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Palringo, one of the most popular instant messaging applications for mobile phones, has added live location information to the latest version of its application—Palringo Local.
Accurate to the suburb or even street level in a city, and to the closest named town in rural areas, Palringo users can opt to display their location alongside their status, for fun, personal, social, business or any other purpose.
Continue reading this press release from Palringo
You already heard what the people have chosen, and now to announce what the supposed experts have to say. Like we mentioned in last week’s podcast, it’s a tough call to make with such a wide range of products being shown off at WES. The judges for each category had their own set of standards (as you can see), so the results are bound to be highly subjective. The fact of the matter is every exhibitor at WES had something worth showing off, and these were just some of the few that stuck out in our judge’s minds.
ITTOMP, the lovingly-anacronymed picture-sharing service, announced an update at WES, including geotagging support. Although not new, it was news to me that the service supports video sharing too, which is pretty awesome considering how impressed with Qik I was. Geotagging is getting increasingly popular, with whole apps like GPSed revolving around it, and even becoming integrated into the BlackBerry 9000. You can nab the latest version of iTookThisOnMyPhone for free right over here.
This one nearly slipped under the WES radar, but not quite. SteelCloud, the BES-in-a-box that boasts a half-hour setup time, has announced that they’re preloading SteelWorks Mobile with Conceivium BES monitoring via MobileMonitor and Analyzer. The majority of BES admins I talked to at WES didn’t have a monitoring solution in place, so this is a pretty sweet deal to have it all bundled together with the initial set-up. There is talk that RIM will be including monitoring software with the next version (5.0) of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, however… I wonder how much of a bite that will take out of potential BES monitoring customers…
Yeah, you’d think a week would be good enough to catch up on WES stuff, but that’s clearly not the case. WorldMate Live announced a new “Connections” feature to their great BlackBerry travel app, allowing you to easily hook up with people that have overlapping travel plans. After requesting a connection with someone else, WorldMate Live will keep an eye on both of your accounts, and whenever it looks like you’ll both be heading to the same destination, you’ll get a notification. This is a really cool and easy way to keep in touch with business contacts who are on the move just as much as you are. On top of that, the WML handheld client also added calendar integration, so all of your itinerary information get shunted to your BlackBerry’s default calendar app. Oh, they also announced integration with Telmap’s mapping systems, so you can get GPS directions to all the destinations listed in your itinerary. If you’re interested in giving it a shot, there’s a free version available, but to get the good stuff, you’ll have to sign up for Gold service.
Doug and Simon reminisce about WES, and we talk with our choice for Best of WES: Consumer Award winner, Unity4Life about their awesome new home remote control system. Nothing quite like using your BlackBerry to record shows when you’re not at home. If you haven’t seen the video demo, check it out! Grab the podcast in the canonical MP3, the quintessential iTunes, or esoteric XML formats.
We’ve tallied all the votes, and we’re now ready to announce the winners of BlackBerry Cool’s First Annual Best of WES: People’s Choice Contest. Reader participation is a huge deal here at BBCool HQ, so we were touched to see so many people voting for their favorite BlackBerry products and services. One of the most startling aspects of the contest was seeing just how close the voting was in many of the categories — you guys really like a lot of different things! To that end, we’re going to post the top three favorites in every category.
Thanks to everyone who voted!
Consumer
1st - Viigo - Viigo
2nd - Unify4Life - Unify4Life
3rd - Zumobi – Zumobi
Back at WES, RSA announced updates to their SecurID for BlackBerry due in Q2. Their existing SecurID Token produces new passwords every minute used to access sensitive information on the corporate network. Paired up with an individual’s PIN number, you’ve got a system that keeps an airtight seal on information. The new features include easy Wi-Fi access on your thusly-enabled BlackBerry, updates to turn your BlackBerry into a one-time-password-provisioning device, and more options for BES admins.
We survived John Mayer. We ran around like wild men. We live blogged Mikey and the Jim-Dog. We podcasted with carriers, industry analysts, and AAA BlackBerry developers. Simon interviewed every company, ever. We were the most visible BlackBerry news site at WES. Everybody wanted one of our tee shirts and an invite to our exclusive poker game (next time, we promise). We even freaking blogged while walking. Essentially, we kicked butt to provide the BlackBerry Nation with the best WES coverage and established BlackBerry Cool as the #1 BlackBerry news site on the web. Period.
Now, we want to hear from you, our readers. What was the WES experience for you? What piece of news, editorial, or video defined the show? If you were there, who did you meet or what did you see (cough, BlackBerry Bold, cough) that made it all worth while? Post a comment and let us know. The person who best describes the WES experience will win a Viigo WES ‘08 bag jam-packed with some special schwag, including one of those popular BBCool tee shirts everyone has been raving about.
Beamberry was showing off an upcoming PDF viewer at WES, toting offline file viewing. That means you can view full fidelity PDFs even when you don’t have a signal, since it’s all rendered on-device. BeamBerry PDF Reader, available this June, will be able to process PDFs stored on microSD or internal memory, attached to e-mail, or accessed through web links. An especially handy bundled feature is a file navigator to find and organize your locally-stored PDFs, as well text search. Keep an eye out for it soon!
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