Facebook’s mobile site and mobile applications have been very well received by social network addicts around the world, which makes you wonder why the guy in charge of it all, Jed Stremel, resigned? After 4 years with the company he probably realized that Facebook is nothing more than a useless time suck creating a false sense of companionship while doubling as a playground with a barbed wire perimeter that you’re forced to live in for the rest of your life. That or he is just tired of working with people half his age, his shares have vested, and now he can go look for work at a company that is actually doing something useful.

Good luck Jed.

[Via: mocoNews]

During their Q3 2009 financial results conference call, TomTom announced that they sold close to 80,000 copies of their iPhone application. Pretty rad considering the total cost of ownership, for the application itself and the dock to stick the thing in your car, is over $200.

[Via: GPS Business Review]

Police officers from New York City issued 7,529 tickets last Thursday for people using their mobile phones behind the wheel. This 24 hour crackdown wasn’t as successful as the one earlier May which resulted in around 9,000 violations issued, but a far higher number than the usual 540 tickets that are issued on a daily basis for texting/calling behind the wheel. Last year the NYPD issued 197,198 tickets for being a douche who thinks that they’re so important every single call and text must be acted upon with the utmost urgency.

In other news, a record number of rapes took place last Thursday. When one of the few men caught asked what was so special about Thursday, he replied: “all them cops are going after people who pay their tickets real fast in order to avoid going to court, so us rapists saw this as an opportunity to take to the streets and add some notches to our belt.”

Update: The NYPD have issued a statement: “Oink. Oink. Oink.”

[Via: NY Times]

Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Droid fever has hit the team at IntoMobile, and our readers, ridiculously hard. We’re all enamored with the Motorola Droid for different reasons; some like the new Navigation application, some like the fact that it is running a more mature looking Android 2.0, the hard core among us know that it is the first ARM Cortex A8 powered Android device, but whatever reason you have for liking the Droid, we can all admit that it’s the first time in a long time anyone has actually paid attention to Motorola.

Late last night Will discovered that the name of the GSM Motorola Droid is “Milestone”. A bit too long, a bit too much ego, but it suits the device just right. I first spotted Milestone last Wednesday in Vietnam, and another video has hit the net this morning, courtesy of @eldarmurtazin from Mobile-Review, showing the Milestone one more time:

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) just posted an entry to their N-Gage blog saying that the N-Gage publishing platform is going to die in less than a year. Games will now be sold through the Ovi Store, which on face value makes sense, giving consumers a single location to purchase applications, whether that be a new alarm clock, or Super Monkey Ball, but all the community features that many of you have come to love will be gone. Stuff like high scores, messaging, and keeping up with your friends in the N-Gage Arena, that stuff is gone.

If you’re an N-Gage addict, make sure you read the complete blog post to get the details on what’s changing and when.

[Hat tip to @stevelitchfield from All About Symbian]

Yesterday Google launched Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 and with it crushed the stock prices of Tom Tom and Garmin, makers of dedicated navigation devices. The question of whether or not we’ll see Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps Navigation come to other platforms has yet to be answered, but knowing Google’s previous moves in the mapping space, it’s pretty much an inevitability.

Why is Google dominating the mapping space with such force? The answer lies with the cost of maps. If anyone with enough entrepreneurial spirit wanted to create a competitor to Google Maps, Bing Maps, or Ovi Maps, they would soon realize that they would have to secure mapping data, at a great cost mind you, from the two largest players on the market: Tom Tom, who purchased Tele Atlas in 2007, or NAVTEQ, who was purchased by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) during the same year. Entering the mapping space is not easy financially and that is why we’ve seen little competition.

Google Maps is fantastic, I use it on a near daily basis, but how much better could it be if anyone could build a mapping service? I’m not talking about using the Google Maps API to overlay your data on top of a Google Map, or the Ovi Maps Player API, which is an exact clone of Google’s, I’m talking about making mapping data open and free and allowing the same city center to be rendered in millions of different ways depending on the context of what a user wants to visualize. There is already an effort taking place on the internet right now to do just that, and it’s called OpenStreetMap (OSM), but they need help.

If I was Nokia I would donate every last bit of mapping data collected by NAVTEQ to OSM and just sit back and watch to see what happens. Anyone in the world would be able to use that data, and with it usher in a long due renaissance in the world of mapping. This isn’t about OpenStreetMap beating Google Maps, this is about allowing the creation of many mapping services.

If you think about it, honestly, how much better has Google Maps become since it was launched in February 2005? Sure, we now have Google Maps on mobile, but that’s because we had to wait for Google to make their maps available on the go. If access to the data of all the buildings, and all the streets on this Earth was available for anyone to build upon, with no licensing fees, and no strict conformity to the aesthetic dictated by one company, a 3rd party could have not only beaten Google to the mobile maps game, but may have created an entirely new user experience.

Think about it Nokia. You’ve been playing the open card a lot lately. First with Maemo, then with Symbian, now do the same thing with NAVTEQ. It’s the only way you’re going to beat Google at maps. They’ve got smarter people, more of them, and they stand the most to lose so they’re going to defend what they’ve got to the death if you try to out innovate them with Ovi Maps.

Google disrupted the mapping space by making navigation free, your turn to disrupt the mapping space by making maps free as in speech.

AT&T’s marketing machine is in damage control mode right now. Remember that post I wrote a few days ago about AT&T’s network sucking because the company didn’t configure it properly?

Check out the email I just got:

Hey Stefan,

Saw your post and wanted to get you a response – we don’t think there’s any merit to the observation you passed along. Would you mind adding this to the post? Feel free to attribute to me or the company …

Also, noted your comment about cell sites – we’ve talked publicly quite a lot about the improvements we’re making to the network (7.2 rollout, increased backhaul to our sites, etc.) – but we also said we plan to add more than 2,000 sites this year.

Thanks,
Seth Bloom
FH for AT&T Corporate Communications

“The AT&T (NYSE: T) wireless network is designed and engineered to deliver the highest possible levels of capacity and performance. Our standing as the nation’s fastest 3G network is validated by multiple third-party testing organizations on the basis of millions of drive tests annually.”

“We believe that recent online speculation regarding AT&T wireless network configuration settings is without foundation. Allegations in these posts regarding packet loss network settings are incorrect.”

To which I simply replied:

I’m not going to copy and paste your marketing message to my blog post. Good luck getting other blogs to follow your request.

Take Seth’s message with a few hundred kilos of salt. If you’re an iPhone customer, or just a plain AT&T customer experiencing network issues, leave a comment below.

Don’t ask, don’t tell, that seems to be the policy in Vietnam where somehow gadget site tinhte.com gets the latest stuff before the western world. Oh sure, Verizon customers will enjoy the CDMA version of the Droid come November 6th, but the real meat and potatoes to be had is in Asia. If the GSM version is already up and running, and already approved by the FCC, you can bet that we’ll probably see the Droid making a global attack by the end of the year.

Photos after the jump, oh and before you hit play I have to warn you. There is a lot of Michael Jackson:

[Via: Engadget Mobile]

Read the full article »

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) announced Google Maps Navigation earlier today, and it crouched on several people’s business models.

Check out how Garmin, makers of dedicated turn by turn navigation devices, reacted:

[Hat tip to @zpower, otherwise known as Chris Ziegler from Engadget Mobile]

Now we all use and love Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps, but turn by turn navigation has always been missing. With the Motorola Droid announcement today there was a mention of a new application: Google Maps Navigation, and as the name implies, it finally adds navigation capabilities to Google Maps, albeit with some limitations. It only works on Android 2.0 devices, and so far there is only one: Droid. And It only works in the USA, so Europeans and Asians are out of luck. Those small issues aside, you do get some nifty new features. The new voice API is used to enable hands free searching, and if you have a handset that supports a dock then you get “dock mode” so you can keep both hands on the wheel. Check out the videos below to get an idea of what Navigation is all about:

6 minutes 50 seconds: Intro to Google Maps Navigation:

1 minute: Google Maps Navigation Voice Search

35 seconds: Google Maps Navigation Car Dock

Quote of the Day: “Condolences to everyone who owns TomTom/Garmin/etc stock.” – @zacharye

Also let us not forget that the days of operators charging “some bullshit monthly fee” (quote from Simon in the ultra secret, ultra exclusive IntoMobile chatroom) are soon going to come to an end.