Late last year, the iSkoot blog broke the news that Verizon had launched Social Beat as a virtual preload on their BlackBerry Curve 2 handsets. Virtual preloads are a pretty cool thing. BlackBerry Curve 2 prosumers literally woke up to find all-in-one social networking, email and IM capabilities had been added to their phones - for free.
And now, starting this week we’re pleased to announce that Verizon has added a load of new BlackBerry handsets to the Social Beat-enabled list. Social Beat is now preloaded for prosumer users on the Blackberry Tour, the Storm 1 & the Storm 2.
We’re really excited about this new launch, and we definitely aren’t the only ones taking notice. The BlackBerry community is already hailing it as “SocialScope meets Viigo and then a bit” and betting that “those looking for a “SocialScope on steroids” will find delight in Social Beat.”
As one BlackBerry blogger opines, “What’s so nice about this app is how it beautifully combines all these networks and news information on an easy to use interface…Social Beat is great for anyone who is always staying up to date with their social network and the news.”
We’re glad you guys think so too.
Thanks as always to our friends at Verizon for giving Social Beat this amazing opportunity. And thanks in advance to all you BlackBerry users out there who are giving Social Beat a try. Let us know what you think!
It’s been just under 5 months since AT&T first introduced AT&T Social Net to the world. We aren’t at liberty to divulge details, but let’s just say…the world noticed. As we here at iSkoot suspected, there was a heck of a lot of demand for mobile Facebook, Twitter and MySpace from people who didn’t want to pay boatloads for a top dollar space-age mobile handset. To the fearless users of the inaugural AT&T Social Net: We thank you. AND…we’ve got a little something new for ya.
Meet…the new version.
Veteran ATTSN users: You came, you talked, we listened. And now, a better-than-ever new build of AT&T Social Net is available for grabs at the AT&T MEdia Mall! We added some extra zip to make it faster, and threw in a few new bells and whistles based specifically on your feedback to enhance the entire mobile social experience. In no particular order, and in this blogger’s humble opinion, here are a handful of AT&T Social Net’s coolest new adds:
1. Retweeting
Spotted a shareworthy update in your Twitter feed? Now you can retweet posts from your Twitter feed directly from AT&T Social Net. It’s a one-click maneuver, and it’s awesome.
2. Read your @replies
Now there’s a whole tab in the Twitter section devoted exclusively to @replies. If anyone’s talking at you or about you on Twitter, now you’ll be the first to know.
3. Poke ‘em, like em, messege ‘em and more
Now ALL the stuff you wanna do on Facebook is done completely within the app. Like, all of it. Want to send your friend a message? Do it in the app. Want to “like” or comment on a post? Do that in the app too. Basically, you’ll never go out to the browser again, unless you want to look at something old or obscure. Jackpot!
4. See who’s commenting, and who likes what
When a post shows up in your feed or on your wall, you can not only read the update, now you can read what other people comment on it and see who gives it the ole Facebook thumbs up.
5. More News feeds
Now you can choose from over 50 different news sources! We’ve added Huffington Post, The Economist, Rotten Tomatoes, TMZ, Dictionary.com and a bunch of others. Get your news on.
6. Tie: MySpace Comments or MySpace Inbox
Now you can view both within AT&T Social Net. Which is cooler? I’m still on the fence. But I’m also glad they’re both in there. Now I can tell people to start sending me messages on MySpace again (which, as you can see from the video, hadnt been happening lately.) Amen.
Seeing is believing folks, so make for the AT&T MEdia Mall now and treat yourself to the new and improved AT&T Social Net. We think you’ll like what you see!
Attention holiday shoppers: Black Friday draws near, and Verizon’s new BlackBerry Curve 2 just hit shelves nationwide. This new phone has quite the sell. It’s slick, it’s speedy, and it’s got iSkoot’s Social Beat preloaded on the device!
That’s right folks - the social media app known for promoting an “all phones created equal” world just made the leap to BlackBerry. Don’t worry, we’re still holding true to our smarter-phone philosophy. But we’re also betting that Social Beat’s integrated, all-in-one social media experience has plenty to offer a BlackBerry contingent that values simplicity, efficiency and of course, connectivity.
That’s why Social Beat is now exclusively Verizon’s BlackBerry Curve 2 users with the “Prosumer” package. Prosumers can find Social Beat preloaded in the BlackBerry’s Applications folder. Just click on the Social Beat icon to fire up installation and launch the app.
The new BlackBerry Curve 2 flavor of Social Beat comes with most of the usual bells and whistles, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google Talk and News feeds. Plus (because BlackBerry is swanky) you can move the Social Beat icon to your BlackBerry home screen for easier-than-ever access to all your favorite stuff.
More Verizon BlackBerrys will come equipped with Social Beat in the coming months, so be sure to check back here or tune in to the Social Beat Facebook fan page to stay on top of the latest news.
In the meantime, for you Black Friday veterans in search of the essential one-stop shopping solution, look no further than Social Beat on the new Verizon BlackBerry Curve 2.
We here at iSkoot are VERY pleased to introduce Social Beat, our latest product now available exclusively for Verizon customers in the Verizon Media Store.
In iSkoot’s latest charge to bring internet goodies and social media magic to all mobile phones, Social Beat delivers the top social networks - Facebook, Twitter and MySpace - plus Gmail, Google Talk and RSS feeds from over 50 leading sources on the web. It’s our most advanced feature set to date: users can check their email, IM with friends, comment on, “like,” retweet and @reply to the latest updates in their social networks, view messages on Facebook & MySpace, read @replies on Twitter and get feeds from New York Times, Huffington Post, TMZ, Rotten Tomatoes and Dictionary.com - all within the Social Beat application.
Want to see for yourself? Let us show you around:
Social Beat has launched on 15 top devices at Verizon, with many more coming down the pipeline. For the current list of supported handsets, click here.
Social Beat is iSkoot’s latest foray into the world of integrated social media on mobile, but it isn’t our first. This launch follows the launch of AT&T Social Net, a mobile application that iSkoot developed for AT&T that because available to AT&T’s customers last July.
What’s next on the iSkoot agenda? Only time (and perhaps the occasional blog post) will tell…
In the meantime, check out the newest addition to the iSkoot product family. We’re all very proud of Social Beat and would love to hear what users have to say.
As we signposted a few weeks back, trade show season in the wireless biz is really starting to crank; here at iSkoot, we’re prepping to pack up and ship out yet another iSkoot executive to get in the mix and spread iSkoot’s unique brand of wireless wisdom.
iSkoot Senior Director of Marketing Jake Martin heads to the VON Conference and Expo in South Beach, Florida this Wednesday to participate in a panel entitled Smartphones on Steroids: Netbooks and the Next Device Wave. The panel kicks off at 10am EST (that’s this Wednesday, Sept 23) and promises to deliver a full 50 minutes of industry expertise on smartphones, laptops and how the marriage of the two is changing consumer/provider experience.
The official blurb from VON:
“As mobile phones get smarter — with multicore processors, larger screens and improved graphics — laptops are getting thinner, becoming hyper-connected “netbooks.” This convergence is shifting the way people compute and connect - and the way service providers relate to their customers and generate revenue. This session will explore the effects of the smartphone/netbook convergence on service providers’ business models, network planning and marketing.”
The discussion promises to be an interesting one, and if Jake’s past speaking record is any indication, audiences can look forward to a pretty rollicking good time.
AT&T Social Net is an all-in-one mobile application with a live connection to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and feeds from over 35 leading news, sports & entertainment channels. The user just has to sign in once, subscribe to his/her channels of choice, and AT&T Social Net does the rest - updating automatically to always display the very latest in tweets, feeds, posts, updates, photo alerts and more. Users can respond in real time too, with tweets, @replies, messages, pokes, wall posts and status updates. The carousel menu of icons at the top of the screen makes for easy navigation from service to service - and the AT&T Social Net Home screen offers an integrated Update stream for quick access to the newest activity across all services.
The word from Mark Collins, vice president of voice and data products, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets:
“Five of the top 10 searches on our mobile Web portal are for social networking sites, a clear indication of the growing popularity of mobile social networking. With this app, we’re satisfying the increasing demand for aggregation apps that make it easy for customers to be active in multiple communities simultaneously.”
As the official press release notes, AT&T tapped iSkoot to develop AT&T Social Net, and iSkoot aficionados may spot a few parallels with iSkoot’s Notifier, introduced earlier this year. Notifier was one of the first applications featured in the AT&T Apps Beta - a program that lets developers test new applications with AT&T customers for feedback - and after a keen fine-tuning based largely on valuable insight from the beta testers, AT&T Social Net was born.
From Mark Jacobstein, iSkoot’s CEO:
“The feedback generated from Apps Beta helped us confirm some hypotheses and prioritize some features before general release. For example, we focused on ensuring seamless operation on touch-screen devices — a huge point of interest with Apps Beta users — and also added server-side content caching to improve app speed and responsiveness.”
Here’s a look at the application, fresh off the AT&T MEdia Mall, running on an LG Neon:
AT&T Social Net is available for download today on 20 devices, with more coming soon. AT&T customers can check to see if their devices are compatible here: www.att.com/socialnetdevices
Enormous gratitude goes out to everyone at AT&T for this fantastic opportunity!
We are delighted to report that, after several months of diligent polishing in the iSkoot workshop, we’ve got a shiny new Notifier 1.2 on our hands- and we think you should get your hands on it too.
Notifier 1.2’s got most of the same features as 1.1, but with a swanky new user interface and an improved navigation scheme you can drive it like a Benz with one hand on the wheel.
Here’s a peek at the demo so you can see for yourself:
Notifier 1.2 is available for download today exclusively from the AT&T MEdia Mall.
Give it a whirl and let us know what you think!
Update (7/16/09): Notifier 1.2 is no longer available in the AT&T MEdia Mall. Please check out our new and improved product AT&T Social Net, now available here.
For those of you who might have missed the buzz, the first and long-awaited Android-powered mobile phone, the T-Mobile G1, finally hit stores today. And one of just a handful of cool apps made available right out of the box in Android’s Market (the only mobile VoIP app the Market currently offers) is none other than everyone’s favorite mobile Skype solution, iSkoot for Skype. Of course, it’s always been a big priority for us here at iSkoot to get iSkoot for Skype working across a wide variety of mobile devices; and designing our solution for one of the slickest new platforms around just makes our job that much sweeter.
We’re also fairly giddy to report that people are already liking what they see! The folks at Techcrunch –concluding after a week of testing the G1 that for them “it’s all about the apps”–gave kudos to iSkoot as one of their Top 10 Android Launch Apps this morning. As early as last week, before the T1 had even hit the shelves, early reviewers at jkOnTheRun and Switched were sizing up the new device, running test calls via iSkoot for Skype, and declaring that “it’s the third party applications that will truly set the device apart.” ZDNet also highlighted iSkoot as one of the Market’s cool new apps to try.
Guess there’s only one thing left to do…go grab yourself a G1! In the meantime, we’ll keep you posted as the buzz continues to unfold.
You’re not alone - those of us at iSkoot often ask ourselves the very same question, particularly as our indomitable CEO marches in and out of the office with suitcase in one hand and laptop in the other (for the 3rd time this week, no less).
But still, amidst the flurry that comes with spearheading a mobile start-up in the Valley, Mark’s penciled in time to pen some insight for “Wireless Week.”
In his most recent contribution, a piece entitled “Mobile Phones are Very Un-PC,” Mark dismantles the common misconception that mobile phones work like pocket-sized computers.
Examining the multi-task capacity of a PC versus your average mobile handset, Mark points out “Even those of us who use our PCs for little more than e-mail, IM, Web browsing and iPod docking take for granted that we can open multiple browser windows on top of two half-composed e-mails and three Word documents all while listening to iTunes and chatting on AIM. Try that on your phone.”
Mark also reminds that in terms of basic resources - from screen resolution to data transfer speed - it’s an apple and orange comparison:
“Screen size and resolution limits are brutal; after all, the Q in QVGA means we’re working with a quarter the real estate we had on PCs in the early 1990s. And even QWERTY phones, let alone the more typical 12-key devices make triple-tapping your way into your favorite Web service sheer agony. Factor in the current speed of data transfer, even through those shiny 3G pipes, and you can induce flashbacks to the dark days of dial-up. At least until your battery runs out.”
Beyond the obvious hardware constraints still are the fundamental differences in the way a user interacts with a service depending on whether he is using a PC or a mobile handset. Mark illustrates:
“[F]iltering content to bring a user their most essential information, while useful on a PC, is absolutely critical in mobile, with its limited real estate and even more limited “discover” capabilities….To give a nod to loopt [a mobile social network that uses location-based services to let users map where their friends are], seeing your friends’ locations when you’re all on your PCs is probably unnecessary, since PCs don’t move around much. Seeing the location of their handsets, on the other hand, is profoundly powerful.”
With the frenzy of mobile development happening in recent years, particularly hot on the trail of the latest iPhone release, Mark expects that we’ll see soon enough whether developers really get the PC-mobile distinction. An appreciation for these finer details is, as Mark puts it, “critical not just for success, but for survival.”
We’re glad to report that the the corrected production version of iSkoot for Symbian S60 v3 is now available for download here. Because this is a critical security release, we will also be releasing a forced upgrade for current users around midnight tonight, California time.
Thanks again to everyone who helped us to identify and resolve the issue quickly!
Edit: Particular thanks go out to Phone Boy, as well as Andy Abramson, Dan York, Jonathan MacDonald, and Jim Courtney — who not only helped us to identify the issue but also kept the online community up-to-date on our efforts to resolve it.
The blog community is an amazing resource — particularly for new companies like us, where the participation and feedback of our users is fundamental to our success. Enabling real-time communication with in-the-know users like Phone Boy, the blogosphere served as a truly invaluable advocate during a critical security breach. We are incredibly grateful for the support, and warmly welcome continued feedback.
