Really amazing to read these new figures: 500,000,000 app downloads. Never heard of a number like this at one of the mobile operator portals of the pre-iPhone century Vodafone life or T-Motion would have dreamed of numbers like this.
But the 500 million app downloads can not be compared with the number of songs, sold on iTunes: Apple only revealed the complete number of app downloads – free and payed apps. So there is a fundamental difference between the number of (paid and free) apps and (only paid) songs.
More than 15,000 apps is also quite impressive – but it is getting harder and harder to find the apps you really like on the AppStore. There is a lot of room for improvements to meet the needs of consumers as well as developers.

Deutsche Bahn and T-Mobile extend their traveling WiFi HotSpot service at the ICE train routes. Now, also the route Frankfurt am Main – Hanover – Hamburg is covered with WiFi internet access (“railnet”). Overall, we have WiFi internet connection within the train on most of the ICE routes in Germany:

• Dortmund – Düsseldorf – Cologne (also via Hagen and Wuppertal)
• Cologne – Frankfurt am Main Airport
• Frankfurt am Main – Stuttgart – Munich
• Frankfurt am Main – Hanover – Hamburg

The service offers laptop and especially iPhone users an internet connection even if the train travels at a maximum speed of 300 km/h – more than 180 miles per hour! Im always impressed about the quite stable and fast internet connection even when traveling that fast. And the best thing of all: as a (German T-Mobile) iPhone user you don’t even have to pay for the WiFi connection in the train!

Source/picture: Deutsche Bahn

These days are really exciting: Tomorrow at 9:00 PST (18:00 CET) Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing bei Apple, will begin his keynote at MacWorldExpo … and today CompareMe, the first codedifferent iPhone application is released at the iTunes AppStore! The financial utility app is used to compare, convert and negotiate prices or bargain. The app makes use of touchscreen gestures to convert or drag and drop prices. But let’s cut the long story short: Click on the video at the CompareMe application webpage to get an impression of the look and feel.

… so now, I’m really thrilled about Phil’s talk in San Francisco about Snow Leopard and new hard- and software … what ever battery solution Apple is coming up with in the rumored unibody 17″ MacBook Pro

The field trial of the new mobile application from Deutsche Post, called Handyporto ended in September 2008. Basically it‘s clever and simple:

If you don‘t have a stamp at your fingertips you can send a Premium-SMS. As feedback you receive an SMS with a 11-number code. That code has to be written on the letter or poscard instead of the stamp … the rest is handled by the letter distribution centers of Deutsche Post.

But there‘s a catch: the stamp for a letter costs normally 55 euro-cents in Germany – the Premium-SMS for a letter costs at least 95 euro-cents. That‘s a hefty premium of 73% or more. Regarding postcards it‘s even more: 85 instead of 45 euro-cents is 89% premium or more. The user will be additionally charged for the costs of the SMS at his or her mobile provider.

It‘s clear for industry insiders, why Handyporto may be that expensive: The Deutsche Post is treated like every other mobile service provider and only get‘s a part of the revenue share of the 95 or 85 euro-cents: Basically, the Deutsche Post has to share their Handyporto-charges with the premium-SMS-serviceprovider – in this case the shortcode-SMS-number 22122 belongs to WHATEVER MOBILE in Hamburg, Germany. Additional the Deutsche Post also has to pay some cents for the code-SMS which is send back to the user. At last – there are a lot of expenses at the Deutsche Post itself for providing the infrastructure to recognize, process and validate the Handyporto-codes.
Therefor the higher price for Handyporto is comprehensible from a business point of view. But it‘s questionable whether the user benefit is big enogh to help Handyporto to be accepted and successful.

BTW just a brief remark to the marketing specialists: Don‘t do promotional Handyporto-FlashMobs again … that‘s contrary to nearly everything a FlashMob stands for.

Jason Chen, android-Developer-Advocate at Google, just blogged the good news: One day before the first T-Mobile-G1 android-smartphones ship in the US, the Open Handset Alliance released the sourcecode of the android operating system as open source. Quite logical and necessary step … but don’t under estimate this: This step may change the mobile industry like LINUX changed the computer industry.