If you want to add an event of your own, just create a new event on the GreenHorn calendar and include the tag ‘mobile’.

Boston continued to define itself as a technology hub when it was announced by Mayor Menino on Tuesday that the city of Boston was awarded top honors twice from the Public Institute of Technology (PIT). Recognized were Boston’s iPhone app, Citizens Connect, and GIS (geospatial information system) Data Hub.

The PIT is a non-profit organization based in Washington D.C. focused on promoting and perfecting the use of technology in local government. Backed by federal, governmental, and industrial organizations, the PIT makes it their business to learn the newest technology solutions and share these with the local governments of the nation.

The PIT also recognizes local governments for technological achievements in government affairs, and as a Bostonian I’m proud to report that Boston took gold in the Web and E-Government category, as well as the award in GIS.

Web and E-Government Award: Citizens Connect

Mentioned in one of our all-time most popular posts, 10 iPhone Apps from Boston, Citizens Connect is an iPhone app that lets citizens instantly report any infrastructure issues like road damage. Now commuters sick of hitting that same pothole day-in and day-out can notify the city about it easily.

GIS Award: Data Hub

The GIS system, Data Hub is like a Google map that plots all kinds of Boston government information in a geographical context. With the interactive interface, users can visualize information like stimulus projects complete with locations and associated investment. It’s also a great way to see the locations of Boston public computing centers.

The BostInno team is very excited Boston is pulling in awards like these. Congratulations to our local government for killing it in the tech department and keep up the good work!

If your grandmother is anything like mine, she’s probably still watching the same photos you loaded into the digital photo frame you gave her as a gift four years ago.

Last week, I got a chance to sit down with Matthew Growney, the CEO of Concord-based Isabella Products, to talk about Isabella’s first mobile-enabled gadget: The Vizit

What’s more, I got to play with a prototype version!

The Vizit is going to be released on March 23 at next week’s CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas, Nev. Essentially, it’s what digital photo frames should have been when they hit the market years ago in that it lets you send and receive fresh photos via the AT&T 3G mobile network in minutes.

Pics and images can be shared with a Vizit owner from mobile devices in about two minutes using Email or text message, and users will also be able to share photos through Flickr and Photobucket, or by uploading them to a browser-based account page called “VizitMe.”

That means you can snap a picture with your smart phone and fire it over to granny in no time at all. Here’s a quick video we made while Growney was in the house.

The Vizit will feature a 10.4-inch full touch screen display, and an unbelievably intuitive interface. Growney noted that the fact that all the options and lists are carousels so you can never get lost in the software. Plus, the Vizit will be able to receive photos from LIFE.com, so even if your family isn’t nice to look at, you can still load up cool pics regularly.

The screen is a matte finish, and, while it requires a bit of a harder touch than my iPhone, it should be pretty durable. Plus, it’s easy to detach from the base of the frame, which houses all the brains of the Vizit. That means upgrading to a different or larger screen in a few months will be a snap.

The downside?

It’s retailing for $279.99 plus you have to pay for the VizitMe account on a monthly or yearly basis. At $6 per month or $72 per year, that will add up. If you choose to opt out of the VizitMe account, it will remain active for a year so you won’t lose your photos. Plus, you’ll always be able to upload photos with the USB port and SD card slot whether you pay for the service or not.

Still, the fact that this thing can send and receive photos and retails at a price that competes with high-end digital frames with no connectivity makes it a really cool device, in my opinion. After tapping it for an hour, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I’d like to have a set of feeds for image-based content on it: Imagine getting news, weather and sports fed into a device like the Vizit in real time. That would make a touch screen image frame like the Vizit a worthwhile addition to my work desk — not just something that makes me think about not visiting my grandmother enough when I see it.

For more on the Vizit and Matthew Growney, be sure to check out vizitme.com. Check back here for more of Isabella Products mobile-enabled devices coming soon… Shhhhh. The next one will be a childrens’ tablet called the Fable.

I’m sick of living a lie.

I’m sick of pretending to know which wines to pick. In fact, I’m also sick of butchering French pronunciations. Ka-berr-NAY SOH-vi-YON anyone?

If you’re anything like me, you love a good wine but you’re definitely not a snob. And you don’t have the time or patience to acquire all the knowledge necessary to navigate wine racks or read wine lists with complete confidence.

Wine novices of the world,  there’s an iPhone app to solve your worries.

Co-founder Jim McNamee of Massachusetts-based Hello Vino says the app is designed to help the “average wine consumer who might have trouble making a confident selection when browsing that [all-too-familiar and often intimidating] wall of wine.”

They’re basically doing for wine what the calculator did for math — With minimal input, Hello Vino does the heavy lifting.

Hello Vino allows people to discover a great bottle of wine for almost any scenario. The app helps us non-snobs find wines that pair well with specific meals, are ideal for certain occasions and holidays (including Earth Day), and discover new brands based on taste and regional preferences. Also, if you already have a wine you really like, Hello Vino can even help you pick the perfect dish to compliment it.

Did you know that the 2008 Willamette Valley Vinyards Riesling is awesome with Hawaiian pizza? Yeah, me neither.

Hello Vino is available as a free iPhone app and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store. It looks great and is quick and easy to use, allowing you to make a selection in just seconds. That makes it especially helpful if you’re at a restaurant and want to pick your wine (and learn how to pronounce it properly) all before the waiter returns. “Ah, yes… I’ll have the PEE-noh NWAHR with my veal please.” And if you’re looking to kill time while waiting for dessert, Hello Vino also lets you easily share your selection with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

Since launching back in June of 2009, the iPhone app has been download hundreds of thousands of times and has already provided people with over 4 million brand recommendations.

Don’t have an iPhone? Hello Vino also already has a mobile web app and a text messaging-based service. Simply point your smart phone browser to hellovino.com or text ‘HELLOVINO’ to 368266 to access this powerful software.

McNamee is excited about all the attention Hello Vino’s been receiving — they were recently featured at the March gathering of the Mobile Monday Boston community — but he and his partners have big plans for their bootstrapped venture. “The holy grail for us is to provide more relevant, location-based results,” he says. They’re working on some major updates over the next couple of months,  but that shouldn’t keep you from downloading the app today!

So the iPhone may be the prettiest, the Blackberry may boast the biggest smartphone market share, and the Windows Mobile platform is, um, around, but it’s Android that’s best for developing apps. Or at least it was the Android developers who best defended their platform at the smartphone smackdown during our Mobile Madness event on Tuesday.

The event was a big success, featuring a look at the future of the mobile industry both locally and globally, a panel of executives dishing on what we can look forward to in the next year, and keynote speakers touching on voice recognition, data storage, and Windows’ share in the smartphone world. More than 200 people crammed into Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center for the forum. (Check out our slide show here.)

I think the purpose of the smackdown was best summed up in the words of referee John Landry, founder and managing director of Lead Dog Ventures: “The objective here is really to dump on the other platforms.”

To achieve that, we invited developers and others passionate about app creation to step up and represent the iPhone, Google’s Android, BlackBerry, and Windows. The audience decided by a raising of hands that the Android guys did the best job representing their platform. The congratulations goes to Henry Cipolla, chief technology officer of mobile app analysis startup Localytics, and Carter Jernigan, founder of two forty four a.m., makers of the app Locale, which enables phones to automatically change their settings based on locations.

The duo lauded Android’s ability to work with multiple carriers, the openness of the platform’s market, and its ability to run background apps, allowing an app to remain active even when it’s not the primary app being run. Jernigan spoke about how his product could only work with the Android platform because of that unique capability. “If you’re trying to create a business and have a lot of different avenues for success, the Android makes the most sense,” Cipolla said.

This gave the iPhone guys an opportunity to jump in. “Don’t you want to be where the people are?” said Raizlabs‘ Craig Spitzkoff, pointing out the fact that Apple has the highest share of customers downloading and paying for mobile apps.

Cimarron Buser, VP of products and marketing for Apperian, pointed out that when it comes to apps, in the beginning there was the iPhone. “You can already see that every other vendor is looking at the iPhone in terms of technology and business model,” he said.

Other smackdown contenders, and even audience members, pointed out the sense of entitlement this has given the iPhone. They criticized Apple’s tendency to suddenly shelve a mobile app (which it did last month with apps it deemed too sexy) and in turn tank a developer’s business.

Zachariah Hofer-Shall, representing development on the Windows Mobile side, lashed out at what he called the “communist regulations of the App Store.” He and others also brought up the iPhones’s inability to support Flash—a perennial criticism of the device.

He took his far share of flak, though. So did our keynoter, Windows Phone evangelist Anthony Kinney, when he gave us a look into the company’s plans for its 7 Series phone, due out in “holiday 2010″ (vague, we know).

And it turns out that Windows’ problem isn’t just one of design or construction, but of marketing (a point brought up earlier in the event by Kinney). “A lot of people out there have Windows Mobile devices and don’t even know it,” said Hofer-Shall, who works for Forrester Research but spoke on the Windows platform from his personal, not professional standpoint, as he has a tech blog outside of work.

William Sulinski, co-founder and CEO of mCaddie, makers of the golf analytics AccelGolf app, represented the BlackBerry platform with the logic and composure that often categorizes this smartphone, or at least its users. He also has iPhone and Android versions of his app, but said he likes the older demographic he can target with BlackBerry (made by Research in Motion), and the huge user base of the phone.

But he had no pretenses about the challenge in developing for RIM’s device. “What it does is separate the men from the boys,” Sulinski said, with a nod to the fact that the varying screen sizes among BlackBerry devices require different coding.

In the end, it seems, no platform is perfect. But each one seems to have developers who love it.

Other highlights from Mobile Madness — The New Future of Computing included:

—Nuance Communications’ vice president of product management, Matt Revis, walked us through the company’s plans for gesture recognition technology for mobile phones. The speech recognition software company already has a big hit with its iPhone app for translating voice to text.

—Andrew Capener, director of service provider marketing for mobility at Cisco Systems, explained how Cisco, which recently acquired local wireless broadband leader Starent Networks, has a stake in the mobile world, due to the exponential growth in data trafficked through mobile networks.

—The 150,000+ mobile apps that Apple boasts of isn’t a lot, or at least not compared with the number of websites that exist on the Internet, Greg Raiz, founder and CEO of app development company Raizlabs, said during our executive panel. Meaning, there’s still plenty more apps to come. He also said he thinks this year will be the year his mom gets a smartphone.

—We concluded the afternoon by inviting about 10 mobile companies (most of which can be seen in our online mobile showcase) to give 90-second lightning presentations of their mission and products. They even stuck to that time constraint. And so did we! (The event ended on time to the minute.)

The take-home message of the day? Things are only beginning for the mobile industry. We’re excited to see which mobile platform, if any, ends up winning the real-life smackdown in development, and all the new moves the industry innovators make in the process.

Guess what Boston? We’re in line to be one of the first cities with 4G-network coverage for mobile devices.

On Tuesday, March 9, Xconomy held a forum called Mobile Madness-The New Future of Computing. I got the chance to sit in on the Executive Panel: New Gadgets, New Infrastructure, New Business Models. The panel included Walt Doyle, CEO of uLocate; Steve Krom, VP/GM of New England AT&T; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; and Dan Olschwang, CEO of Jumptap.

The panel kicked off with an in-depth discussion of mobile networks, specifically, conversation about the how the technology powering your cell phone signal is improving. With 4G networks, we’ll get more wi-fi integration, bandwidth and speed. What does this mean for  your cell phone? Faster application downloads and fewer calls dropped.

Faster downloads mean more applications.

In February of this year, TechCrunch reported 150,00 apps in Apple’s app store; there are thousands of other apps for the Palm, Android and Blackberry platforms. Greg Raiz of Raizlabs made a good point; in comparison to the number of websites that provide services like apps, there aren’t that many mobile applications yet. He predicts that, similar to when everyone had to have a business card or a website, soon everyone is going to need a personal mobile app. Early-adopter locals like Jeff Cutler and Steve Garfield already have their own personalized iPhone applications and soon you will too.

With the technology developing quickly, it remains important for every interested party to keep monetization strategies current.

According to Doyle, yesterday, his company uLocate — the maker of the WHERE mobile application (an app that let’s you search and see consumer recommendations based on your location) — launched Where Ads. Where Ads uses location-based technology to deliver ads relevant to a consumer’s whereabouts. Expect to see fewer banner ads with bad graphics, mobile wallpaper downloads and B.S. ringtones, and instead, look for more discounts and special offers based on your geography.

The panel agreed, the biggest challenge the mobile industry is facing is keeping monetization efforts on track with the technology.

Already, mobile carriers and app developers have it easier than those with websites because they can pinpoint a cell phone user’s location and quickly create relevant campaigns. Still, the technology is moving fast: devices are smarter and less expensive, network coverage is strengthening rapidly, and more applications are being added to their respective platform’s store daily. The proliferation of applications is akin to the proliferation of websites in that, with more “retail space” popping up every day, that “real estate” is losing value. Can advertisers keep up and find new and dynamic ways of reaching consumers?

We’re obsessed with all kinds of things here at BostInnovation; robots, Twitter, YouTube videos, augmented reality, foosball, and especially our cell phones. We’re an office full of mobile users, texting, photo uploading, and gaming, and we’ve taken our mobile activity to a whole new level this month because it’s Mass Mobile Month.

On Monday March 8, the BostInnovation team attended Mobile Monday Boston, a quarterly event that allows companies specializing in mobile products and technology to present their products to a huge local audience.

Organizers Matt Gross and Kate Imbach put on an impressive event last night or should I say “battle?” That’s right the lines were drawn between the U.K. and the U.S. to see who had the coolest mobile companies. It can’t really get much geekier then that, can it?

In case you missed the event, here is quick a recap of the companies who presented and a look at what they do:

Local Companies
Textaurant is everywhere these days, thanks to our boy, founder and CEO Josh Bob. If you haven’t heard about it already, Textaurant is replacing those annoying beepers you’re accustomed to getting at restaurants. Instead, the Textaurant system sends a text to your phone when your table is ready and also allows you to opt in for special deals and discounts.

Celtra, based in Cambridge, Mass., creates mobile marketing campaigns. They work with companies to create mobile experiences for their consumer base. Celtra focuses heavily on keeping their clients’ brands cohesive throughout each campaign. They’ve worked with companies like Heineken and Paramount.

Fluent Mobile developed what they call “App Store Optimization,” which is basically search engine optimization (SEO) for iPhone and iPod touch applications; they help apps “get found” in the app store. Fluent Mobile also has an app that aggregates news from websites like The New York Times and BBC and puts it in a mobile-friendly format.

Hello Vino is a mobile wine guide, which makes finding wines for meals easier, and makes shopping for wine a little less overwhelming. They take you step-by-step to help you find a wine based on the occasion, taste your looking for, or the country where the wine is from, They’ve been featured on Mashable and were Apple’s App Store staff pick twice.

U.K. Companies
Apollo Mobile, has developed a mobile technology called RE4CTOR, which allows for real-time user interaction with things like audio, video, text, and photographs. The cool thing about Apollo Mobile is that technology is not just reserved for smart phones; users can also interact using SMS (text messages).

Ustwo focuses on the user interface, or the experience the user gets from an application. One of their most successful apps is the Position App, an iPhone application made especially for marketers and developers to track the position of their app, all while on the run.

Tattu Mobile believes the word mobile doesn’t only apply to cell phones, but also to cameras, digital photo frames, medical devices, and cameras. Tattu has worked on projects internationally with companies like Telefonica. They also partnered with Disney to create a child-friendly phone that allows parents to manage their child’s cell phone activity.

With i-Migo you will never loose your cell phone or laptop again. I-Migo backs up all the data on your cell phone via Bluetooth technology, but even cooler, i-Migo will sound an alarm when you go 30ft from your phone so you don’t loose it. Saban Demirbasa gave the audience a demo by running out of the conference hall. As soon as he was gone, the alarm sounded.

Fluid Pixel is a company focused on mobile gaming applications. They’ve developed games like “Pimp Da Chimp,” an app that lets you dress up a monkey and watch him dance to installed music or your own voice. Their most successful game though is KamiCrazy, a puzzle-game where you have to navigate some crazy jungles.

Who won? The U.K. had cooler technology than the U.S., but the U.S. products seemed more consumer-friendly. You can’t compete with a company that eliminates waiting for a table or an iPhone app that picks your wine for you. We are calling it. U.S.A., you’re the winner.

Who do you think should win, the U.K. or U.S.A? Let us know in the comments.

A big thanks to UK Trade and Investment, who sponsored the event.



Venture investments in Boston-area mobile technology companies decreased in both volume and value in 2009, plummeting to levels not seen since 2005. But payouts from mergers and acquisitions hit a record level, raising overall deal flow to an unprecedented $1.5 billion, according to data compiled by Mobile Monday Boston.

Venture investing started out strong in 2009, according to the report, with $208 million invested in the first quarter. But investors couldn’t keep up the pace. They doled out only $24 million in the third quarter and $40 million in the fourth quarter.

By year’s end, venture capital firms had handed out only $339 million, a decrease of 40 percent from 2008′s record figure of $565 million. The total number of companies in the region receiving venture funding also fell, from 45 in 2008 to 32 in 2009.

The drops—which were paralleled in other sectors, and likely reflect the venture industry’s own travails rather than any fundamental decrease in venture-fundable innovation—brought an abrupt end to a three-year run of increasing venture investments in the region’s mobile industry.

Even as the venture well became drier, though, a number of more established mobile companies were acquired, providing exits for their own investors. The value of acquisitions in the mobile business zoomed upward from $473 million in 2008 to nearly $1.2 billion in 2009, Mobile Monday Boston found.

A single acquisition, 72 Mobile Holdings’ $530 million purchase of Chelmsford, MA-based wireless broadband equipment maker Airvana, accounted for nearly half of the $1.2 billion total. Compuware’s acquisition of Lexington, MA-based Gomez, Prime View International’s acquisition of Cambridge, MA-based E Ink ($215 million), and KPN’s acquisition of Burlington, MA-based iBasis ($93 million) significantly boosted the numbers. (Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless isn’t counted in the figures, since it was announced in early January; in any case, the companies haven’t disclosed how much Apple paid.)

Mobile Monday Boston organizer Kate Imbach, of Skyhook Wireless, presented the investment data at Monday night’s meeting of the group, and plans to detail them further at Xconomy’s Mobile Madness event today.

The report also detailed mobile investments by category. Hardware companies were the luckiest in 2009—19 percent of the 32 companies that won venture investments were in this category. Applications and software companies tied for second place at 15 percent each, followed by voice and advertising companies (tied at 9 percent each), and wireless infrastructure, content and RFID companies (tied at 6 percent each).

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Boston is one of the hottest places globally for mobile development. With Steve Jobs’ recent announcement of Apple’s new iPad and the release of Google’s Nexus One phone, Bostonians are seeing a shift in lifestyle and technology due to evolving mobile devices.

Perhaps sooner than we realize, we’ll depend entirely on our mobile devices; desktop computers and laptops will be a thing of the past. Or as Mobile Monday founder Matt Gross predicts “the term mobile will become obsolete.”

So why mobile and why Boston?

I sat down with Gross recently to get a better grasp of where Boston’s mobile scene has come and where it’s going.

Gross is a mobile pioneer — he was on the local scene before mobile meant the big money we associate it with today, and yes, before the iPod. (Shocker, I know. There was life before the iPhone.) He credits Boston for being so mobile-developed because of places like MIT and collaborators like the Google Android development team in Cambridge.

Gross has become the face of mobile in Boston because he recognized the opportunity for a more unified mobile community in the area and did something about it, bringing Mobile Monday (often abbreviated MoMo in online forums) to the area.

Four years ago, 60 people gathered for the first Mobile Monday Boston event he put together. Mobile Monday is global movement established in 2000 to create settings for members of the mobile sector to meet up, talk about ideas, and listen to presentations from established companies and industry leaders.

Past Mobile Monday Boston’s have included speakers from RIM, which manufacturs Blackberry phones, Gross’ employer uLocate, which created the Where mobile application, and SCVNGR, which lets users create scavenger hunts and then follow them with friends from their smartphones.

Gross has watched Mobile Monday explode recently.

“As Boston’s mobile scene expanded and the iPhone came out, [Mobile Monday] opened to a much larger audience and became a larger event,” Gross explains.

Mobile Monday’s next big event (other then the Mobile Monday meet up being held on March 8^th) is the April 5^th Mobile Camp. He hopes to attract developers, entrepreneurs, and business from all mobile platforms to the camp. The format of Mobile Camp is an “un-conference,” where attendees not only have to listen to speakers, but can create their own breakout sessions as well. This format fits perfectly with Mobile Monday’s discussion-based forums.

Gross made sure to tell me about the diverse group of people they’ve had show up for past Mobile Camp events. What can we expect? People fly to Boston from as far away as California and London in hopes of creating some mobile magic.

“There could be a guy who’s worked for ten years at Verizon sharing knowledge with a kid who’s building an iPhone app in his dorm,” says Gross.

So what are Gross’ plans for the future of Mobile Monday?

Mobile Monday plans to become more structured and partner with other MoMo chapters in different cities around the world. Gross hopes this will bring in fresh ideas and new talent. Gross is looking to co-brand more with other organizations, like MIT Mobile. It seems his original vision of better unifying the mobile development community in Boston is still intact.

Which Boston companies does Gross expect big things from this year?

He’s keeping an eye on Survey On The Spot, an iPhone application, mobile website, and online destination that allows users to share feedback and experience at restaurants. Gross believes in their solid team and unique placement in the industry. Gross also has high hopes for Pongr, Raizlabs, and Localytics.

The future is mobile and thanks to people like Matt Gross and events like Mobile Monday Boston, our city is well positioned to lead the way. It’s either go mobile, or go home. Literally.

What are your mobile predictions? What mobile companies are you expecting big things out of? Let us know in the comments.

Want to go mobile or at least learn more about it? Follow the Mobile Monday Blog, join the group on Facebook or search the Twitter hashtag #momo.

Last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft surprised the tech world by unveiling the Windows Phone 7 Series mobile operating system (WP7S). Despite the funny name, the operating system itself is poised to be a seriously fresh and exciting new contender in the mobile space.

We’ve previously written about Boston’s bustling mobile scene. Given the area’s unique demographics and massive student population, Beantown might just be Microsoft’s perfect testing ground for WP7S; a mobile tech microcosm of sorts.

Microsoft’s WP7S will definitely love Boston.

With Microsoft N.E.R.D. in town — it’s one of the biggest offices Microsoft has outside of their Redmond, Wash., corporate headquarters — Boston could see a little love.

One approach might be to distribute devices to a select group of testers (I’d be happy to help compile that list, haha). We’ve got tons of busy, bright, and tech-savy students and young professionals here that can serve as an early adopter base. Since Windows Phones won’t be available for many months still, this group could use these devices in the wild and begin to reveal what works and what doesn’t. Microsoft could think of it as a head-start in usability.

Okay, so perhaps a pilot program is too much to ask for, but that doesn’t mean Boston’s not going to be a massive testing ground for the WP7S.

We’ve got over 250,000 students in Boston and Cambridge universities alone. A recent survey from Ball State University found that 27 percent of college students own a smartphone as compared to the national average of 19 percent among working adults. And it’s these college students that are most likely to love all the unique features of a Windows Phone: Xbox Live, MS Office, and Zune, just to name a few.

Also, Boston is ranked as having one of the top 3 fastest 3G networks in the country, so if local users are unhappy about WP7S’ Internet connectivity here, that will be an indicator of global reaction..

Plus, Boston has one of the biggest communities of mobile developers around, so you know a lot of what’s available on WP7S will be dreamed up and created here. It was recently estimated that by late 2009, there were about 250 companies in the mobile space here in Boston.

But will all you techies show the love back?

It’s difficult to compare WP7S directly to iPhone, Android, or even Microsoft’s current Windows Mobile devices since the user interface and philosophy behind this newest mobile operating system is very different.

What’ll be interesting to observe is whether people will value enough of these differences and actually fork over their cash to Microsoft as opposed to Apple, Google, and others. I had the opportunity to chat with Gian Wilson, Product Manager in Microsoft’s Mobile Communication Business, about WP7S and asked him how it might be better than other smartphone options out there.

He’s clearly been getting asked this a lot and clarified that WP7S is “simply different” and “solves a different kind of problem – it’s designed for life in motion so you don’t miss a moment.” Based on the principles of smart design and integrated experiences, Wilson explained that Microsoft’s new operating system is more than just about apps; it’s about content, and it’s created for the individual that “sees technology as enabler.”

Microsoft absolutely has a lot of catching up to do. In the last 12 months alone their market share of smartphone sales fell from 11.8 to 8.7 per cent. With WP7S, though, it seems as though they’ve now put their best foot forward. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for the holiday season for Windows Phones to hit the shelves, but as soon as that happens, we at Bostinnovation will be keeping an especially close eye on how Bostonians react… and so should Microsoft…

The Windows Phone is a bold, fresh start for Microsoft’s mobile efforts – a complete reboot if you will. Nearly everything from device hardware quality to what you get when you actually turn it on will be different and improved. There are tons of great articles already out there that cover everything from WP7S’ unique, new user interface approach to analyses of Microsoft’s revamped mobile strategy. Much is still unknown, so I’ll spare repeating much of what people are still only speculating on, but here’s a collection of great of posts from Gizmodo and “everything you ever wanted to know” about the operating system from Engadget.

Perhaps what’s most exciting about Microsoft’s move is the new user experience approach Microsoft is taking. I never thought I’d say this, but watching this 22-minute WP7S demo video makes my iPhone feel sorta dated.

Instead of navigating endless screens of glossy icons, Windows Phones will instead feature “hubs,” each of which are specifically designed to house all your information, apps, and services around one of six topics: People, Pictures, games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office. Facebook, for example, isn’t just an app on the device. Instead, all your ‘book info and services (friends, photos, events, etc.) are integrated appropriately into multiple areas of the phone. We’ll learn more about the WP7S app environment at Microsoft’s MIX event in March, but I’m hoping to see more of that same level of integration with music apps, games, and more.

What do you think? Will you be willing to make the switch? How will the local development community react to this new platform?