Amy Jo Kim's presentation at Game Developer's Conference, is quite an interesting read for ppl interested in location based services and the impact of virtual communities. Also, check out her web site: http://socialdesigner.net/ and blog http://socialarchitect.typepad.com/
TheFeature has an interesting article - Moblogging Uptake Weak, Even in Japan. The debate following are also rather interesting. I need to look up the related links.
TheFeature has an interesting article - Moblogging Uptake Weak, Even in Japan. The debate following are also rather interesting. I need to look up the related links.
picturephoning.com reports on yet another moblog. This one is form UK and is a Creative Commons-licensed phonecam blogging service, supported by users.
Courtesy, Verizon, the Boston Marathon is encouragin people to post camera phone-taken pics of the event. I like the picture comparing superman with flash in the link.
Reiter reports that Cingular, Kodak sponsor $10,000 camera phone "Share a Smile" contest. This is defintely an interesting way for Kodak to promote their OPhoto service.
An interesting Business Week article on camera phonesBW Online | April 12, 2004 | The Camphone Revolution.
"..This year, says Strategy Analytics, a research company in Newton Centre, Mass., camera phone sales should double, to 169 million units, or about a quarter of all handsets. By 2006 the number could top 380 million..."
"...Mobile operators from Britain's Vodafone PLC to Sprint PCS Group (PCS ) in the U.S. have launched services that let customers upload photos from cell phones to online sites, where the pictures can be stored or sent off to be printed. Manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), Seiko Epson, and Canon (CAJ ) are rolling out inexpensive color photo printers that connect wirelessly to handsets -- with no need to store pictures first on a PC...."
"... Katsumi Ihara, president of cell-phone maker Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, says Sony Corp. (SNE ) has ceded the low-end camera market to mobile phones....."
Bad news for all those carriers subsidising camera phones,WirelessWeek.com reports that only 9.25% of the pictures taken by camera phone users are send as picture messages (the rea$on why these camera phone$ get $ub$idised).
I am unsure how to digest this report - true only a small percentage of pics might be sent - but the truth is since its a digital cam, people tend to take a LOT of low quality pics - most of them blurry and out of focus. So, I wouldn't be surprised that only 15% of these pics are worth showing anyone else and out of that if 2/3rds or 10% of the total are sent out, hey, thats not bad.
Or maybe people just don't like sending pics around, they just like storing them locally.....?
I guess this article adds more masala to all the talk we hear about DVB for mobile phones: Soap on mobiles as TV goes tiny. 04/04/2004. ABC News Online
I wonder how this is going to take off - especially with the limited attention span that mobile phone users have. As a PC viewer of videos, I realize how limited our attention span can be - especially when there are so many things to distract you. As a mobile user, the magnitude of distractions seems to be much higher. News Corp's approach to make 1 minute videos makes sense, but how many content generators are going to generate content - its going to be a chicken an egg story once again - will it be content first and users later or vice versa ?
I was going through this blog's access log - seems like a lot of people looking for pictures of Motorola phones get here via Google. In case you are one of those, please go to: Motorola Mediacenter - Graphics Library. This is the official site with high resolution images of Motorola phones and devices.
According to the Seattle PI [via the folks at Feedster], the MSN BlogBot is a blog/RSS feed search tool to be launched by Micorosft.
Chile gets into the Mobile TV frenzy. Alan Reiter reports via PicturePhoning.com, Telefonica Movil in Chile offers TV on camera phones. It costs 1 cent per Kb for downloaded video and half-cent for streaming media. This is cheaper than my data plan with NEXTEL (which I upgraded yesterday to a 10MB data plan yesterday), but I've learnt from experience that these Kbs add up faster than you know it..... I've only been billed $10 extra last month, inspite of my semi-frugal data usage - but hearing about people like Joi Ito's experience (with his $3500 bill), I wouldn't be surprised if more people get unbearable bills due to streaming media. Certainly the pricing needs to be worked out - especially ppl like Telefonica Movil who provides this service over their *slow* GSM-GPRS network.
PS: For all you multimedia folks out there, the streams are sent using the RealONE format.
Alan Reiter blogs that CNET News reports textamerica signs deal with "top five" cellular operator. Like he mentions, I am not sure if its a top 5 US carrier or top 5 'international' carrier...
Anwar's random reading on topics related to mobile technology, mobile blogging, location based services and other things techie. (PS: The views expressed here are my own and NOT of my employer). I've stopped updating this blog. Used to update it when I worked at MOTorola and worked on MobILITY services - hence the name.
This is my blogchalk:
United States, Illinois, Streamwood, English, Hindi, Anwar, Male, 21-25.
