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The Google IO keynotes were boring. I cant believe I wasted ten minutes watching before I turned off. In-app payments in Chrome Web Store? Yawn…

What Google should have announced to make things exciting:
- That they are launching their own mobile operator. All android devices with their SIM gets unlimited data at a low cost.

- Google Search adds semantic analysis. When I search for Abba it should ask me if Im looking for the music group or the Swedish brand of tuna fish sold at IKEA.

- Their self-driving cars have been proven to cause *less* accidents than cars driven by humans and will start being sold to consumers in a cooperation with Toyota in 2012. nuff said!

Funny, I wrote this back in December but forgot to publish it!
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Playing the prediction game is fun, but impossible. One of my core beliefs is that the future is inherintely unpredictable. The best way to predict the future is always to guess that things will be the same as the last year. So lets try that:

Apple will launch a new version of the iPad and a new version of the iPhone. They will both be huge succeses and outsell any other single smartphone or tablet. Nokia will remain the market leader in terms of market share. Analysts will debate if market share is a valid measure of Nokia’s and Apple’s success.

Google will continue to be the #1 search engine. They will take a stab at launching a new social product to replace Google Buzz. It will be mildly successful.

Mobile operators will continue to debate if they should become smart bit-pipes or if they should launch their own app stores and API offerings. The only ones who will be profitable in this space will be WAC (who charges huge membership fees) and STL Partners (who runs the Telco 2.0 conferences).

Today I decided to bring my iPad instead of MacBook Pro for a one day business trip as a test of the iPad as a true post-PC device.

My conclusion: the iPad is 70% there.

Now admittedly my work on the road is basically mail and PowerPoint. Obviously, if you have applications on OS X not available on the iPad this is not going to work for you.

Overall, I was satisfied with the experiment. The extreme light weight and excellent battery time is something you appreciate quickly. Not only can I leave my computer at home – I also can leave the charger!

There were four things that bothered me though:
1) Inadequate coy and paste. The copy paste does not work in all apps and especially not on all websites. For some reason I was unable to select text in the Gmail iPad optimized interface and in one internal web application we use.

2) Dropbox is a must to access files. But the iOS app does unfortunately not auto-sync all files like it does on the Mac. Instead, only starred files and recently viewed files are available. Dropbox needs a Sync all button that I can use when I am home on my Wi-Fi to be useful to me on the road.

3) No ability go edit PowerPoint files. Admittedly, Keynote for iOS might do what I need. But from what Ive seen on YouTube it only seems to support light editing. This is my biggest problem as it is scary not to be able to make last minute changes in a presentation before a meeting. Any PPT editor also needs DropBox integration.

4) Not possible to mail files from DropBox or import files from mail to DropBox. Dropbox needs a Send as attachment feature and the Mail app needs to be able to save files into DropBox.

I tested the iPhone app “WordLens” briefly the other day. A pretty nitfy app that promises to do on-the-fly translations using the iPhone´s built in camera. If you haven´t seen it already, check this video out:

To be honest, the app is pretty much worthless. Using Google Translate is free and more accurate. Half of the time the app won’t recognize text and unless you hold the phone completely still it doesn´t work. It´s still impressive though and will probably get better over time. I wonder if it was even possible to do this on a desktop computer with a webcam ten years ago? Someone needs to compare the iPhone specs with a $599 desktop from 2001 and also factor in that we have much better algorithms for image processing now than back in 2001.

WordLens is the first app that earns the name “augmented reality app”. Why? Because it actually uses the camera for it´s data input instead of displaying it as a background. Layar and similar apps are just a fancy way of displaying map data on top of a background composed of the input from the phone´s camera.

If I´m gonna make one prediction for 2011 then I would predict that we will see more apps like WordLens that are true augmented reality apps. For the first time we have image processing algorithms and mobile processors that are powerful enough to do realtime  processing of the camera input and recognize salient features in it. The app stores of the world are just waiting for developers to take advantage of that!

A short wrap-up of the year that has passed:

February-March
Lets skip the dark Swedish winter months, shall we?

April
Me and Stefan launched whentotweet.com. A very succesful launch, lots of press!
Got my iPhone 3GS pickpocketed right in the middle of Stockholm of all places.

May
Bought a new car, a Volvo V50 of course (what can I say – I´m Swedish).
Got married! I never wanted a big wedding but I´m happy Sophie convinced me otherwise.
Note to self: Don´t get married, buy a car and take a honeymoon trip during the same month. It can put a strain on your bank account.

June-August
Family issues during the summer that I won´t go into detail here. Thanks to all who supported me.

September
Resigned from Ericsson.
Decided to get UL flight certificate. Didn´t realize that it would consume all of my spare time during the rest of the year.
Got my iPhone4, an amazing device.

October
Lots of flying lessons as I was waiting to leave Ericsson…

November
…to join Payfone as Director Solutions and Technology EMEA. Can´t wait for next year and all the stuff that we will be rolling out.

December
Lots of hard work in preparation for next year. Here´s hoping I can blog about the stuff I´m working on at Payfone during next year.

If you want to keep your phone bills at a reasonable level, travelling with an iPhone means turning off mobile data. And we all know what that means: your smartphone turns into a dumb piece of metal and glass.

Artists illustration of an iPhone without mobile data. Source: Gizmodo

Both the iPhone and Android phones are noisy, data-wise. Even if you don’t actively use mobile data, things like push notifications and playing games with game center consumes data.

But I’ve noticed that there are only two mobile data services I *really* need while travelling:
1) Google Maps
2) E-mail

So here’s what I want: a VPN solution that does the following:
1) Only allows IMAP data to/from Gmail
2) Blocks the download of any Gmail attachments
3) Compresses Google maps so that the tiles are just barely readable.

Sounds like a great idea for a Y Combibator startup, no?

Today Ericsson Labs is launching Async Voice, a communication tool built from the ground up using internet standards.

This is how they describe the thinking behind the application:

Much of the communication happening online today is asynchronous, meaning that the user is in control of when and how to communicate. You can reply to a chat message, a Facebook wall-post or a received SMS whenever you feel like it. The added flexibility of asynchronous communication together with instant notifications, i.e. the “real-time web”, allows for simple yet powerful communication

What if you would combine the richness of voice together with the simplicity and flexibility of asynchronous communication? Introducing: “Async Voice”

I really can’t explain in words how it works, so go try it yourself (and then come back).

Async voice is part of a trend where we constantly find new ways to communicate. We can send text messages, tweet, do status updates, send facebook messages, e-mail someone, or phone them. The interesting thing about this is that whenever we find a new way of communicating it almost always finds users. So I think the lesson to be learnt is that we are only at the start of innovation in the communication space.

This short video with Bert Nordberg (CEO of Sony Ericsson) contains everything that is wrong with the race for developers in mobile platforms.

First of all, saying that you are trying to attract developers makes it sound like you are trying to attract lone developers sitting in their basement coding for fun. In practice you need three types of companies: the  hundreds (thousands?) of small indie companies that might make the next Angry Birds,  the large established companies (EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu) and the internet companies whose services you need to work on your device (Facebook, Twitter, Spotify).

All of these companies have one thing in common: they want a business case to invest in a particular platform. That business case contains two components: the cost to develop for a platform and the potential revenue. The iPhone business case is sound: it’s an easy platform to develop for and there is a large potential revenue. Tada, case closed!

The second mistake Bert makes is saying that you don’t need hundreds of thousands of applications because most people only use ten applications. The problem is that not everyone uses the same ten applications. Of those ten applications that people use it might be one of them that made them choose one particular platform. If you are an amateur pilot in your spare time a flight planning application only available for Android might be your most important app. The other nine games and fart apps does not decide what platform you choose.

Service providers should focus on their core assets – their network, customer and product data. And they should leverage their core capabilities, such as billing, customer care, and service delivery to create new services they can monetize through partnerships with Google and other over-the-top competitors.

There are more and more mobile apps coming out that use the phone’s camera in new clever ways. Apps that do everything from reading bar-codes to recognizing faces to recognizing text.

Here’s something I would like to see in Android 4.0 or iOS 5.0: hooks that allow image processing apps to directly hook into the live feed from the camera whenever the camera app is loaded.

Imagine this: You fire up the camera and point it at someone. Immediately the face-recognizing image hook feeds the person’s face  into Facebook which overlays data about the person. A click on the person’s face takes you to their facebook page. Move the camera the other way, over a bar code on a wine bottle and the Wine app you have recognizes the bar code and overlays information about this particular bottle of wine.

I could go on, but you get the picture.