MobHappy

Russ's Rant

Example of MMS

Russell Beattie has blogged a rant about MMS. In a blog entitled "MMS still sucks" (get off the fence on this will you, Russ?) he writes about a failed MMS to someone on the same network, when both sender and recipients have Nokia's.

It doesn't arrive - quelle surprise!

The only damn justification MMS has for living is the "it just works" factor. You get a new MMS enabled camera phone and MMS works just as easily as SMS. If you take that out, then MMS just doesn't make any sense: It's not as quick and easy as SMS, it's not as functional as email, and it's not as instant as Chat. It's a freakin' mutant. It has no fallback: if MMS doesn't just work, it's completely useless. Email and Chat are worth struggling a bit with settings to get working, but MMS? There's too much infrastructure you don't control and too much magic behind the scenes. It either works or it's garbage.

Grrr..

I couldn't agree more. Though I'd add that the over-pricing adds insult to injury.

Sometimes, operators are excused their shite marketing as they focus on technology and infrastructure. But when that doesn't work either....

The word according to Howard

One of my favourite writers on technology and society in Howard Rheingold, who has written a great piece in The Feature about why mobile services fail. Nice to see that Howard agrees with much I have to say on the subject :-)

Designer Scott Jenson says mobile services like WAP and MMS were set up to fail because designers looked backwards at past successes instead of forward to new, untried ways to use mobile media.

Jenson, who, among other things, led the design team for Symbian's Quartz user interface (now known as UIQ) and worked on the Apple Newton, likens the situation to the birth of motion pictures. The first moviemakers nailed cameras to stages. Cinema didn't blossom until D.W. Griffith used close-ups and sophisticated editing to invent the language of film. Jenson thinks the same kind of thinking has prevented WAP and MMS from replicating the accidental success of texting.

"The original use of movies to capture stage plays wasn't wrong; it just wasn't ultimately all that exciting," Jenson wrote in his brilliant rant on "Default Thinking." "Something much more interesting happened as the use of the technology matured. Most likely the same will happen with photos and phones. Something far more interesting will most likely come. We should be getting used to this pattern and anticipate it."

WAP and MMS failed to meet expectations because services were designed by what Jenson calls "default thinking," a clichéd and unquestioned mindset that combines "a weak collection of axioms of design, broad market visions, or rules of execution that aren't clearly articulated. This collection exists in the background, much like the assumption that gravity exists."

Jenson goes on to suggest 4 potential "killer apps" in mobile services:

Jenson has a hunch that gift-giving rituals could drive future uses of MMS. "It is possible to create quite a complex MMS, one that includes not only a picture but sound and text as well. This has clear value as a gift. There could be a small study in the gift giving groups to see how they would respond to photos as gifts…" Then he suggests a simple service that wouldn't require any change in existing SMS and mobile handsets -- enabling users to safely store messages they treat as gifts with symbolic value, a behavior uncovered by studies of adolescent use of SMS.

This gut feel is amply borne out by the fascinating research of Professor Richard Harper whose paper "The Gift of the Gab" is worth getting hold of if you can. He focused on text messaging and uncovered loads of evidence that gifting was an important ritual in youth SMS'ing:

We have attempted to illustrate this fact by focusing on the obligations associated with giftgiving.

We have demonstrated that under certain conditions and in specific contexts, mobile phones can be used in gift-giving rituals, taking on particular meanings in young people’s daily lives. These situated and embodied understandings become intertwined with the technological constraints and possibilities of the phones and, in turn, influence further uses and understandings.

The text message, for example, provides the basic ingredients for a gift. As we have seen, between peers and in the right context it may be offered as a symbolic gesture of friendship and allegiance.

Furthermore, he found evidence that the value of such gifts increased, the more that the recipient could see that the sender had invested in the composition.

Cognima as we reported earlier in the week can also play a huge part in this area.

The product Jenson calls "Tap" would require custom software on the handset to send and receive SMS messages that convey only the time and the identity of the sender. "Although no text is sent, the message isn't really empty of content as it has a sender and an arrival time, both of which can have meaning depending on social context. This text-free message can be thought of as the social equivalent of a tap on the shoulder" that could convey different messages, depending on context. "For a family in a theme park tapping could mean it is time for lunch. It could also mean a lover is thinking of their partner during the day."

Hmm. Not so sure about this one. Why not include a quick text element or have a template to say "Love you, Hunky Buttocks" or whatever.

Another product would involve even more extensive software on the handset, using the simple procedure of sending SMS but substituting a brief recorded message for hand-entered text, which can be a barrier for those with less dextrous thumbs: "VoiceSMS would be sent with just 2 actions, one to start recording, and another to select a recipient, mimicking the design syntax of most SMS clients today."

We've already seen this sort of thing with Push2Talk. Logically, I agree that voice messages should be big. But they're never really taken off yet, apart from specialist uses in the US.

And going back to the gifting argument, a voice message is never going to achieve the same kudos as an SMS, as the sender hasn't "invested" as much in its creation.

Good stuff though.

Mobile Entertainment

Justin Hall has written a thought-provoking piece in The Feature about the role of Mobile Entertainment in society.

We are the first generation of humans carrying powerful personal computers in our pockets. What kind of collaboration is possible? How can we find and organize our contacts and connections in an entire city? By playing together, we come to understand the shape of wireless living. It may seem as though we are connected now, with mobile phones ringing from Fargo to Falluja. But our phones today are only tangentially aware of where we are. Soon, mobile devices will have tangible context-sensitivity – knowing where you are, and juggling that with time of day and your activities to suggest information, or appropriate diversion.

What is mobile entertainment when you’ve just left a movie theater? What is mobile entertainment when you’re touring Notre Dame in Paris? What is mobile entertainment when you’re visiting your parents? If you have a mobile device that is aware of all these places, timings and states of being, your mobile entertainment options are not going to be limited to Snake and screensavers.

Imagine being able to play a game with your friends at all times, whenever you feel like it. Friends out on the town with their mobile devices, or friends on desktop computers at work or home. Imagine virtual data objects scattered all over the real, physical world. You may have just walked over a digital pink umbrella you can’t see, unless your friends tell you, or you’re gazing at your mobile phone screen. Why would you care for that umbrella? Because you’re collecting umbrellas. Or maybe your friend collects pink objects and this would make a great gift. French company Newt Games has created an intricate economy of virtual objects strewn across Tokyo. Players of their mobile game Mogi have the chance to work with players on PCs or phones, traveling the city, collecting and trading items they pick up on the way to work or out for an evening with friends.

Now imagine you’re in the city, looking for good stuff, but you’re being chased. You’re playing a sort of game of tag with your friends, who are all cooperating together to find you according to GPS data and sightings from spies around downtown. Your virtual friends might reach out and touch you, through physical agents. This is the idea behind New York University’s recent experimental game, PacManhattan. Players acted the part of PacMan and the four ghosts, the ghosts chasing the yellow dot-gobbler around lower Manhattan. Handlers in a remote location watching their respective team members, advising the lead character to stay take a quick turn on Broadway to stay alive, or advising the ghosts to surround him near Cooper Union.

Finally, imagine your phone beeps. You look down -- a friend has sent you a picture, showing a dalmatian she just photographed with her mobile device. You check the GPS statistics on the picture, and you see she was near home. You’re psyched by this news: the dog is a symbol, a sign you recognize -- your friend has just scored a point by finding that species of dog in her particular location, at that time of day. Her dog-sighting means that your team will probably win the neighborhood for the week. You’re playing a scavenger hunt game involving locations, pictures, media sharing. Your buddy list is the playspace: you’re collaborating with friends, and competing with neighbors. You play when you want, you keep up with the game as a way to maintain casual social relations.

Personal, Not Professional

This last scavenger hunt doesn’t exist quite yet, but it’s likely to have been played by the end of this year. Experiments are afoot in laboratories, universities and cities, to figure out how to use all this technology for games, for mobile entertainment.

It’s an awful lot of trouble to take for diversion! All that engineering and expense to rig up a game of tag with friends you can’t see. But it makes sense -- it’s hard to imagine what better use we might have for GPS-enabled mobile multimedia. There may be explicitly productive uses of these technologies, but business applications are not likely to inspire the widest range of people to experiment. One look at mobile messaging and its clear that its success lies not so much in its explicit professional potential so much as its usefulness for maintaining personal relations.

Mobile entertainment is the means with which we will adapt and evolve with these technologies. We work towards them; we prepare our fingers for readiness by playing when the stakes are not so high. With mobile entertainment, we’re practicing for the empowered mobile future by playing together.

Learning through playing is a natural human activity, starting in childhood. But in technology terms, many a non-geek has got to grips with a PC for the first time by playing Solitaire.

Location services on mobiles has the potential to seriously change the way we live, work and play in ways that even now we have no idea about. And it's not about finding your nearest ATM or pub.

21st Century Crime

Engadget reports a "crime" that would happily sit within the pages of 1984.

Warronnica Harris, a college student in Florida, definitely made a mistake when she answered a phone call from her mom while watching the opening credits to Catwoman at a local theater (though going to see that movie in the first place was probably her first mistake). An irritated police officer in the theater noticed her on the phone, shined a flashlight in her eyes, then pushed Harris and her boyfriend into the lobby where he doused them with pepper spray and arrested them for disorderly conduct, thus fulfilling the secret revenge fantasies of irate moviegoers everywhere.

Crikey.

3 Launch Music Video

Proving that there must be someone at 3 who knows what they're doing, New Media Age highlights an article in The Mirror

Today's Mirror reports that mobile network 3 has introduced full-length music videos that customers can play on their phones.

The mobile network has joined forces with record label BMG to launch their new 'Video Jukebox' service which will enable customers to choose from a selection of the latest and classic music videos to watch on their handsets.
BMG have provided access to full-length videos from their roster of artists including Outkast, Christina Aguilera, and Dido.

The videos will be available before singles are released, up to four to six weeks before singles appear in stores, while some videos will premier exclusively on 3, reports the paper.

Each video will cost £1.50 and will be available to stream or download to the handset.

Assuming The Mirror is right on this* it's a great initiative for 3 - finally taking advantage of their uniqueness of being able to offer video downloads (as opposed to the insanity of focusing on video calls).

But, I also add:

1. Isn't GBP 1.50 a little greedy fellas?

2. Why have 3 waited until now to do something sensible, with their competitors just about to launch?

3. When the hell are 3 going to offer email to their subscribers? That is the key to recruiting high APRU generating customers - the businessman.

4. I hope that downloading video is a lot quicker than it was when 3 launched. It wasn't the downloading itself that was slow (actually it was fast). It was that every time you interacted with the server, there was a 12 second delay. It doesn't sound very long but..

"I think I'll watch me a 30 second video clip of last night's goals in the United match." Load browser (12 seconds), go to football site (12 seconds), chose match (12 seconds), hit download (12 seconds). Hmmm. Shite springs to mind.

5. Why oh why have BMG teamed up with the losers in the space - why not wait a few months for Vodafone or Orange? Or maybe it's non-exclusive.

6. Is 3 called 3 as it's just about to become the 3rd player in the UK market. And will they change their name to 5, after T-Mobile and O2 launch their 3G offering. Pass the cream, Mr Buckley.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with this. The music video is the perfect sushi morsel for the mobile.

* The British tabloid isn't known for being right all of the time. Its editor had to resign recently over faked photo's of torture victims.

My favourite comment on British tabloids came from Jasper Carrott, a UK comedian. He said (of The Sun) "I always feel sorry for Sun readers as they can't write in to complain." It kind of backfired though when he alienated many of his Sun reading fans.

Death over a mobile

Engadget reports a very sad story from the UK

a 12-year old English boy attempted to scare his parents after they refused to let him get a cellphone by faking a suicide, and unfortunately only succeeded at killing himself.

But it does provide a horrible reminder of just how important the mobile is in kids' lives these days.

Pokia

Reuters carries this interesting story about a retro hybrid phone - the Pokia.

When he walks down the street trying out his nifty invention, Nicholas Roope looks just a little bit crazy.

He is, after all, talking into a heavy, black, old, Bakelite telephone handset, with a thick coiled cord leading into his pocket.

Heads turn. The faces of passers-by register surprise, disbelief, and then, almost immediately, signs of recognition as if Roope's object were the most familiar thing in the world.

It is, essentially, an old phone handset wired up to a standard mobile phone concealed in the pocket. It may or may not become the de rigueur fashion accessory of the decade. It may or may not ever make Nicholas Roope any money.

But it has landed him on the covers of an Italian style magazine and the Home section of the New York Times, and into the pages of technology, fashion and finance sections of magazines and newspapers in Britain and Sweden.

Bill Gates' Hovel

There's a great blog here about a Microsoft Intern's experience of dining with the Big Man at home. Including airport level security to get in!

Obvious Orange

W2Forum (subscription needed) highlights an extraordinary article in the FT. So extraordinary that I've taken a couple of days to digest it. I don't have access to the original article, but have no reason to doubt W2Forum's interpretation.

In an Interview with the FT Sanjiv Ahuja identified a key change in the mobile Industry. Successful mass-market adoption can only be achieved through better customer understanding.

Developing technology in abstract of the consumer is unlikely to create success for the innovator. This is particularly the case within the mobile Industry, which facing saturated markets, increasing price competition and falling arpu have yet again turned to a technology to try and save them.

The current buzz-word within the Industry is customer centricity. People are increasingly understanding that it is not about the technology; yet are still to come to grips with ways of implementing a solution.

The case study evidence of 3G adoption shows that successful uptake is based on natural migration of existing customer bases. The right strategy appears to communicate the benefits of usage to the consumer and not try to differentiate upon the basis of technology.

Sorry? Isn't this so basic, it's like saying "the secret of life is not to die" or "the sun is pretty hot"?

You wonder what Marketing Directors have been saying in board meetings. Or is the Financial Director talking about how 2, when added to 2 generally equals 4, with the CTO fiddling around with tin cans and bits of string?

Marketing is and has always been about the customer. It's that simple.

Now I know that operators have to be focused on lots of things and that technology and infrastructure is vital. Without a product, after all, you don't have a business.

But the same can be said about the customer - without them, you don't have a business either. And to imply that the operators are only just realisiing this is frankly, staggering.

But it does explain some of the silly initiatives we've seen, from the poorly executed MMS to the double think of 3's focus on video calls.

For MMS, its not too late, you simply do this

1. Make sure every handset worked “out of the box”. I know it’s not easy, but neither is this impossible.

2. Make sure that we have cross network compatibility. If you’re going to send a message, it has to arrive. No excuses.

3. Develop a range of content, readily available and FREE that people could use to quickly compose their MMS. Most operators try to “double bubble” by charging for content and then charging you to send it. Come on guys, that’s just greedy!

4. Drop the price. 35p (OK O2 have just generously introduced a 25p tariff – more than double what an SMS costs on the most expensive tariff). 10 – 15p seems reasonable for a premium content message. 25 – 35p is that greed thing again.

5. Give 1,000 or so handsets to the coolest kids and give them free MMS messaging.

6. Stand back and watch MMS usage take off.

For video conferencing, it's just pure stupidity to focus your marketing on the one factor that is your Achilles Heal - you need to know someone else on your network to make a video call. And when a network is launched, what is there a scarcity of? Yep, other people on the network. Brilliant.

In Mr Ahuja's defence, he does obviously get it. But when are we going to see real evidence of this customer-centricity?

The Mobile Detective

SmartMobs has a story about a Japanese TV Show, that illustrates quite how deeply the mobile phone is embedded into society.

Literally translated as "the cell phone detective," Keitai Deka is a weekly show on Japan's BS-i channel wherein a teen with a super-cellphone solves crimes. "Although Westerners might find the premise implausible, in Japan, where multitasking teens can thumbtext faster than you can type, it's practically a documentary."

Old folk's phone

Engadget via Textually declare that LG has launched an incredibly ugly phone (my description - anyone want some copy writing done?) for the elderly.

with extra large keys that—gasp!—only makes phone calls and sends text messages.

Personally, I think this is rather patronising. Wouldn't it be better to make phones easier to use all round?

iTunes and Motorola

Techdirt has an interesting point about the announcement of iTunes launching on Motorola.

Namely, have they forgotten to build in a cut for operators? If so, will the operators kill it?

The wireless carriers are notorious for supporting closed systems, and making sure that they get a cut of any transaction that goes through a mobile phone. While this is a shortsighted move that has slowed down the creation and adoption of wireless services and applications, the carriers still insist on sticking to that plan, under the weird belief that they know best what applications and services subscribers will use (and pay for).

Surely Motorola can't have overlooked this? When you move quickly (and instinct says this was a deal that happened quickly), mistakes can happen. But not, I think, as basic as this. It would be like Mars launching a new chocolate bar and forgetting to build in a margin for the retailer.

Developers - forget everything you know!

There's a very good article on Mobile Pipeline, spotted on Tom Hume's blog.

Aimed primarily at developers, it contains some real gems for all of us involved in mobile.

Forget what you know

It's essential for developers such as yourself to realize that the interaction between mobile users and their devices is fundamentally different from that of a PC user. The mobile user expects to get information quickly by "one-handing it" while riding in an elevator or waiting in an airport queue (which is much different from searching a hard drive in the comfort and convenience of an office).

While the over-competitive PC development market often comes down to a battle of application robustness, multimedia mobile software must be as transparent as possible. In a mobile environment, it's get in and out with speed, which has a considerable impact on your coding. You must consider the features that are absolutely essential to complete the task, and discard everything else.

And remember, mobile content is sushi, not turkey and all the trimmings. It's designed to be dipped into and enjoyed periodically.

Tracking kids in South Korea

Reuters covers a new service launched by SK Telecom of a new child tracking service:

Parents in South Korea will now be able to track their children by using a device in a new mobile phone that has been designed for kids. SK Telecom Co. began selling Wednesday colorful cell phones with antennas that look like human ears and a built in tracker using the global positioning satellite (GPS) network.

The firm, the top mobile operator in a country where three-quarters of the people carry at least one mobile phone, put a price of around $86 on the handset.

The phone has four buttons to save phone numbers of key contacts, such as Mom and Dad.

The GPS technology works even when the phone is turned off.

To keep the price down, the phones do not have text messaging or Internet capabilities.

It sounds like it's aimed for very young kids indeed. Maybe 8 and below? Otherwise, it'll be politely returned to Mummy and Daddy with a "Whaddya mean no texting?"

I've written before about my scepticism about these child tracking devices.

Images via Gizmodo.

Eccentric or what?

From SmartMobs

Mr Josh Kinberg's "thesis is a bicycle that receives text messages and prints them in foot-high chalk letters, then blogs a digital photo and GPS map of the printing, all while the rider cruises along,"PopularScience reports.The article says that Mr Kinberg "will officially roll out the bike during August's Republican National Convention in New York, but he says the project is as much performance art as protest."

Digital Photography Development

The Feature has an interesting article about Cognima.

One of the big complaints about camera phones is that it's complicated to get the photos off the phone. Cognima believes they have the obvious solution: make it happen automatically.

Mobile phones don't have the reputation for being the most intuitive devices. As the devices get "smarter" some say that the interfaces get dumber. Cramming so many functions into such a small device scares off many people, who tend to learn how to do a few key things, and leave the rest to the mysteries of the unread manual. Often, one of the more complex processes on a camera phone is figuring out how to get a photo off of the phone itself. After someone learns how to take a photo, they still need to figure out how to send it to someone, upload it to a server or somehow transfer it to a computer.

A company named Cognima realized there was no reason why this process needs to exist at all. The company understood that when someone took a picture, it's likely they would want it off the phone at some point. Thus, why not take it off automatically? They built a system that will automatically synchronize a camera phone with a server, and invisibly upload the photo, where the user can do what they want with it. The concept isn't new. The Danger Sidekick has always worked via this concept. However, Cognima has made this "Snap" service work on a wide variety of smart phone operating systems, including Symbian, Microsoft Smartphone and the Palm OS.

To show the impact of this simple change, Cognima tested the technology with a group of users to see what happened. The results are very interesting for any operator or handset maker expecting camera usage to become something of a habit among camera phone owners. Cognima's study showed that normal camera phone users end up not being particularly active MMS users.

Only 18% of the regular MMS users they followed kept on taking and sending pictures on a regular basis two weeks after the trial began. However, 70% of customers using Cognima were still happily snapping photos. This is a classic example of looking at where the "pain" point is in the process, and coming up with a way to remove it. There's simply no reason that the process needs to be so convoluted for users. By making it so easy that it's automatic to get a picture off the phone, Cognima simply pushes aside one of the biggest hurdles to more widespread camera usage.

This is a very, very clever idea and brilliant marketing thinking. It solves a real need AND removes the need for the consumer to DO something. I hope they succeed, become wildly rich and that they live happily ever after.

Moblogging

Picture Phoning points to a round up of the main moblogging sites in an article in the WSJ (registration required).

-- Textamerica - One of the oldest moblogging sites, Textamerica.com counts about half a million users, about 110,000 who keep moblogs and about 400,000 who just view and comment.

-- Mobog - Mobog, run by Phil Kaplan, claims about half a million users, almost 16,000 of whom regularly send in photos (albeit many of them racy). Mobog says most of its users are in their 20s and 30s.

-- Yafro - Yafro, run by the same company that created dating site HotOrNot, is free and has more than 100,000 users. Yafro has a special section of "Pictures from the Frontline," featuring moblogs from soldiers in Iraq.

-- Buzznet - Buzznet reports more than 20,000 registered users, most of whom have posted photos, and plans to launch premium subscriptions.

-- moblogUK - moblogUK launched about nine months ago, has just under 1,000 users and features a forum where they can chat.

And interesting:

Most users of the sites, however, don't actually post. They just look at pictures. For example, Textamerica.com says it has a total of about half a million users, about 400,000 of whom just comment or view shots, and Mobog says about 95% of its half a million users don't have camera phones.

Essentially, then moblogging seems to be very niche and rather voyeuristic - in the widest sense (ie not necessarily sexual).

Having said that, I'd also argue that Moblogging as a term is used incorrectly here, or maybe the verb is mutating to include all photo's taken on Camera Phones. I'd say that moblogging, strictly speaking, is using your phone to create a blog, which may (and probably does) include photo's. Sort of like an illustrated journal.

The intriguing question is whether moblogging (by my definition) is the start of something big or is destined to remain an arcane pursuit of a few. I'd say (words that may come back to haunt me) that it's the latter. Blogging really needs access to a keyboard or other means of producing text and lends itself better to a PC.

However, if we take the wider definition of digital photography with camera phones, I think there are huge opportunities. All we need now is a way of easily transferring the images to PC and storing them online for other's to see.

See my next blog entry.

Are we nearly there yet?

Textually points to a story in The Telegraph that texting is killing off "traditional" family car occupations.

No, not kids being sick, fighting with their siblings and asking "are we nearly there yet?" but

Old fashioned pastimes such as I-spy, a sing-song or story-telling have been replaced by children text messaging.

Seventy-three per cent of youngsters asked said that on car journeys they preferred to listen to music through their mobile while 55 per cent spent the trip texting friends.

Half of children also said they would rather listen to music on their headphones than talk to their parents. Direct Line questioned nearly 2,000 people.

Having said that, I think it's a little unfair to blame mobiles. Personal stereos for audio stories and music and Game Boys have long been a great way of shutting the little..... errr keeping kids occupied on car journeys. And let's not forget portable DVD's...

Moblogging gets BBC endorsement

Suw Charman (not a typo - she's Welsh) writes on Corante about the BBC using a photo taken on a camera phone in their news bulletin this morning.

BBC South’s news bulletins have this morning been illustrating a breaking news story with a still photo taken by a camera phone, and have explicitly stated it as such.

The photo, of the plume of smoke caused by a serious fire that had just broken out, was easily as good as the stills you’d get from a ‘proper’ camera - testament to the quality of camera phones now.

Tomorrow, we'll all be photo journalists.

PS the photo used above is stock footage, taken from CNN. BBCi still haven't used it on their site.

Sony Ericsson 700i Review

Thanks to Justin Blanton for writing this comprehensive review of the new K700i.

Overall verdict is --- a big thumbs up.

Motorola and iTunes

Following my musings yesterday,

What's also fascinating is if the humble MP3 player will survive anyway. Many phones now come with MP3 players (albeit mainly with shite usability at the moment), so has the iPod got a future, no matter how uber-cool it might be? Who wants two devices when one slightly less cool one does the job?

Motorola and Apple announced today that

they are partnering to enable millions of music lovers to transfer their favorite songs from the iTunes® jukebox on their PC or Mac® , including songs from the iTunes Music Store, to Motorola’s next-generation 'always with you' mobile handsets, via a USB or Bluetooth connection. Apple will create a new iTunes mobile music player, which Motorola will make the standard music application on all their mass-market music phones, expected to be available in the first half of next year.

I can see what Motorola get out of it strategically. But haven't Apple always argued that iTunes was about selling iPods? So, doesn't this potentially cannibalise iPod sales? Or are they gambling that an intro to iTunes will lead to sales of iPods?

Or are they bowing to the inevitable - that iPod will disappear - and reversing strategy to make their dosh from the software? But the iTunes business model is relatively easy to copy and really is just a commodity, as the brand is actually the music, not the download vehicle.

All round it's a bit of a puzzle. While Mr Jobs is undoubtedly brilliant, to err is after all, human.

86c Phone

According to Textually, Interpulse for LG Telecom have launched a basic mobile phone for 86 cents:

the model only supports calling and SMS service. It weighs 2.02 ounces (63g) and is 59 inches wide (15mm).

According to an executive of LG Telecom "The model was born to provide mobile phones to elderly people because its key pad is big and the price is cheap."

At that price, it's disposable.

Is this a sign of things to come? Will mobiles of the future be free (as some authorities argue), with income generated from services?

Ringtone.net

Representing a major market shift, Ringtone.net is shutting up shop in the UK. Andy Clarke, a senior partner writes on the site:

From the 26th September 1998 we have received over 10 million visitors and still receive over 1000 visitors per day.

We were the first ringtone related domain name registered in the world and the first to ask for the MCPS Ringtone B5 license back in 1998!

We have just received yet another list of titles that cannot be used as ringtones from the MCPS!

We know some of you will be disappointed however after doing this for 6 years we have decided to retire on a high.

Artists and record companies are finally getting in on the act and selling direct, ousting the incumbent sellers. I wonder if they'll all roll over like this or if they'll fight back? Companies like Monster Mob can't just give up as they're a listed company.

The Ultimate Mobile Home

The Evening Standard reports on the ultimate mobile home:

Panpuch was inspired by the Thames to design the sphere as an answer to London's overheated housing-market. His design is being shown at the Royal Institute of British Architects' (Riba) exhibit of innovative housing, Future House London.

"The river in London is empty, yet there is a big problem with land in short supply," said Harrow-based Panpuch, 30. "With my sphere you could live on the river or in London's empty docks.

"Or you could live in the middle of the capital, enjoying the vibrant atmosphere-and beautiful river views." The sphere would be divided into three floors built around a core containing the stairs, kitchen, bathroom and lavatories. The upper floor is the living space, with the lower floor housing the bedrooms and main entrance.

The bottom floor, beneath the surface of the river, would be used for storage, water tanks, heating system and computer equipment. Retractable screens offer privacy. Energy from solar panels is stored in batteries below water level. The main floor stores heat in the day for release at night.

iPod Stuff

The Register carries a story today about pPod.

London-based iPod users, sensitive souls that they are, can now avoid the horror of unkempt public toilets, thanks to pPod (yes, pPod), a directory of reviewed public conveniences designed especially for the trendy music player.

Developed by digital media firm Nykris for reasons probably best known to themselves, pPod is a multimedia toilet guide that combines written reviews and hilariously appropriate sound tracks (Handel's Water Music, for instance) to help people find the "loveliest" facility in their vicinity.

David Read, MD of Nykris, who developed pPod told the BBC that it

was designed to make use of underexploited features of the iPod, such as text. And pPod is just a start. Read went on to say that other applications are in the pipeline:

"We're currently exploring other iPod-based services that could be developed, including an interactive audio guide to gigs and clubs - something that we think could be particularly attractive to iPod fans."

Stand by for a rash of iPod, non-music products to download, from speaking guidebooks to classic radio shows - catch up on The Archer's (the UK's oldest running radio soap) via your iPod, is a classic yin and yang combo.

What's also fascinating is if the humble MP3 player will survive anyway. Many phones now come with MP3 players (albeit mainly with shite usability at the moment), so has the iPod got a future, no matter how uber-cool it might be? Who wants two devices when one slightly less cool one does the job?

I also think that MP3 and location has some interesting angles. Again, talking guidebooks spring to mind in museums, as an example. Or how about the ability to select the genre of music based on where you are. Calming chill-out for the busy tube journey or traffic jam. Exhilarating and inspiring for a mountain top, perhaps.

Browser Wars

A rather startling observation from the BlogOn conflab last week from Boing Boing

Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand. The presenter was thrown off his mark, but he recovered and said, "Wow! Okay how many of you wish we'd fix IE so you could use it?"

Still no hands....

Informal survey afterwards said the Windows users in the crowd were all using the latest Firefox. Wouldn't it be amazing if Mozilla ended up winning in the end?

While it has to be admitted that attendees at such a specialist event are hardly representative of the average user, this does represent an important and influential beachhead for Mozilla.

It's also interesting in the light of Nokia recent investment in Mozilla, as reported in The Register last week.

Mobile Social Software

ElasticSpace has done a fabulous job of cataloging a whole bunch of mobile social software applications.

We've featured quite a few here, but there's some new ones too:

Jabberwocky / Familiar Strangers

This research project explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that lead to a design for a personal, body-worn, wireless device that extends the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and relationships with strangers in pubic places.

Encounter bubbles

A visualization tool based on Mobster that enables users to explore their social encounters in new ways. Designed to be an open framework on which locative (meaning location-based) networking applications can be built.

Fluidtime

The first of these services is aimed at public transport users in Turin. While on the move, travellers can find dynamic information on mobile screen-based devices while at home or at the office, people can find the same information on physical display units. The other service is a personalised and flexible scheduling system to help Interaction-Ivrea students organise shared laundry facilities; mobile and stationary tools give them constant updates about the progress of their laundry cycle.

Mobster

Affords the social creation and excavation of proximity history. At its core is a simple question: Who was near who when? Software on users’ mobile devices (laptops, cell phones, PDAs) monitors the presence of nearby devices (Wi-Fi hotspots, cell towers, Bluetooth devices), from which Mobster infers historical proximity models. We call these sociospatial histories.

WiFi Bedouin

Expanding the possible meaning and metaphors about access, proximity, wireless and WiFi. This access point is not the web without wires. Instead, it is its own web, an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of virtuality, materiality, displacement, proximity and community.

Tuna

A mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices.

Mamjam

One of the first location-based instant messaging platform for mobile phones. Asks the user to input location, and then creates links to others in the same space.

Dodgeball

Tell us where you are and we’ll tell you who and what is around you. We’ll ping your friends with your whereabouts, let you know when friends-of-friends are within 10 blocks, allow you to broadcast content to anyone within 10 blocks of you or blast messages to your groups of friends.

BEDD

A Bluetooth-enabled mobile social medium that allows people to meet, interact and communicate.

BuzZone

Using Bluetooth-enabled laptops and PDAs to find new contacts, communicate over small distances, and share information related to their business.

IcyPole

Uses Bluetooth to detect the proximity of other devices and determine whether there is a match between users’ entertainment profiles. The application can be used as a platform for personal area network music discovery, file exchange and/or sampling, as well as for social networking based on similar entertainment interests.

Peepsnation

Enables users to connect with others with a similar interest that meet your filter criteria using user-definable groups tied to a specific location.

Proxidating

Using bluetooth technology, ProxiDating allows you to meet people with common interests.

Plazes

Plazes is a web service offering information on people and places based on your location. It enables you to tag your location and announce it to your friends or the world. You can find other Plazes in your vicinity or see where your friends are at the moment. It also allows you to see other people you do not know yet at the same Place.

Plink mobile

A ‘people search engine’ and social networking application. You can search for friends, see who they know and who knows them, find people with shared interests. Can use an SMS interface in the UK.

Saw you

Saw-You allows u 2 chat 2 people who go to the same social venues you do on your mobile phone. U don’t see their number and they don’t see yours.

Mobule serendipity

An application for mobile phones that can instigate interactions between you and people you don’t know. A profile, along with your mobile phone provide a connection a community of people around you.

Who at

Lets you find dates and friends anywhere, anytime. Tell WhoAt where you are and we tell you who’s nearby – all from your mobile phone, PDA, or PC.

Hocman

We have performed an ethnographic study that reveals the importance of social interaction, and especially traffic encounters, for the enjoyment of biking. We summarized these findings into a set of design requirements for a service supporting mobile interaction among motorcyclists.

ImaHima

The Japanese expression for “are you free now?”. A mobile, location-integrated, community and instant messaging service allowing users to share their current personal status (location, activity, mood) publicly and privately with their buddies and send picture and instant messages to them.

Socialight

A location-aware mobile social networking platform that allows people to connect with their friends and friends of friends in new, expressive ways.

Socializer

A distributed, peer-to-peer platform that connects a person to people and services in the same location. An open, extensible platform. New features can be developed and propagated by an open-source community running on wired as well as wireless networks.

Aware

A flexible platform that operates a spatio-temporal moblog (mobile log) allowing collective contribution and distribution of media. Considering scalable systems, comprehensive and inclusive models for participation, the project has focused upon how to communicate context-awareness, mobile experience, and its narrative potential.

Meetup

A technology platform and global network of local venues that helps people self-organize local group gatherings on the same day everywhere.

Modus

Music in a venue should reflect the taste of the people in that space, not the owner of the jukebox or the people working behind the bar. What if a jukebox allowed people to add their own music or could help you remember what was played at a particular time? What if the box was aware of who was in the room and could queue up your favorite songs as you walked through the door?

Traces of fire

Transmitters, embedded in cigarette lighters deliberately lost in carefully chosen pubs, illuminate the social relationships underlying daily habits of travel, entertainment and (nicotine) gifting.

Ashphalt games

An Internet-enhanced street game in which players stage and document small interventions or “stunts” on the street corners of New York in order to claim turf on a virtual map of the city. The game is an experiment in collectively reimagining commonplace views of New York. By providing an online counterpart to the urban environment, it allows players to share their visions of the city with others.

Crowd surfer

Enables a user to surf for other Bluetooth devices and get in contact with them, primarily designed for a campus environment.

Pocket rendezvous

A web server for the Pocket PC that advertises itself to other Pocket PCs in the neighbourhood wirelessly using ad-hoc WiFi networks and Rendezvous.

Activematch

Enables users to find their ‘ideal partner’ on the spot (unity of time and venue). Works in any GPRS network and on all mobile phones with Symbian OS and Nokia’s Series 60 platform.

Mtone

A social networking multi-user game “Cell Phone” is based on the popular Chinese movie of the same name. This comedy movie was directed by one of China’s best known directors, Feng Xiaogang. Customers play this multi-combining romance and SMS and MMS.

Wavemarket

A suite that can turn a mobile phone user into an on-location broadcaster. You can add information and commentary about restaurant reviews to safety tips. You can find a buddy, or track a truck, inspect a neighborhood for real estate or child safety. It’s good for both social and business and it puts the power of blogging technology into the hands of the masses.

You'll have to head over to here if you want the links to all these sites.

Orange and the Oldies

Techdirt has a story about Orange in the UK teaching the over 50's how to send text messages and how to download ringtones.

I greatly admire Orange's previously announced strategy of becoming educators. Too many people are becoming isolated by technology, whereas it should be one of the great enablers of society. It's just a shame that the great principle doesn't seem to get executed very often.

Having said that, I think the over 50's use texting if they want to already. If they don't know anyone who they want to text, what's the point in taking a class? And if they've got children in their teens, they'll certainly know how to use SMS - it's the only way they can talk to their kids :-)

Camera phone Hysteria

Boing Boing reports on a PBS story about what happened when Kodak cameras were introduced in May 1888. It seems that "authorities" reacted with similar hysteria to today's camera phones, trying to ban their use in all sorts of places.

The appearance of Eastman's cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the "camera fiend" began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares. One resort felt the trend so heavily that it posted a notice: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Other locations were no safer. For a time, Kodak cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The "Hartford Courant" sounded the alarm as well, declaring that "the sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around among his Sunday School children."

Of course, all this talk of banning cameras both yesterday and today are nonsense really. If we do succeed in banning them, what are we going to do when cameras are so small that they're essentially undetectable to the naked eye? Are we really prepared to contemplate being x-rayed to go to the swimming pool, the park or the beach?

Business Plan Surgery

TJ and I have developed an idea to help those aspiring entrepreneurs out there:

The "Business Plan Surgery" is designed to give expert feedback for your very own business idea - for free.

Here is how it works:

You are a early stage company in the process of finalizing your business plan or looking for investment or you are already in business for less than 6 months.
You may send in your business plan to us and get a review from our experts and as far as feasible from myself too. We will focus on the viability of the business model and the biggest challenges for your business from our point of view.

We guarantee you full confidentiality just the author of the respective weblog and myself will take a look inside your executive summary. What we want to do however is to inaugurate the TOP 5 after August 31st. For this inauguration we would like to present the abstract business model (2-3 sentences) to our blog audience.

What is your benefit? First of all you get an expert opinion on your business plan which in turn reduces your risk. Additionally our weblogs are read by a wide range of technology experts, business angels and some VCs. So with some luck our nomination will bring in investment.

What does it cost? Nothing.

Isn't it risky to give my secret idea to other people? - Not really as Seth Godin would say "...an idea needs light and oxygen much like a plant" to survive. You should feed it, ideas in the dark basement will most likely die.

What do I have to do? Please send your executive summary to my mail address mail@tjacobi.com and we take it from there.

So if you have an idea - especially in the mobile space, drop TJ or me a line at russell@mobhappy.com

Cache her if you can

Megallan via W2Forum has details of the annual "Cache her if you can" GPS Adventure game.

Throughout the summer, thousands of friends and families in America will enjoy fun and adventure in the great outdoors — hot on the trail of a fictitious criminal mastermind and searching for secret locations where treasures await. The Magellan® “Cache Her If You Can” GPS Adventure is a geocaching game that sends amateur crime-solvers on a weekly quest for clues in 30 cities across the U.S., competing for grand prizes.

Found exclusively at www.magellangps.com, “Cache Her If You Can” is the second annual web-based contest hosted by Thales, global provider of Magellan GPS consumer products. Running from June 24 to September 1, 2004, the game showcases geocaching as an ideal outdoor recreation activity for people of all ages.

“We were delighted by the excitement that thousands of people expressed during our 2003 treasure hunt, so we decided to do it again but with a detective-story twist,” said Karen Carbonnet, vice president of Corporate Communications for Thales’ navigation business. “Our geocaching adventure offers something for everyone, and is the perfect activity to encourage kids, parents and friends to grab their Magellan GPS receivers, get out of the house and enjoy some family fun and adventure while taking in the natural beauty of the great outdoors.”

In the contest’s fictional storyline, the “Magellan Detective Agency” enlists the contestants as agents to assist in foiling the sinister plans of the notorious “Stella DeCache” and her devious henchmen of “Organization X” before they are able to disrupt the game of geocaching.

To play, and be eligible to win, participants will need to have access to a GPS receiver and register at www.magellangps.com where, each week, the Magellan Detective Agency will post a series of clues. With this evidence, contest agents will use their investigative instincts to narrow down the possible locations where they’ll carry out their next mission.

The final clue for each mission will provide the exact latitude and longitude coordinates for contestants to enter in their GPS receivers so they can use it to guide them to a secret “cache,” a black, briefcase-like container hidden above ground on public property, like a park or forest. The first person to find the cache case and the top-secret reward document inside wins a grand prize plus some of the cool items they find in the cache container.

Location based gaming is going to be hot over the next couple of years. And actually will start to help us understand what the future of mobile and location is all about.

Interactive Advertising

W2Forum* (subscription needed) has an interesting post on an interactive ad campaign for Ford Fiesta

In several major cities of Belgium, young people are staring up at a huge Ford Fiesta billboard - visually similar to the TV pinball machine commercial - while texting on their mobile phones.

Each passer-by can try their hand at winning a Ford Fiesta by sending an SMS with his/her first name to a short code and indicating the code on the billboard. The billboard then responds to this SMS; displaying an "encouragement to continue" message addressed to the person, and sends him/her another SMS with a question. If he or she answers correctly, the billboard reacts like a winning pinball machine and he/she is entitled to an "extra ball" meaning he/she will be included in the draw for a winner. For every incorrect answer sent by text message, the pinball machine displays a "tilt".

The fiestafun website - http://www.fiestafun.be/index_fr.html - allows anyone to check on the progress of the game or find out where exactly these billboards are located.

Cool beans!

However I still find it really strange why the advertising industry isn't embracing SMS interactivity - we've been talking about it for 4 years. While I could understand that it was early then, it's been a mainstream medium for at least 2 years now, by anyone's definition.

But then, contrary to popular belief, the ad industry is actually pretty conservative and mostly still worships at the alter of the 30 second TV commercial. Even though this God is no longer answering their prayers anymore and grows increasing deaf as time passes.

Social Networking on Planes

An excellent line of thinking at SocialTwister about networking on planes - or the current absence of an organised way of doing it.

Air travel brings millions of people into close proximity on a daily basis. From the long lines to the waiting lounges and onto the planes themselves, people are placed into contact with many people that have never met before. For many, this entire process spans any number of hours, and even into extreme cases, days. It's always amazed me that there isn't more of an effort to get people to interact.

They go on to explore the specific opportunities, such as who you sit next to:

the ability for people to aggregate based on a series of personal or professional preferences. Imagine indicating that you are interested in skiing, hiking, and rollerblading. Based on those preferences, seating is organically aggregated.

Cool idea. I wonder if an airline will pick up on it.

3G in US

Follwoing last week's leaked announcement AT&T Wireless announced today that they were indeed launching 3G. Press release here.

Interestingly, a cursory scan shows nary a mention of video calls - the service that 3 (n the UK and Italy anyway) thought (and still does from its adversing) is something that people want and moreover, that it's their USP.

As I said last week, who on earth would have thought of focusing their efforts on promoting a service that is actually their Achilles heal? A new service --> few users --> who are you going to video call with?

IP Based Assisted GPS - All you need to know...

Wayne Hulls of M-Location has kindly made this presentation "IP Based Assisted GPS - The Technical Benefits" available to The Mobile-Weblog readers.

If you understand the title of the presentation, the chances are you'll find it invaluable :-)

There goes the Sun King?

Business Week has a great article on legendary Sun CEO, Scott McNealy, titled Sun: A CEO's Last Stand Scott McNealy knows he made many mistakes. Is it too late to recover?. This kind of gives the conclusion of the piece away.

But back in 1995, he looked like a man who really knew what he was doing:

"Conventional wisdom doesn't contain a whole lot of wisdom." He believes it because of his own experience. Consider 1995: All of Sun's competitors -- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), IBM (IBM ), and Digital Equipment Corp. -- were busy developing new servers to run the next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software. Wall Street pundits begged McNealy to show some common sense and do the same. But he refused, instead cranking up his investment in Sun's own software, called Solaris. What happened next made McNealy look brilliant. Rivals couldn't match the speed, reliability, and security of Sun's servers. As the tech boom took off, Sun's boxes became the must-have gear for thousands of Internet startups and financial firms. Sales soared; profits exploded.

But just because you were right once, doesn't mean you can do it all the time:

Six years later, as the boom of the late 1990s came to a crashing end, Wall Street had more advice for McNealy: Batten down the hatches for the storm ahead; slash research; lay off staffers; and get serious about low-cost products. Once again, McNealy held his ground. But this time, he was dreadfully wrong. Sun's sales have tumbled 48% in the past three years, it has lost a third of its market share -- and it continues to head south even as its rivals ride the economic recovery. Its stock, which reached $64 in 2000, trades at about $4. No other major player has been weakened as much during the tech downturn. "Right now it looks pretty grim," says Geoffrey A. Moore, author of several tech-industry books, including Crossing the Chasm

Even worse, it's now clear that both internal and external advisor's pleaded with McNealy to change strategy, but he insisted on remaining on course. This has led to a string of defections of staff, while he remains convinced that a boom is about to happen.

His strategy for recovery?

The new strategy calls for Sun to move in two directions at once: build bare-bones servers while also inventing cutting-edge technologies. Those are diametrically opposed pursuits, like trying to be Wal-Mart and Gucci at the same time. McNealy contends that Sun is more focused than major rivals. Dell Inc. for instance, sells printers and digital music players, while IBM gets half its revenues from services. "We're not doing digital cameras. We're not doing printers," says McNealy. "We're fundamentally focused, much more so than any company I see out there."

Actually, I think Sun is better poised than many to take advantage of where the market's going to go. Although (somewhat Scott McNealy-ish myself) I'm not sure that they realise that.

My scenario would be that applications like Gmail and BlogLines are the start of the huge centralised servers of tomorrow (a return to the mainframes of yore). In other words, the "work" is being done centrally, rather than locally on the PC. I expect this trend to continue.

But parallel to this, we'll see the rise of ever more functional "mobile devices", which will be used to access these central servers. Sometimes, this will be done on the move. And more intense work (like writing documents or PowerPoint presentations) that require keyboards will be done by docking the device at home or in the office or indeed, at any public docking station, designed for this very purpose.

The great opportunity for Sun is that they have the potential to exploit both ends of this vision. They have the expertise in powerful, central servers. But they also have Java (J2ME) that has the potential to be the de facto application platform on the mobile device.

But, an outsider's view, for what it's worth, is that they're going to let others win the battle for the mobile space - Qualcomm's Brew is making serious in-roads and how long is Big Bill going to watch and do relatively little? His mobile epiphany can't be far off.

This is quite a simply presented case, as blogs aren't (in my view) the right environment for longer essays. But I also think the case is pretty compelling.

Thanks to Tim Oren, whose controversial blog on the future of the PC helped my thinking on this area. Note, to clarify, I'm not suggesting that my scenario is endorsed by Tim.

Historical note: The original Sun King (Louis XIV of France - pictured above) reigned for 72 years, longer than any other European monarch. I think there may be a parallel :-)

Is this a broccoli I see before me?

According to We Make Money Not Art

Food company Dole has introduced a new service that allows mobile phone users to check vegetable information while shopping: where the product comes from and how it arrived on the shelf, along with cooking tips.

The service only works on items packaged with a "QR'' barcode, a super-code storing the information. The shopper needs a mobile equipped with a camera and scanner to read the codes.

Broccoli is the only line so far to carry codes (why broccoli, I wonder?).

I never saw fruit & veg as being the cutting edge of technology, but I stand corrected :-)

It seems that it would be much more appropriate to give info on high tech stuff, when the sales person is about as much use as a carrot.

Elephant Paths

Pasta and Vinegar have a nice definition of Elephant Paths:

"Elephant path is a name for a path that is formed in space by people making their own paths and shortcuts; it is an unofficial route. Elephant path is an anarchist way of moving in a city, a town or a village. It is an overlaying system of going from a place to a place in a space regardless of the city/town plan. Still, it is connected to the streets and the architectural forms."

One of the great opportunities for Urban Planning will be using Elephant Paths to work out how people use their environment and adapting it accordingly. A kind of user-friendly planning system, made available by location tracking - assuming that they can get permission to use the data like this from say, GPS feeds.

I heard of an architect recently who refused to pave the outside of the building. Instead he planted lawns. After 6 months, he sent his people back to pave the paths that had been made by the occupants on the lawns.

Clever.

Mobile Wallet Launch

Well, no surprises that it's happened, but maybe a few raised eyebrows about when. According to Reuters

NTT DoCoMo Inc, Japan's largest mobile operator, on Saturday became the first operator to launch a wallet phone, equipped with Sony Corp.'s FeliCa smart chip, which can be quickly read by passing it over a scanner.

The other players (KDDI and Vodafone) are expected to follow in due course, but not until next year.

FeliCa itself isn't new - "Suica" train passes with an embedded FeliCa chip has been around for nearly three years.

"FeliCa is going to be a basic requirement for me when I upgrade my phone," said 31-year-old Norihiko Fujimori, who works for a Japanese Internet startup in Tokyo. "It'll be extremely convenient if my phone can contain everything."

The day is not that far off now that the mobile will contain everything you need when you leave the house - ID, digital money and even your electronic car and house keys.

I'm reading Cory Doctorow's excellent Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom at the moment. One of the principles is that you back up your digital self, the same way as you're emant to back up your PC.

So, if you're killed, they simply upload your latest back up into a new clone. Obviously, this makes people a little paranoid about backing up as if they're killed and haven't backed up for a couple of months or years - well, anyone who's ever has a PC crash will realise the potential nightmare.

However, with the real launch of digital wallets by players with enough marketing and political clout to make it happen, Cory's scenario seems ever closer :-)

Vodafone gets marketing

According to Reuters Vodafone have done a truly amazing thing.

Telecoms giant Vodafone Group Plc slashed to one euro from nearly 300 the price of a card that allows laptop computer users to access the Internet through its high-speed mobile network, it said on Friday.

It goes on:

A spokesman for Vodafone said sales of the card had been as expected but declined to be drawn on precise numbers. He said the price cut, which is good until the end of September, was meant as an "interesting proposition" for potential customers, who have to pay for use of Vodafone's network.

It'd be interesting to see if this is a marketing exercise (like sampling) or a panicky way of shifting inventory. I hope it's the former and we're seeing shift away from the telecom trend of launching a product at a super-premium price.

Can we expect that they'll cut the price of MMS now? Somehow, I doubt it.

3G Launches in US

According to Techdirt AT&T Wireless could be launching 3G in four cities as early as next week.

It's not so straightforward though:

even after the acquisition announcement from Cingular, AT&T Wireless was still required to launch 3G service in four cities by the end of the year, or be forced to pay back the $6 billion NTT DoCoMo gave them.

So, it's no surprise to hear that AT&T Wireless is on track to have four cities launched by the end of the year. They have $6 billion riding on it, after all.

However, the surprise news may be that such service could launch next week. The four cities in question are San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix and Detroit, and the pricing isn't quite as ridiculous as you might expect.

I wonder if they're going though the motions (6 billion is a lot of dollars) or if they're serious? It would be great if they're really doing it.