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The Steve Jobs of Zimbabwe!
Posted by gour.lentell, October 17th, 2011
Thank you biNu user Munyaradzi in Zimbabwe for sending this feedback email a couple of days ago!
“Hie i just want to thank with everywork u are doing as a Zimbabwean i truly proud and inspired to have someone like u who binu co founder u are indeed our own Steve Jobs, keep own improving and implementing new applications and may the lord and the Zimbabwean Spirit guide u,good day.”
biNu books – Hundreds of books now available on your mobile phone via Project Gutenburg
Posted by mark.shoebridge, October 13th, 2011
We have released our first version of biNu books for mobile phone users. Today over 300 books are available via Project Gutenburg, but in the near future the entire library will be available and all for free. Project Gutenburg http://www.gutenbergnews.org was conceived by Michael Hart who recently passed away. Hart’s vision was to make “everything available to everyone”. This project started in 1973 and now has over 33,000 titles available in many languages.
biNu now gives mobile phone users access to an entire library of books without the need to download the individual books to their device. biNu books does not use any space on the phone because biNu reads them directly from the biNu cloud. As books are added to the library they are instantly available to all users without the need to download new versions. biNu compression and caching technology means that data transfer is fast and efficient–all through an intuitive interface.
With biNu books, users browse and search books by title, author, language, view popular or recent books. When reading books, users share, translate and lookup words via the online dictionary all without having to leave the application. Many biNu users are from emerging markets in Africa and in Asia where access to hard copy versions of these books are not always available. Furthermore, frequently feature phones are the primary Internet access device ruling out PC or tablet based readers.
Here is a sample list of some of the books available within biNu:
- A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
- Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Here are some user comments:
- “Wow! i like it so much”, from Nepal, Nokia 7210 – Supernova
- ‘This is wonderful”, from Zimbabwe, Nokia 511
- “Dracula on biNu O o o o Horror!”, Bangladesh, Samsung
Download biNu from http://m.binu.com for your Java feature phone, Android or Blackberry.
For more information on Project Gutenburg visit: http://www.gutenbergnews.org
Nokia Publisher Successes – biNu: Offering the smartphone experience on any phone
Posted by gour.lentell, October 11th, 2011
Nokia published a success story on biNu last week:
“Analysts at Gartner predict that by 2015, more people will access the Internet via feature phones rather than from their personal computers. So why are internet users still relying on the slow, clumsy and expensive browser-based connection of their feature phone to access all their favorite content?
Seeing this as both a problem and an opportunity, two serial internet entrepreneurs based in Australia decided to create a solution. In 2008, Gour Lentell and Dave Turner developed biNu, a software platform that enables mobile phones to access Internet applications and services with near instant response times—even on slow or congested networks. For developers, the biNu platform enables mobile Internet applications to be developed quickly and easily using existing development tools and methods. For consumers, the free mobile biNu platform provides quick and easy access to a world of biNu performance-optimized apps.
If they are using biNu’s mobile platform, any of the five billion individuals across the globe with access to a mobile phone can now get immediate access to the economic, educational and social benefit of the Internet without owning a computer….”
How to win 1000 biNu Credits
Posted by tim.wightman, October 8th, 2011
Want to win 1000 biNu Credits? Just by sharing content in biNu beats? Then read on!
All you need to do is be the user with the most unique shared beats from any News application, biNu Books, Football, The Quran, The Bible or Wordnik. Go to ‘More Apps’ in the Menu to find these apps. Browse or search for content and share it using the ‘Menu’ -> ‘Share This’ option.
The competition runs for a week, starting Monday 10th Oct at 6am GMT and ending on Monday 17th Oct at 6am GMT. You are of course welcome to practise sharing content before then as well. :)
Rule 1: We will only count *unique* content shared by each person, so please do not repeat the same content many times.
Rule 2: We will only count shared content via biNu beats.
Good luck!
Share biNu content with friends via beats or Messenger
Posted by tim.wightman, October 8th, 2011
You can now share some of your favourite biNu content with your friends or the wider biNu community using biNu beats or biNu Messenger. So far we have enabled sharing in these apps:
- Quran
- Bible
- Wordnik English Dictionary
- Football
- biNu Books
- All News applications!
This is how you share: First find one of these mentioned apps in the catalog by clicking ‘More Apps’. Once inside the app, browse or search for the content you are interested in. Then use the Menu again and use the ‘Share This’ option. Then select how you would like to share – either in biNu beats, or using Chat, Email or SMS in Messenger.
It’s that easy!
biNu’s new Smart look for non-Smart phones
Posted by tim.wightman, October 7th, 2011
biNu has always had a large catalog of apps that are accessible from every installed app – but for some of our users it hasn’t been obvious how to find them.
biNu v3.2.1 changes all that with a new icon-based home screen that will be familiar to smart phone users. Not only does this provide instant access to our most popular apps, it also allows users to
(i) easily search through our entire app catalog
(ii) customize their home screen by adding, deleting or removing app icons
To enjoy this genuine smart phone experience on your feature phone (or to speed up your smart phone!) get biNu v3.2.1 now! Download from m.binu.com
Amazon Silk and cloud browsers
Posted by gour.lentell, September 30th, 2011
In conjunction with the new Kindle Fire tablet announced yesterday, Amazon also introduced the new Amazon Silk browser. It employs a “split browser” architecture that accelerates the power of the mobile device hardware by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services Cloud, resulting in a faster web browsing experience. The video provides a great overview of the new technology, how it works and its benefits.
Whilst Opera Mini and other “proxy browsers” have been using a split browser design for years now, Amazon Silk goes farther. Amongst other things it uses “pre-rendering” to predict which pages a user might want next and delivers them in advance and it employs extensive caching of common files to improve delivery response times.
However the Amazon Silk browser is designed to run on tablet computers that still offer significantly more horsepower than mass-market mobile phones. As much as we might want it to, the internet “browser” model that works so well on powerful computers running large browser software applications requesting uncompressed HTML data over wired, broadband network connections will never work well on mobile devices with limited processing power requesting page-at-a-time data over wireless mobile networks.
biNu’s technology design employs very similar concepts to the new Amazon Silk browser but takes things even a step further by performing 100% application processing on our cloud servers, which just happen to also run on Amazon Web Services.
biNu delivers internet based content with lightning-fast response times, even to low-end mobile feature phones on slow “2G” mobile networks, by:
- performing all application processing in the cloud, even down to graphics rendering, thereby minimising processing demands on a mobile device
- using a highly efficient, proprietary data protocol to deliver content to the mobile device (an average screen of text display is delivered in 1 or 2 packets of network data)
- employing extensive caching on our cloud servers as well as the mobile device to prevent anything being requested or sent more than once, even down to individual letters/characters displayed on the mobile screen
- “predictive caching” whereby screen pages are sent in advance of a user request, thereby providing instantaneous response times in many cases.
As this BI Research article points out, faster browsing leads to more engagement (more shopping in the case of Amazon), which offers even greater value in the the mobile internet world where the experience for most mobile users in the world is still woeful. There’s also amazing value in the market intelligence collected when all user activity is being channelled through a single cloud based service.
500,000
Posted by gour.lentell, September 21st, 2011
Since launching biNu account registration along with the biNu Messenger service last April, we’ve just passed 500,000 registered account profiles.
Last month we had 1.6 million unique users accessing biNu from pretty much every country in the world.
The biNu journey is just beginning…
Facebook on biNu
Posted by tim.wightman, September 21st, 2011
biNu already offers access to some of the most popular services on the Internet today, including Google search, translate, Wikipedia, Wordnik and many more. But none comes bigger today than the social networking giant that is Facebook.
Today biNu released its first version of the Facebook app, opening up the hugely popular service to users on simple feature phones and accelerating the experience for existing smartphone users. We like to think that our Facebook experience compares favourably with the likes of Snaptu (now the official Facebook mobile app) in terms of speed and data efficiency.
And in addition, biNu allows users to keep abreast of the latest news, search, translate, communicate to their friends using biNu Messenger, and many other useful social features all on the same platform.
If you don’t already have biNu, visit m.binu.com on your mobile and download the app today.
Everything for everyone
Posted by gour.lentell, September 15th, 2011
Sadly Michael S. Hart, the founder and driving force behind Project Gutenberg, died recently. Here’s a great article, The Inventor of the Digital Age, about his life and driving passion to make “everything available to everyone”.
We’ve been thinking about Project Gutenberg for some time at biNu but never had the time to really get into it. But we’re going to now. The entire texts of the Quran and the Bible have both been available on biNu for a while, in multiple languages and versions, and have proved to be popular with biNu users all over the world, from the U.S.A to Zimbabwe.
The time has come and now we’re going to use the same underlying technology to make every book on Project Gutenberg available and easily read on biNu, for free. Watch this space…
Requiescat in pace, Michael Hart.
Translate your messages! आसान
Posted by tim.wightman, August 26th, 2011
Upgrades to the biNu Messenger app and Google Translate mean that you can now translate messages in your inbox to any language. If you wish to translate an outgoing message, enter your text in the Google Translate app, choose translation language and then use the ‘Send’ option in the menu. This will take you to the Messenger app where you can send the translated text as per normal. We hope our users from all 208 countries around the world enjoy this new feature!
Rebranding: biNu Messenger
Posted by tim.wightman, August 10th, 2011
Today we renamed our messaging product to “biNu Messenger”, to reflect the broader nature of communication modes we now support. What started out as a purely SMS product, is now a truly unified messaging platform, allowing users in 208 countries to send messages via SMS, chat (biNu to biNu) or email on almost any mobile device in the world.
Pondering The Blackberry Puzzle
Posted by gour.lentell, August 8th, 2011
Tomi Ahonen wrote an interesting article on his blog pondering the sometime confusion surrounding Blackberry and the up and down fortunes of Blackberry maker RIM.
In recent years there have been sudden surges in sales of of Blackberry phones in traditionally lower-key markets for RIM such as South Africa, Indonesia and Venezuela driven largely by the youth market, not RIM’s traditionally strong business market.
And the reason? BBM – the Blackberry Messenger service.
I was at the CommnicAsia conference in Singapore recently where I learned from fellow mobile app developer companies in Indonesia that most people, well at least amongst youthful middle class educated professionals, have two mobile devices – with the second one being a Blackberry to send messages on BBM. It costs around $100 to buy a lower-end BB phone and on a $10 a month data plan they have unlimited messaging via BBM. No need for SMS on their “normal” mobile.
One problem of course for the broader population is that you need a BB phone to join the BBM conversations. Bummer if you can’t afford one or don’t like BB phones.
And the problem for RIM as Tomi points out is the sudden growth doesn’t repeat across the whole population and they don’t seem to upgrade their handsets at nearly the same rate as traditional BB users.
And of course, the more general global problem is there are billions of other mobile subscribers in the world today who can’t afford a second handset, let alone a BB one, and they have just the same desire to communicate.
As Tomi succinctly points out, the epiphany is that “the addiction is not to the handset, it is to the service.”
Which is why we are very optimistic about the huge potential we are beginning to see realised for the messaging services offered on biNu.
Last week we launched the biNu email service giving every biNu registered user an easy to use, fast, simple unlimited email service on top of the SMS and text messaging service we already offer.
Tomorrow we will be re-branding our integrated, unified messaging service as biNu beaTs giving biNu users on any type of phone (including BB) a single unified service to communicate in the form of SMS or chat or email as well as sharing Twitter like “beaTs”.
Watch this space!
Introducing biNu Credits
Posted by tim.wightman, August 8th, 2011
From today, biNu users can buy Credits from our new website at https://credits.binu.com. This means that registered biNu Messenger users can purchase additional credits to send more SMS in addition to their free daily quota. The binu Credits system also allows users to transfer credits to other users, from within the biNu application. This opens up biNu Credits to entrepreneurs who wish to buy Credits in bulk at a discount and resell them to people in their communities.