This week has been an exciting one in mobile and voice news, here’s three important stories you don’t want to miss.
iPhone to Open to Outside Apps
Steve Jobs posted to the Apple Hot News page today that a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod touch will be released in February. I’ll be curious to see what kind of reactions emerge around this news in a few hours, after everyone sobers up from the announcement. I bought a futon couch on iPhone weekend (a purchase the whole family could enjoy, brick and price drop free) but our crew over at Last100 has an in-depth analysis of the SDK news.
GoogleDocs Goes Mobile
A new mobile version of Google Docs has been released and it’s a whole lot better than nothing. That’s about all it’s better than, though – it’s view only.
Maybe I’d change my tune if I was viewing Google Docs Mobile on an iPhone, as Chris Messina is in the image here.
On my BlackJack (great phone by the way) and IE mobile you can’t edit any docs, you can’t invite new collaborators or viewers, you can’t do much at all in fact. Doc view is great and I’m thankful for that but spreadsheet view in HTML is barely usable and Presentations can’t be viewed at all. It’s a good start and I can imagine using it, but I sure hope it’s only the beginning.
MySpace Ads Skype Calling
Starting next month, MySpace users will have Skype voice calling integrated into their IM clients. Both Skype In and Out will be available. That’s a big score for Skype but why not team with Gizmo or another open standards based VOIP client so that developers can leverage that too in the forthcoming “MySpace platform.” That’s a rhetorical question. I’d love to see the business details on this deal.
Some days the mobile and voice worlds are really interesting to pay attention to. I’d say today is one of those days. It’s hard to think of a set of technologies likely to be more important in the future.
