Posts filed under 'Business'
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In case you have not checked lately, there are a host of mobile sites and services that are making everyday life easier for thousands of people just like us. To highlight just a sample, I compiled the following list of 71 things you can do from your mobile phone.
I wanted to make this interactive, so I temporarily left the links off of a few items. Why? So that we can learn from you and everyone else out there. If you have recommendations for what mobile sites or tools to use to accomplish any of the items below, leave a comment to this post and share your knowledge. After February 9, ten of the highest quality commenters will be sent a free MobileMammoth t-shirt, AND I will add the links to the remaining items in the list.
Happy mobile browsing…
71 Ways to Make the Mobile Web Work For You
- Use text messaging to solve a crime
- Confirm flight departure time en route to airport (mobile site)
- Play Brady Bunch Kung Fu!. (Sprint users only)
- Browse Flickr photos (mobile site)
- Call your spouse from your bank to confer on a new account (wait – you can’t do that at First National Bank in Chicago).
- Get a text alert when your Google stock reaches
$500 $600 a share
- Get an alert if your kid wanders off-campus
- Transfer money between your bank accounts
- Play music stored on your PC
- Listen to “The One Minute Manager” on audio book
- Prevent drunk driving (and drunk phone calls too)
- Get Radiated? (We hope not!)
- Use your phone as a modem for your laptop (great when you’re stuck in a hotel)
- Check the weather (mobile site)
- Cheat at chess (wait — don’t do that!)
- Go moblogging
- Get more done
- Watch a BoSox-Yankees game
- Play a Texas Hold ‘em tournament
- Pay your parking meter
- Watch a new music video
- Upload pictures & video to the Web in seconds
- Take Spanish lessons
- Over your messaging limits on your wireless plan? Send text messages, for free
- Better yet, send a comic message!
- Send map and directions directly to your cell phone
- Make your own mobile website
- Check your email
- Check your favorite blogs via Bloglines or Google Reader (both are mobile sites)
- Send a text message to your sister in Tokyo
- Send a video message to your spouse
- Play Madden NFL 08 on your cell phone
- Instant-Message your Mom on Mother’s Day
- Avoid the 5 car pile-up on your way home (best traffic site anyone?)
- Track your UPS package
- Check the TV listings
- Receive SPIN magazine on your mobile phone
- Locate your buddy
- Do a Yahoo image search
- Watch last night’s episode of Lost
- Listen to your favorite podcast
- Research a client on your way to a meeting
- Listen to NPR live (mSpot Radio)
- Watch highlights from the Olympics
- Do a Google search for your favorite mobile websites
- Watch a BareNakedLadies concert
- Listen to your local radio station
- Backup your Motorola phone directory
- Watch your favorite movie
- Phone stolen? Next time, Lock it
- Find a wifi hotspot
- Laptop crashed during a presentation? Run a slidehow from your mobile phone.
- Get injury alerts and win your fantasy league
- Find out your favorite PGA player’s tee time on your way to the Masters
- Try your hand at the NYTimes crossword puzzle
- Get NHL scoring updates by text message
- Get stock quotes on demand
- Get live score updates by selecting a sport here, then putting that RSS URL into FEED2MOBILE
- Update your fantasy line-up while shopping with your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse
- Get tonight’s TV lineup
- Get your Maxim mobile fix (flash required)
- Get your soap opera fix
- Play ESPN Poker
- Play a scenario game
- Get your CEOExpress to go
- Make your own wallpaper for your mobile phone
- Text message your questions at 30,000 feet
- Get alerted when your child’s school closes early for snow (or any other reason)
- View a Google Map
- Access your GMail account
- Call your mom (Remember voice calls?!)
I hope you are able to find at least a few gems here that make your life a little easier. I worked on this list for a while, so hopefully all the links are still active!
As always, get your daily mobile website right here.
January 24th, 2008
There’s a small, but growing number of services that let you initiate a group conference call at a moment’s notice from your mobile phone.
One I ran across recently was from Lypp. For $9.95 per month, users are able to use their BlackBerry, PDA, smartphone, regular mobile phone, or a landline to connect to multiple people in North America without the need to schedule it or ask people to call in. The service comes with 250 minutes, and each additional minute costs $0.08.
Lypp uses your phone’s instant messaging capabilities, though the calls themselves are routed through the regular voice service (not data), so voice quality is not an issue. Users must have IM capability installed on their phone, and Lypp’s website provides directions to install them if it’s not already available.
I do struggle a bit to find effective uses of these services on a consistent basis that would justify the cost. I’d imagine there are certain commercial environments where this would make a lot of sense, but not for the average consumer.
Am I missing the boat here? Have you used these services?
Mobile Conference Calling Website:
www.lypp.com
December 27th, 2007
With your cell phone, of course.
If you have relatives in Mexico, Brazil, or anywhere else in Central or South America, it’s quite simple to send them money using your mobile phone. And all for much cheaper that the traditional wire services such as Western Union.
First, sign up for PayPal (aff) if you haven’t already. Paypal, which is now owned by eBay, is used by thousands of people every day to make purchases online, and to send money to friends and family.
PayPal offer two ways to send money. One is through text messaging, and the other is through filling out the appropriate forms on the mobile web.
To transfer money via a text message, send the text message to 729725 (PAYPAL). Include the amount and the recipient’s phone number or email in the subject of your message. PayPal then either calls or text messages you back to confirm the transfer. Even if your friend’s phone is not activated for PayPal Mobile, they will provide instructions on how to activate it.
To send money from the mobile web, simply visit www.paypal.com (aff) from your mobile browser and complete the form to transfer money.
Mobile Website:
www.paypal.com
August 17th, 2007
Bank of America expanded its mobile banking capabilities as it began promoting its mobile banking site to online customers this week.
The mobile site, www.bofa.mobi, allows Bank of America customers to access all their BofA accounts from their mobile phone. Now users can pay bills, check balances, transfer funds, or find the nearest BofA ATM on the go.
The image above includes screenshots from the BankofAmerica.com site. One feature the mobile site does not include (yet) is the ability to transfer money outside Bank of America.
This is certainly not the first mobile banking service from Bank of America, but it does illustrate the increased focus on mobile banking sites versus simple text messaging alerts. If you already use Bank of America, and your cell phone plan includes web access, give it a try and let us know how you like it.
June 4th, 2007
If you still carry around a checkbook, we here at MobileMammoth have only one question for you. Why?
Mobile Banking is Here
With the recent announcements of mobile banking services from Cingular Wireless and Citibank, you now have absolutely no valid reason to tote around an actual checkbook with actual paper checks.
Cingular announced major mobile banking partnerships with four large financial institutions last month, which included Wachovia, SunTrust, BancorpSouth, and Regions Financial. Citibank’s announcement yesterday offered a new mobile banking service, dubbed Citi Mobile. Citibank’s service, which will allow users to check balances, transfer funds, and pay bills, is currently available in select U.S. markets, including Southern California, and is scheduled to be rolled out to the rest of the country by late summer 2007.
Below is an excerpt from the Citi Mobile FAQ page:
What is Citi Mobile?
Citi MobileSM is a convenient, secure, and easy-to-use service that lets you do your day-to-day banking on your mobile phone. You can use it to pay bills, transfer money, see your balances and activity, find a Financial Center or ATM and connect directly to Customer Service—right from your cell phone.
Designed for customers on-the-go, Citi Mobile is the first downloadable mobile banking service offered by a major bank in the U.S. Citi Mobile has been designed to work on a wide range of phones across several U.S. wireless carriers. Citi will be actively adding more cell phone models over the next few months.
Balance Your iPhone
While neither of these services will let you pay for items using your cell phone, PDA, or iPhone mobile device just yet, it will. You already know that most stores in semi-metro areas will accept a debit/credit card for payment. Now if you’re wondering what your account balance is before you make that $300 debit, just fire up the new Citi Mobile app on your iPhone mobile phone. (What, you don’t have yours yet?)
Checkbooks are so 2002. Get with the program.
Editor’s note: We goofed! Our readers correctly pointed out that the Citi Mobile app does NOT work on the iPhone, as some of you have seen in the comments. We have corrected the mistake in the post. We are sorry for the confusion, and thank you again to our readers who helped correct that information for everyone!
April 3rd, 2007
|
As many of you recall, President Bush had an interesting interview last fall with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC. If you have not seen the video yet, it truly speaks for itself. |
With this same spirit in mind, we at MobileMammoth.com theorized on what just might be the top 10 Google Maps searches Bush would make on “The Mobile Google” from his cell phone. Here is our best guess:
1. “where my phone”
2. “find osama”
3. “Who was Reagan’s Vice President”
4. “laura’s brasiere strap”
5. “The Ranch”
6. “East Korea”
7. “1600 pencilvania road”
8. “are my daughters sober?”
9. “weapons of math construction”
10. “strategery”
What other mobile searches might our oh-so-savvy President make? Post a comment with your favorite!
March 30th, 2007
Ingenio announced yesterday that MSN will begin displaying pay-per-call ads on its Windows Live Search service for mobile phones and PDAs.
When displayed, the ads will allow the user to click on an ad relevant to their search. When the user selects an ad, a call is automatically placed to the advertiser.
Think about this for a minute. When you consider all the ads that we put up with on various forms of media, this is without question one of the most convenient types of ads for the end user. If you are interested in what the ad is offering, you are immediately put in touch with someone over the phone. You actually talk to someone. There are very few ads that provide this type of opportunity for immediate interaction, and that’s good for both the customer and the advertiser.
Pay-per-call ads are certainly not new, even for mobile search. Other search engines such as Yahoo and Google have either already begun pay-per-call ads for mobile search, or are experimenting with it as we speak. Nonetheless, the increasing amount of investment dollars going towards improving the mobile web experience is getting interesting, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
October 10th, 2006
Need to do some quick research on a potential client on your way to a meeting? Want to make a sell/hold decision on one of your stocks right now, but are away from your PC? Now you can.
With the increasing number of business and financial cell phone apps now available, scenarios like these are no longer a challenge. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most mobile financial information services available today.
Stock Quotes & Trading
Receiving stock quotes on your mobile phone or PDA is certainly not new. Many early mobile applications provided stock quote services through SMS (Short Message Service), also known as text messaging. More recently, this same service has been migrated over to the mobile web. And while using SMS to request and receive stock quotes remains a very useful service today, that same service over the mobile web opens up a host of additional features and options.
As you can imagine, the big search engine companies have offered mobile information services for some time now. Google’s stock quote feature, available through Google SMS, is rather interesting in the amount of information provided in the response. Here’s a sample output they have provided on their site:
Compare that to a similar service by San Francisco upstart Synfonic, and you can see quite a difference in the amount of data provided (image is an example from the Synfonic site):
We will get into more detail on various stock quote services in future articles. For now, let’s move on to a few other services available today.
Business Headlines & Company Research
While it may seem impractical to do any significant amount of company research on a mobile screen, many folks are pleasantly surprised at what today’s cell phone tools can do. Bloomberg, for example, provides mobile company research through AvantGo for the PDA, and through specific wireless providers for its mobile phone users. Financial Times users can select Market Headlines, Company News, and Index information via it’s WAP-enabled mobile web site. Of course, The Wall Street Journal also provides business news and information to Blackberries, cell phones, and even to GM cars via the OnStar service. Further details about the mobile services available can be found on their cell phone services page.
Other financial information services available through your mobile device today include mobile banking, stock trades, and much more.
What types of financial-related cell phone apps do you use on your mobile phone or PDA?
August 11th, 2006
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