MobHappy

The Value Of Cameraphones

I've talked before about how cameraphones are proving their social value, whether it's as sousveillance tools, or empowering stupid criminals, or how they're helping supplant actual memories with digital ones. But, I'm fairly convinced I've been missing the real value of cameraphones: to provide evidence to our friends for otherwise unbelievable anecdotes.

I say this after taking the photo above with my phone last night, as some random guy decided he needed to show my friends and the tattoo he's had inked from his shoulder blades down to the back of his knees, which involved not just taking off his shirt, but dropping his pants (in the middle of a bar's patio) as well.

Full story and marginally NSFW image after the jump.

DRM Storm Swells Around Sony

You've undoubtedly heard about the Sony DRM Rootkit fiasco. Just to recap, Sony BMG CDs installed a rootkit as part of their copy-protection scheme. The software hides itself on Windows computers, and acts like malware, and can break systems if users try to remove it. It even phones home back to Sony -- some people say it sends back info about the CD being listened to; the company that made the software says it simply looks for updated banners for the program people must use to listen to the CD on their computers. In any case, it's a real mess for Sony, and they're doing a typically crappy job of dealing with it, displaying all the arrogance that so endears people to entertainment companies.

Now, they're being sued, too, in a few US states and in Italy. The lawsuits were inevitable, really, but the widespread reaction of people to this has been pretty amazing, and further evidence that the tide is turning against copy protection. This has put Sony's efforts under the microscope (exposing the absolutely ridiculous EULA for the corrupt CDs, for one thing), but has also clued people in to the fact that DRM and copy protection are giant trojan horses used by the entertainment industry. It starts with "this is so you can't copy stuff so much," but it's just a ruse to lock down as many playback devices as they can in an attempt to wring as much money out of consumers as possible.

Typical people typically don't really care about DRM, so long as their iTunes music plays on their iPod and so on. But its pervasive use is slapping the general public in the face with increasing frequency, whether it's when they realize they can't buy music from Napster and listen to it on their iPod, they can't rip all the songs from a CD onto their computer or they've gotten a virus because Sony assumes they're a criminal. The situation has to change, and change quickly, or the entertainment industry is going to copy-protect itself into the grave.

Update: Rather unsurprisingly, the CD that spurred my initial moment of clarity about the stupidity of DRM is one of Sony's spyware discs.

Axe Falls On Gizmondo Execs

A commenter on Russell's earlier post about Gizmondo execs and their interesting management payment plans turned us on to a little further scandal earlier in the week regarding some previous extracurricular activities of some of their executive team -- apparently some of them had done some time in Sweden for fraud and organized crime.

In an SEC document that came out this week (but was dated October 20), the two that went to jail resigned along with Gizmondo Europe's MD, who had earlier reimbursed the company for some of the expenses paid to him, his wife and companies to which he was connected that Russell pointed out in his first post.

It's an interesting soap opera. Just a shame it's more interesting than any of the company's actual business.

Tide Turning Against Copy Protection?

I've been pretty upfront lately about my distaste for copy protection and DRM. I have no problem paying for content; I just don't like having my options of how I choose to enjoy it being limited by the short-sighted greed of companies looking to lock me in to their proprietary products. People in general do complain about copy protection, but not very loudly. Mostly it's a question of interoperability -- why won't the songs I've bought from Napster play on my iPod? and so on. But more and more people are going to have a personal experience, like I did, that changes their mind about copy-protected content and illustrates what a pointless pain it is. And I'm seeing signs that's already beginning to happen, that more people are noticing -- and more people are simply getting pissed off about it.

It's easy to find vehement opponents of DRM and copy protection, like Boing Boing's inimitable Cory Doctorow. It's easy to marginalize their criticism by labeling them zealots or communists or nerds or whatever. But now, you're seeing that criticism go mainstream.

I point again to the Amazon comments on the CD that caused my moment of clarity; bands and labels having to backtrack in an attempt upset fans; a columnist from a big tech publication setting off on a campaign for "InDRMpendence" after he found out his $20,000 home stereo system couldn't play the 99-cent songs he'd bought from iTunes. Even The New York Times is telling people how to circumvent copy-protection in an article trying to explain the mess.

The ball is rolling, and people are starting to realize that yes, DRM and copy protection are pointless and stupid. The argument that they're necessary evils to persuade content providers to make content available digitally is hogwash; they're used as tools to lock people in to formats, products, brands and stores. As consumers, as these companies' customers, they're forced to listen to us, or at least to our money. If people choose not to buy their DRMed products, they'll have to change.

The challenge, then, isn't convincing people that copy protection is bad -- the content companies tend to do a good enough job of that themselves. It's simply just making people aware of the problem. It's easy not to care about DRM when you've got an iPod and you just want to listen to the songs you've bought from iTunes. That's why mobile is going to be ground zero -- the penetration of phones that play music and the waves of incompatibility that are going to come as people attempt to navigate different brands of hardware and different mobile and online download shops.

The problem isn't necessarily one for consumers, we can eliminate the problem just not by getting involved. But that highlights the problem for all the content providers and hardware manufacturers -- they're the ones that need to change, they're the ones with revenues at stake. At some point, the vast majority of people are going to get pissed off and decide to not play ball, and its companies using DRM that are going to pay for it. So they've got a choice: make the short-term revenue grab that copy protection might enable, or make the long-term choice to build solid revenue streams and business models that don't use DRM and aren't endangered.

Update: Subway Perv Busted

NYC police have arrested a man they believe to be the guy caught on cameraphone exposing himself to a woman on the city's subway. Behold the power of the cameraphone.

Cameraphones: Empowering Stupid Criminals Everywhere

Following yesterday's update on the subway perv, two more examples of criminals being exposed via mobile phones popped up this morning:

- A New York man has been able to give police images of the guy that stole his phone after the thief unknowingly uploaded all the photos he took of himself, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's rear end to a Sprint web account. Apparently whenever a picture's emailed off a Sprint phone, it gets cc'ed to the web account, so the phone's owner was easily able to track down the thief, who then obligingly responded to one of his emails with his real name. Smart.

- While this one doesn't involve a cameraphone per se, it's pretty amusing as well. The MoDaCo Windows Mobile enthusiast site recently had a meetup in the UK, and Orange had donated a phone for them to raffle off. Before they could give it away, somebody swiped it. Not figuring how stupid it would be to steal a phone from a bunch of phone geeks, he was pretty easily tracked down when he tried to unlock the phone to use it on a carrier other than Orange. Nice one, Einstein.

Update On The Subway Flasher

I posted last Thursday a woman snapping a cameraphone picture of a guy that exposed himself to her on the New York City subway, and how she'd posted it on Flickr and given it to police. The story's now a dual-meme phenomenon (with citizen journalism, sort of), as the New York Daily News ran the photo and a story about it on the front page of Saturday's edition. Hopefully this well help get the perv caught.

Mobile Phone Sousveillance In Action Again

The idea of mobile sousveillance/coveillance/equiveillance has got legs. Today, Boing Boing links to a Flickr post by a woman that says she snapped a picture of a guy that exposed himself to her on the New York City subway. She later took the photo to police, hoping it would help them catch the guy, but apparently he's still at large. His face (and moving hands) are all over the Web now, though.

Airtime As Currency

I spotted a column by Dave Birch in the Guardian from last week (when it looks like Emily posted it on Textually as well) that's pretty interesting about how mobile phones are being used to facilitate payments in African countries.

It's nothing advanced as Simpay or PayPal for mobiles or anything like that -- it's using prepay credits as currency. We've seen operators that allow P2P airtime credit trading, which has spawned micro-resellers in places like the Philippines, but this sounds a little different. It's a grassroots use of prepaid credits, which carry enough value to people that they're accepted for payments -- and even as bribes by government officials.

It works by people buying scratch-off vouchers, then texting the voucher number to the payee, who then applies it to their account. The only drawback is that while somebody could pass the number on to pay somebody else, they can't split up the credit. Yet, anyway -- it seems like if the operators there are smart, they'll do like the Filipinos and make their systems open to this kind of thing, and reap the benefits.

Alfie Sorts Out O2

We told you last week how O2 UK managed to annoy mobloggers by sending MMS addressed to email addresses as a message with a link to a web page, instead of just sending the picture as an attachment.

Alfie Dennen, who very smartly turned us and a bunch of other bloggers on to the issue, reported back today that O2 has backtracked and reverted to the old method, and even the BBC's picked up on the story, with an O2 rep saying they'd listen to the needs of mobloggers in coming to a solution.

So:
- nice one, Alfie;
- yet another example that companies need to pay attention to blogs;
- operators, or O2 anyway, are paying attention to moblogging.

More Post-London Scams

Following the ICE virus scam Russell wrote about, there are a couple more hoaxes making the rounds.

The first one says that even if their phone has no signal, people riding the Tube in London can reach emergency services if they dial 112. The hoax says that "ALL phone companies have signed up" for a service that routes the calls to emergency services via a satellite connection. Clearly that one isn't true.

Down in Italy, the second isn't about mobiles, but is traveling via SMS, spreading a rumor that terrorists had poisoned the Rome water supply. With polls showing 85% of Italians fear a terrorist attack, the SMS seems to be a prank to cause a bit of panic, and the city's mayor has pledged to catch whoever was responsible.

Community Protests ID Cards

"I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10000 other people will also make this same pledge." So writes Phil Booth on PledgeBank.

As I write, Mr Booth has attracted 10,003 people to his cause and the UK's nascent anti-ID card movement therefore has a fighting fund of £100,000 ($175,000). I expect this to grow substantially in the coming weeks.

PledgeBank is an interesting example of community power, in action. You visit the site and make a promise to do something if a certain number of other people sign up to do the same thing.

Pledges can be small and mundane, like promising to sweep up outside your house in Somerset, UK, if 20 other people in the county do the same.

While this may seem insignificant, little things like this can make a big difference, to quote The Tipping Point and who knows? This could be the start of a street clean-up virus spreading through Somerset and sweeping throughout the world.

But clearly, Pledges can be big issues of the day, such as the anti-ID card protest. Digital technology  can be used to mobilise opposition in a very powerful way, exactly as envisaged in Howard Rheingold's visionary book, SmartMobs.

As for Mr Bliar's ID card concept, if he progresses with it, it'll become his Poll Tax (or more likely, his successor's Poll Tax) which caused rioting in the British Streets back in 1990. No matter what the merits of the scheme (which for both Poll Tax and ID cards are pretty dubious anyway), the people don't want them.

And imagine how quickly Poll Tax could have been ended using the technology available today, in the form of the net, to campaign and co-ordinate opposition, and the mobile phone to organise on-the-ground protests.

I think that we're about to see a massive demonstration of community power flexing its new muscles.

Via Tom Hume.

Scoopt Launches Photos by Citizen Journalists

It's always a little frustrating when you have an idea and see someone else run with it. About 6 months ago I was trying to get a large German publisher to implement something similar to Scoopt - with no success - and now they've been scooped!

Scoopt recognises that these days, the best photographs of a news event are likely to be taken by eye-witnesses at the scene and not by professional press photographers. Of course, this is nothing new - big events like plane crashes are often captured by amateurs, who happen to have a camera with them and the precence of mind to use it.

What has changed though is that, thanks to camera phones, a lot more people are carrying around cameras than they ever used to. This means that it's infinitely more likely that the event will be captured.

What Scoopt does is allow witnesses to news events to post their photos online. Then they try to sell them to their "extensive network of media contacts", splitting income on the 50:50 basis - though the photographer retains copyright.

The big challenge (assuming that the network of media contacts is real) is in communicatiing the idea to the population at large. People don't witness news events every day and may well not know about Scoopt - or have forgotten about it when they need it. Which is why it makes much more sense to launch it in conjunction with a newspaper.

A lot of fuss is being made about bloggers "replacing" journalists in some way. And indeed, many bloggers provide a very high quality output that would grace the pages of any "traditional" publications. But the reality is that there's plenty of room for bloggers/citizen journalists, as well as the more established genre of writers.

However, it's pretty clear to me that the news photographer is much more endangered as a species and sites like Scoopt are happily hammering the nails into the coffin.

As a slight digression, I'm reading Andrew Marr's book "My Trade" about journalism. [Andrew Marr is a senior Brit journalist, who is about to take over Sir David Frost's iconic TV programme Frost on Sunday. Presumably they'll change the name.]

One pithy quote I enjoyed was "Journalism is the industrialisation of gossip". I wonder if he'll write about blogging or citizen journalism?

Blocking out Advertising

The Firefox browser is evidence of community power in action - a bunch of bright techies get together to launch a better competitor that Microsoft is prepared to offer. And in taking on one of the world's biggest and aggressive companies, their latest market share is 10.3% - with no marketing budget to speak of.

This might not sound too much, but many serious companies would kill to be able to carve out that much market from a MS core brand. Imagine controlling 10% of the word-processing or spreadsheet market!

While this leaves MS with a comfortable 83.7%, there's two underlying trends that are important. Firstly, most of those 10.3% are almost certainly all very influential people, whose opinions on tech will be listened to by their peers (especially their non-techie  friends). Secondly, Firebox has doubled its reach in the last three months.

Could Firefox have reached its tipping point and will the next version of Explorer reverse the trend?

One of the really popular aspects of Firefox (OK, apart from tabbing) is the ability to block annoying pop-up advertising. Personally I wouldn't dream of giving money to companies that annoyed me this much, but hey, some people must. It must be the same drongos who respond to spam email.

But The Big Picture now reports that you can go one step beyond blocking pop-ups. A downloadable Firefox extension, Adblock, allows you to strip web pages of all advertising material all together. This includes banners, buttons and Google Adwords.

Adblock is now the third most popular extension and has so far been downloaded 2.8 million times. For a product you probably haven't heard of (OK, you might have, but I hadn't) that's quite a big number. If I did some analysis, I reckon that might make it somewhere in the league of iPod in terms of initial rate of sale, at a guess.

For media owners that's a hell of an issue. It means that Adblock users have ended the tacit reader/ media owner treaty which was drafted in the mists of time:

And it shall be declared that the media owner shall produce material for the reader to the best of their ability and that the media owner may subsidise all or a proportion of their costs by selling advertisers access to those readers in the form of advertising messages.

If that Treaty is abandoned, how can the readers expect the media owner to continue to serve them great content? But they do seem to expect this - that's the problem increasing faced by advertisers and media owners alike.

That's why advertisers and media owners must move beyond traditional models and explore new methodologies of engaging the customer as a matter of urgency.

Now, anyone fancy advertising on this site :-)

Community Power

CNN reports that eBay bowed to the pressure of the community yesterday and withdrew all sales of Live 8 tickets.

Tickets were awarded on the basis of an sms lottery and started appearing in hours on eBay for 100's of dollars. But good old Sir Bob, branded eBay as an electronic pimp and condemned the auctions as against the spirit of the event.

But that's not all. On Sky News, he urged people to go on eBay and "mess up the system":

"Everyone should go on and pretend they have got tickets for Live 8 ... otherwise go on and bid ridiculous amounts of money for the tickets already on the site," said the feisty Irish rocker.

His call didn't go unheeded. Within minutes, bids for hundreds of dollars turned into millions and eBay was flooded with false auctions.

eBay had no choice but to back down quickly from their previous "there's nothing illegal about selling them" to "we've listened to the eBay community". They should have seen this one coming, I think, when Sir Bob first made his displeasure known.

But it proves that there's nothing so powerful as a community that has decided to act in unison. Even mighty corporations and governments must bow down to its wishes. Community power has arrived, but we ain't seen nothing yet.