Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Mobio Networks announced today that are launching new mobile social media widgets for Web 2.0 services Twitter, Digg and Kaboodle as part of their GetMobio lifestyle portal. Mobio has created 50+ mashups that help people stay connected with friends, places and information while mobile. As Mobio describes their service…”With Mobio widgets, you can find a hip new happy-hour spot to impress your co-workers, stay current with your favorite news sites, browse photos and share customized shopping lists with friends”. “When people think ‘mobile’ and ‘widgets’ they typically think RSS,” said Marcia Kadanoff, Vice President of Marketing of Mobio. “While we definitely mobilize RSS feeds, we also go way beyond this functionality. We take the best of these social media sites and make them available in a graphical and interactive format that truly allows you to stay active within your social network while you are mobile.”

Twitter via Mobio will help people stay connected via both text and images - Twitter is only text right now. Fans of Digg can now view the top stories on Mobio. With Kaboodle on Mobio you can recommend and discover new thing from other users with similar interests.  

Also along with these “web 2.0″ widgets, Mobio has also developed a series of free widgets that let users manage, search and read their favorite blogs and news sites through a “streamlined, customizable mobile interface called My RSS”. For more information, visit GetMobio.com.

In what should come as no surprise since rumors have been bouncing around for weeks, Google announced today that they have acquired GrandCentral Communications. GrandCentral provides services to manage your voice communications by integrating all of your existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account - which can then be accessed via the web. Google said in their press release that they feel GrandCentral’s technology fits well into Google’s plan to "enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users." This just shows, once again, Google is looking to expand past being a search engine and into a media conglomerate. GrandCentral was a great service and should be even better with Google behind them.

Currently Google is offering a select few Beta accounts, you can request an invite at GrandCentral.com

I am starting to see a trend happening… MyNuMo just launched their latest product Fun4iPhone.com. Fun4iPhone is bringing games, social networking, news and products to the…iPhone. The best part of this is that they just released their first game, ready? Its called iWhack and it lets the player whack Microsoft CEO and iPhone critic Steve Balmer. 

“iWhack is a fun activity that is the first in a series of casual games and useful products for the iPhone.” states William Volk, CEO of MyNuMo, LLC. “We’re excited about the iPhone, this game is just the beginning of great things for Apple’s groundbreaking device.”“Our goal was to create a fun game for the iPhone that would appeal to game players and iPhone fans.” commented MyNuMo President Sherri Cuono. “MyNuMo will be launching a series of fun casual games, social networking tools, and other products on Fun4iPhone.com as well as providing a portal for news and information about the iPhone.”

Yeah it is sort of useless and low on the "cool" level for the must have tech gear of the year (way to much rhyming), but I just had to post it since it is always interesting to see even the most low-level companies feed off a products buzz.  

Yahoo! announced the full launch of it’s Go for Mobile 2.0 this past Thursday, it had been in Beta since January. I recently downloaded the service onto my Treo and I was impressed right off the bat. First off the interface is very intuitive and the services that come with Go 2.0 are impressive - Search, News, Sports, Finance, Weather, Entertainment, Mail, Local Search and Flickr integration. Enhancements include:

• Faster browsing and operation
• Improved email functionality, including the ability to read more attachments, including PDF’s, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents.
• Enhanced maps
• Better integration with Yahoo! Address Book and Yahoo! Calendar,

Here are some screen shots of the new interface.