WAP has become the “silent success story” of additional value-added services of recent years – at last “the mobile Internet” has enough users, so that it pays off to offer services through it, at the same time as the theme of mobile search is becoming more topical – how to find WAP-pages? Is the operator’s WAP opening page really the only solution?

At a 3GSM information session an analyst asked a rhetorical question: “Why is it that we have to search for a mobile search?” At least the smarter phones could have it at the bottom of the screen all the time? You type in the word, the phone connects to the Internet and takes you to the desired page right away?

At 3GSM it seemed that next year we will probably see some changes, because providing a good search becomes important for phone manufacturers and operators. Unlike the web search, where it is clear that Google is No 1 and everyone else follows at a great distance, the things with mobile search are blurrier and two approaches dominate: one is that Google will be used also for mobile search, the other is that each operator will offer its own search engine brand.

What are the advantages of each approach? The advantage of Google is, of course, that it is a world-known brand and their search results (excluding the China-business) are neutral. Search engines offered by operators (supplied by companies like JumpTap) are different, as in their case those items are preferred, which can be used via the mobile phone right away: for example, ringtones- wallpapers-games of the operator’s partners, mobile TV clips etc. Although the results are not neutral, they try to ensure that the content corresponds better to the habits of the mobile search user. I wonder which approach will be adopted by our local operators?

For several years the Nordic Mobile Media conference has been organized in Latvia and Lithuania. Now the scope has been broadened and the first Central European mobile media conference has been organized – mid-May in Prague. As expected, a lot of people were present, including my humble self, to find out how the Central European market differs from ours and what could we learn from them or take over. And vice versa.

After two days at the conference it seems that services like m-parking, m-payment, m-state etc. that are quite spread here, are viewed as “emerging services” – which is definitely a step ahead compared to the time some years ago, when no one even talked about those services. At the same time SMS services with periodic taxation (so called “clubs”) are more spread in Central and Eastern Europe than here. Our service providers are only making first tests with these.

Widely discussed new “future services” like mobile TV, selling full-length songs through mobile phones, mobile search etc. are still in the testing phase everywhere – some have achieved promising results, the majority still has nothing else to show than the bare existence of the service.

I’d better finish now. For those who are more interested, the organizers have put up slides of the speakers, from which I would bring out good overviews about mobile (service) market in Russia, the Czech Republic and the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.

My first experience was in July 2006, when I was boarding to a flight to Germany, exactly at the same time of the World Cup semifinal match between Italy and Germany. I had the possibility, though, to watch most of the match in the boarding area, thanks to a DVB-H mobile phone. 2 inches-wide screens are not really much, especially if you share the vision of the match with other 5-6 passengers. But still enough to catch something.

Some months later, in Vodafone, my boss showed me the German Mobile TV – this was not DVB-H but a simple video stream played by a UMTS phone. In this case, instead, the experience was much worse… I could hardly see the ball.

Some months again, and still I tried to watch some Mobile TV, this time on a Estonian UMTS phone. Not really better.

The reason is obvious: trying to resize a video stream (intended for a 800×600 screen) into a 240×160 stream cannot be done without a huge loss in quality. But why resizing when we can actually also crop?

Well, finally (but actually I would say that a prototype of this technology was already available much time ago), some company has developed a patented application for editing/encoding video contents from TV signal to 3GPP automatically with a single shot. The coolest thing, is that at this point you can simply use an eye-tracker that automatically recognizes the position on the screen where a test user is looking at, so that it is really possible to understand where the real focus of the action is. Have a look at the screenshot!

The drawback, at least at the moment, is that such operation (clipping and resizing in real time) at that time, was still too expensive for obtaining a real live stream. But now, times are come, and the real Mobile TV is not anymore an utopia.
Ah, you do not need to spend 5000 eurs for a eye-tracker. There are head-pointers (mainly used for users with motorial disabilities) that cost much less and have much similar results. Otherwise, google around, there are applications that do the same!