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.

• 4 billion global mobile subscribers (ITU, 2009)
• In 2009 half of all connections to the internet worldwide will come from a mobile phone. (eMarketer, 2008 and 2009)

This is a bit hard to believe even for me, as I would imagine that most cellphone customers don’t have a data plan.

MetroPCS is a prepaid cellphone company which offers fully unlimited plans starting at just $40/month. They have 5 million subscribers and just entered the New York market. I was aware of their offerings but not the data promotion for new voice customers: free internet for the first month and if they choose to upgrade, unlimited data for a flat rate. As a result nearly half of their users optin for this down the line. The big point here is simplicity as all consumers demand an unlimited data access just like with our home ISP.

The original article has a lot of interesting mobile stats from Google indicating current trends:

In a few years the mobile phone will become a mobile computer with the ability to make voice calls being just one of the features.
Following that, there will be a move to the web-enabled applications that live in the browser just as we have seen on the PCs. But for now the hype is still around installable native applications.

T-Mobile (reported Feb. 27)
•    Wireless Revenue: $4.9 billion
•    Wireless Net Income: $483 million
•    Wireless Data Revenue: $905 million
•    Net Prepaid Adds: 355,000
•    Net Postpaid Adds: 266,000
•    Total Subscribers: 32.8 million
•    Blended Churn (contract and prepaid): 3.3 percent
•    ARPU: Postpaid $54, prepaid $23

Sprint (reported Feb. 19)
•    Wireless Revenue: $6.56 billion
•    Wireless Loss: $1.82 billion
•    Wireless Data Revenue: N/A
•    Net Subscriber Loss Prepaid: 314,000
•    Net Subscriber Loss Postpaid: 1.1 million
•    Total Subscribers: 49.3 million
•    Churn: Postpaid 2.16 percent, prepaid 8.2 percent
•    ARPU: Postpaid $56, prepaid $30

AT&T (reported Jan. 28)
•    Wireless Revenue: $11.5 billion
•    Wireless Operating Income: $2.7 billion
•    Wireless Data Revenue $3.1 billion
•    Net Subscriber Adds Prepaid: 800,000
•    Net Subscriber Adds Postpaid: 1.3 million
•    Total Subscribers: 77 million
•    Churn: Postpaid 1.2 percent, prepaid N/A
•    ARPU: Postpaid $59.59, prepaid N/A

Verizon (reported on Jan. 27)
•    Wireless Revenue: $11.1 billion
•    Wireless Operating Income: $3.57 billion
•    Wireless Data Revenue: $3.2 billion
•    Net Subscriber Adds Prepaid and Postpaid: 1.2 million
•    Total Subscribers: 72.1 million
•    Churn: 1.35 percent blended, postpaid 1.05 percent
•    ARPU: Blended $51.72

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

Fast forward to March 10, 2009 – Boston, MA, about 8:00ish AM – Ilya and I are sipping coffee and eating breakfast in the new TechStar Boston office, attending the exciting “TechStars for a Day” event. To Ilya’s amusement, and my surprise that he wasn’t kidding, I find myself in a cramped room, surrounded by lots of nerds, exchanging ideas – which probably would be interesting to me – if I could understand what they are!

With a little exaggeration, this is how one of the most amazing and interesting events I’ve ever attended, began… In all seriousness, all the entrepreneurs and fellow TechStars applicants that I met, were not that nerdy and had awesome and innovative ideas, which were relayed in simple language and with passion.

Now about the “TechStars for a Day” full experience… Well for starters, I’m still in awe of Shawn’s (blog), David’s (blog) and Brad’s (blog) and accomplishments and their modesty that goes along with it. Just to be in the same room with these incredibly successful entrepreneurs, pure geniuses, oh – and most importantly innate, charismatic comedians, is a complete honor. The program which they prepared for us was fun, educational, valuable and stimulating. Their laid back style along with the informality of the program’s setup, made us feel comfortable and very welcome.

It was so interesting to learn about the TechStars program, their founders’ accomplishments and meet all the impressive (which is an understatement) mentors who take part in the program. All the sessions were very informative and beneficial; especially the Q&A with previous TechStars “graduates” who shared their stories with us, and graciously thanked TechStars for the current success of their companies. The atmosphere was filled with entrepreneurship, innovation, motivation and encouragement. Ilya and I are fortunate that we were invited to such an exciting event and got a chance to experience the cool vibe of TechStars. We are now more passionate than ever, more driven than ever, and are working on Mobilestead more diligently than ever before. Ilya and I want to prove to Brad, David and Shawn on March 21, 2009 (application deadline) that they should choose us, such that our experience with TechStars will last more than a day.

The article, Smartphones to go: Five apps you’ll want to pack illustrates just that. The new applications, both free and paid versions, offer to a traveler valuable, convenient, and on-the-go services all from one device – the traveler’s phone. For example, digital books and magazines through the Stanza application, or the Pocket Express “mobile concierge.”

I don’t want to undermine these “cool” and useful applications under any circumstances, because if one had a smartphone, they would surely be using them when traveling. However, I do have a concern: the fact that all these applications are developed individually, also means that they are unique and may be hard to access or figure out. I personally like extremely “user friendly” computer/cell-phone (which may soon become an interchangeable term!) devices, and would think that a group of useful applications, especially for one purpose, i.e. traveling, should be built under one umbrella. I think that if there was a standard, master application that offers a variety of options for any service, and is in the same format and style, that such a device would catch on faster and to a greater market range. Nowadays, simplicity attracts clientele, and I’m in front of the line waiting patiently for an umbrella of such applications.

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.

Some other interesting findings from the study:

• iPhone users are four times as likely to recall LBS (location-based service) ads as non-iPhone users.
• Calling a toll free phone number published in the ads is the most common means of response; iPhone users called twice as much as non-iPhone users
• One in seven consumers reported buying a product or visiting a store as a result of seeing a mobile advertisement; for iPhone users, more than one in four bought something as a result of seeing an ad

More info at ReadWriteWeb.

As we all know, Apple’s iPhone comes with restrictions that prevent owners from running applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes App Store. Prior to iPhone 2.0 and AppStore, which came out in July 2008, jailbreaking was the only way to run 3rd party applications. This voided the warranty, yet hundreds of thousands of users went ahead with this. Since these applications were typically free, when AppStore was officially opened, many developers moved their apps there and now had an ability to make money from their efforts. There are many applications that are rejected from the AppStore due to Apple’s or AT&T policies of offering competing services (using the iPhone camera for video, laptop tethering) or doing things in “unsupported” way. Also some applications can be banned for being “useless or offensive” (example: Obama Trampoline iPhone App)

Mozilla and Skype has come out saying that they are on the same page as Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which has opposed the Apple’s new rule by filing an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This exemption would take away Apple’s ability to charge groups with DMCA violations for circumventing the iPhone’s security by modifying Apple’s internal software.

Apple claims that by jailbreaking the software one is violating their copyright on the cellphone’s software. They justify the policy by saying that opening the iPhone to independently created applications will compromise safety, security and reliability. But shouldn’t I be able to run “buggy” software if I choose to?

An iPhone is a platform just like a PC and should be open to developers.

At Mobilestead, we use WebApps as much as possible as this avoids the Apple approval process and enhances portability between multiple platforms.