Pat Phelan, the mastermind behind Cubic Telecom and MAXroam has launched a brand new service called Twitterfone. It uses speech recognition to turn your voice into tweets on your Twitter account.

A number of services also provide a similar service: Jott and Spinvox come to mind. However, Spinvox is a pay service and Jott is “free in beta.” However, this is focused only on twitter, and it’s bog simple to use.

Local country numbers are available in 10 different countries, including the US, UK, and Ireland. Local numbers in 40 countries are expected within the next 6 weeks.

Crossposted from The Web 2.0 Weblog

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A consortium of three companies has decided to improve on the usual URL-carrying QR Codes by tweaking the data in each black and white square to contain a brief snatch of audio and a simple image. Digitalworld Toyko reports.

“The Voice QR, as it’s called, simply needs to be scanned with the camera on a mobile phone for it to give up its hidden treasure without the need to connect to a website.

That might be a squeaky voice saying “Hello,” “Well done on getting into college,” or “Thanks for your hard work.”

The consortium sees Voice QR Codes delivering multi-media jingles from posters, books and product packaging. For that to happen, it will have to persuade mobile phone makers to install software that understands the new kind of QR code – currently, only seven handsets are capable of doing so.”

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A German supermarket is encouraging customers to scan and ring up their shopping using camera phones, and check out without the help of a cashier.

Watch BBC video.

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Project Lady Bag uses RFID tags to keep a track of the items you stuff into your bag. Should you miss out on your elusive keys; a related icon will appear on the LED screen.

The LadyBag also displays how you are feeling, fidgety hands is read as nervousness and so a nervous looking emoticon appears. If you’re hugging the bag close, a happy face appears.

[gearfuse via Gizmodiva]

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Absolutely amazing, the new MIDP3.0 will bring us powerful and cool features for future mobile software. The new java platform will be released next Q2 2008, some months before Android.

Most remarkable MIDP3.0 enhancements are animated GIF, support for multiple orientations (landscape / portrait), scale / rotation of the images…

Especially there are a some features that will make a difference in the user experience:

LIBlets
Code shared between MIDlets. As studio or company, all your games or applications have common parts (key management, 3D engine, text management…), from MIDP3.0 these parts of code will remain common and outside your developments, don’t worry about these common features. All your games or applications will reuse it in a shared and secure environment inside the phone

Auto-start
MIDP3.0 phones will be able to launch a MIDlet once the phone is initialised.
This feature will let to a concrete brand to distribute (free or not) a mobile handset that launches an on line shop offering the last products.
I can imagine a gameloft phone that once is turned on displays its own menu plenty of new updated demo games ready to play, your fave games, buttons for call, messaging… Funny !
2009 - 2010 is going to be years for handset personalisation, brands will have the needed tools to offer consumers its own custom phones.

IMC (Inter MIDLet communication)
Launch a MIDlet from another MIDlet, ok that’s cool. If one MIDlet can launch another I can create a game that launches other games, or one game that launches different levels and one level is a completely different java development.

OTA RMS
Download configuration files stored in the phone and shared by your MIDlets.
What remains the same across games and applications ? The player or user.
Player and user profile information (photo, alias …) is stored in servers. This feature will let to download and share this information for all the games or applications from a concrete publisher.

2008 will bring us Android and MIDP3.0, it is gonna be a mobile revolution and we are going to see spectacular mobile software.

http://www.mobilemediaconsult.com/2007/11/midp30-overview-of-right-android-rival.html

What would happen if everyone, anywhere, could have their own live television station from a mobile phone? The BBC has an idea.

“A number of services including Qik and Flixwagon, are competing to make “live” the next big thing in web video, and YouTube is poised to introduce its own live service.

… Eran Hess, the chief executive of Flixwagon, has made a deal with MTV which has seen the station give phones with Flixwagon software installed to what it calls “Street Journalists” to cover the primaries in the United States.

Their clips are shown live on the web - whether it’s an Obama victory speech or vox pops with New York voters - and some make it onto MTV itself.

Eran Hess also revealed that he had just done a deal with an Israeli news channel which will supply similar phones to citizens in the towns of Sderot and Ashkelon where rockets fired from Gaza have been landing.

So a phone and a piece of software - and a 3g network - are you all need now to start putting your message across to a live audience. It promises to give new vigour to the whole idea of citizen journalism, and poses a challenge to existing broadcasters.

Because of course these citizen journalists are not bound by any code of taste, decency, truth or impartiality, which could give their broadcasts a dangerous, edgy quality which might appeal more to viewers than the professional version of television news.

Welcome to a future where everything may be televised - live. I’m not entirely sure I like the idea.”

On Qik you can watch and listen to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, filmed by Robert Scoble for Fast Company.

http://www.textually.org/picturephoning/archives/2008/03/019375.htm