I have been watching the trends of Twitter Applications, Browsers and Platforms over the last couple of months and this type of segmentation and convergence had emerged.

First of all, what has excited me and what I have been waiting for over the last year has been an application that handles automatic translation.

Given the fact that I speak both Japanese and English and have business in both Asia and here in North America, I have wanted to build a consistent cross-border  following on twitter.  I found that with the existing Twitter platform, the only way to do this is with two-accounts.  With my existing account, when I tweet in Japanese, I loose followers.  When I tweet in English, I have a hard time growing Japanese followers.

I mentioned this concept to the Digital Garage folks last February when I was in Japan, but they all laughed.  About a year ago during a Breakfast in Vancouver, Jeff Pulver ( Founder of 140conf.com, serial entrepreneur and VOIP visionary)  and I had a lot of fun with this by cutting segments from Google translate into twitter to go back and forth between English and Twitter.  Even when Jeff started to Tweet in Hebrew, he saw how this took conversations to the next level and really touched individuals on the other end.  I can not stop thinking of the smile on his face when he said ” This is amazing”. So this is really the state of now when we see the auto-translation of different languages for different countries or multi-lingual translations.

When I saw the announcement in April by Hootsuite I felt like they were really listening to the customer; as there must had been lots others like me with the same predicament.  In my mind this is a big move by the Hootsuite folks in their attempt  at this and even though we have not yet seen this capability on Facebook,  MARK MY WORDS….. This is going to be one of the most important features for them with their 500M users in the coming months.  If they do not buy Hootsuite, then they will do this timeselves by the end of the year.

Given the fact I would like to Tweet in both English and Japanese simultaneously,  I really thought this would be a feature that Twitter would release to the market.  Given that Google is so strong in language tools, and Google has a terrific product ( Google Translate), I was pretty sure we would see this from our friends at Google first. Even thought this would get quickly integrated into Google Buzz so that it scaled.   English language schools  have grown from the cottage industry base to a core part of  Japanese society.  With the growth of iPhone and Android devices cross-border,  I am sure this type of feature is going to be more and more important.

What we have seen is that our friends in Vancouver ( Hootsuite) have really looked to market differentiation with these translation tools.  It only makes sense as Vancouver is one of those multilingual communities, and even here in Canada most people have adopted the two-language way ( English, French).

This is what the Hootsuite folks have to say:

Need more ways to socialize? Seeking zen-like efficiency? Start by updating HootSuite for iPhone to clear your mind and make your social media experience more enjoyable. This update adds full localization in four languages to go along with the recently-released translation tools. Both are designed to help marketers, socializers, and internationalists understand the vibe about their brand, industry, and interests from all over the globe. Additionally, the release includes a kit full of new tools to help you stay on top of multiple social streams — and share the best parts with remarkable efficiency.  All the features are available in both the Lite (no-cost) and Full ($2.99 USD) versions of HootSuite for iPhone.

This may be a risky strategy for Hootsuite as unless they can get clients on both sides of the pond ( meaning that in order to really use the multilingual features, but send and received need a Hootsuite client) Twitter will just copy and improve on this. When Twitter does release its interfaces to support multilingual capabilities, where will this leave Hootsuite?

Secondly, when it comes to integration we are seeing many companies bring in all the different feeds into there Applications. Fring just announced with much success their Video-Call capability for mobile, Seesmic continues to be “Switzerland” with all of the different Feed integrations.  I have just been waiting for them to make the product opensource or open API’s… as we have started to see more of with Tweetdeck and the Buzz API.

So where does this leave us?  As Twitter sits in the middle of it all, it makes me wonder if Twitter has just become a proprietary TCP/IP-like bit pipe?   They made the move to build there user experiences by buying the Application company Atebits most recently, but they are in a  good position being in the middle.

The wildcard in this evolution in my mind is now the Browser.   So lastly, I must say that the convergence that starts to get interesting is now what Plug-ins and what enablers we start to see in the browser as it also has become a standalone application in its own right. Opera released its application for the iPhone and in weeks we have seen Millions of downloads.  They have developed a widget framework that has been adapted by several of the carriers now to promote services, application and advertising revenue from the Widgets.  JIL ( Joint Innovation Lab – Softbank, Verizon, China Mobile and Vodafone) have actively been starting to promote the cross border opportunities with widgets through there entire network of devices as a core driver for developers, but the fact still remains that over 50% of developers are now focued on iPhone Applications.

Opera has positioned themselves very nicely in this Application game and it is going to be interesting what the next big moves are?  Will Opera be aquired as part of the JV of JIL? Will Facebook buy Opera? or will we see the integration of Twitter and all these applications into Opera?  or will we see Opera buy Hootsuite?

The fact remains that in the Application space there is a lot of convergence going on.  What we have not heard much of these days for advanced integrated apps is Google.  They did have their flagship Google I/O conference several weeks back and it is exciting to see that they are really driving HTML5.  As HTML5 expands this gets very interesting from the standpoint of Application convergence.  Where will this all go with HTML5 ( See my next post)

When I met the consumer reports team at the last CTIA, I enjoyed talking to them about the opportunities of bringing such a great brand to mobile.  Well they did, and here is the release of the ConsumerReports.org mobile strategy.

• Their focus is on the web, making the experience ubiquitous for all the different devices.
• You need to be a paid subscriber to ConsumerReports.org to get access to the publication, but  the key issue is that they did not raise there price for mobile. Any users that already have a subscription (~$29), also get mobile as part of the package.
• The product is perfect for on-the-go to see product ratings.

Here is the video of the product

It seems like this week was a key milestone for the HTML5 world. Google opened our Friday morning with an example of HTML5 Game ( PacMan) being added to the Google logo of search.  With approx 2B searches a day, this shows the scalability of having an active game embedded just as there was once a static logo.  Did Google pay for the rights of Pacman for the day? My wife thought her PC was attacked by a Virus!  Today was a great day for the progress of the web.

The Google I/O ( Input/Output) or ( Innovation/Openness) Conference was a great success in bringing more transparency and openness to web standards, and with the announcement of opening VP8 to the world as a royalty free licence ( I did not see the word perpetual???).  They launched Google TV, Music Streaming for the Android platform, and a wide variety of new announcements surrounding the Chrome App Store.  As for Wave, it has now moved from the closed invite only option that makes it very difficult to have a social network to being officially launched.

Yahoo announced the launch of a new class of interactive mobile display ads leveraging HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript technologies.  Yahoo stated that traditional static banners across the top and bottom of the mobile device screen were not optimal  and with–the new format promises to solve those issues via rich media content optimized for next-generation HTML5-based browsers. Yahoo Mobile product marketing staffers Mandar Shinde and Calvin Hung stated that this will enable  ”creative executions of interactive advertisements” on the Y! Mobile Blog.

Yahoo will launch its first interactive display campaign  with Paramounts and DreamWorks Animation release Shrek Forever After. “Going forward you can expect to see more ads that are tailored to the way people use mobile or that take advantage of particular attributes of mobile devices,” Shinde and Hung add. ”For example, we know users like to ‘content snack’ on mobile and ads that offer video or creative interactivity can be very successful.”

Now Adobe…. With all the chatter back and forth between Apple, iPad and the release of Flash, you think that Flash was the lifeline of Adobe.  Looking at this revenue breakdown of the company, it is clear that Flash is only a small part of the overall revenue strategy of Adobe.  What was very assuring is that now with HTML5 being the next coding platform for the Web, everybody is working together…

HTML5 aims to eliminate the need for web plug-ins like Adobe Flash. Instead, the functionality of Adobe’s Flash platform will be available right in the code of the web.)

The gradual elimination of Flash sounds like a bad thing for Adobe, but it’s actually not a huge problem. From a revenue perspective, Flash only accounted for 7% of the company’s revenue in fiscal 2009, or $231.2 million, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard.

While losing a revenue source is never a good thing, the widespread adoption of HTML5 can actually be good for Adobe. The company is introducing a bunch of tools for web developers to make HTML5 sites. Its Dreamweaver software, in particular, is getting an update to help web designers. There’s no reason that Adobe couldn’t even built an “export to HTML5″ command in Flash. As HTML5 grows, Adobe can offer new tools, and thus drive revenue growth.

Both Flash and Dreamweaver are part of Adobe’s core business — “Creative Solutions” — which generated half of Adobe’s revenue last quarter.

• Tons of  bug fixes and performance upgrades ( 3 months worth
• Fennec UI have been rebuilt entirely in CSS,
  • This will allow the browser to easily be tweaked  different handsets without having to go in and change the hardcoding, making it easier to  port Fennec to different screensizes and resolutions.
• And last but not least Add-ons! Lets see where this goes with the compatibility for plug-ins. This will become quite dynamic for plug-in providors to start building different User Interfaces for mobile….

My key question is when all of the API’s that we normally see for applications all start to become part of the browsing experience. No longer will a developer need to create an iPhone app to do those cool things, but in basic CSS and with widgets.

Something to keep an eye on.

http://m.popvoxawards.com

http://m.vipf.ca

http://m.vancouverdigitalweek.com

I am excited to see that even with all the GaGa only about iPhone Apps ( understandably so, but) that there are new announcements every day on some of the most practical usage cases of mobile linked to web development and the mobile browser.

As it does make sense to have an application based strategy, there is still a lot to be said about the browsing experience off of the

OpenSource Webkit ( Safari) browser that is used on Android/iPhones/Nokia devices and many more.  As the browser is equivalent to web browsing we experience on PC’s, having a mobile experience that lends itself to the smaller screen size and the user interface of a mobile device is a very smart approach for scaling your existing web/publishing digital strategy to mobile.

I am a very active user of Gmail on both my PC and Device and find that the hardware does not matter anymore. What matters is my seemless ability to connect to the services that I use frequently and email is something that is extemely important for me to have virtually on all the time and extendable in a very usable form from either my PC or my Nokia E71.    I did find it strange that Google has only launched this for iPhone and for Android, when it would make sense to have this for all devices that support webkit from the starting point.  I am sure we will see the announcement for Nokia support in the near future.

********************

Gmail has announced a new web interface for iPhone and Android platform based mobile web browsers. Built over a new engine, this Gmail Mobile interface closely resembles the Gmail Desktop version. The whole mail browsing, reading and composing experience has become faster, even over weak network connections.

The user interface has been optimized for snazzier inbox, a new ‘floaty bar’ and offline Gmail support. The new floaty bar allows archiving, deleting or more options for the email like Mark as Unread, Add star or Report as Spam. This floaty bar follows as one scrolls down further to select more emails. Navigation and display of threaded email conversations has been simplified and made faster.

Searching specific mails quickly is possible by poking the Magnifier button representing search. More messages can be viewed by hitting ‘Show more messages’ and the page hardly takes half a second to load more emails.

The new Gmail for Mobile is available on Apple iPhone and iPod Touch devices with firmware 2.2.1 or higher. All Android-powered phones are supported.

The iPhone OS 3.0 brings landscape keyboard support in the Mail application but it still takes a while to load messages. Scrolling between the messages often results in sore fingers. Also, search emails and labels are still difficult to use. However, the Gmail team has made many Gmail fans happy with the new desktop-like mobile web interface iPhone and Android platform.