Talking with Windows Mobile at CntrStg

During CES, Senior Product Manager for Windows Mobile – Greg Sullivan, came out to CntrStg to talk to us in more detail about what Steve Ballmer showed off during his keynote a couple days earlier. Greg walked us through the new Netflix application that allows you to control and rank your downloads as well as start a movie download so that it will be ready for watching when you get home from work. NetFlix and Microsoft have worked hard on this and it looks very nice! If only NetFlix had a Canadian presence.

Greg also talked about the long awaited IE Mobile 6. This was announced last year at Mobile World Congress and was promised as something that would be widely available “soon”. Ultimately, the problem came down to performance and the default setup of devices didn’t allow for optimal performance of the application. So instead of releasing it early and having a mediocre response, they decided to bundle it with new devices that would be better optimized to handle it. You can expect devices to begin to ship with IE Mobile 6 in Q1 of this year. That pretty much means any day now.

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone; Microsoft has been focusing Windows Mobile on the enterprise market in the past. To bring the phones to a wider consumer adoption, Microsoft understands that changes are needed and they are working on those changes – whatever they may be. According to Greg, a platform update that is set to ship later this year will dramatically change the user experience and help to extend Windows Mobile into the consumer market. Try as we did, Greg wouldn’t expand on this comment. I guess all we can do is wait and see. Hopefully we’ll get an announcement or some sneak peak at the upcoming MWC. [ ..Read More.. ]

Eye-Fi Changes How You Deal with Digital Pictures

One of the first companies I saw at CES was Eye-Fi.  They dropped by CntrStg early on Thursday and showed off their products. Ziv Gillat, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, showed off the latest in Eye-Fi goodness. I had never heard of Eye-Fi prior to CES this year, but now that I have seen this product in action, you can bet that I’ll be buying one shortly!  So what is so great about these Eye-Fi guys? Easy, they take your standard SD card and add in wireless plus a little smarts. So now when you take a picture, it will automatically upload your pictures over your wireless router to your home computer or to your flickr account. That means you will never have to take the card out of your camera, insert it into your computer, and manually copy pictures off it again and that’s hands down cool.

Ziv told us about their latest announcement – video support.  With the latest card, you can automatically upload videos you take from your camera right to YouTube! Or, if you really feel the need, you can put a copy on your computer as well.

The Eye-Fi cards support all of the popular online photo sharing sites, including SmugMug and Flickr. Certain cards also support Geo-Tagging of your photos through the use of SkyHook. The idea behind SkyHook is actually pretty slick. It uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi Positioning to get a fast, accurate and dependable location information for your pictures. And unlike GPS, it works great indoors.

Eye-Fi has been in operation for approximentaly 2 years, and have had product available for about 1 year. In that year, they have seen over 5 million pictures uploaded to online photo sharing sites via their Eye-Fi cards.  That number does not include the pictures people have had sent to their computers.

I’m going to be adding one to my gadget bag shortly.  I’m just trying to decide if I should wait for my local store to carry the Geo-Tagging card, or just grab the regular version and do without the location goodies. I highly recommend this card to anyone that snaps pictures on a regular basis.  You won’t be disappointed.

CntrStg, CES 2009 and Twitter

I’ve written about CntrStg here in the past. This past week I’ve been down here in Vegas for CES and running CntrStg. It’s been such a busy weekend that I haven’t had a time to make any posts.  CntrStg was a huge success and we’re definitely looking to do it again and maybe even at other trade shows besides CES. I’ve made a lot of connections and talked with numerous companies.  As a result, you’ll be seeing a lot more reviews and in-depth articles about various products. I also have pages of notes that I took at various sessions and events. I will be writingt them up over the coming days. So stay tuned!

As an aside, I’ve setup a Twitter feed for Mobile Jaw. If you’re looking to get the latest Mobile Jaw posts in your twitter feed, simply follow http://twitter.com/MobileJaw

CntrStg – Changing the Face of CES

One of the projects that I have been working on outside of my day job and this site, is something called CntrStg – pronounced “CenterStage”. CntrStg is a concept that a group of us came up with while attending CES last year. In the past, every Community Leader, Blogger, and Podcaster would be racing up and down the Las Vegas strip to meet with various companies and listen to them talk one-on-one about their plans for the coming year. More often than not, we found ourselves crossing paths with one another as we entered and exited these meetings. Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to stay in one location and have the companies come and talk to all of us in one shot? CntrStg does just that. We have already signed up companies to present, as well as community leaders from some of the top tech and gadget sites around the Internet to attend. CntrStg will be the place to be during CES 2009!

You can read all about CntrStg, including our press release that should be going live on the wire as you read this post, over at the CntrStg website – http://www.cntrstg.com