Kuneri bloggy

Pikkoo introduces interactive Live Screensavers and partners with Foreca to bring weather-cast of 140.000 locations worldwide to mobile screensavers

Oulu, Finland, 30th June 2009 – Pikkoo, an innovative Finnish startup, today introduced the ground breaking Live Screensaver concept, streaming information to mobile devices without ever pushing a button. Using Pikkoo Live Screensavers, mobile users will not only be served up-to-date information anytime, anywhere without a need to launch an application, but also will be able to interact with their screensaver just as any other mobile application.

With the introduction, the first live screensaver is launched in partnership with Foreca, leading Finnish digital weather service company. Foreca Live Weather Screensaver will bring up-to-date, geographic-specific weather information of 140.000 locations worldwide to mobile screensavers. Users will also be able to get detailed information from foreca.mobi, the most comprehensive mobile weather service, using the screensaver.

“Here at Foreca, we’re very excited to offer such a novel concept to our audience together with Pikkoo. With an ever increasing demand from the mobile audience for accurate, up-to-date weather information; it will be possible for Foreca to bring weather-cast into everyone’s pocket with minimum effort” says Marko Moilanen, VP Business Development, Foreca.

Utilizing Adobe Flash® Lite™ and its own proprietary technologies, Pikkoo interactive Live Screensavers are able to brings contextual content to mobile devices, reducing information delivery to the simplest form possible for today’s mobile devices.

“Why should you launch an application to access information, while information could be served right in front of you?” asks Mr. Ugur Kaner, CEO of Pikkoo. “Our partnership with Foreca is one great example of how weather information could be brought to users, without users needing to go and get themselves. Pikkoo interactive Live Screensavers can similarly be applied to a multitude of uses to a variety of industries as a value-added service that can capture any mobile user today.” he continues.

For more information, visit www.pikkoo.com/foreca-live-weather-screensaver.html or contact Pikkoo.

About Pikkoo

Pikkoo is an innovative startup based in Oulu, Finland. Pikkoo focuses on social, user generated and interactive mobile content for Adobe Flash® Lite™ and non-Flash Lite enabled phones. The company is privately held and founded in early 2009. Pikkoo launched private beta in November 2008, and opened to the public in May 2009.  For more information, go to http://www.pikkoo.com

About Foreca Ltd.

Foreca Ltd. is a full-scale weather company based in Helsinki, Finland. Foreca has more than ten years of experience of forecasting weather and providing internet and mobile weather services. Foreca specializes in weather services for digital media and especially mobile devices. Foreca’s first commercial mobile weather service was launched already in 1997, and it is still steady revenue creator. Thanks to its world-wide partner network Foreca is able to provide accurate weather information for any market. Today, Foreca’s mobile weather services have users across all continents. For more information please visit http://corporate.foreca.com

About Adobe® Flash® Lite™

Adobe® Flash® Lite™ software, Adobe’s award-winning Flash Player runtime specifically designed for mobile devices, to enable web browsing of Flash Player compatible content. Flash Lite has shipped on 1 billion devices (40% of all new handsets in 2008) and will reach more than 2.5 billion devices by the end of 2010.

Contact Info

Pikkoo Ltd.
Mr. Endale Mitiku, VP Marketing & Sales
Tel: +358 443 19 1259
Email: dale[at]pikkoo[d.t]com
Adress: Pakkahuoneenkatu 12 A, 90100, Oulu, Finland

Foreca Ltd.
Mr. Tuomo Kolehmainen, Business Manager, Channels
Tel. +358 44 3300646
Email: tuomo.kolehmainen[at]foreca[d.t]com
Address: Tammasaarenkatu 5, FI-00180, Finland

via Pikkoo blog

Pikkoo released the latest version of Pikkoo Screensaver Manager with full touch screen support for Nokia phones such as 5800 XPress Music and N97.

Release notes:

- Full touch screen support (for Nokia 5800, Nokia N97 etc..)

- Bug fixes

- UI improvements

Apparently, Nokia decided to remove screensaver support on Nokia 5800 XPress Music (or S60 5th edition we should say?). As enjoying Flash Lite screensavers seems to be impossible natively, there is a small widget application enabling Flash Lite screensavers on 100 Nokia S60 phone models, including Nokia 5800 XPress music. With this widget application, it’s also possible to get unlimited free screensavers designed by users or yourself.

Below is the step by step guide on how to enable Flash Lite screensavers on S60 3rd and 5th edition devices, such as Nokia 5800 XPress Music or Nokia N73.

1. Download and install Pikkoo Screensaver Manager

2. Browse through screensavers on gallery, or create your own using Pikkoo Themes.

3. Note down the pCode (Pikkoo download code) of the screensaver you like

4. Run Pikkoo Screensaver manager on your phone, goto “Download” menu, enter the pCode code and download

5. Activate the screensaver. Voila!

Now you can enjoy the full power and fun of Flash Lite screensavers on your Nokia 5800 XPress music and many other phone models

PS. If you use twitter; I recommend you to follow Pikkoo.

[via Pikkoo blog]

Pikkoo released 2 ultimately cool mobile screensaver & wallpaper templates: Snowboarding and Rainy Day.

If you love Snowboarding, you should definitely want to show that off on your mobile and design your own snowboard screensaver/wallpaper and why not snowboard.

If you love cute and tiny characters, Rainy Day template is great to spread the cuteness on your phone. I like that one.

As we are coming closer to release Pikkoo, we are preparing to return KISS60 back to it’s original purpose (not a screensaver gallery, but a Flash mobile screensaver distribution channel for S60 phones). During these preparations, we dug into KISS60 statistics to see what it has achieved in 14 months since it’s launch late 2007. What we see was quite satisfactory for a service we haven’t put any effort to market or sell, distributing more than 300.000 Flash Lite screensavers to various devices in the market, mosly being S60 3rd edition. It’s also interesting to see, KISS60 mobile application was downloaded (and installed) on more than 40.000 Nokia S60 devices out there.

This creates a rough vision for us for Pikkoo, which supports not only Flash Lite, but all other devices and unlimited content generated by users online.

Below you can see a summary of the the analytics, which includes number of screensavers served per year (duration), screensavers downloaded online or from KISS60 mobile client application.

Just spotted City Lite, the global winner of Forum Nokia Code Camp competition got featured on Nokia and S60 sites.

City Lite is a nightlife guide built upon Flash Lite from Adobe. It provides information about nightlife events in the cities to which you travel, with outstanding graphics and animations. It is available for all S60 devices that can display Flash Lite versions 2.0 or later. It allows you to browse movies, restaurants, and entertainment events. City Lite also allows you to make calls directly from links embedded in the application, making it easy to book tickets and make reservations. The intuitive navigation interface puts you one click away from maps, phone numbers, e-mail, and Web site information.

You can also grab free Flash Lite screensavers and wallpapers with Olympics theme. Here is the one with battery indicator, and one with the signal indicator. Thanks to Poly and all Ideas Lite team!

Sony Ericsson Developer World published an interesting article about different ways of presenting data on mobile devices with Flash Lite 2.0.

This new tutorial explains how data from a Sony Ericsson phone can be presented as dynamic Flash Lite™ 2.0 animations which can then be used as freestanding wallpapers (standby) or imported into a theme using the Sony Ericsson Themes Creator tool (version 3.29).

Although it focuses on Sony Ericsson devices, this can be applied to most of the Flash Lite enabled devices. iMode users enjoy such representations in Japan for many years already via Flash Lite. If you remember, Adobe also showcased Sponge Bob home screen concept this year in Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I am sure, we will see these kind of creative ways of data representations on mobile, as device manufacturers integrate more deeply into their devices. Up now, Nokia has been little too slow (as usual) catching this up, compared to Sony Ericsson. But this doesn’t mean that they will never do it.

Ok, that’s not an application, or a new cool Web 2.0 initiative. Flori is the sweet, cute and innocent character of Vivek, which I missed when he first released. But definitely worth to see!

You can also download and use it on you mobile as a screensaver or wallpaper; just purchase it for a small fee here.

As a nice move, Vivek offers licensing of this character. Just get in touch with him.

Design province labs, creator of LiveU screensaver (which also is enabled on KISS60), released a new Flash Lite screensaver called iBattery.

It’s quite elegant, simple, and iPhone-like. You can see the battery level and time as well.

Great work!

Today, we are proud to announce the availability of KISS60 Beta 0.9! We have been working hard to make it exceptionally good looking, highly functional and pleasant to use. New version of KISS60 is one of the best examples, exposing the potential of our innovative platform KuneriLite and demonstrating the next generation S60 User Experience. Now you can enjoy Flash Lite screensavers on your S60 device even more and easily manage them using our software.

KISS60 is also a great potential for content aggregators, advertisers and screensaver developers. It enables Flash Lite content on 20% more devices, increasing content availability and boosting revenues. KISS60 has a very flexible content download system, that can be integrated into any kind of payment system or distribution channel. Furthermore, availability of many free screensavers makes it a very powerful advertising platform.

Some feature highlights;

- Interactive S60 UI with Flash Lite
- Enable Flash Lite screensavers on your S60 phone
- Easily manage your screensavers
- Simply download free screensavers from free KISS60 gallery
- Share KISS60 and your screensavers with other S60 and Series 40 phones
- Set up screensaver timeout and backlight duration

If you are in Mobile World Congress, just drop by to Adobe stand and learn more about KuneriLite and KISS60 from us. If not, stay tuned to our blog for latest news and enjoy KISS60 in your hands.