It's time again to upgrade your handivi. We've got a great bundle for you this time! Here's what happened since last version:

• we're heavily punishing ourselves, since you shouldn't read this email to do the upgrade. Honestly, we hope that this will be the last update screwup. So, uninstall handivi, go to this link and download the new application: http://get.handivi.mobi/

• you can now invite your friends to join you on handivi. That's right, we're giving you 10 invites to use among your close friends. Just go to "Friend List", "Add Friend" and insert his number or pick from your phone address book. If he's not already on handivi, your friend receives a SMS to register, if he's registered, then he's added to your friend list.

• navigate in fullscreen mode; by viewing a photo and then use the left and right phone keys to navigate.

• resend your content items to other friends; don't left anyone out.

• lots and lots of bugs and usability fixes.

As always, you can feedback us by replying to this email or just go to: http://getsatisfaction.com/handivi
PS: Don't forget to uninstall handivi before download the new one.

Today didn't start very well. I got a call early in the morning from Vitor letting me know handivi.com was broken. I remember mumbling something and him asking me what the hell was I trying to say. I guess when my brain is booting it is unable to translate thoughts into words.

This new release is very important for us because now all your photos are safely stored on Amazon S3 (mind you, we do backup regularly but there was a very small chance of loosing a photo and we don't like to take even small chances on bad things) but to make that happen we had to make some changes. As Murphy would say: if anything wrong can happen it will and it did. Fortunately, it was just a matter of applying a patch to Perlbal and as soon as it was fixed all services became available.

At about the same time, someone sent me a rocking youtube video link, the sun became brighter and warmer and you guys started to give positive feedback on this new release. I couldn't help but feel energized by this combination of events and it set me on a great mood for the rest of the day.

So that's the funny story about this release, what goodies do we have in the bag for you? Lots of them:

• Ruben worked hard at further optimizing the mobile application and it's snappier. Not only that, but our content adaptation engine now optimizes photos so that they transfer faster to your mobile and this results in faster browsing of your friend updates;

• still on the mobile camp you're now able to browse albums and friend updates without having to return to the lists, what we call fullscreen browsing. Just press the left and right buttons on your mobile;

• if you're at the computer, you should notice that your friend updates and the public timeline are refreshed automatically too so you can just sit back and check what's happening anywhere in the world in real time;

• speaking of website: we really, really, love the feedback and deeply appreciate the time you guys are taking to help us iron out the kinks. With that in mind, we've established a presence at Get Satisfaction, a leading website for user feedback. Not only you'll be able to share your ideas and problems with us, but also with the rest of the community;

• for those who are curious and haven't registered yet, you can get a glimpse of how handivi looks like on our tour guide.

• finally, there are some other tweaks like improved profiles and many changes under the hood that overall should improve your experience with the service.

More things are coming for the next release, if you would like to see something built into handivi get in touch!

If you're already an handivi user, you might've notice that there's a new version for your phone. It's more slick, fast and with lots of bugs reported in the previous versions squashed!

But that's not all, we've open our site also, go check it out: http://handivi.com


There you can see your shared photos, the public timeline, read messages and manage your buddies or your profile.
Our team awaits your feedback at hello@handivi.com

This year's SHiFT edition is right around the corner and judging by the speaker list it's going to be a great conference to attend. All five of us at 7syntax will be there and this means we get an extra ticket for the conference but, since we don't have a 6th person, we'd like to bring someone else with us. This is where you come in :-)

If you'd like to attend and want that extra, free, ticket all you have to do is drop us a message letting us know why you should be the one to have it. Simple isn't it? You can use Handivi (text us or, better yet, express yourself with a nice photo - and sure, we love kitties too so if that's all you have, that's ok) or send an email to hello@handivi.com. We'll get in touch with the lucky winner this Friday.

Rudy De Waele, dotopenfounder and Mobile 2.0 Europe organizer, talks about digital storytelling, which "is an emerging term, that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own 'true stories' in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity." - slides here.

I consider Rudy one of the true "watchman" of the mobile trends, so it was great to know that he gets handivi as one example of mobile storytelling, which in fact is true, we propose people to share their experiences with others, by telling their own story as it happens. handivi is just a tool to come along a larger broader device, that's always at hand and ready to interact - your phone.

To support it and looking at his presentation graphs, we can find that mobile users usually (and this is not new) send sms, took photos, send mms and play games. Actually, the boring part of the experience is that along with those actions, people also transfer photos or videos to PC and then upload to some kind of social software. Sure there are now software that streams from your phone to the internet, but it's a half broken experience, they only do that and forget that the mobile phone is also interaction between people.




Taking the flickr "tell a story in 5 pictures" example, handivi allows everyone, with a regular, low-end mobile phone to tell a story as it happens, whenever it happens and for how long it takes.
It's not only allowing people telling stories, but rather engaging people to share experiences.

I really dig Android. I like it's promise of delivering an open platform, the solid SDK and how easy it is to get familiar with it's framework and libraries. The day the SDK came out I put together a little utility application for Codebits that answered a question I had overheard while walking in the venue "where's the nearest ATM?". Taking advantage of location, maps and SAPO's GIS it took me just a few hours to get into it and, with 0 experience, create an application that allowed you to search in the real world and narrow down the results to what's closest to you.

Anyway, a few days later while discussing Android I remember saying that the first device shouldn't be out before this year's 4th quarter and, almost like clockwork, the first Android phone is out: the HTC Dream.

So at 15:30 (local time) I plugged in the headphones and watched the video coverage of the device's launch made available at T-Mobile's website. Unfortunately, I couldn't help but feel underwhelmed.

The good stuff is that pricing is really competitive. They're (all of them: Google, HTC and T-Mobile) pitching it as a consumer product and it's great to see a price tag that reinforces that pitch: $179 USD. I'm really curious to see how it'll be sold here in Europe and at what price range. And that's really just about it, in my opinion it's all downhill from here.

The device marks, if memory serves, the entrance of HTC on the consumer market. HTC is a well know manufacturer of enterprise smartphones and it shows. To be honest, I don't really believe HTC will continue to churn out consumer devices but I've been proven wrong before. Anyway, the fact that the first device comes from an enterprise vendor really shows although it's missing some critical enterprise features, e.g. compatibility with Microsoft's Exchange and Office file formats. But I guess it's all part of the Google-plan, on which they want to challenge the dominant enterprise player, just not in an obvious heads-on way but instead borrowing a page from guerrilla warfare.

From the video presentations all I saw was a mobile phone that, just like a PC, has everything and the kitchen sink and, just like the PC, is confusing as hell. They even imported the desktop concept, complete with workspaces, desktop shortcuts and clock widgets. Now I don't know about you but I don't want that. I don't want a mobile phone that's just like a PC, only smaller. What I want is a mobile phone that's almost like a PC only simpler. And this comes as a surprise because the SDK's UI is actually pretty good at being simple.

The other thing I didn't like to see was brand confusion. To HTC it's the HTC Dream, to T-Mobile it's the "T-Mobile G1 with Google" (not kidding, that's what they kept calling it), to the vast majority of people out there it was the Google phone but under what name will I, a Vodafone Portugal customer, know it? Maybe the bells are tolling for "smaller" manufacturer brands?

This state of confusion kept getting stronger as speakers took turns at pushing their agendas but never telling me, in a clear way, why I should consider buying (into) the Dream. The only guy I actually enjoyed listening to was Sergey Brin, who showed up in rollerblades and said that after getting the device he created a non-sense application to measure the time between you throwing up the phone and grabbing it (or it hitting the ground). I can see how it would be useful to measure the time between users throwing the phone against the wall and the time of impact, in acts of frustration.

In conclusion, I believe the best surprises will come from Samsung and LG who are also part of the Open Handset Alliance and have a bit more experience in designing consumer market devices. There are no official launch dates for them so I'll have to wait and see but one thing is true: I won't go out of my way to get an HTC Dream when it becomes available in Europe.

And how about you, what's your opinion on the first Android mobile phone?

Today we've released handivi 0.4.17 version, which address the following problems, kindly reported so far: a) it doesn't run on my ZYX phone, b) is slow, c) the public timeline/friend updates isn't correctly refreshed, d) crashes, and finally e) it has bugs.

You've might notice some pattern there, and you're right, this new version is only bug squashing.
from offthemark.com

As you can see, some could not yet be squashed and more just "cut the line", but we're working on it, bear with us and report your problem, or just say hello@handivi.com

handivi is getting better everyday, we're making magic as we speak, meanwhile we leave you a small presentation of this great application, with some screenshots for everybody get to know a little bit more handivi.

A special thanks to "zone41" ( http://zone41.info ) for the photos.

We will keep you update of new stuff here, so see you soon.

First of all I'd like to thank all of you who are helping us test Handivi and make it a better product. To help you getting your feet wet, I'm writing a series of small posts that introduce some of the features that are already available.

So you received an invitation code and downloaded the application. After you login, you'll be able to introduce yourself to the rest of the Handivi world by filling in some information:

Next up you'll need to define your privacy settings. This is a really important thing because by default your profile is private. If you choose to continue having a private profile only the people that you explicitly allowed to friend you will see what you share on their friend updates.

After that, we'll take you straight into the action which, in this case, is the public timeline:

At this point, you can do pretty much anything so lets share a photo with the rest of the world shall we?

Any photo can have a message attached to it. It can be anything really: a funny comment, a description of what you were doing at the time, etc.

Lastly you can choose who can see your photo:

If you send it to All (and you have a public profile) your photo will end up in the public timeline. You can also choose to send it directly to specific persons and then only those persons will be able to see it.

We'll be introducing some new features to the communications part of the service in the near future but in the mean time keep send us your feedback, thoughts and ideas.

Big touchdown today, as we released the first handivi alpha version to all who registered so far.

In quite a stressing move, we've dispatched all invites in a couple of minutes and watched carefully the system logs, as people registered and installed the application. In no time we had lot of comments, which were not expecting that fast and, of course, some failed installations as well as some bugs founded.

Thank you all for your support and feedback. We'll now be in touch and you can find me more on handivi :-)

"cute and cuddly" is the most catchy phrase from madagascar [2005] animation movie, where penguins rocked. It's pretty much what we're here, a bunch of cute and cuddly penguins that are in love with technology and working on a kick ass project, for people all around the world.

Hi, I'm Vitor Domingos (vd), the guy behind marketing and operations. Usually know as the benevolent basher, I maintain 7syntax systems and servers - all on thin lines of silk, ready to fail, not!. I'm also the "marketoid" that does company sales and communication, ensuring that messages, briefings, client or user requests flow properly and are taken care of. As co-founder in charge for hell on earth, I'm the disruptive part of the company.

My first post here is to engage conversation and to start discussions, from and to 7syntax. Ramblings from the trenches, will be my main motto here, so, expect rants from all sort of stuff, technical, marketing or just plain stupid. Feel free to poke me with your email, I'm looking forward to meet or talk to you. You can reach me at vd@7syntax.com

Disclaimer: This place is where people from 7syntax express their individual opinions and it doesn't necessarily reflects 7syntax views, methods or opinions. This blog will be the fun part of the company and a relaxed way of communicating to the world.