Samsung I7500! Android finally arrives in Korea

Samsung finally went ahead and did what we’ve expected them to do today with the announcement of their first Android powered handset, the I7500. Better late than ever, I say. The I7500 is no slouch in the feature department with a 3.2-inch AMOLED touch-screen, GPS, Wi-Fi, and 8GB of internal memory. It’s also an HSDPA capable device with a 5-megapixel AF camera with Power LED (no clue what that is but I assume it’s flash), Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, MicroSD (up to 32GB support) and a 3.5mm earphone jack. It’s also pretty thin at 0.47 inches.

The media player should be pretty good with MPEG4, H.263/4 and WMV video playback support. The following audio codecs are also supported in case you were wondering: MP3, AAC, AAC+, e-AAC+, WMA, RA. Battery life should also be okay with a 1500mAh removable battery.

No word on price, but the I7500 will launch in Europe this June.

I can’t say that I’m surprised Samsung will launch the I7500 in Europe first, but touting themselves as the first of the three top global handset manufacturers to announce an Android handset is nothing to boast about in my opinion. What is it with this company and having to be the first at something no matter what it is?

Facebook Big Site To Really Embrace OpenID!

Apparently it’s embrace the developer community day at Facebook. In addition to the news that they are making activity stream data available to third party developers, they’ll also be making an announcement around OpenID, we’ve heard. And importantly, the announcement is that they’ll become what’s called a relying party, meaning anyone with an OpenID (Yahoo, Google, AOL, MySpace are all issuers, and Microsoft is in beta) can create and log into a Facebook account using those credentials.

Let me take a step back. OpenID is a distributed single sign on solution that allows people to sign into different services with the same login credentials. There are two ways companies/websites can participate in the OpenID framework – as “issuing parties” or as “relying parties.” Issuing parties make their user accounts OpenID compatible. Relying parties are websites that allow users to sign into their sites with credentials from Issuing parties. Of course, sites can also be both. In fact, if they aren’t both it can be confusing and isn’t a good user experience.

All the big guys are now Issuing Parties, which allow their users logging in all over the Internet with those credentials. But none of them accept IDs from anywhere else, so anyone that uses their services has to create new credentials with them. It’s all gain, no pain. There are two exceptions – AOL Mapquest and Google’s Blogger – but for the most part the big guys are issuers, not relying parties. And that has led us in the past to accuse them of exploiting OpenID for their own benefit without giving back to the community. See our post Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?

Facebook has been a wild card with OpenID. They’ve talked about adopting it eventually, but their Facebook Connect product has actually muddled the situation – Facebook actually competes directly with OpenID when allowing users to sign in to third party sites via Facebook Connect.

Now that’s going to change, and we’ll soon see users have the ability to sign in to Facebook using, say, their MySpace credentials if they choose to. I like the thought of that.

But it still may be a while before we see the other major players take similar steps. Facebook has never really had notion of a user ID – you’ve always logged in with your Email address, which could have come from any number of other services, so Facebook isn’t really sacrificing much here. Instead of a user name, Facebook members are assigned a meaningless user ID number (though they’re experimenting with vanity pages).

Contrast that with Yahoo and Google, both of which have built up their own login systems, which can be used across multiple services using a single persistent account name. Users benefit because they can seamlessly jump between services, and Yahoo and Google get their users to stay within their own suite of products. There’s a good chance they’re not going to give that up so readily.

A Micromessaging Service That Asks “What Are You Doing!” And Means It

At its core, Twitter is supposed to be a micro-presence service that invites users to answer the question, “What are you doing?”. That’s all well and good, but most people tend to ignore this question entirely, Tweeting about anecdotes, their favorite songs, and any number of other things totally unrelated to what they’re actually doing. It’s become a service for entertainment, news, and conversations, where those presence statuses (messages like “I’m at work”) have become frowned upon for being dreadfully boring.

They may be boring, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. Quub, a new service launching tonight, is looking to fill the gap between Twitter’s status updates and the location-based services offered by the likes of Loopt and Google Latitude. The service’s primary purpose is to help users tell their friends what they’re actually doing, and while it shares some similarities with Twitter (including a 140 character limit), there are some key distinctions that help Quub stand on its own.

The first main difference is that all relationships on Quub are two-way. That is, you’ll have to send a friend request (and have it accepted) before you can view someone’s updates. The service also has support for groups, which means you can selectively send out your current status updates to a specific list of people (you can drag and drop users between groups much as you would songs in iTunes).

The other major difference is the way Quub helps you actually write your status updates. Quub knows that most people repeat similar tasks on a day to day basis, and pays attention to your previous status updates to help you build any updates in the future. These suggestions appear as floating text in a bubble beneath the entry field, so while you still have the option of filling in each action manually, you can also click on the suggestions to build your update in a few seconds. This may not matter much on the web client (you’d probably only save a few seconds versus typing the update yourself), but the service is also going to launch a fleet of mobile applications for the iPhone, Android, and other devices, where the suggestions will definitely come in handy. These updates are sent to your Quub friends, and can also be syndicated to a variety of services like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

When it comes to browsing your friends’ status updates, Quub offers a handful of different modes. The first is ‘Present’, which shows the most recent location update from each of your contacts (the resulting list looks similar to foursquare, without the game aspect). A ‘Past’ view offers a Twitter-like stream of all of your friends’ recent updates. And finally, there will be a ‘Future’ view, which allows users to time-stamp updates. The ‘future’ mode is handy because it can also be used as a basic calendar function.

Quub has opted to forgo allowing users to post their exact GPS coordinates (which they deem to be too creepy), and instead leave it up to the user to announce where they are in their message. Unfortunately, Quub has not yet partnered with any databases to help users match their current position to nearby points of interest, so you’ll have to input each location you visit manually at first.

Quub has a solid idea and is well designed, but it’s going to face a few big challenges. For one, many people are already on Twitter, and it may be hard to convince them use another micro-messaging service. Granted, Quub serves a different purpose, with more granular privacy controls and intelligent message suggestions, but it shares so many similarities with Twitter that people may not understand the difference. And unlike foursquare, which has a neat gaming aspect, Quub has nothing to drive you to pull out your phone and update your status frequently. Finally, there’s also the problem that plagues all such location-based services: they’re only useful if your friends are on them, and it’s going to be a long uphill battle to reach critical mass.

Microsoft Vine To Connect Family, Friends When Crisis Hits

Microsoft
is launching a new product into private beta on Tuesday morning with
the aim of keeping friends and family in touch during emergencies. The
idea for product, called Microsoft Vine, came to Microsoft GM Public Safety Initiatives Tammy Savage four and half years ago during Hurricane Katrina. Development started a year and a half ago.

Vine is designed to keep family and friends in touch when other
communication methods are either broken or not particularly efficient.
Times of crisis usually involve a breakdown in mobile phone or other
key communication infrastructures, and Vine is designed to be as hardy
as possible to keep people connected. Vine can be accessed via a
desktop client (Windows only for now), text message or email.

So what is it? Vine is a tool keep people connected during a crisis,
but it’s also used to for more mundane, everyday tasks. My guess is it
will hit a sweet spot with the masses. My parents, for example, are
going to love this.

It will gather local news (you tell it where you live or are at the
moment). News items are gathered from 20,000 local and national news
sources, plus public safety announcements from the United States
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The tool shows
you news items on a local map. You can choose to filter out certain
types of news (sports, entertainment, etc.).

Vine also gives you status updates from Facebook for close friends
and family. Twitter and other social network news feeds will also be
added over time. This lets you see what people are up to, as well as
their location on a map if they share it.

Users view and post alerts to some or all friends/family. These can
be quick messages to family in the case of emergency, or a church or
sports club for meetings or practice. Each person defines how they want
to receive alerts – the client, email and/or text message.

Users
can also post more lengthy reports which are sent to the dashboards of
those you share it with. There are four types of reports at launch:
check in safe and well, report upcoming plans, report a situation or
general information.

The product is very early and Microsoft is stressing that this is an
early beta, designed to get feedback from a small number of users.
Eventually the client will have some limited functionality even when
offline (which is a likely scenario in a crisis), and new interfaces
will be built on other platforms like Mac and Silverlight.

People tend to like stuff like this, and it may eventually turn into
the place that you keep your true friends list – the people you
absolutely want to be in touch with when things go badly

Marin Raises $13 Million For Search Engine Optimization Software

Marin Software, a startup that creates search engine optimization software for advertisers and agencies, has secured $13 million in Series C financing led by DAG Ventures, with Focus Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Amicus Capital participating. Marin received $7.25 million in Series B funding in 2008 led by Benchmark Capital. The company also received $2.5 million in Series A funding from Amicus Capital in 2006.

Marin Software offers a browser application to help advertisers and agencies managing paid search advertising campaigns across Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search sites. Marin’s software is used by Razorfish, ZipRealty and other companies. Marin’s customers spend at least $100,000 per month on paid search campaigns across the major search engines.The company’s main competitors include Kenshoo and Refined Labs.

LG Renoir KC910 goes pink

Whoa! A pink phone! We haven’t written about a pink phone in months. It seemed like every company on the planet was re-releasing all of their popular handsets in pink for a few months there – then nothing. Looks like LG wants to kickstart the trend back up.

Because nothing makes old things new again like a fancy paint job, LG is re-releasing the six month old Renoir KC910 in head-to-toe pink. Same specs as before, including the 8 megapixel camera. Unfortunately for pink fans around the globe, this one’s a UK-only deal for now, with availability on Orange, O2, and T-Mobile.

EQ Network Converts Videos To Mobile-Friendly Formats While Inserting Ads

The web is filled with video content, but there are different formats that don’t always play nicely with all players. The most obvious example of this is the hugely popular Flash format, which does not work on the hugely popular iPhone. EQ Network has an answer for that and other format issues, and wants to offers content owners a way to serve up ads in those video post-conversion.

The company’s Media Delivery Bar can be embedded on a page below any video player. This gives viewers an easy-to-understand option for converting and sending a video to a specific type of device they may want to watch the video on — like an iPhone. You simply enter an email address or cellphone number that you want to send the video to, fill out some quick demographic information, and within a few minutes, the video will arrive in a format tailored to your needs.

The demographic information part is key. That’s how EQ Network hopes to serve up ads to you that are embedded within those videos. Because it knows your sex and age range, these are highly tailored ads that in theory will lead to better returns. But the ads themselves are kind of annoying. Rather than being overlay ads at the bottom of a video, they stop the entire video and make you watch them, similar to what you have to sit through on Hulu videos. Of course, for most of the content that this Media Delivery Bar will be used for, it probably won’t be hit Hollywood content like Hulu has, that people seem to be okay with sitting through some ads to see for free.

But to smaller content providers, EQ Network’s solution could be an intriguing one. “Virtually all companies that we met with confirmed our model and can’t wait to use the bar to instantly deploy their videos without having to ad additional infrastructure or up-front costs,” Equilibrium (the company behind EQ Networks) CEO Sean Barger tells me. That sounds suspiciously optimistic, but testing the solution out, it does work well. I took a web video that wouldn’t play on my iPhone, hit the iPhone button on the Media Delivery Bar, and it formatted it so that it will play on my device.

But the big boys in the field, like YouTube, will continue to go with their own solutions. For example, YouTube reformats all of its Flash videos to the h.264 format to play on the iPhone (and Apple TV). If any one device gets big enough and won’t support Flash for whatever reason, you can be sure they’d do the work reformating the videos to play there as well. Likewise, Hulu would likely choose its own solutions if and when it decides to make its site compatible with devices like the iPhone.