It’s Round 3 of the trade show tour: This week, Mark Jacobstein heads to San Diego to join a panel at CTIA Wireless 2009. His panel, part of CTIA’s Mobile Applications track, is assembling for a discussion called “APIs - Enabling the Future of Mobile Development.”
Mark’s participating alongside execs from CloudMade, Mashery, NewBay Software and Global IP Solutions, and each panelist will be showcasing their company’s latest and greatest application to be launched via API. The panel will be moderated by O8 advisor Hank Scorny. Things are scheduled to get started tomorrow, October 7 at 4pm PST.
The official word about the panel:
“Application Program Interface (API) is changing the speed at which applications for mobile become available. What works and what doesn’t? The common denominator is the role that APIs are facilitating a modularity that handset openness brings to the consumer choices. Panelists will talk about their newest applications being launched via APIs, the brands and products using APIs to speed up their launches and the process to work via APIs to get the apps up and running, fast.”
If you’re heading to San Diego this week, make sure you don’t miss it!
It’s a common tale. You’re standing on the subway, juggling the coffee and the morning paper en route to work when, suddenly, he appears - the iPhone guy. Swiping his e-copy of today’s New York Times, smirking at his coworker’s latest Facebook status update. You eye your humble flip phone. Feeling a little inadequate? Fret not, frugal phone user - When iSkoot CEO Mark Jacobstein sees your inexpensive feature phone, he sees big potential.
Mark’s shared his thoughts on the subject this week as a guest blogger in Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech blog. His post “Every Phone A Smartphone” points out that while the high-end smartphone market share might be growing, advances in mobile computing - the magic that happens remotely to power cool functionality on everyday phones - are getting more and more sophisticated by the day.
According to Mark:
“Remote data centers can better manage the applications, information, and rote data crunching that smart devices require. All we’ll need is a basic Internet connection and data can be passed back and forth from the phone to the data center in near real-time, without having to bog our devices down with heavy applications and software.”
Think about the way you use your computer these days, Mark suggests to illustrate the shift. Much in the way PCs have become “terminals for accessing to Internet-based content and applications, mobile handsets will need less and less onboard capability to do the things that make them ’smart.’”
He concludes that with remote mobile computing evolving to power slimmer, smarter mobile apps, nearly any phone that can connect to the Internet can “deliver an experience that rivals today’s smart phones at a fraction of the build and materials cost.”
To read Mark’s full blog post, click here - and say goodbye to your iPhone envy.
Conference season is heating up, and iSkoot CEO Mark Jacobstein has gotten himself into the mix once again!
Tomorrow, that’s Thursday September 10, Mark is headed bright and early to kick things off at GigaOm’s Mobilize 2009 conference at the Mission Bay Center in San Francisco. His is the first panel of the show, a 40-minute examiniation how to company’s can turn mobile apps into a profitable business.
“Monetizing Mobile Apps” starts at 8:25am tomorrow; joining Mark will be Dorian Porter, CEO of Mozes, Zannel CEO Adam Zbar, Plusmo CEO Krishna Vedati and Flirtomatic CEO Mark Curtis. Raven Zachary, President of Small Society, will be moderating the panel.
Tickets are sold out, but for those of you who jumped on the wagon early, come check out the panel! For more details on Mobile 2009 speakers and tomorrow’s schedule of events, check out the Mobile website: http://events.gigaom.com/mobilize/09/schedule/
It’s that time again - South by Southwest Interactive is recruiting speakers! The one-of-a-kind festival, known for assembling the best & brightest in cutting-edge tech and media, is looking for top-notch talents to tout their industry wisdom –and iSkoot CEO Mark Jacobstein is in the running for the job.
The best part: YOU can help us bring Mark - and the iSkoot anthem “Every phone a smartphone!” - to the festival-going masses next March. How, you ask? Simple: the kind folks in Austin are letting you vote to get him the gig!
Here’s how:
1. Click the button below. You’ll create an account (it takes approx 15 seconds total) so you can cast your vote.
2. All registered? Here’s Mark’s listing: Click me to vote for Mark!Just click the “thumbs up” icon to cast your vote!
3. Heck, why not leave an encouraging comment? Scoll down to the bottom of the page, and let SXSW know you’re a believer in iSkoot.
The polls close on Friday, Sept 4 so act fast!
Thanks team! Let’s get Mark Jacobstein to Texas in 2010!
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!
iSkoot CEO Mark Jacobstein heads to the MobileBeat 2009 conference at San Francisco’s Parc 55 Hotel on Thursday, July 16 to go head-to-head with fellow mobile experts on the future of data-heavy applications.
Mark will join execs from Sprint, GoTV Networks and Zer01 Mobile for a panel discussion aimed at finding out: Are data intensive apps in danger?
The Breakout Session (#5), kicks off at 3:40pm. An overview of the discussion topic:
New data-intensive applications, embodied by Internet voice applications such as Skype, are endangering carriers’ voice revenue. At the same time, millions of new smartphone users are browsing the Web and hogging massive amounts of bandwidth. The plethora of new data-intensive apps are only going to make things worse for carrier costs. Growth in data being transferred from AT&T, Verizon, and other network giants is exploding — it grew 1,000 percent last year alone, and is expected to roughly double annually through 2012, according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index. So how will carriers survive as costs may exceed revenue?
For additional details on MobileBeat’s full schedule of events, click here.
Mark Jacobstein is heading to International CES and Digital Hollywood in Las Vegas this Thursday, January 8 to sit on not one but TWO discussion panels. The details:
Alongside panelists from AT&T Mobility, Qualcomm, Mozilla and The New York Times, Mark will explore the fate of the basic telephone in an age where the feature-rich Smartphone dominates.
Mark joins panelists from Motorola, Nokia, Lenovo and more to discuss how mobile technology has ascended from the realm of functional convenience to an out-and-out lifestyle, and has become a consumer identity symbol in the process.
2008 was an action-packed ride here at iSkoot, and with the New Year having hastily arrived (already?), it is–of course–only fitting to take a look back at just how far we’ve come in the last 365.
Last January, we were just 2 months into celebrating 3’s UK launch of the iSkoot-powered 3 Skypephone - the first dedicated mobile Skype handset of its kind in the world. In the months that followed, the little Skype handset that took the UK by storm set off for the rest of 3’s global territories, launching in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Italy. And somewhere along the way, the Skypephone picked up a Global Mobile Awards Silver Medal for Best Mobile Handset of the Year too.
While our success with the Skypephone picked up steam, iSkoot welcomed some fresh faces to the team as well - most notably our tireless CEO Mark Jacobstein, who’s brought to this outfit a lengthy track record of serial entrepreneurship and an exciting new vision for our company. Yosi Shaulson and Jim Hudak came aboard not long after, as VP of Finance & Ops and VP of Business Development, respectively.
Days later, we celebrated Yosi and Jim’s arrival alongside the renewal of our longtime partnership with Skype, which - in the wake of the 3 Skypephone’s resounding success on 3 continents around the world - awarded iSkoot exclusive rights to sell Skype-branded mobile products in territories spanning the rest of the globe - including South America, Africa and Europe. After all, we wouldn’t want Jim and Yosi to think we didn’t have enough for them to do, now would we?
With new leadership, renewed vows with Skype and a fully-integrated mobile device under our belts, the team decided it was time to make for sunnier pastures. We relocated our US headquarters from Cambridge, Mass to San Francisco - though not before iSkoot for Skype picked up a MITX Technology Award for Best Mobile Technology.
After getting settled in our West Coast locale this summer, iSkoot’s dreams for expansion kicked into high gear. In early September, we acquired social network IM client Social.IM as part of our scheme to grow beyond mobile VoIP to offer live-connection mobile solutions for a broader spectrum of web services. Of course, this didn’t meant our mobile VoIP efforts were becoming a thing of the past - just ask the folks at 3, who launched a shiny new incarnation of the iSkoot-powered Skypephone, the Skypephone S2, or the folks at Android, who featured iSkoot for Skype in the Android Market when Android’s inaugural device, the T-Mobile G1, hit shelves across the US this fall.
Having closed our Series C funding in November, everyone at iSkoot is now gearing up for a very big year ahead. And if 2008 was any indication - a very big year it will be.
Thanks so much to everyone who helped to make our success this past year possible - especially our iSkoot for Skype and Skypephone users around the world. We look forward to delighting you with a whole new generation of game-changing mobile products in the coming months.
Until then, our very best wishes for 2009. Happy New Year, All!
…Particularly when Mark Jacobstein is running the show. Mark zipped down to San Jose yesterday to moderate a panel at the Mobile Content and Marketing Expo. The subject? How To Mobilize Existing Content.
Alongside panelist execs from Skyfire, Hollywood.com, and New Media Broadcasting Company, Mark led discussion on the various avenues for bringing current Web and TV content over to the mobile realm. MobilizedTV.com posted a great recap on the event, so we’ve pulled out a couple of highlights to share:
Topic 1: “Best Examples of Mobilized Content”
Hollywood.com’s Kevin Davis points to Flixster on the iPhone. an application that lets users find movie show times, watch trailers, get maps to local theaters and tap into Flixster’s database of 70,000 movie listings.
Highlighting the the natural fit of mobile and dynamic media-centered social networks, Russ Lujan of New Media Broadcasting volunteers Twitter for mobile as his mobile conversion of choice.
Skyfire sports junkie Nitin Bhandari admits ESPN’s mobile goodies are his personal favorite - where he tunes in for the scores but usually sticks around for all the additional interesting content.
Topic 2 (and arguably Mark’s favorite): “IS the mobile phone a PC in your pocket?”
Davis: Has his doubts, but understands that the inevitable shift into mobile isn’t something to be ignored. “This is a fundamental question. We went through a major re-design [on Hollywood.com], and even on this most amazing device that changed my life [the iPhone], it doesn’t work. We have to decide where this fits into our business model.”
Lujan: Acknowledges the overlap, but points out that it isn’t one-to-one. “We’re nearing earlier generation PC platforms on the handset. It does have the mobility factor…We’re probably a generation or two out from the mobile phone being what the PC can provide.”
Bhandari: Argues that the “PC” comparison doesn’t do the potential of the mobile handset proper justice. “The technical answer is that the mobile phone is absolutely a PC. It’s not as good as the PC of today that we’re all used to. But then part of me thinks that thinking of it as a PC is a failure of imagination. It’s so much more. It’s always on, always with you, nobody else uses it. It’s way more than a PC.“
As the conversation shifts to the future of mobile, Bhandari speculates that the mobile browser will become central to the mobile media experience. Naturally, Mark is all over this one with some ideas of his own.
Countering Bhandari, Mark contends that even PC-based browsers are still limited in terms of what they can access, and that mobile browsers won’t be ubiquitous in the foreseeable future.
“I would argue that the most interesting services that people will build will be completely integrated. The coolest thing on iPhone is that level of integration, and that takes more than a browser.”
Following iSkoot’s acquisition of Social.IM, Calcalist, the Economy section of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Acharonot visited iSkoot’s Israeli office for an interview with our CEO Mark Jacobstein and David Guedalia, iSkoot’s CTO.
One of the topics they covered in the interview: how iSkoot for Skype’s one-of-a-kind technology sets it apart from other mobile Skype applications. Of course, Mark loves nothing better than an opportunity to defend the iSkoot business model. Here is an excerpt:
Calcalist: Most start-ups nowadays use technology which circumvents the cellular networks to direct their calls- like the Israeli start-up, Fring. What is unique about iSkoot?
Mark: In contrast to the majority of the companies which offer VoIP
service from the cellular phone, iSkoot does not circumvent the cellular networks, but utilizes them. In reality, iSkoot’s Skype conversation begins as a cellular conversation and is directed to the data traffic from there. Cellular service providers do not like VoIP conversations on their network, as it clogs the network, and takes away from their income. I do not think that a company which provides VoIP services will be successful in the long run without working together with the cellular service providers. RIM, the manufacturer of the BlackBerry, is a good example of how this works.
Calcalist: So doesn’t courting the cellular company come at the expense of courting the clients?
Mark: If you work with the cellular company, you will also be able to provide better service for the clients. For instance, Hutchison provides iSkoot for Skype for free (with purchase of the X-Series package or a 3 SkypePhone).
