you a decent-looking ad-supported WAP site that simplifies directory search and helps you avoid long waits while listening to ads from dial-in services like 1-800-FREE-411.

Enter the search term--it can be a business name ("Blockbuster"), business type ("video store"), or person ("Bill Blockbuster"). Then select the search type, and fill in either the city or zip to search or browse listings. From there you'll have a spectrum of choices to plot on a map, get directions to, dial with a click, or use as an anchor while searching for nearby gap pumps, hotels, banks, and so on. You'll still be able to connect to the operator at the usual carrier rate, but with this useful, easily navigable app, it's doubtful you'll ever need to. P.S. It even looks decent on the RAZR!

At CTIA 2008 in Las Vegas, I took a look at LiveContacts BuddyFinder, Web app that launches on April 15.

I tried it out with a non-GPS phone, and in the process moved to Germany.

To clear a little confusion, BuddyFinder and LiveContacts are two sort-of related names for the app, which is itself the free branch of the better-known FindWhere, a Dutch company with a much more useful, robust service--tracking people down (kids, an elderly parent, a wayward spouse) through their devices. FindWhere includes lost phone recovery, emergency alerts, and notification services if the device goes outside your specified bounds.

Of course, the free BuddyFinder doesn't do all that. Instead, it installs an app to the phone (with yet another name) that utilizes either GPS or cell phone triangulation on select smartphones, and broadcasts the location to FindWhere's servers. The app's only role is to play transmitter. Buddies then see your location mapped online after every five minutes or location change. That's wonderful for plotting a route somewhere for demonstration purposes, or to prove that you actually did go to the library to study, but it's less useful if you're interested in finding a pal while you're out and about.

From the looks of it, BuddyFinder is a rather late, rather feature-slim arrival to location-based friend tracking that's similar to a lot of other services out there, including Loopt, Whereboutz, Rummble, and Whrrl, and even FindMe, which didn't impress me on all accounts, but works nonetheless.

To differentiate BuddyFinder from the competition, the press materials call the Web and cell phone app combo "the only truly free buddy finder service on the Web." I see what they're getting at, since some of the other services rely on data transfers to update your location on your phone, where BuddyFinder tracks you from your PC for free. As I mentioned, it's hard to see how being limited to the PC is a perk, even if there is no data charge. Besides, much of the audience for location-based services already subscribes to an unlimited data plan, so it's difficult to see a real detraction there.

Still, if you're seeking a geo-tracking service, there's no harm in looking at BuddyFinder. You can sign up for the beta now, or wait until April 15th for the full release.

I'm looking at a cell phone screen and four faces are looking back. It's CTIA 2008, the biggest wireless and cell phone trade show of the year, and the CEO of iVisit, a multiparty video conferencing app for PCs, Macs, and mobile phones, is demoing the product, iVisit Teleport. I must say, the slick, feature-rich app looks pretty cool on Orang Diamaleh's large-screen smartphone.

iVisit Teleport's feature-rich app manages to avoid distraction.

The simplest way to think about iVisit Teleport is as a P2P social network that lets you call, chat, video conference, and transfer multimedia for up to 8 contacts at a time. You sign up for an account and can start adding any contact who has also registered with the service. Conferencing starts when you enter a room, after which you have an array of controls to launch multimedia sharing functions with a one-button click; that is, tap or click the interface to chat, start a video conference using the phone's camera as the lens, send a file, and see a buddy's GPS location on a map.

I like the glossy black interface, which packs in a lot of features without making the app feel overcrowded. The video quality wasn't too shabby either, and definitely an improvement over other video software I've seen, but a lot of that input will depend on the capabilities of the phone itself. On mobile phones, iVisit Teleport supports 120x160, 320x240 video. It will be interesting to see how iVisit Teleport plays out on an actual conference call when the app's beta release goes live in April on Windows Mobile phones, and if the pricing will appeal more to consumers or small businesses. In the meantime, anyone can pre-register for the iVisit Teleport private beta or iVisit desktop for Windows and Mac.

Quite a few services on the market offer some variation on the theme of making inexpensive international calls. Fring and EQO dress it up with IM and a social networking aspect that grants free international calls between registered friends and cheap calls to everyone else. Likewise, there's Skype to Go and Talkster, which both require you to punch in local access numbers to get cheap rates. However, Packet8's MobileTalk has risen above them all as a mass market solution that sheds the extra messaging frills, money-making ads, and prep time to make the call. (Note: Give yourself a few minutes for the initial account set-up, including finding the phone's IMEI number.)

The premise is dead simple. You download the MobileTalk app, then make calls as usual. When your fingers dial out an international number, MobileTalk springs to life, delaying the call by a few seconds to connect you to a local number (that's what gets you the cheaper rates,) then pushes the call through to your destination.

Payment is pretty easy too; it arrives as a separate credit card charge on your statement when you set up your account. The costs are comparable to other phone card and VoIP-out services--that's about 2-3 cents per minute to most of Europe and 3-5 cents to most of Asia. Doubting Thomases can track call costs from their online account as they speak.

Because Packet8 MobileTalk requires the user to do absolutely nothing to connect an international call, it's the kind of set-up I want to have for calling my London-dwelling sister on my morning commute, and the kind of app I would recommend to any smartphone owner who prefers to set and forget. Packet8 MobileTalk is currently available for Windows Mobile, Symbian, and BlackBerry phones, and is expected for Java phones in 4-to-6 weeks.

Dashwire, a small Seattle start-up eleven employees strong, continues to impress with its growing service for managing and interacting with the contents of your cell phone online. To recap an earlier review, Dashwire synchronizes your cell phone to an online account, displaying on a flexible dashboard your call history, images, profile, texting history, photos, ring tones, videos, and contacts. You can roll up your sleeves and muck around with your phone from Dashwire, a much happier experience than crouching over your two-inch cell phone screen and tapping or clicking away through on-device management programs, particularly if you're not on the go and are sitting comfortably in front of a computer, thank you very much.

Since Dashwire is linked to your phone via a downloadable client, everything you do online also occurs on your phone, and vice versa. Therefore, you can view, tag, and share media, send text messages, listen to voice mail, and add bookmarks from the comfort of your online dashboard. It's cool. But in the last month, it's gotten cooler.

(Credit: Dashwire)

There have been quiet roll-outs of tweaks, even a few big changes. For a start, Dashwire has drastically improved its search tool. Users can now push photos to friends' phones, e-mail addresses, and Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Bebo. (In Twitter, most photos are converted to a TinyURL.com link. It doesn't work 100 percent of the time, and Dashwire's working on that.)

The service also now supports data transferring when users switch phones, which was the top request among private beta testers, and a great new feature for quickly assigning speed dial settings.

The big thing, though, is integration with CallWave, a service that transcribes voice messages to text. This is a smart move, and it makes perfect sense for Dashwire, which is all visual management, to provide visual voice mail.

Coming up
Dashwire will be introducing a few more additions in stages over the next six months. Starting Friday, text messages will be threaded by contact, in a manner much like the iPhone. In about four to six weeks, a new, dynamic phone client will replace the current app, which is currently limited to a few syncing options. The new, richer Dashwire client will peform all sorts of party tricks, like pulling in media when you switch to a new handset, push status updates to Facebook and Twitter, and pull in content from the Web.

The final announcement in this cascade of upgrades is that Symbian S60 users will be able to get their hands on Dashwire if they can hold their horses until late August or early September.

Dashwire runs equally well from your phone memory and storage card, and it's now in public beta for Windows Mobile users. Get out there and try it.

>>See all the latest news in cell phones and mobile software coming out of CTIA Wireless 2008.

Share photos via SMS, e-mail, or post online.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

(Credit: Yahoo Inc.)

Vioce technology is Yahoo's big news of the day. While vocal search is one aspect of an enhanced version of Yahoo's oneSearch tool for mobile phones, it's the only aspect of the service that has been made available as a preview today. And the implementation has only been rolled out for BlackBerry phones.

Luckily, I happen to have one of those here at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas, where I met with Yahoo's director of mobile product marketing, Adam Taggart to discuss oneSearch 2.0 (see video).

Like Yahoo Go 3.0, oneSearch 2.0 opens with a slick interface. The idea is to make vocal input as good as manual input, Taggart said, but to remove the pain points of having to type a search when you could just as easily speak it.

In the cacophonous conference hall, not every request came out clearly, but it's easy to see how this feature will form the basis of hands-free search. Additionally, the recognition technology is adaptive, Taggart explained, interpreting from a range of accents and inflections, and learning your vocal patterns after a few sessions.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

That's not all oneSearch will learn. With a little use, it's also meant to interpret your search patterns, which will help the app return more customized results. The vocal recognition isn't perfect every time, so Yahoo has embedded drop-down boxes to fill in the unclear search terms.

Going forward, phones will also receive relevant proximity-based search results, which will offer suggestions for listings close to your current location. GPS is the most precise, but mass market phones should also be able to take advantage of cell tower triangulation, which is effectively put to use in the My Location feature of the latest iteration of Google Maps. When in doubt, there's always adding your city or zip code manually.

Windows Live Search with voice announced something similar last November at CTIA's fall show in San Francisco. The big difference here, Yahoo emphasizes, is that oneSearch isn't just about dishing out local listings. You can also search for flights, Web sites, zip codes, videos, and so on, by pressing and holding the green talk key for as long as you speak your query. No need to shout or slow your speech. The app works best when you present your normal cadence and tones.

Currently the talk feature of oneSearch 2.0 is available for BlackBerry, with predictive search features and all the rest coming in a few months. Get the link by pointing your BlackBerry browser to m.yahoo.com/voice.

>>Catch the latest news in cell phones and mobile software from CTIA 2008 in Las Vegas.

Updated 2:30 p.m. PDT with comments and photos.

LAS VEGAS--Yahoo announced upgrades to its Yahoo OneSearch product at the CTIA trade show here Wednesday that it says make mobile search smarter, more relevant, and easier to use with voice-activation technology.

Marco Boerries, the company's executive vice president of "connected life," introduced the new Yahoo OneSearch 2.0 during a keynote address, promising "instant answers to any query, not just Web links." This means that search results will expand from traditional hyperlinks into other media--a search for "New York" could yield subway schedules, for example, or a search for local sushi restaurants could bring up Zagat's ratings and reviews along with one-click reservations. And searching the name of a friend could provide links to the social-networking sites that the friend uses.

Yahoo is leveraging technology that it's used in a project for its PC-based search tool called "Search Monkey," which consists of a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific Web sites. The two applications share the same APIs (application programming interfaces), and Boerries said he expects some 1,000 publishers to work with them to help make search more relevant.

Also central to OneSearch is voice-enabled technology. "Consumers can search for anything, including flight numbers, locations, Web site names, local restaurants, and more, by simply speaking," a release from Yahoo detailed. The voice-activation software is now available for download on a number of Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, and Yahoo has said that over the next few months it will be compatible with more handsets.

Yahoo OneSearch 2.0 combines search results with other published information.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

Yahoo is using voice-activation technology from Vlingo, which announced Wednesday that Yahoo is the lead investor in a $20 million Series B funding round. As part of that investment deal, Yahoo has exclusive rights to the technology.

"We liked the technology so much that we invested in the company," Boerries said during a press conference following his keynote speech. "But we made sure that our competitors can't use it."

Boerries also said that Yahoo's voice-enabled search is different from Microsoft's more limited voice-enabled search because Yahoo's service allows people to find results no matter how they say a term or phrase.

OneSearch also includes a download called Search Assist, which encompasses recommended search results, predictive typing technology to speed up the amount of time it takes to enter a query--a key feature for small mobile keypads. Currently, this is only available for Apple's iPhone.

Yahoo plans to update OneSearch in the second quarter of 2008 with something that it calls an "idle screen search service," so that people can access the mobile Web and the search technology without needing to open their cell phones' Web browsers.

OneSearch 2.0 is Yahoo's latest attempt to stay ahead of rival Google in the mobile market. At the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, the company unveiled its Yahoo OneConnect mobile messaging and social-networking platform, which still has yet to debut publicly.

Yahoo pushed out the original OneSearch product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year.

"With the launch of Yahoo OneSearch in 2007, we revolutionized mobile search by recreating search specifically for the mobile phone," Boerries said in Wednesday's keynote address, adding that a total of 29 carriers worldwide are now OneSearch partners. "With Yahoo OneSearch 2.0, we are fundamentally changing the way consumers use the Internet on their mobile phones."

News.com's Marguerite Reardon contributed to this report.

(Credit: MobiMate)

Last November, MobiMate revealed WorldMate Live for BlackBerry. A large stride ahead of its traditional business-class travel software, WorldMate Live got some souped-up features, including online management tools and functionality to push flight status alerts and scheduling reminders to the phone.

In a few more weeks, WorldMate Live will come to Windows Mobile phones, the number two platform pick for businesses, and therefore frequent corporate jetsetters. I got a preview today at the CTIA Wireless conference, and it looks good. By "good" I mean nearly identical to the BlackBerry version of WorldMate Live, with perhaps one or two navigation and interface tweaks. Other than that, the app is expected to behave identically and contain the same content services, like currency conversion, a live itinerary, real-time weather reporting, world clocks, and so on.

MobiMate hopes to add WorldMate Live for Symbian to the product family by the end of 2008.

(Credit: ICanHasCheezburger.com)

Starting Wednesday, fans of the 'cheezy' Internet phenomenon LOLcats will be able to get updates of the funny, iconic felines from their cell phones. (I bet you thought I was going to say "from soda bottles.")

That's right. With a little help from Frengo, the company behind the popular Facebook app, Flirtable, I Can Has Cheezburger will be pushing daily updates of the newest LOLcat via text and the mobile Web, transcoded from Frengo's servers. The functionality is simple, but sensibly actionable. Users can view past images and share image links with friends via text.

To get started, text 'LOL' to 44566 and follow the link the the poster kitten of the day. Or, visit http://frengo.com/ichc/ from your mobile browser. I'm hooked already.

>>See the latest news in cell phone software, webware, and handsets from CTIA 2008.