Widgets for Your Mobile Life

The football season is winding down, and baseball is still a few months off, so sports nuts have been getting their fix by following NBA and NCAA Basketball action. Plusmo once again is offering these fans compelling NBA and NCAA Basketball apps for their mobile phone (iPhone, TMobile G1, etc.). The apps have live scores, standings, news, blogs, and even allow users to chat and cheer their team before, during, and after a game. Check out the screen shots below, and simply visit nba.plusmo.com or ncaab.plusmo.com on your mobile phone to grab the apps.

After months of anticipation, people finally got their hands on the T-Mobile G1, the world’s first Android-powered smartphone. And Plusmo was right in the midst of all the excitement. Plusmo’s Pro Football Live and College Football Live were among a select set of cool apps that were showcased on Android Market. With Pro Football Live and College Football Live, G1 users will never miss a minute of their favorite teams and players this season. Just like the popular iPhone Apps, Plusmo’s Android apps give football fans a totally unique “virtual stadium experience.” In addition to live, play-by-play updates, news and great game-time photos, you can “Smack Talk” with other fans or Boo and Cheer teams and plays. With some good coverage in the Wall Street Journal, SportsBusiness Journal, ZDNet and Wireless Week, it’s been a good week. Here are some screenshots:

There are two stories dominating the news and blogosphere today: Joe the Plumber and the new T-Mobile G1. At Plusmo, we’re phone geeks at heart, so we’d prefer to read people’s first impression of the new Android-powered smartphone. Here is a quick round-up of some of the interesting reviews we’ve been reading today:

Bonnie Cha at CNet posted a thorough “first look” video of the T-Mobile G1. Watch for our cameo appearance when Bonnie talks about Android operating system right around 1:30.

We may be partial, but we really enjoyed Matthew Miller’s review for ZDNet. It boasts “over 260 images and 5 videos” and we especially like the part that says Plusmo’s Pro Football Live is one his favorite apps at Android Market.

David Pogue shared his G1 report card in the New York Times tech section.

Over at TheStreet.com, Gary Krakow says the G1 “is loaded with terrific features.” He briefly mentions that Pro Football Live is available on both iPhone and G1.

At CrunchGear, Peter Ha has a “short and straight to the point” review, cutting right to what he sees as the good and the bad.

MocoNew says the G1 is “ the most customizable device” they’ve ever seen.

Stay tuned for more Android news from Plusmo!

If you are a sports fan, and if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, Plusmo has some compelling iPhone Apps for you. All of Plusmo’s iPhone Apps give you the latest scores, news, and schedules. In addition, our Pro Football and College Football Apps have social networking features that give you a ‘virtual stadium’ experience so you can ‘Smack Talk’ and Cheer or Boo teams or plays.

Check out the attached screen shots, and also stay tuned for more exciting sports Apps in the future (Cricket, Basketball, Soccer and more).

Also, in case you don’t have an iPhone, all of our sports offering are available on hundreds of other mobile devices. Simply point your mobile device web browser to plusmo.com!

Plusmo is proud to announce that we’ve been recognized as a Forum Nokia Innovation Series Developer.

The Forum Nokia Innovation Series program is designed to provide select small- and mid-sized developers with key business and market support and facilitate access for cutting-edge applications and services to the Nokia mobile device market, which is one of the largest mobile device markets in the world today. In order to be selected as a Innovation Series Developer, Plusmo cleared multiple selection hurdles over the course of the past year, including internal Nokia reviews and the screening of application features and functionality by consumer focus groups around the world.

Plusmo was specifically recognized by Nokia for our development of a standards-based mobile web widget developer platform. We’ve already written about the power of mobile widgets and the benefits of our widget engine, so we thank Nokia for this recognition. We won’t rest on our laurels though, so expect to see continued innovation from Plusmo.

Over the last several blog posts we’ve been highlighting the many cool and useful features of Plusmo’s Mobile Widgets. We’ve included photos, reviews, and information on how to get Plusmo’s Mobile Widgets on your own phone.

We also have a great selection of videos that demonstrate the power and convenience of Plusmo’s Mobile Widgets. For example, the following video demonstrates the latest version of the Plusmo client, Plusmo 3.0 (which is still in beta):

Here are two other great videos that highlight some of our most popular Mobile Widgets for Pro Football (USA) and Cricket.

Stay tuned for more great videos of our newest Mobile Widgets!

Following up on our post about Plusmo and the S60 platform, Plusmo has been selected as a featured application by Nokia for its S60 devices. Plusmo brings the power of Mobile Widgets to users of S60 devices, so we are very excited to receive this recognition.

Stay tuned for more information about our Mobile Widgets and as always we love to receive feedback from our users.

Tomorrow Apple is launching their second generation iPhone, so given all the excitement around the launch we’d like to remind everyone about Plusmo’s exciting offerings for the iPhone.

There is no doubt that the iPhone is an exciting mobile phone, media player, and portable computer.  The iPhone has great hardware and software, and since all iPhone owners have an unlimited data plan and easy access to WiFi, the iPhone is a great device for Mobile Widgets.

Plusmo on iPhone

We’ve made all of our Mobile Widgets available on the iPhone.  Simply point the Safari browser on your iPhone to plusmo.com.  In addition to Widgets that deliver news, games, podcasts, videos, RSS feeds, weather, comics, etc., we’ve optimized the Widgets for the iPhone.

Customizing Your Widgets

Let’s look at how you can customize your Plusmo home screen with the Mobile Widgets that fit your preferences.  You can customize your plusmo.com home screen on the iPhone from plusmo.com through your iPhone (or on your desktop, also at plusmo.com).  Let’s look at a concrete example - I’d like to add a video widget to my home screen (see picture 1).  I simply click add more (at the bottom of picture 1), click on the category ‘Entertainment’ (picture 2), ‘Add’ ‘Videos Top Picks’ (picture 3), and voila, we’ve got video on our home screen (picture 4) and access to some great videos.  Simply visit plusmo.com from your iPhone and enjoy the thousands of Mobile Widgets available in a few touches!

(Picture 1)(Picture 2)

(Picture 3)(Picture 4)

Sports Widgets on iPhone

Some of our most popular Widgets for the iPhone are our Sports Widgets.  These Sports Widgets are very useful for keeping up with your favorite sport or team when you are on the go.  They give you quick access to all the statistics the most ardent fans care about and even offer play-by-play for live games.  Check out our Cricket and Golf Mobile Widgets:

Plusmo and iPhone 3G

The new iPhone lauching on Friday is exciting for many reasons: it is cheaper, has faster data speeds, and is just as slick as the original iPhone.  The most exciting feature accompanying the iPhone 3G launch is the introduction of the iPhone App Store.  The App Store will offer native applications built by third party software publishers, and Plusmo will soon introduce our native iPhone application.  The Plusmo native application will make our already exciting Mobile Widgets even better - we’ll be making use of the iPhone’s native features (such as location services and multi-touch) to make our Mobile Widgets even more fun and useful.

Stay tuned for more on our iPhone App, and as always, please submit any comments or questions.

Today Nokia announced that it is creating the Symbian Foundation to unite the Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform (Plusmo is quoted in the Nokia Press Release, which you can find here).  Plusmo is a longstanding supporter of the S60 Platform through its S60 Widget Service where S60 device users can discover and use thousands of S60 Mobile Widgets.

What is the S60 Platform?

S60 is a the leading mobile operating system for smartphones.  Currently, there are over 200 million devices running S60 (you can find a list of all S60 devices here).  S60 supports Widgets through its browser software called Web Run-Time, which allows developers to create Widgets that access the special features of S60-enabled phones (such as contacts, location, and phone services) via JavaScript APIs.

           

s60.plusmo.com

Plusmo has created an S60 Widget Service which allows mobile users to easily discover and use thousands of S60 Widgets (simply visit http://plusmo.com from your S60 device).  All Plusmo S60 Widgets feature a simple user interface and one-click access to content and automatic updates, eliminating the need for constant browsing and wait times.  Further, the Widgets that are created on Plusmo’s S60 site also work on many other platforms, such as Windows Mobile and the iPhone.

Plusmo also provides a Widget Manager for S60 Devices (pictured above) which provides extended functionality such as offline access, device-native catalogs, etc.

Special Tools for Publishers at s60.plusmo.com

If you are a blogger or a content publisher, the Plusmo Widget Service enables you to easily create S60 Widgets in minutes.  Simply follow the directions listed at our tools page for content publishers.

Please stay tuned for our next blog entry when we’ll detail how the Plusmo Widget Engine improves upon the iPhone user experience.

What is a Widget? 

A Widget is a “thin” (in the software sense), intuitive software application that does one task very well (e.g., displays the weather, stock quotes, news, flight status, etc.).  (For another definition, please refer to Wikipedia.)  The major modern OSes (OS X, Windows, Linux) all offer ‘Desktop Widgets’:

        

What is a Mobile Widget?

A Mobile Widget is also a Widget, but Mobile Widgets have some special properties.  First, since Mobile Widgets reside on mobile phones, they have to take into account any special characteristics of the mobile phone, e.g., if the mobile phone has an accelerometer or a touch screen, then the Mobile Widget should respond appropriately to user touches or shakes of the mobile phone.  Second, Mobile Widgets have the power to make a general purpose mobile phone feel like a dedicated device for the specific service it offers.  For example, if a Mobile Widget offers weather reports, it should be responsive yet deep enough to make the user feel as if they own a dedicated weather report device.  Mobile Widgets have the power to turn a mobile phone into any number of dedicated devices! Here are some examples of Plusmo’s Mobile Widgets:

    

Plusmo’s Widget Engine

So now that we know what Widgets and Mobile Widgets, we can tell you about Plusmo’s Widget Engine Platform.  We build a Widget Engine platform that allows developers to easily create Widgets that can run on many types of mobile devices.  The Widget Engine is based on some of the most popular web standards, yet it is powerful and flexible enough to take advantage of many of the special characteristics of the many mobile devices it supports.

To find out more about Plusmo’s Widget and its Widget Engine, please head over to plusmo.com.  In the next few days, we’ll be blogging more specifically about Mobile Widgets, so stay turned!