Skyfire’s currently available for Windows Mobile and Nokia smartphones, but they’ve also announced they’ll be tackling BlackBerry next. What’s more, they say they also had a million downloads during their beta period, so congrats for that.

Download the app from get.skyfire.com.

Luminaries include Mike Short, O2; Christopher Schläffer, Group Product & Innovation Officer, Deutsche Telekom; Kenneth Karlberg, President Business Area Mobility Services, TeliaSonera; Alan Brenner, SVP, RIM; Pieter Knook, Director Internet Services, Vodafone; Hugo Barra, Global Director Mobile Applications, Google; Mitch Lazaar, VP & GM Connected Life Europe, Yahoo!; Lee Williams, Executive Director, Symbian Foundation.

I’m doing a panel on Mobile Advertising.

If you’d like a discount on the normal price, use my VIP code RussellB01 when you register for a £400 discount before 1 May, 100 pound thereafter http://www.openmobilesummit.com. Full price tickets are £1,195 (plus VAT) if you book before the end of April, so start begging your boss now. You only have to have one good networking contact at these things for the ticket to pay for itself many times over.

The obvious idea here would be to allow people to upload their own photos to the billboard, but there’s always a risk with user generated content, even if it’s moderated. So rather than involve the brand in compromising positions, they’ve approached it in another, interesting way.

The billboard features a series of images, which people can snap on their mobiles in combination with their friends. For instance, the one I’ve used here, features a guy “wearing” the headphones displayed on the board. Other images include objects like hats, thought bubbles and seasonal messages like “Happy Father’s Day” or just captions like “Hi Mum” and “I Love You” – kind of digital Love Hearts (Sweethearts in the US*).

Once you’ve snapped your photo, you can send it to your friends or Relies, or upload to a special Flickr page.

The billboard display also features short videos to get across the idea and a short “How To” message.

It’s a neat idea, though we’ll have to wait and see how popular it becomes. Based on the 59 current uploads on Flickr, the answer may be “not very” but it’s early days and I always applaud innovation in marketing. Unless you try new things, you don’t know if they’ll work or not.

I can’t help thinking that this idea could be made to work harder though – communication seems a little random. Perhaps they have plans to do more at street level to get the idea across. Once you kick start it and have a steady stream of tourists snapping themselves in front of the poster, it should start to get more viral. And maybe throw in a competition for best photo via Flickr.

Perhaps they have more plans afoot to make more of it all.

*Random factoid: 8 Billion Sweethearts are sold a year.

The portfolio consists of 1.5 million free books that are in the public domain (ie out of copyright), which normally means pretty old, or “classics” if you’re an optimist. Copyright is hugely complicated and varies from country to country, but a rough rule of thumb is that books are in copyright for the author’s life plus 70 years – so writers who died pre-1939 generally speaking. So you won’t find John Grishams or Stephenie Meyers, but there’s a rich cornucopia of Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Mark Twain (no relation to Shania), which should keep you busy for a while.

I had a bit of a read of Dickens’s Hard Times last night (and you thought we had it tough) and it works pretty well as a reader, though it’s no comparison to the real thing – the Kindle – or the old real thing, a book. You can’t download it per se, just view it online, 15 pages at a time, which means that the size of the screen means an awful lot of scrolling down. It would also be hard to read a whole book in snack sessions, as it would mean a little bit of clumsy navigation to return to your place every time. I think that could be a little irritating.

Having said that, Dickens especially, lends itself well to snack reading as he wrote most of his novels in installments, not books. This means that each chapter builds to a crescendo, designed to get you to originally buy the next one and these days, navigate to the next chapter. This led to a famous real scene in the US where the quay was lined with people waiting to hear the news of Little Nell, the desperately ill heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop. As the ship approached the harbour, it was hailed with shouts of “What news of Little Nell???!!”.

She died, by the way.

Anyway, back to Book Search. Strangely, given the parent of the project, the one main criticism I have of it is that it’s actually not very good for ummm…searching for a book – or displaying its wares for discovery either.

As far as discovery is concerned, there’s a category called “Featured Books”, which in principle should be used to whet your appetite for hidden gems or popular choices. In reality, the same 5 books are featured every time you visit the page or refresh it, or click the “Load More” button.

In search, books are presented pretty randomly – or perhaps I couldn’t see a pattern – with critiques of works often ranked higher than the original book, as an example. Maybe it’s in order of popularity of download so far and maybe lots of English majors use the service, swatting up for exams. But it seems unlikely.

Finally, and I don’t want to be picky, but an awful lot of books that are free and available online aren’t available for mobile. So the 1.5 million books used in the headline is rather misleading at this stage. I’m assuming (and hoping) that they’ve rushed out to market with a very limited selection at this stage and will be adding to the portfolio on an ongoing basis.

Having said that, the logical approach would be to load popular works first, and then round out the portfolio. This doesn’t seem to be the case, with some really obscure stuff already there and some great works unavailable for mobile at the moment. We should be told.

So, nice one, Google. Thanks for what we have so far, I’m sure I’ll be using it from time to time and I look forward to enjoying it get better.

It does this stuff better than native apps in many cases — for instance, I think it does Skype better than the official Skype mobile app. It’s worked well for me over a Wi-Fi connection (voice quality of a chat from a Skype user on PC to my mobile was perfect), and I imagine it would do well on 3G. For those of us on 2.5G nets, you can switch from pure VoIP to a local dial-in bridge (much the way the 3 Skypephone works, etc.).

One additional feature Nimbuzz offers that I think is quite cool are a selection of widgets, which you can use to integrate Nimbuzz into your social-networking profiles. For instance, the image here is from my Facebook profile. By putting the Nimbuzz app in my profile, people can click on the various buttons to contact me in different ways. The widgets currently work with more than 20 social-networking sites, and you can also use them in your email signature. So somebody could click on the “call me” button, and if I’m logged in on PC or mobile, they can start a VoIP call with me, and so on. It’s nice to see this sort of integration with existing social networks, rather than trying to force users to adopt something completely new. It’s also great that Nimbuzz can extend these networks to mobile, often in more complete ways than the networks’ native mobile services offer.

Nimbuzz said this week that they’d raised a second round of funding of $15 million, which they’ll certainly need to negotiate this crowded market, but I think they have a good shot as I’ve been pretty impressed with the service thus far. The business model — of course — remains the biggest issue, but they’ve said they’re looking into white-label services as well as some mobile advertising plays. One other sticking point: the S60 client is a 1.1 megabyte download, which is pretty hefty.

US satellite TV provider DirecTV has launched a new feature that allows its DVR subscribers to remotely schedule recordings. Users can do it via the DirecTV.com web site, but the company is also prominently advertising the mobile version of the service, available at m.directv.com.

Similar services have been available in other countries for some time (such as with the Sky mobile app in the UK), while TiVo users can schedule recordings over the web, and if they’re Verizon Wireless subscribers and willing to pay $2 per month, from their mobiles as well (AT&T also offers a similar service to consumers who have both its U-Verse fixed-line video service and a mobile with the company). So while DirecTV isn’t treading new ground, the fact that they’re really playing up the mobile service — hell, even launching it at the same time as the web version — provides further evidence that we’re at a tipping point for the mobile web. Mobile access wasn’t an afterthought or a poorly put together add-on here; it’s a central part of the offering and one that DirecTV is making freely available, rather than trying to tie it into an exclusive deal with a particular operator.

I tried the service earlier, and it works well. I was able to set a recording about 10 minutes before a show started, and it was received successfully by my box. (While my box is connected to the internet, the signal is sent down from the satellites, DirecTV says.) The process was pretty painless on my E61. My only real criticism is that it might be nice to be able to browse listings; currently you can only search by title, keyword or channel.

Here are a few screenshots:

The main search screen…

Results page (note it indicates which shows are in HD)…

Episode page, with description and other info, and the option to schedule the recording…

Nice option here, to record regardless of what else is scheduled, or only if nothing else is scheduled.

Confirmation screen. But wait, what’s that at the bottom?

Eep. That CYA language isn’t very reassuring…

But never mind, orange light = success!

All in all, I think it’s a pretty decent process. The disclaimer worries me a little, though — if the service only works some of the time, that’s a pretty poor user experience. Still, it’s great to see a major brand like DirecTV launch this service on the mobile web.

They do basically the same thing, with one big difference: Johnny27 costs $1.99 per question, ChaCha is free (for now, anyway). I gave ChaCha a whirl earlier to check its accuracy and speed, and was impressed. It was able to tell me the winner of the 1987 baseball World Series and provide me with the name and address of the nearest bowling alley to my house in about two minutes and twenty seconds each time, from the time I opened the messaging application on my E61 to the time I got the response. That said, I got the answer to my bowling alley query from Google SMS in about 40 seconds; searching for the baseball answer took about 1:20 using Opera Mini, though it was over WiFi.

The big difference, though — natural language. I simply texted “Who won the world series in 1987?” and “Where can I go bowling near 89135?” to ChaCha’s shortcode, 242242 (that’s chacha on the keypad). To use Google’s service, you have to know the right lingo (in this case, a simple “bowling 89135″ worked, but there’s quite a list of others to remember); using the built-in search box on the start page of Opera Mini was pretty easy, but that’s probably not a realistic normob usage scenario.

I can see this sort of service becoming fairly popular here, especially if it’s free. ChaCha apparently plans to start charging $5-$10 per month in a few months, which seems steep, though they’re also looking at ways of using ad support. Johnny27′s $2 per message makes it a non-starter in my eyes, as these services are offering a commodity — that is, what makes it worth a premium price over other services? Better answers? And how can a user tell?

For all the hype around the mobile search space, I wonder if these sorts of services, that in many ways are much easier to use than automated search engines, are where the real growth will be. ChaCha includes a URL in its response, with a link to its site where the user can see their question and answer, and get a link to the site where the human guide found the answer, and they could easily put in links for queries that need more info, or to maps, or other useful information.

If you give ChaCha, Johnny27, or any other similar services a shot, let me know what your experiences have been like in the comments — especially if you’ve been able to stump them!

Anybody else?

Various alternative and “better” layouts have been tried over the years but never with much success, as too many people have too much skill invested in the old ways. And anyway, touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard actually works nearly as well as any other method and who can be bothered to learn all over again for a marginal eventual improvement?

But there’s a new generation who have grown up with a new skill – inputting text via a mobile phone style keypad. Just watch how quickly a teen can write an sms without looking at the keyboard and they’re certainly pretty quick.

Enter the cre8txt keyboard, pictured above, which plugs into Windows PCs (sorry Mac users), allowing people to transfer their sms super-powers into the computing environment. It also comes with a dictionary and sms slang translator containing 140,000 words.

Will it catch on?

I think it’s a clever piece of thinking, allowing all those young sms stars to transfer their skills. However, even the fastest sms inputter would be easily beaten by an average QWERTY typist. An average touch typist will achieve about 50 – 70 words per minute, according to Wikipedia, with even “hunt and peck” doing 27 – 37 words per minute. Obviously good typists can go much faster – 120+ is not exactly unusual.

However, the very fastest sms’er in the world can only do about 38 words a minute, although a newer record may have been set since this. So anyone planning to spend time around a computer would be better off going QWERTY, or perhaps hanging out for voice input, which has been promised to be the new, new thing for the last 20 years or so.

The Opera crew says they’ve made a ton of improvements to Mini, including an Overview mode, support for landscape viewing and a new mouse cursor. One thing I think that’s particularly cool — and should be used in more browsers — is the ability to sync bookmarks between the desktop browser and Mini using Opera Link.

Safari on the iPhone and now Mini support this, and other mobile browser makers should take heed and make it easier to get bookmarks to the mobile.