RIM’s BlackBerry users experienced an ~18 hour blackout yesterday. Are their subscribers growing too fast? BusinessWeek speculates about the reasons and the impacts to the users and the company.
Just wanted to highligh an interesting article (click past the sponsor page) about a group of MIT researchers who have made some insights around the data that tracks movement of people based on their mobile signal. Since traffic sensors only detect cars (and not bike/foot traffic) and street cameras don’t have continuous tracking abilities, the mobile phone is becoming the best source of GIS data for tracking where people go.
I think the most interesting thing is that instead of MIT focusing on one data set, they’re working with euro-carriers, taxi companies, architects, metropolitan transit authorities, etc…obviously alot of organizations see immense value in this and it’s great that the data is being shared to help get them there.
If you think Tamagotchi is past tense for virtual pet, think again. They’re connecting with some US partners to create a competitor to Disney Mobile and Firefly.
“Tamagotchi virtual pet now comes as just one of the many features loaded onto a fully functional prepaid mobile phone for kids. The phone is being brought to retail through a joint effort between PlayPhone and Bandai America Inc.”
Summary:
Read more information at: http://www.collectiondx.com/node/147
EMI keynote at CTIA Orlando
Eric Nicoli (CEO of EMI Group) hinted in his keynote at CTIA that his company had been “experimenting” with DRM-free music and said that their studies showed people would be willing to pay more for it. Last weeks’EMI Group announcement of an iTunes deal will make higher quality, DRM-free, tunes available for $1.29. The new offering doesn’t replace the existing $.99 DRM versions. What’s even more user-friendly is that users who own DRM versions can upgrade their tracks for $.30 each.
Eric Nicoli also made a call for the mobile industry, specifically those in the media and entertainment realm, to take cues from Apple and address issues like value for price, making compelling products and ease of use.
This is no April Fool’s joke. “New Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Phone” is the New York Times write-up of the emerging trend.
From the article:
“In Japan, McDonald’s customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.”
Clearly the US has a way to go before catching on. Mainstream media just may be catching on too:
“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the digital world,”
Related resources:
1. “China: Craking the Mobile Ad Biz” – An article from BusinessWeek focusing on mobile barcodes in China
2. “All About Mobile Life” - A blog focusing on Kaywa QR code, a barcode service in Switzerland offering a bridge between We-based and Mobile content.
1// Adobe is reporting that Flash Lite will now support video.
2// Wired has posted their interview with John Maeda, who spoke at the TED Conference in Monterey, CA this week. When probed on his favorite manmade designs, he offered this:
“I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn’t have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn’t have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.
I think if you’re a young designer now, you’ve got the internet and you’ve got screens all over the place — it’s awful hard. Technology is just so powerful now. You can do so much with so little. You can shove it into the size of a quarter. For designers to design great objects where technology is concerned, that’s hard.”
Too true. (Thanks Nancy.)
3// Last weeks’ Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, yielded some interesting discussion, like the keynote on networked mobile gaming.
4// File under: alternate desktop metaphors. Check out “BumpTop,” a desktop UI paradigm that uses physical behavior to aid organization of files. Whether or not the desktop metaphor is appropriate to mobile UI, could this type of physics and motion apply to mobile touch screens using a finger tip or thumb as the stylus?
5// Opera Mini. At most it looks like a strike against the operator content foothold. At the least it may be a reason not to have to buy a smartphone. (Thanks Christian.)
1// Picturephoning has an interesting write-up on “unauthorized” use of mobile phones by students in classrooms with plenty of YouTube evidence to back it up.
2// At Punchcut we’ve been calling it the new convergence (where convergence is no longer a move to a single, mega-device, but a broad move toward ubiquitous data availability across devices and media), but Mike Mace is calling it the information ecosystem. Whatever you call it, Mike shares an interesting perspective: “The rise of the information ecosystem: How mobile devices, personal computing, media, and the Internet all fit together.
3// Cingular (AT&T) is the second carrier to adopt Qualcomm’s mobile broadcast TV platform MediaFLO.
4// Microsoft announces Windows Mobile 6 at 3GSM.
5// Wired features a quick look at the smartphone lineup that was announced at 3GSM this week.
6// In non-phone device news, a cadre of music execs are busy creating the next gen MP3 player.
7// Finally! Bluetooth headphones worthy of audiophiles.
8// Bank of America Mobile to let users check their accounts, pay bills and transfer funds.
9// Business Week analyzes the timing of a Virgin Mobile USA IPO. It’s an interesting run-down of the US prepaid wireless market with Virgin’s competition from MVNOs Boost, Amp’d and Helio.
10// The “fourth screen”, as the film industry has dubbed it, had an interesting submission from Sundance that debuted at 3GSM. BBC Quote: “Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s A Slip In Time is one of six shorts made especially for mobiles as part of the Sundance Film Festival Global Short Film Project, and screened at the 3GSM Mobile Phone conference in Barcelona this week.”
The best mobile news and discussions for the week ending 26 January, 2007.
User Experience
1// An interesting video Q & A session with Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google shares her thoughts about Google as a “swiss army knife that is closed.” She suggests that all the tools are there, but they don’t throw it all at you at once. There’s a nugget of simplicity there that mobile “portals” could benefit from.
She also suggests that Google engineers, sales people and even lawywers are user focused. She pontificates on the dangers of overdoing Web 2.0 to the detriment of usability.
2// On the voice search front, Midomi has announced a music recognition service (alas not yet for mobile). Users can sing or hum a song and get results. Pretty impressive results, according to ZDNet. What the news sites failed to mention is how much more natural it will be to do a voice search on a voice-centric platform like mobile.
3// On the mobile voice search front, I have to suggest those of you heading to Barcelona in a couple weeks to make sure and check out Promptu’s voice search, nominated for 3GSM’s Global Mobile award.
Mobile news
4// In the clamor of the Apple Keynote, Nokia and Visa’s announcement of mobile Visa payments in the US snuck under the radar.
Mainstream media digs at the iPhone
5// Colbert is a voice of finger-wagging, syrupy, in your face, um, reason and he is on a roll this week. If you missed the episodes, here are a couple of clips featuring commentary on the Cingular and AT&T merger and he pans the iPhone release.
The best mobile news and discussions for the week of 19 January, 2007.
Culture of Mobility
1// Mayor Bloomberg announced that New York will soon allow 911 (and 311) to accept digital photos and videos.
“If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you’ll be able to transmit images to 911, or online to nyc.gov,” the mayor said in his annual State of the City address. “And we’ll start extending the same technology to 311 to allow New Yorkers to step forward and document nonemergency quality of life concerns, holding city agencies accountable for correcting them quickly and efficiently.”
2// Book, I hot mod balk. (a.k.a - Cool, I got one call.)
Kottke.org has a mention of kids in the UK using “book” as a synonym for “cool.” It’s rooted in a T9onym where the word cool and the word book both come up when you enter 2665 on a T9 keypad.
3// In the clamor of the Apple Keynote, Nokia and Visa’s announcement of mobile Visa payments in the US snuck under the radar.
Mobile technology news
4// Mainstream press picks up on Qualcomm: BusinessWeek has a feature on emerging mobile technologies primarily mentioning Qualcomm’s mobile TV offering, MediaFLO.
5// Mobileburn has a review of Samsung + Cingular’s latest sleek little smartphone — the BlackJack, a Windows Mobile handset that is slightly smaller than Motorola’s popular Q. Being skeptical about Samsung handsets doesn’t mean I don’t want one. Did I mention it’s black?
Mobile UI
6// Looks like Alltel is doing the widgets thing.
7// Mike Krisher has an interesting piece on FlashLite.
8// Mike Rowehl on Rails Dev for the Mobile web: Rails and Mobile Content
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