construktiv GmbH – the makers of Mister Wong, websnapr, mypictr or pixer.us – have launched Beam it up Scotty, a small but useful tool to easily send files to mobile phones.

You can upload photos, videos, music and any other type of documents on the site, have it compressed and optimized for mobile devices if you want and the service will send you a text message with a download link to your document for your cellphone to use.

Beam it up Scotty if free, you can access your files for 7 days, usage is limited to 10 docs a day.

Semi-social mobile video community ViiF has publicly launched yesterday. ViiF lets you record video calls from your mobile phone, watch them later and share them with your friends.

No additional software is required, all you need is an UMTS enabled phone which supports video calls. Once you have called the service the video is recorded and stored in your inbox. You can mark videos as private, public or make the access available to your friends only. You also can include your videos via a widget (ViiF Player) on your blog.

The video calls will be 39c/min with operators who will support the service. Currently O2 and Vodaphone are in, T-Mobile still charges 58c/min and e-plus does not support the service yet. Their business model is based on sharing the revenue made from the calls with the operators.

For the users this is both good and bad news. To steal the plot from twitter: when you see a monkey walking down the street it is definitely worth the money to stream the scene as video to ViiF instead of sending a plain text message to twitter or a MMS to your friends. From a receivers point of view watching those videos from your friends soon might add up. I haven’t found out whether it is possible to watch the videos from your friends on the site, but they heavily encourage everyone to watch the videos on their phone (e.g. when you recommend your video they will get a SMS and the video will be displayed when they call ViiF and enter a PIN) and the rates apply for watching the videos too.

ViiF currently is available in Germany only, they will roll out the service to the UK, France, Italy and Spain in 2008.

See also: ViiF Recieves Funding

Our friend Robin Wauters over at blognation Belgium has compiled a nice list of domain names of popular brands which have been snatched in Belgium, but the indifference of companies to prepare for an international roll-out is not unique to small countries, most domains in his list have not been secured in larger markets like Germany neither.

A current running gag in the German twittosphere is iphone.de. Instead of a shiny iPhone you will see this:

The domain has been grabbed by freenet and they use it for promoting a BackBerry with a cheaper data plan than the one T-Mobile will offer for the iPhone.

This obviously is conceived to be a joke, the design aesthetics is clearly mimicking Apple’s, they use slogans like ‘I phone with freenet’ or ‘Big Apple’. It is not hard to imagine the high fives between the creative genius who came up with this and the management or project lead.

What’s notable is that freenet is no bunch of students who think this is funny (e.g. the founders of Studiverzeichnis – now Germany’s biggest social network by far – also grabbed various domains of their competitors before Holtzbrinck took over), but a publicly traded company and one of Germany’s largest telecommunications company and ISP.

Just in time for the launch of the iPhone in Europe (Nov 9 in Germany and UK, Nov 29 in France) local review service Qype has finally launched mobile versions in Germany and the UK.

The mobile site is not very fancy – your phone won’t start to vibrate when you pass by a shop which currently provides a coupon or special offer for Qype users when walking down the street etc. – in fact the site is pretty minimalistic:

You enter what you are looking for and where you are (future versions will provide geopositioning via GPS) and places nearby which match your search will be listed. These places are ranked by distance from your current location and basic infos like address, phone number, ratings, reviews and the position on a map will be displayed.

But even if simple since Qype is all about discovering places the mobile version adds a lot of value to the site. You can quickly check the reviews for a restaurant you don’t know before you go in, you can search for the next Gelateria when you suddenly are in desperate need of a huge cup of ice cream or you can look for free WLAN nearby.

Qype is a great resource (more than 3,000 cities are covered in Germany, the UK is catching up fast) and has a strong community, but the web is a big place and it is hard for any informational site to be sticky, there is always more information available just a mouseclick away. On the road you want infos you can act upon and you want them fast, so Qype mobile might increase identification with the brand and trigger positive feedback loops for the main site too.

You don’t need an iPhone or expensive data plan by the way, the mobile version has been designed to have a small footprint and to run on any web enabled phone.

Company blog: German, English

BITKOM has published a report which reveals a few figures on the state of the mobile nation:

• 36.5 million mobile phones will be sold in 2007 (a plus of 6% compared to 2006. Not digging into the detailed demographics based on 82 million inhabitants that is a shiny new phone for about every second German who is able to talk)
• on average 100 Germans use 109 active contracts (Western Europe’s average is 98, the US lacks behind a bit with 76)
• carriers will make 4.2 billion Euro in revenues in 2007
• 57 billion minutes of calls have been made from mobile phones in 2006 and 22.5 billion SMS have been sent
• when asked mobile data services are considered to be useful but hardly used yet. The prognosis is that this won’t change in the near future: only 20% are estimated to use them by 2010 (the biggest obstacle for a wider adaption seems to be intransparent pricing schemes; you usually need to use a pocket-lens to discover the price per MB but how much does it cost me to look up a restaurant on Qype or to download a track again? A few flat rate plans for data starting at 10 Euro have become available but they all are tied to 24 months contracts.)

Sometimes you see things and you ask yourself “why did nobody think of this till now?”. For example why you don’t have a cool mobile phone wallpaper?

Most likely you dread those normal wallpaper available (as well as ringtone and other gimmicks) and never found something worth the space on your phone. But … how about these cuties?

Get a mobile wallpaper from your favourite social networking site! Made by Hamburg based graphic designer Liron Tocker and available at “Mobile wallpaper for social networking fans“. It is worth checking because she already added some requested logos. Given the admiration of Apple fans, I wonder when the first iPhone only wallpaper sites will pop up …

Plus I can totally see this to be a new required position on any decent Web 2.0 business plan: make a cool mobile wallpaper and make everybody from boss to delivery guy use it. And your beloved customers will happily show it off.

If you excuse me now, I have to mail some startups to turn their logos into some decent wallpaper. And after that I have to figure out how to add my first ever wall paper to my mobile phones …

ps: if you think you will never ever want a cell phone charm either - think again.

A month ago we reported on the price of the iPhone in Germany but no information on the rate plans where available. Yesterday rumours appeared about the pricing and today macnotes states to have the “complete and definitive” overview of the T-Mobile rate plans for the iPhone (in German).

macnotes states further that T-Mobile is expected to officially announce the prices end of October or beginning of November, and employee training to start at the very late November 7th.

While there are flat rates in the German mobile market, like for example the often cited BASE flat for voice and / or data, the coverage is lacking due to it being the E-Plus network. Other providers offer “data flatrates”, only to limit it through T&C down to 5 GB per month maximum.

Neither the prices for voice nor SMS are attractive, but unlimited free Voicemail, free data over EDGE and free T-Mobile Wi-Fi Hotspots - maybe. The commenters are also very unhappy about the included minutes and complain that with 39 cents per additional minute the T-Mobile iPhone contracts are four times the price of the cheapest prepaid plans.

If you want to use your iPhone primarily as a PDA, surf station and for music, this seems like a good choice but if you need it for voice this could be an even more expensive toy than expected. And as commenters (not only in this post) lamented about having to shop in a T-Mobile store rather than being able to get the full Apple experience, there might be some travel to France to get an unlocked iPhone.

Hm. Any suggestions where to buy in iPhone in Paris for the attendees of LeWeb?

One day after the announcement for the UK start, Steve Jobs and Telekom chairman René Obermann revealed prices and start date of the iPhone for the German market.

The press release shows a lot of excitement:

“We’re thrilled to be partnering with T-Mobile to bring the iPhone to Germany,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Customer response to iPhone in the US has been incredible, and we can’t wait to introduce T-Mobile customers to the most revolutionary mobile device on the planet.”

“We are convinced that we can get our customers excited about experiencing the mobile internet with the iPhone,” said Hamid Akhavan, CEO, T-Mobile International. “I am proud that Apple and T-Mobile have become partners. The best mobile device currently on the market will soon be operating on the best network in the country.”

Similar to the UK, the pricing is “399 with contract”, but this actually comes in much more expensive than the recently announced prices for the US.

As it seems, T-Mobile expects a lot of attention, having replaced their front page with just this:

The 8 GB iPhone will be made available November 9th, exclusively from T-Mobile’s shops and website (not in Apple stores) and will cost 399 Euros (including VAT, ~553 USD) plus a special two year contract for iPhones. No details have been given on how expensive this contract will be, or if for example customers will be able to use for free the over 8,600 wifi hotspots of T-Mobile for free with this.

This would make sense, especially since existing T-Mobile customers in some contracts have access to those hotspots for 200 hours a month. T-Mobile also promises to offer 100% EDGE coverage by end of 2007, allowing customers “broadband access everywhere”.

According to Spiegel, the decision against 3G was intentional:

Wireless Lan is the better choice, as UMTS consumes too much battery and are much faster than the best 3G networks. This is why there is no 3G support.

According to FTD Germany T-Mobile also seems to have secured the rights to sell the iPhone in Austria, Netherlands as well as Hungary and Croatia, but today was only about the German launch. No information have been given how much of the revenue will be shared with Apple.

Ready in stores for the lucrative Christmas business, hyped as the must have gadget - still this does not mean it will be a home run for the iPhone. Also the iPhone is not subsidized, which is usual for PDA like phones with two year contracts, making it even more expensive than comparable phones.

While Germans tend to be rather ‘German only’ especially German apple enthusiasts are not blind or deaf to the recent announcements of price reduction and might rather use a trip to the US to get an unlocked iPhone.

And ‘normal’ buyers may rather take a trip to the next Mediamarkt (a chain which was rumoured to have the iPhone as well) and choose a competitor with a subsidized plan.

A lot will depend on how attractive the plans for the iPhone are going to be: If they are compelling enough, T-Mobile could get a lot of customers into using mobile services and build onto that for new business models.

Berlin based ViiF – a yet to be launched mobile video community which will let users watch a variety of video channels and share their own videos – has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital from Neuhaus Partners, VC Fonds Berlin and business angels Thorsten Rehling and Daniel Wild amongst others (announcement [pdf] in German.)

ViiF is scheduled to launch in October, no additional software will be required.