In less than two days, Skype for iPhone has been downloaded more than one million times – around six downloads every second.

That’s amazing growth for these type of applications and it’s obvious that Skype will dominate in mobile VoIP as well.

This also gives iPod Touch users an ability to make calls over the WiFi network. They will need to purchase an external mic to do this.

Its also worth noting that Fring and Truphone had Skype integration for months, but now we have a native Skype app which allows for IM, loading the avatars and more importanly to make the “callout” calls.

Microsoft is sponsoring the first-ever “Mobile Incubation Week” to help startups incubate outstanding ideas.

We picked three that have most potential and utility:

Location Awareness
Location-sensing technologies (powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation) provide live information on users’ locations to enhance mobile social networking applications. Over the next two years, this sort of technology is expected to become more mainstream. There are still a bunch of privacy questions around this: Do you want all your online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal mean that you’re up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, or boss)?

Mobile User Interfaces
With mobile applications the User Interface is crucial as the screen size is limited and the user is usually multitasking. Apple has been so successful because of their UI. Businesses will need to mobilize their B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer) applications to keep up with a rapidly-evolving standard for mobile user interface.

Mobile Widgets
Widget-like applications will become more common especially when reaching consumers. Gartner highlights that mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS.

Mobilestead will help businesses to meet their mobile objectives and leverage the above to increase productivity, save money and increase customer satisfaction.

For more information on the above technologies and the full list of 8, you can read the full report on Gartner’s web site.

NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas are the main players. They both provide mapping data to GPS manufacturers and online mapping services.

GPA Magazine has a very good discussion of them.

Fletch concludes that NAVTEQ is the better choice (in the USA). It is a bit more expensive to the GPA manufacturers.

Frankly, when choosing a navigation device, I can hardly think of anything more important than having current and accurate maps! Until I hear otherwise, I say NAVTEQ is the way to go.

Here is a good blog article about Google decision to move to TeleAtlas.

Native App Web App
Offline Access X
Has local storage Requires Internet Connectivity.
Access to core phone features (GPS, camera, accelerometer phone book, calendar,) X
Updates to new version Requires approval of AppStore (takes a lot of time). Users have to download the updated version Instant since it’s on the server
Portability to other mobile platforms (Android, Blackberry etc) A lot easier
Speed A lot faster
You can define your own caching strategies, your own network services, and your own event/threading model.
Data Storage Persistant data in their own local data store, even being able to use SQLite, and allow offline access.
AppStore Lots of free traffic
Requires approval which can take 2 weeks+
Your application may get rejected
Some of the applications maybe be a B2B product and would not be going to the app store.

Here are 2 good blog posts on the same topic:
I started doing some technical research and have decided that maybe an iPhone WebApp is the way to go vs iPhone (native) App.
It seems that there are some obvious advantages with this:
Right now there are about 3x as many iPhone Apps vs WebApps.
I’ve seen the iPhone Facebook WebApp app vs. Native app and they are pretty close. Facebook has built probably the best WebApp that I have seen. Of course it’s limited: can’t use Facebook Chat, upload pictures etc – but it’s a lot cheaper and quicker to develop.

http://www.appcelerant.com/iphone-app-vs-web-app.html <— A good topic on similar topic
http://keithahern.com/?p=94 talks about wrapping a webapp just to have yourself listed in the AppStore (access to new users)