MobHappy

ShoZu Widens Handset Support

Russell wrote about ShoZu, a free mobile photo uploading service a couple months ago, noting it looked like a good way to get around the problems of MMS for uploading photos to a sharing site like Flickr. It's built by Cognima, which makes the cool white-label Snap service that's pretty similar, but it sold to carriers. ShoZu offers some of the functionality of Snap, but is open to anybody with a compatible handset, and is free. When ShoZu launched, it only worked on some Symbian handsets, but it now supports a slew of Windows Mobile devices as well as some Java handsets.

I downloaded it on my Sony Ericsson K750, and have messed with it some, and it seems pretty great for uploading to Flickr -- far easier than sending them via email or SMS. So check it out again if you were disappointed by the earlier list of compatible handsets, and hopefully the list will keep growing.

Sprint Launches EV-DO, Things Get A Little More Interesting

US carrier Sprint did the full launch of its EV-DO offering today, calling it Sprint Power Vision" (annoying intro to the site). It's EV-DO, and the content is focused on TV and music. There are a number of streaming channels of both kinds users can get. While the content doesn't look all that exciting, the prices are quite good: they're offering 3 levels, at $15, $20 and $25 per month (all unlimited use), and the only real distinction is the number of TV channels users get. It's simple and straightforward (well, until you start looking at premium channel subscriptions and so on, but even still...). Tethering the phone to a laptop costs an extra $25 per month, but it's still cheaper than Verizon.

This should be an interesting 6 weeks or so -- Cingular's HSDPA network is rumored to be launched tomorrow and Mobile ESPN goes on sale in four markets (Austin is one of them, and I was planning on picking up a unit to play with, until I saw the pricing), while Amp'd should get going before Christmas.

The real question isn't the fast networks -- 2 EV-DO and one HSDPA will take care of that -- but the content. Verizon's V CAST and Sprint Power Vision are focused on video, but will that be compelling enough to get people to upgrade? I've got my doubts, and I'm very curious to see what else they'll be putting in front of users.

Hello Helio

One of the MVNOs I met with at CTIA, SK-Earthlink, has rebranded, and is now going by "Helio". It's still planning to launch in the spring here in the US, and hasn't given many details on its content or pricing strategy yet, apart from saying it will target 18- to 30-year-olds with high-end devices and advanced services.

It's early, but the company is still saying all the right things. I missed the news a few weeks ago (PDF) that they hired away the director of design from Danger -- that's a good move as well. The Hiptop isn't without its faults, but its UI and industrial design certainly isn't one of them.

"Now" You Can Respond To Mobile E-Mail With A Voice Message

Mobile e-mail company Visto says that it will add the ability for users of its mobile e-mail service to respond to messages with a recorded voice message. "Voice is the next logical step in the progression of mobile email, providing mobile professionals with the freedom to choose how to communicate, depending on the situation and the business need," says the company's CEO.

Um... hasn't this functionality always been there, pretty much since the beginning of mobile phones, let alone mobile e-mail? It's called a voice call?

Interview with Mark Curtis - Author of "Distraction Culture"

I've known Mark Curtis, on and off, since pre-internet days. Yes, that long and yes, there was such a time. We probably didn't even have mobile phones in them days.

So it was interesting to do this interview, catch up with his latest thoughts and find out about his new book. Since his company do a lot of work for Nokia, he's at the very heart of all things mobile and I think I'd describe him in a couple of words as a "thoughtful evangelist".

While passionate about digital and mobile generally, this is not the blind enthusiasm of a shallow gadgetman, constantly in search of the new, the faster and the smaller. Mark takes time to think, to argue and to wonder just what the implications for all of us are for the future we're rushing into at break neck speed.

Here's the interview:

Please can you give us a sense of who Mark Curtis is? A brief biog in a few sentences.

I’ve often wondered myself!

I started in marketing agencies – below the line specialising in the (at the time) rapidly growing radio industry – and then became fascinated by the potential of what we then called interactive media in 1994, and set up CHBi as an offshoot to a sales promotion company I was then a partner in.

After a shaky start (no-one we talked to believed in our vision that media would change totally), the cuckoo outgrew the nest and it became an independent company, which we sold to Razorfish in 1998 and became Razorfish London.

Thereafter followed dramatic growth, for a while wonderful work (at our best when 90 strong), head-turning new business wins (100 enquiries a week at one stage), a plague of management consultants who thought digital was cool (and that they could get rich quick and then screwed up client relationships by being so arrogant) and then the internet winter set in.

I left in March 2001, set up Fjord a few months later and where we have focused on mobile. Basically the consistent theme in my career has been media innovation.

I have a number of passions which include my four daughters, cycling, running, wine, books, mountains, food, wildlife.

Tell us a little about what Fjord does.

Fjord develops new mobile products and services for clients seeking to differentiate themselves in handheld media. However, a lot of our work is cross platform.

And a campaign that you’re most proud of, that encapsulates what you’re trying to achieve these days.

I feel the need to take issue with the word "campaign". Right now I fear that much of the interest in mobile is marketing focused and that the default setting for marketing thinking is “campaign” – suggesting ads, ephemeral items that come and go, and above all a pointer to products but not the product or service itself.

We’ve been down this road before at the start of the web. Marketing money tends to gravitate towards new media because it can create stand out appeal, new stuff is fun, and often a very appealing audience can be found there.

But with the web the real value was created by building the products and services that suited the medium – in my case Yell.com, RAC’s traffic news and route planning, many community plays. More famously Amazon, E-bay etc…These are not campaigns….

But to answer your question more directly…..As so much of our work is innovation, it is hard to talk about it (clients, understandably, don’t want us to.) However we played an important role in the development of Lifeblog from Nokia and it gave us a big lift to see a product we had worked on for so long a) see the light of day and b) so well reviewed. We think it is a harbinger of things to come (but we’re very biased).

Secondly, next month a new service comes to market called Flirtomatic which Fjord has played a key role in developing. I’m spending all my time on this and it is very very exciting.

That sounds interesting - let us know when you can tell us more.

If you had to summarise the key messages in your new book, “Distraction – Being Human in a Digital Age”, what would they be?

In 2000/2001, as the dot com boom went pop, the doom sayers emerged gleefully from the forests of doubt where they had been lurking impatiently. They had of course seen this coming all along and now we could all gratefully forget about this digital nonsense and return to wearing suits. I remember reading an article about the new managing director of the London office of a web services company where he actually said this. Hurray the madness was over.

The perception that took hold and to some extent is still at large, was that this “digital” thing was going away, had never had any real meaning and that its impact was superficial at best.

This is a very dangerous fallacy.

Digital technology - essentially the bit that deals with communications – is changing our world more than most people remotely imagine. This book is about that change.

Some of it could have been written three or even five years ago. However, the outlines of the impact of mobile technology are beginning to slope out from the mist and affecting the story for better or worse. It is time to give it some narrative form and see if it makes sense.

Our world is changing shape. This should not be a surprise as it has happened before. I do not of course mean something as dramatic as a shift from being a sphere to a cube. In this book, I am more interested in the way we think about our universe. If you define reality as that which we think we experience, then history is well furnished with examples of man’s perceptions of the world around him changing fundamentally.

These are very important moments though at the time they happen, it is hard to see what the effect will be.

You’d have to go back to the sixties for another decade when our world has changed (the pill, pop music, drugs, the moon landing) so much as in the last ten years. The changes we are living through now are perhaps less raucous and demanding of our attention as sexual freedom or the rise of the teenager. That does not mean they are less important. In the long term, they may be more so.

This re-shaping of our landscape is happening at the same time as a tremendous shift in the way we structure our social networks, caused and enabled largely by new technology. The world of our friends and acquaintances is mediated increasingly by electronic address books – in sim cards, mail browsers and buddy lists (the address books used by instant messenger services such as MSN Messenger). Are these going to support or disrupt the traditional social networks - or is this an artificial distinction suggesting that there is nothing to worry about?

We do know that social capital – the store of goodwill that helps us have easier relationships with people – is in decline. Will digital halt this or change its course?

We cannot take for granted that all progress is good, as the Victorians did. In “Why Things Bite Back” Edward Tenner developed a compelling theory that every technological advance carries with it what he called a “revenge” effect, a kind of unintended consequence. Frequently this is chronic and long term, by which he meant low level and hard to detect, but often much harder to deal with than the problem that was being addressed in the first place.

For example, pesticides eliminate pests, but damage other parts of the food chain too, which in time makes the growing of crops harder because natural predators of other pests are affected for the worse. Indeed, the original target pests themselves often out-evolve the poison, and the new superbugs are much harder to get rid of.

The digital revolution, now roughly ten years old, will not be without its revenge effects, most of which will be social. This book begins to examine what some of these might be and suggests how we can ameliorate their influence and build on some of the very positive aspects of new technology.

Erik Davis in Techgnosis relates the following story, taken in turn from Plato, and narrated by Socrates. It concerns Thoth, the Egyptian god of magic and invention. “…One day Thoth approached King Thamus with an offer of a brand new techne (art): writing. By giving the gift of writing to the king, Thoth hoped to pass on its wonders to all of the Egyptian people, and he promised Thamus that the new invention would not only augment memory, but amplify wisdom as well. Thamus carefully considered the matter, weighing the pros and cons of this major communications upgrade. Finally the king rejected the gift, saying that his people would be better off with out the new device. And reading between the lines of the story, it’s clear that Socrates and Plato agree.”

Thamus feared that the gift of writing would take away his people’s memory. He reasoned that once you could write ideas and stories down, the facility to remember them would fade. As Davis points out, it is hard to disagree when you consider the loss of oral tradition in societies that have put pen to paper and ink to press.

Well, Thoth has been laying on the gifts thickly recently, and we have no all-powerful Thamus to say "no thank you". As media guru Marshall McLuhan observed (some time ago now), when you gain from technology, you always lose something too. The aim of this book is to contribute to the debate about losses and gains in the field of human communication.

Who should read it?

Anyone who wants to think about our world and how we live in it in the early 21st century.

And argue about it.

What’s the big picture for mobile technology? One of the things we’re written about a lot for instance, is the mobile taking over from the computer as the most important digital device to access the net? Is this a theory you subscribe too?

No – not yet at least. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the screen size and input limitations of the mobile are about to be overcome. Of course, I’ve read about digital paper, scrolling displays etc… but I tend to rely on personal experience and I’ve not played with anything to change this view.

I prefer to think of the mobile as a remote control device for demanding things in the context of mobility, i.e. when a PC is just not convenient. It’s also great at recording stuff – where you are, what you’ve seen and experienced. That too is an important point of differentiation. Which device is the key access point to the net will, in time, largely be seen as irrelevant.

How has the mobile changed society and how will it change it, in the future?

It’s made us “always on” and always connected. It encourages partial attention, because we run the risk of emotionally preferencing the siren call of distance, with all its potential, over the here and now. Why else do perfectly thoughtful business people answer calls in meetings, and teenagers text not talk during family meal times? Because they know, viscerally, they are linked to others and it’s just too seductive.

People love incoming.

Give us 3 big predictions for mobile in the next 5 years.

The development of new products and services from outside the existing industry infrastructure which go on to define what mobile data and voice are all about.

Massive industry and consumer confusion about VOIP/mobile/WiFi convergence.

Rapidly dropping data prices.

Your background is in marketing. Can you point to any recent campaign involving mobile that excites you?

No. We are not at that stage yet.

Yes, I tend to agree with that, although I also think we're seeing some green shoots of innovation in this area. Mark, thank you very much.

If you'd like to buy a copy of Mark's book, head on over to the publisher, Future Text.. And no, we don't get a cut, in case you wondered.

News Pix n Flix Launches New Citizen Journalism Site

News Pix n Flix is another new US based, Citizen Journalist site, aimed at getting ordinary people witnessing news, to send in their photos of the event - probably taken with their ever-present camera and video phones.

As I've noted before, capturing live news is increasingly more likely to be done by passing ordinary citizens, than professional photographers, who can't possibly be everywhere at once. But with camera phones increasingly ubiquitous, it's more and more likely that any news events will be seen by people nearby, suitably equipped to capture it for posterity and the news organisations.

The UK has already seen the launch of Scoopt, which Carlo updated us on last week - despite having 1,200 registered users, there have been no photos sent in of the right quality so far. Early days, but it does illustrate the problem of scaling this that I wrote about in my original post. You need millions of people on board to guarantee of capturing anything interesting.

The main difference between Scoopt and News Pix n Flix (apart from Scoopt having the better name)  seems to be in the way they reward the Citizen Journalists. Scoopt opts for a revenue share, which seems a pretty fair way of approaching it. After all, if they do their job properly, they should be able to turn a news-worthy image into lots of money in a way that the normal folk, without the right contacts, wouldn't be able to do.

News Pix n Flix, however, pays out "up to $50" if "your submission is chosen and used in the news".  This seems a little, well...mean actually. A hot news photo can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and people surely realise this.

The other issue that both services have is that, as shown in the London bombings, many witnesses seemed more than happy to send in their pictures and video for free to newspapers and the media. I think that this was something to do with wanting to share the trauma they'd experienced with the world, rather than thinking "Hang on, I may have just got blown up and witnessed my fellow humans dying, but this could be a nice little earner, if I play my cards right."

I have no doubt that we'll see more and more examples of photographs from ordinary people in the media. But time will tell if they'll learn to go via agencies like these.

As for the agencies themselves, here's a new buzzword for you - YASRO. Yet Another Scoopt Rip Off. You read it here first.

Disaster-Related Mobile Memes Continue To Sprout Up

In the wake of the London bombings last month, we've seen several different ideas pop up -- ICE, where the idea's to get people to specify emergency contacts in their phonebook, and sousveillance, getting people to use their cameraphones for anti-terrorist surveillance. Another's emerged this week, aiming to help alleviate the crowding on mobile networks that results from all the "I'm OK" calls and messages in the immediate aftermath of this type of event.

The textOK service lets people in the UK set up contact lists, then for 25p, they send an "OK" message to a short code, which then sends an email with the message to all their contacts. It's a novel idea, and a pretty good one -- and is something operators should latch on to and offer for their users.

While the company running the service says it will donate profits to charity, which sounds great, they are a marketing company -- raising questions of just what they'll do with all the contact info users give them. The company says they hate spam, and sends an email to a user's contacts just to let them know about the service and so they're not surprised should they receive a message. But, they also point out their terms and conditions say users agree "to receive occaisonal emails from us reminding you to keep your contacts up to date, new textOK features and details about our Charity fundraising and information from our partners".

That doesn't sound too promising, and highlights the need for a trusted provider to deliver these kinds of services. It's a void mobile operators could fill very easily, and they could improve on it by forwarding messages via SMS rather than email. Hopefully textOK isn't just a spam front, because that could dent the potential of mobile services like this.

Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore's "Communities Dominate Brands" Book Review

Following my interview with Tomi Ahonen a few weeks ago, I've been reading the new book "Communities Dominate Brands", he co-wrote with Alan Moore.

If you've only got time for a top line opinion, here it is; very good, you should read it. You can get 10% off here by using the promotional code mobile-weblog.

Here's a slightly more meaty review.

Unlike the scope of Tomi's previous books, which are focused on mobile, this one has a much wider scope, encompassing a look at everything that's happening in media, blogging, mobile, marketing and online communities. If you're a regular reader of this blog, many of the themes and case studies will already be familiar to you - indeed, I joked with Tomi that if I was to write another book at the moment, it would have been this one!

That's not to imply in any way that you won't learn anything from the book - far from it. It also does a very fine job of bringing these themes together and making sense of the big picture.

It's very hard to summarise a closely-worded 250 page book into a blog post. But if I had to pick the most important conclusion it would be that the days of traditional, advertising-led, interruptive marketing, dominated by big media are over. The ROI from this type of activity is in rapid decline now, with swathes of big business in denial - led by the ad agencies and the big media owners. Pretty soon they'll move on the the anger stage of the grieving process, like we see in the music industry.

New marketing is emerging and it's about dialogue, or engagement. Companies need to engage with their customers in an authentic, honest and open manner. One of the many case studies in book is the infamous Kryptonite Bike Locks, which I've covered before. While it was certainly true that their locks could be opened with a Bic pen, what enraged people and caused such a problem was that the company ignored them.

As Hugh McLeod so memorably put it:

DAY ONE:

KRYPTONITE: Our bike locks are the best.
THE MARKET: Yes, your bike locks are the best.

DAY TWO:

KRYPTONITE: Our bike locks are the best.
THE MARKET: Yes, your bike locks are still the best.

DAY THREE:

KRYPTONITE: Our bike locks are the best.
THE MARKET: Ummm... yeah I'm sure they are, but what's all this about some recent video on the net that's supposed to show how you can crack your locks in 10 seconds using a simple Bic ballpoint pen?

DAY FOUR:

KRYPTONITE: Our bike locks are the best.
THE MARKET: Hey, I just saw that video on a friend's website. And I'm kinda ticked off because I just paid $60 for one of your new locks 3 weeks ago, and I'm wondering if a Bic pen can crack my lock or not... does the pen crack all Kryptonite locks or just one or two models?

DAY FIVE:

KRYPTONITE: Our bike locks are the best.
THE MARKET: Hey, I just visited your website and saw no mention of the Bic pens. What the hell are you doing about it? Are you going to fix the locks? Are you going to give me a refund?

DAY SIX:

KRYPTONITE: Our bike locks are the best.
THE MARKET: No, they're not. You guys are assholes.

At a cost of $12 million, so far, I'm sure they won't make that mistake again - if they survive, that is. They abused the trust of the community and they've been made to pay the price. The trouble is, you can't get that trust back so easily.

[Speaking of Hugh, it occurs to me that the book could have been improved by the judicious scattering of a few cartoons or something to lift the fairly intense layout. I don't mean the writing style itself is intense, just the way the book is laid out. This is only a small point though.]

New marketing is not about engaging individuals in dialogue, but about working with them as clusters of individuals - or the communities that have organically formed online and through networks of connected mobile phones. People are going to talk about your company or brand, whether you like it or not. You can't set the agenda or control the conversation. But you can listen and react. And you can use this feedback to improve your company and its products.

And you know the scary part? It's cheap. Sure, you need bright people to lead and manage the change. You still need smart people in an organisation to engage with customers. But there's no cost of media anymore. And that's why those who understand this in the ad agencies are desperately seeking a way out, while the rest of the Ruperts blithely continue to wine and dine increasingly dissatisfied clients.

This has fundamental implications for PR agencies too. If clients engage in direct customer communication, why do they need to use the press as a conduit, which just distorts what you want to say?

The other very important message of the book is the importance of Alpha Users. These people are authorities within their community on a given subject. Seth Godin had a similar concept with Sneezers and Malcolm Gladwell with Mavens. But the basic idea is that these are the people who evangelise about your products in the community. If you focus your engagement on them, they'll tell everyone else.

Bloggers are typical Alpha Users. If you engage with a blogger in the right way, they can deliver your company credibility and sales. If you engage in the wrong way, they can do real damage.

On to the book itself. I don't think I've ever read a book that has such a contemporary feel to it. Even the case studies feel current and relevant in an environment where even a few months can seem like years. The price of this is that the editorial process seems to have been a little rushed, with quite a few typos and some areas which could be more polished. In some ways, it's bloggings answer to a book - the writing isn't perfect, but it's open, honest, readable and authentic. Personally, I'm happy to trade a few typos for speed-to-market, so it's hardly a major criticism.

I do have one other major disappointment with the book, being quite honest. That is that the people who need to read it (big company Marketing Directors, Ad agency CEO's, big media CEO's) probably won't and will stay cocooned in their own little worlds. This is going to be very bad news for their companies. So if you know one of these people, you'll be doing them a favour by buying them a copy - even if they might not thank you for it right now :-)

Here's the link again, if you want to get 10% off here by using the promotional code mobile-weblog. By the way, I don't benefit if you do buy a copy, in case you were wondering. I did get a free review copy though :-)

Sony and I-Play

Digital Bridges, the UK based mobile games maker, has changed its name to I-Play and positioned itself as a consumer-facing brand.

I was reading this in the excellent Mobile Entertainment, one of the few publishers who are kind enough to send me a hard copy, here in Germany.

The senior VP of publishing and marketing, said: "But all of them [mobile games makers] have technology oriented heritage and company names. We felt it was time to differentiate and address the mass market. Sony did it with Walkman. We're doing it with I-Play."

I read it several times and just wonder why the Walkman popped into the press release. Is it anything to do with games? No.

Did they go from a B2B proposition to a B2C? No. Are I-Play suggesting that they have Walkman levels of launch spend? I doubt it.

Odd.

Still, good luck to them.

Stylish Video Editing on Nokia

Muvee is an app from Singapore which is very cool. You shoot a video clip on your Nokia (7610, 6630, 6670, 3230 for model number fetishists). Then you choose a template for your "Muvee", which gets automatically mixed with your video to give special effects, text message and sound track.

The results are surprisingly professional from the demo on the site and threaten to make someone else's home video interesting!

The idea is you then send it by MMS, assuming the recipient is on the same network, or that your operator has figured out that network compatibility might be important and that you have the right settings on your phone in the first place. And that MMS happens to work on a Tuesday :-)

But if the idea can overcome all these barriers to usage, it's great and I'm sure will do really well.

The service costs �3.50 (c. $5.60) which I'd say is a tad expensive. But not unreasonable, especially when you think that this isn't a everyday purchase, a little like a small gift.

I've long argued that one of the issues that's holding MMS back is the lack of creative template-driven content. This is a great example of the kind of thing I mean.

Story spotted: Broadband Blog, a newish blog (I think) set up by Om Malik and a few pals. This one written by serial entrepreneur, Ramesh Jain. Not to be confused with serial entrepreneur, Rajesh Jain, who writes at Emergic.

Mobile Streams Say Yes to Video

When I interviewed Simon Buckingham, CEO of global mobile content player, Mobile Streams 10 days ago, I speculated that they'd be going into video soon (and adult and gambling, for that matter).

Today they announced the setting up of a Video Rights Division and appointed Mark Burton, former Acquisition Director at ITV to head it up.

Shall I make a further prediction? They'll have a report out entitled "Say Yes to Video" within 12 months :-)

Drunk Dial Prevention

Mike at TechDirt writes about a great new service from Virgin in Australia. But like much of what Virgin does, it seems to have more than an eye on PR, than real practical uptake.

If you've ever drunk-dialed an ex-partner an 2.00 in the morning and tried to re-hash the break up or - worse - rekindle a flame, this is for you. You can tell Virgin mobile to blacklist certain numbers on your phone during night time hours only.

Of course, it doesn't help with that lunchtime drink habit or if you stumble across one of the last few pay phones and still need to be heard....

Mobile Advent Calender

Zed are launching an Advent Calender for mobile phones, which a pretty cool innovation. For �12 ($22.80) you get a different piece of content every day, including ringtones, logos, jokes or trivia every day.

You can order the content depending on your mobile - colour and poly tones at one end, to black and white and mono at the other.

However, if you fall into the latter category, you should save your money and put it towards a new handset.

Story source: Net Imperative

Cheap Calls Abroad from your Mobile

I spotted an announcement about UK�s BT�s Callwise on My Symbian, which seems to be a very soft launch of a very big idea. Why the low key approach I wonder?

Callwise allows you to download an application onto your Symbian mobile phone. Then, using your normal address book, call a number abroad from any network and save yourself up to 95% of the call charge. For instance, a 6 minute call on Vodafone to the US costs an iniquitous �7.74 ($14.72) and only 30p ($0.57) with Callwise. O2 on Australia costs �5.94 ($11.30) and similarly 30p with Callwise.

Also cool is that you�re not signing an open ended cheque to your operator when you make a call. Before the call is put through, you�re told the per minute tariff and get a total call charge at the end.

While cheap mobile calls abroad have been around for ages, this is far easier to use as the application does it for you. All you need do, is select the contact from your address book that you want to call. Thus, the application mimics standard mobile usage.

Also pretty cool is the facility to send the application by SMS or Bluetooth to colleagues and friends. A nice viral element.

I think that this is what my fellow collaborator on other projects, Nick Hancock, has been working on with BT and has been characteristically cagey about. I�ll see if he can speak about it next time we touch base for a little Q & A session.

But this little application could make a significant impact on one of the huge margin profit centres that the operators have � the rip off tariffs they charge for phoning abroad.

UPDATE: It was Nick. This is his website.

Deutsche Wireless Ecademy

We had the launch of the German Wireless Ecademy last night in Munich, hosted in the offices of Hillert & Co, a local ad agency.

[Before you leave, there is some stuff on LBS you'll find interesting!]

I organised the event with Christian Ehl, who did a great job as moderator of the evening and arranged the evnue and entertainment. Christian has 20 years experience in the technology sector and is just starting Hillert & Co Interactive to specilaise in Interactive Marketing, with a special emphasis on mobile marketing. This is the right approach for an agency to take, in my opinion. As I've written before, just specialising in mobile will marginalise you. But I think there's a very nice and surprisingly large niche for a good marketing-led agency who has a deep understanding of the mobile channel.

I met Christian through this blog and I've been doing some consulting projects for the agency since. You see - blogging does pay the bills, albeit indirectly :-)

Tony Fish, the Wireless Ecademy Chairman, flew in for the event and talked about his many hats. This includes his own venture fund and forthcoming book, Open Gardens, written with Ajit Jaokar. In one of those small world coincidences, I wrote my first book with Ajit too. I hope this one sells rather more than ours did :-) I'll be interviewing Ajit (when he's finished writing) about the book here.

We had a turn out of around 30 people, which I think was pretty impressive for the first one. Particularly as networking isn't something that the Germans have done a lot of historically. We had a good selection of local businesses and representatives of huge corporates, including Intel, HP, Sony Ericsson and Siemens (sorry if I've missed anybody out).

After Tony's brief introduction, I gave a presentation on the state of the LBS market. It's very difficult to cram everything into 20 minutes but I certainly tried! My conclusions were:

* Location Based Services will affect most companies in the 21st century � somehow!
* How will it impact on your organisation?
* How can you leverage competitive advantage?
* How can you improve your marketing campaigns, communication, products or services?

I have blown hot and cold about the relevance of LBS in the last 4 years of being involved in it. Sometimes it seems like video calling - something that sounds great to the technologist but users don't want. And sometimes that it's going to happen and it's really exciting. Always tempered with frustration about the operators dragging their feet over deployment of the technology - at ZagMe we were promised the first trials in January 2001 for shit's sake!

Right now, I'm getting excited. To pick up on one of Tony's remarks, there seems to be lots of evidence that we're moving from supplier push (and hype) to user pull (bona fide demand for services). The user "innovators" (to use Moore's term) are coming into the market and I think services like Dodgeball and Yellow Arrow are pointing to the future. Sure, there are a lot of issues to resolved, but I'm sure the first wheel didn't work perfectly either and no tech innovation since has.

I'll happily send anyone a copy of my slides. With the caveat that I think they may need a narrative.

The next stage was Speed Networking - you have 3 minutes to talk to someone, before I brutally blow my whistle and you have to move on. It's a surprisingly effective way of meeting lots of people quickly, breaking the ice and finding out quickly if it's worth both your time talking further. While I think there was quite a bit of nervousness among many participants, most actually found it fun and very useful.

We then had a performance artist, Etelka Kovacs. She puts up a series of A2 paper on a wall, until she has a giant canvass (see pic above) and within 20 minutes, accompanied by an eclectic music soundtrack, she has created an amazing masterpiece. She then sells off each panel for 36 Euros in aid of charity.

It's a hell of a performance and a real privilege to watch her work.

The informal chat afterwords ranged around all things wireless, but lots of interest was expressed in blogging. Obviously the next new new thing :-)

Many thanks to Hillert & Co for organising everything. I look forward to the next event - bigger and even better, I hope. If you were one of the last minute cancellations, don't worry, but you missed out on a great evening.

I hope to see you there next time :-)

Halo 2 - $100 Million/Day Sales

Halo 2 recorded record sales of $100 million on its first day according to Microsoft (via Reuters).

The game went on sale at mid-night last night (Tuesday), to Harry Potteresque scenes of queues round the block and stores opening at the witching hour to make their first sale.

Rumour has it that some queuers were grown-ups :-)

The original Halo is still the best selling Xbox game.

I wonder if we'll ever see a similar feeding frenzy over a mobile game release? Somewhat rhetorical that really - of course we will.

Deutschland Wireless Ecademy

If you don't live in Germany, or can't get to Munich for 16th November, don't bother to read anymore of this post. Unless you know someone who might be interested, in which case forward this on to them - they'll thank you for it.

But if you can come to Munich for 16th November, we're launching the German branch of Wireless Ecademy. It's a networking event with some short presentations and takes place after work - so you don't have an excuse not to come.

I'll be speaking on Location Based Services, but only for 20 minutes, so don't let that put you off :-)

There'll also be, what we think is the first Speed Networking session in Germany!

So if you're interested in mobile or wireless, come along and meet colleagues from Siemens, Microsoft and Intel (to name a few) as well as saying Hi to me.

You can get more info here and register - first come, first served.

Hope you can make it.

Russell

Ogo O No

I was going to write a post slagging off the text and IM only Ogo from AT&T which seems to be reported everywhere yesterday and today. Yes, that's right, it doesn't have a voice call facility.

Hello ....(I was going to start) don't you guys realise that texting might be cool, but your killer app is still voice. Like, you know, that's where the majority of your money comes from?

But then Russell Beattie already wrote it, so go look there. I couldn't have put it better myself.

Clever chaps these Russell people, generally :-)

Russell

PS Didn't someone try an SMS only device in the UK about 3 years ago, that failed miserably?

World's First Mobile Ad

OB, the South Korean brewer is planning to run 2 minute ad designed to be broadcast on SK Telecom's mobile phones.

The most outstanding feature of the ad is that it was made only for mobile phone service while other ads have been edited version of TV ads. In addition, the beer ad will be 120 second-long compared with 10 seconds of other ads run on mobile phones. That is equivalent to 8 TV ads.

OB has promoted a variety of mobile marketing, targeting consumers in their 20s and 30s who account for 70% of beer consumption. Last year, the company attracted more than 1.1 million beer lovers to convenience stores by sending SMS messages about sampling of its new product.

As blogged on MInternet 360

It's interesting to see that they realise that the mobile as a different medium to (say) TV and must be treated as such. This is the shape of things to come.

Personalised Phones on Steroids

Moco News carries a story that Wildseed has found a carrier partner for its innovative range of SmartSkin mobile phones.

It's an interesting concept. Obviously, snap-on phone covers have been around for ever. But they just change the look of the phone. Well, I say "just" but this has been a hugely popular feature with the youth sector.

SmartSkin takes the snap-on the extra mile. Sure, it personalizes the phone with a range of cutting edge designs. But it also personalises the content on the phone with ringtones, games, music and video.

For instance, take Nelly - a popular light entertainer :-)

Nelly's errr...wicked skin also gives you some of his ringtones, a video clip, game and even SMS alerts from the man himself.

The secret's in the smart key micro processor embedded in each skin.

It's pretty cool, but it's going to be an uphill struggle to try to change the industry like this.

Mobile Traffic

A very ingenious use for mobile tracking is covered by Wavy.com.

A new program will use cell phones to help Maryland officials monitor traffic congestion.

A Virginia company, National Engineering Technology, has been awarded a two-year state contract for an experimental program in the Baltimore area. The firm will translate data from an undisclosed cell phone company into information about vehicle speeds and travel times.

All info is provided by the company anonymously to avoid privacy concerns.

I guess the same principle could be used by planners to look for elephant paths.

I want shiny shiny

Sony Ericsson�s new P910 smartphone

And the simply marvellous lego phone.

Both images from Engadget.

Sickest Technology Brand Name Ever?

TeenArriveAlive.com. Yes, seriously folks, that's what the marketing drongo's at this company have named this service, in a blatant attempt to scare parents into buying their product. Perhaps they could run a campaign delivering sarcophagus's to people's homes if they still don't get the message.

Anyway, the product is a YAKTS (Yet Another Kid Tracking System) operated by GPS according to The Ledger. But the angle here is that parents can see how fast they're cutie-pie son or daughter is driving at any given time.

This is supported by a bumper sticker inviting other drivers to call a toll-free number to report reckless or dangerous driving. (Honest, this is all true - no hint of an April Fool here).

Are teens welcoming this product with open arms? Well according to one:

Seventeen-year-old Miles Woronovich is with his mother. "I think my parents have every right to know where I am. I think it would help me drive more safely." Sounds like a fun guy to party with, right?

While these guys actually have the answer:

"There's a little thing called trust," said 17-year-old Jeana Nichols. "I don't like the idea of someone using a device that keeps tabs on me. I think it's retarded."

Pam Rossi, a Bradenton mother of two preteen boys, feels the same way.

"If our children are old enough to drive, they should have already earned our trust," she said.

In fairness, there is a laudable aim here - to make teens drive more safely. The number 1 cause of death in the US is allegedly car accidents.

Robert Berry, the founder, was previously behind an Atlanta-based company that distributed "How's my driving?" bumper stickers to companies including Arby's, Taco Bell, Atlas Van Lines and Georgia Pacific.

"We had hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road and proved that we could reduce accidents by up to 50 percent," he said.

But before we get too misty eyed by Mr Berry's campaign, check out the charges:

The bumper sticker notification service costs $9.99 per month. The GPS system costs $14.99 monthly, and the combined service is being offered for $19.99.

Yes, that's right. He'll charge you nearly $120 a year for displaying a bumper sticker. Yes, I know he has to run the phone lines, but this whole thing strikes me as unethical exploitation of the worst kind.

If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I don't like these tracking devices, mainly as it allows parents to delegate their responsibilities to technology and that the kids will always find a way to get round it.

I'll leave the final word to Alana Watenpuhl, a 19 year old from Bradenton who:

thinks kids will eventually figure out a way to beat the technology.

"They can always leave their cell phone somewhere and take off with friends. It's not like the chips are attached to their bodies.

What does she mean "eventually"? How about "instantly"?

If you're a parent, please talk to your kids about the dangers they face in today's world. Just because there's a technical solution doesn't always make it a better one.

And if you must choose a tracking device, please choose a company that has a little more respect for you.

I always feel sorry for Sun readers..

Britsh comedian, Jasper Carrott used to say "I always feel sorry for Sun readers, as they can't write in to complain". For an explanation of joke and some Sun trivia, for those not familiar with Rupert Murdoch's Sun, see bottom of this blog.

Well, The Sun is the latest media owner to jump on the Java apps bandwagon, with their own Java portal, according to New Media Age.

The publisher believes its brand is strong enough to compete head-on with mobile operator portals like Vodafone Live! and is looking to launch as soon as possible.

'We'll be in a position to launch fairly soon,' said Simon Ashley, commercial manager for News Group Digital. 'We're a strong brand, so we should be doing it ourselves rather than Vodafone Live!.'

The Sun is just the latest in a growing number of brands and media companies looking to mobile Java to offer a direct relationship with consumers, sidestepping the need to negotiate for a place on the operator portals.

This follows my early blog on similar portals from Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Big Brother.

To paraphrase my earlier blog: "If you can see a bandwagon, it's too late." So if you're thinking about your own Java app or portal, I'd recommend reading my previous post.

EXPLANATION of the Joke: The Sun is a mass market, tabloid newspaper, specialising in scurrilous stories, showbiz gossip and sensationalizing the news of the day. "Gotcha" was their headline on the sinking of the Argentine ship the General Belgrano in the Falklands War, with 1,000 men on board - very tasteful.

In fact, the editor responsible, the legendary Kelvin MacKenzie even laughed off Private Eye's spoof Sun headline, "KILL AN ARGIE AND WIN A METRO", joking: "Why didn't we think of that?"

Other headlines have included on the day of the 1992 election: "If Kinnock wins today, will the last one out of Britain please turn the lights out?" and "SORRY, DID WE SAY YOU WERE A POOF?" about any number of high profile people it regularly "outs" wrongly.

There's also the famous Page 3 girl, a partially nude (from the waist up) young lady on Page 3 every day.

Anyway, The Sun is (I'm ashamed to say) easily the most widely read newspaper in Britain, despite it's dire standards - even if it can be quite funny at times. But the average reader thinks it's the truth, which doesn't say a lot for their intelligence.

Hence Jasper Carrott's quip about not being able to write (in).

Little known fact; Mr Carrott is a major beneficiary of the 'Who wants to be a Millionaire' franchise, as a significant shareholder in Celador. With a stake worth �50 million, what does he care about pissing off a few Sun readers?

Personal Sun anecdote:

Headhunter "Would you be interested in a well paid job where you get called 'c**t' 5 times a day?"

Me: "No thanks, I don't want to work with The Sun."

Yes, it was indeed a job at The Sun.

Sun Joke (from the brilliant, Yes Prime Minister):

Jim Hacker (Prime Minister): "Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers:

- The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;

- The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;

- The Times is read by people who actually do run the country;

- The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;

- The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;

- The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;

- And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."

Sir Humphrey: "Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun ?"

Bernard Woolley: "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits."

Enough of this Sun stuff already!

Samsung Photo

Here's the first pic I've seen of Samsung's new mobile phone with 1.5 GB Hard Drive, courtesy of Gizmodo.

I think it's an historical event - a little like the first jet plane. Our children will find it hard to believe that once phones were without hard drives and massive amounts of storage. Even more difficult will be the concept that mobiles used to be the size of bricks and could only be used for voice calls.

Come to think of it...is that right?

Dell launching Mobile Phone

According to Gizmodo, Dell are planning to launch a mobile phone next year, though details are sketchy.

It's unknown if this device will actually be a more phone-like device, like say the Treo or any of the Windows Smartphone handsets, but it is reported to have a small keyboard in place of a numberpad, and come in both GSM and CDMA versions.

Strategically, they have to be there really. I'm convinced that the future's going to be about mobile replacing today's personal computers, so not to have healthy footprint in the market would be very foolish indeed.

First Mobile with Hard Drive

Tech Digest feature a new mobile from Samsung (the SPH-V5400, a clamshell type phone) with the first ever hard drive - all 1.5 GB of it.

While it doesn't sound too big (200 GB isn't uncommon for PC's these days) it does indicate the shape of things to come in terms of storage capacity on a mobile.

It comes with an integrated mega pixel camera, MP3 player and a TV out connection.

Another first is that the SPH-V5400 also features an FM transmitter to enable users to stream music from the phone to nearby FM radios. Sadly at the moment this type of feature is illegal to use in the UK thanks to the 1949 Wireless telegraphy act.

The main screen is a TFT screen - 240 pixel by 320 pixel - and the sub screen is an OLED - 128 pixel by 128 pixel.

We expect the first mobiles with hard disks to reach the UK by the middle of next year with Motorola along with the Japanese/Korean makers leading the way.

So, apart from looking cool, the rationale for the iPod is???

The iPhone looks ever more likely, as I predicted. Well, not just me, I'm sure.

Change This

I've been most remiss in failing to mention Seth Godin's new initiative - Change This. I'm a great admirer of Seth and most of what he does and I think Change This is a worthy and interesting initiative - visionary even, but what would you expect?

The idea is that Change This is series of Manifesto's written by a selection big names (eg Tom Peters, Seth himself, Scoble), not so big names and some with books to promote. The latter category is just as valid, incidentally, especially if they're sharing a goodly part of the book free. The common element is that they all have a strong point of view, which is worth a lot in these days of fudge and sitting on the fence.

Tom Peters' This I Believe is as brilliant as ever, especially if you haven't come across his work and are a senior employee of Mega-Gigantic Corp. I confess it was a little disappointing for me, as he hasn't really said very much that's new (for him).

But with so much of the world still not getting the message, it's still a great read.

There's too many manifestos to cover in depth. Check them out.

But one I really liked is How to be a Boor by Elly Markson.

When I first went skiing, I took lessons, which seemed a good way of avoiding inflicting pain and death to myself and others. A pair of skis or a snow board on the wrong feet are lethal weapons.

So I was frankly amazed that you didn't have to pass some simple exam before you were allowed a ski pass. Nothing heavy, just that you were basically competent.

I think the same applies to email - you need to understand the basic rules like NOT WRITING IN CAPS or passing virus warning hoaxes on to everyone in your address book. If you don't know or don't abide by these rules, your email licence should be removed and sharp objects inserted in painful places all over your body. Notice I'm not sitting on fences either :-)

So, Elly's manifesto should be required reading. Make your kids read it. Make those "Friends" who bombard you with bad jokes read it. And make those fools who send out virus warnings read it - no need for subtlety here, just send it to them.

And let's make this digital world a better place.

Well done Seth and team.

Fashion Victim

Via Engadget we have this rather err....silly? scary? contrived? conversation piece - I mean, fashion statement.

Inspired by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby�s Design Noir, the victims behind Fashion Victims wanted to create clothes and accessories that dealt with the interactions between all the electromagnetic radiation of our gadgets and the �real� world. Notice how cellphone conversations always seem to annoy everyone around the person talking? Your desire to gag that loud-talking-man on the bus is a perfect example.

The Fashion Victims people take it a step further, with bags and shirts that get a little more ink-stained with each exposure to cellphone radiation (be sure to check out the video - the page scrolls right, not down, if you're not cool enough to realise). Given how much people use their cellphones these days it�ll probably take about four seconds to get totally stained, so fortunately they can be turned off when they�ve had enough, though not until we get a visual reminder of our impending sterility.

Moving swiftly on...

Mobile Coke

Courtesy of The Raw Feed here a pic of the new Coke vending machine in Japan.

the Cmo2 supports I-Mode phones with FeliCa capability. To buy a coke, the thirsty user holds his expensive Japanese phone up to a special pad, and the transaction takes place in half a second. The machine also has an LCD screen for game playing. The first Cmo2 machines hit Japan in September.

No details as to the cost of a can of Coke purchased like this. If it was in the UK, the operators would find a way of taking at least 50% of the transaction value, meaning that the can would be about double elsewhere.

Maybe DoCoMo are more enlightened.

Digital Hitching

Alex at Future Now had a great idea and then found someone was doing it.

A few weeks ago, on my Red Herring blog, I wrote about an idea I'd had for doing real-time carpooling. .... The basic idea was that the same technologies that allow for smart mobs and flash mobs also would allow us to turn cars into a kind of ad hoc public transportation system.

It turns out that someone is trying to put such a system into place. It's called Ride Now!, and its purpose is to bring "Realtime carpools to San Francisco:"

Ride Now is a new, "instant match" car pool system.

Ride Now lets you use the Internet and automatic telephone systems ("press 1 if you want...") to take advantage of car pool parking spaces and car pool lane timesavings.

Neat idea. I think they're missing a trick by not including texting though.

We tend to forget (or we weren't born then!) that hitching was a very common way of getting around 15 or so years ago. It seemed to almost suddenly die out over night. I assume both drivers and passengers started getting nervous for no very good reason. In the same way as we don't let our kids out unaccompanied in big cities anymore. I guess a lot of it is down to scare-mongering in the media. Though there's also a Michael Moore conspiracy theory saying big business and big Government want people scared.

Anyway, if you ID check people, it's going to remove the security risk in most cases. So maybe we'll see a revival of good old hitching - albeit digital style.

Carnival of the Capitalists

Welcome to this week's Carnival of the Capitalists, which I have the privilege of hosting this week.

We have a few less entries than normal, but I haven't taken it too personally. Doubtless the holiday season has played its part. But what we lack in quantity, we have made up in quality - some great posts to read.

Firstly, Wayne Hurlbert explores the art of the blogger's follow up post.

Followup posts are ideal for political, legal, and sports blogs. Each of those blog categories is ideally suited to continuing column ideas. Most readers will be very intrigued as to how the initial case, policy, or game under discussion was resolved.

For personal bloggers, ongoing postings are part of the reason for the blog in the first place. The ongoing daily life of the blogger is a continuing saga in and of itself. Following up on some previous event in the blogger's life flows naturally in personal blogs.

Spot on Wayne. All you bloggers reading this, have a scroll through your archives and discover a wealth of follow up material. There's nothing quite so cathartic as writing "Shucks, I was wrong about ....." or so satisfying as "Hell, I told you so..."

Mike Pechar found out that the Danes have

banned 18 Kellogg products, including Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies and Special K. Holy moly! People have been eating these products for generations and, if there were any problem with them, one would expect to have already heard of specific health concerns. But, no! Out of the clear blue comes the prohibition by authorities in Denmark.

Apparently, the problem is that they put too many vitamins in. I thought vitamins were meant to be good for you. In fact, "They're grrrrr-eate", or was that something else?

The week wouldn't be complete without some commentary of the Google IPO - if you've been off-planet, Google (a search engine) went public this week, at an eye-watering, distinctly 1999-ish valuation.

Firstly, Martin Lindeskog gives a comprehensive round up of the whole shebang, with possibly more links than any blog I've ever seen before. He manages to cover everything from the Playboy angle to the fact that 1,000 of the company's 2,300 employees are now (paper) millionaires. I bet the 1,300 didn't enjoy the recent company picnic so much.

Meanwhile, Adam Shostack writes about an aspect of the deal that backfired, despite being designed

to democratize the process and let people buy in at just a few shares, but it was a miserable failure because the organizers didn't realize the securities regulations that require people who bid to have a certain net worth.

Still on the subject of search, OSCommerce Experts has been looking at Internal site searching, as opposed to the mega searching via the likes of Google. The legendary usability guru (an over used word, but applicable in his case) Jacob Nielsen has recently published research and recommendations on this area and it's a major cause of user dissatisfaction.

Read the blog and find out what you can do about it on your site.

Rob Sama of samaBlog has also been searching, but in book stores for the anti-Kerry book Unfit for Command. While Rob eventually tracked one down, it wasn't easy, as it seems to have been sold out in most book stores.

This all got me wondering how this happens. Regenery, the publisher of Unfit for Command, is not a small publisher anymore, and they can certainly publish enough copies of any book to meet demand. I wonder if what happens here is that bookstores intentionally order very few copies of conservative books, so few that they won't have enough to put them on display on the new arrivals tables. Publishers print based on stated demand from the bookstores, and so then when the 4 copies they'd ordered sell out, the book is gone from the store, at least until the publisher can print another run.

Can anyone shed any light on Rob's puzzlement?

Micha Ghertner's post at Catallarchy tackles the somewhat controversial subject of Political Child Abuse.

He cites 12 year old Ilana Wexler as an example of this, who

founded Kids for Kerry, skipped summer camp to work for the Kerry campaign full time, and turned her own birthday party into a Kerry fund raiser. Do these sound like the independently-chosen activities of a normal 12-year-old girl? Or are they signs of a child under the influence of her parents and teachers? Indeed, what must the intellectual and emotional condition of parents be like who would do this to their kids?

Micha discusses this whole area in a great blog, drawing surprising parallels from the world of economics.

Disease Management is the preoccupation over at Goobage. Apparently, it's the hot new sector in Health Care, relying on prevention, rather than more expensive subsequent treatment. But should the Government be meddling here anyway?

Everyone has their own appalling customer service anecdote these days and that's the subject of an insightful piece at Photon Courier. There's more to correcting poor customer service than throwing staff and/or technology at the problem, it seems.

Lead and Gold has started a series of blogs on the oft-misunderstood topic of Competitor Intelligence. Despite being supported by the likes of the legendary Peter Drucker

CI has a worse than mixed record inside of corporations. In 1999 the president of the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals noted that 90% of new corporate CI groups are shutdown or abandoned after three years.

The blog offers great intelligence as to why this might be the case.

Tim Wortsall offers two very short nuggets on his blog this week. Firstly, the idiocy of publishing a Welsh language guide to claiming asylum in the UK. Think about it. Or if your grasp of Geography is about as good a Microsoft's (who admitted this week that their lack of knowledge has lost them millions) read the blog.

And a nice little dig at The Guardian who seem to be muddling up cause and effect.

Well spotted Tim.

Arnold Kling at EconLog has been taking a look at who's best, the US or Europe. Actually, that simplifies his argument rather too much as it's a very thoughtful piece on productivity in the two continents. So what are the differences and how can they be accounted for? And what does Church attendance contribute to the equation?

Innovation is the theme at Drakeview this week - specifically, how you spot tomorrow's genuine winning ideas from the over-hyped or just plain bad ones. The article particularly focuses on disruptive innovations and why they're important.

My own contribution to disruption looks at why VC's often display herd-like behaviour, following the funding of a whole bunch of Java games developers. These are the guys who are writing games for the new generation of mobile phones (or Cellphones, as you call them in the US).

But why is it that otherwise rational VC's display this tendency to play "follow my leader"? It's actually very simple - it's a natural human behaviour which can best be described as "fear of loosing out".

What happens is that one VC decides to take a punt on an investment, for good, logical reasons, or plain stupid ones - it doesn't really matter. And then other VC's hear about it and assume that the original one MUST know what they're doing. So they MUST follow suit or lose out.

Actually, as I go on to explore, they don't have much choice really. Which is great if you currently own a Java games development company or whatever next month's investment focus turns out to be.

Great timing is a factor consistently overlooked in business success. Personally I'd much prefer a mediocre idea whose time is right, than a great idea executed by a brilliant team if the timing is a little off.

Anyway, to our our final post. This is called Carnival of the Capitalists, so it's only fitting to end with a staunch defense of Capitalism itself. Brian Gongol at Hall of Creative Destruction puts the naysayers, Marxists and anti-free marketers to rights.

Next week's CotC is at New Dog Old Trick so send your entries to the usual address: capitalists -at- elhide.com.

That's about it for this week. Thanks for reading - I hope you enjoyed my pick as much as I enjoyed picking them.

Russell

SPECIAL BONUS SECTION: The late, great Doulas Adams wrote "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." Well, quite a few of our would-be contributors seem to have the same view :-)

Despite this (CotC entries need to be in by Saturday night, chaps) my good nature has prevailed and I've included these late entries.

Cap'n Arbyte's blog features a topical post on Price Gouging. This is the illegal practice (in the US anyway) of charging premium prices for essential goods and services in the wake of a natural disaster, such as Hurricane Charley.

The Captain looks at the economic and political pro's and cons.

Meanwhile, Truck and Barter has been looking at the controversy over Public v's Private ownership in cars in Shanghai. The local government seem determined to limit private ownership, forcing residents to look for short cuts (pun intended).

The multi-talented Anita Campbell has not one, but two entries this week. It's against the rules, but hey, they're good posts.

For those of you who are more Capitalists than technologists, RFID is a very important development - another of those "it's going to change the world as we know it" ones. Radio Frequency Identity Devices are tiny little chips that are attached to products (or even people) that can subsequently be read by machines to give a whole bunch of data. Think bar codes on steroids and you have the basic idea.

Anita's first blog looks into McDonalds' use of RFID:

McDonald's customers can use the special MasterCard PayPass card to charge purchases to their MasterCard account. They simply will waive the MasterCard in front of a special credit card reader by VeriFone Inc.

It's a little like combing your hair in a hurricane, as it's not going to save the business, but I guess they have to keep trying.

Anita's second entry - actually written by Dave Patterson on Small Business Trends, explodes one of the myths in book retailing:

The New York Times bestseller list does not always mean increased sales. According to Alan Sorensen, an assistant professor of strategic management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, making the bestseller list had, "no discernible impact on sales," for established authors such as John Grisham.

The Managing Leadership blog, writes about errr...Managing Leadership. Actually, John Stoup, the blogger, wrote the book of the same name and the post is a discussion of Professor Adair's comments on it.

It seems that Inspiration isn't provided by leaders of organisations at all. Despite being counter-intuitive, the argument makes a lot of sense.

The venerable TJ of TJ's Weblog (Technology, Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship - you can't get much more Capitalist than that) has been having a rant at the appalling state of the Affiliate Programme market in Germany.

What is going on with affiliate program managing companies? There have been many start-ups in the last five years and there is strong level of competition that should keep the companies ready to have superior services in order to find an edge.

Perhaps he could try begging to see if any of them will take his money. You never know!

Scott Allen at The Social Networking Weblog has been taking time out from finishing his book on the subject to warn against "canned" messages from services such as Ecademy, Linked In and the current bete noire, Multiply.

If you're not willing to take the time to even personalize a message to a small group of people, like Christian did above, why would you expect me to just open up my calendar and contact list to you?

So, that's really it now for this week's Carnival on the Capitalists. If you want your post to be featured, you'll just have to wait until next week.

Thanks to all contributors and readers again.

Russell

Bluetooth Chat

Sometimes, I really wish I was a techie and able to create cool little apps, just because it's cool. Who am I kidding with the "sometimes" part?

Anyway, I had this idea ages and ages ago, so I can honestly say it's brilliantly in tune with the
zeitgeist :-)

btChat (spotted on Lockergnome) is a really cool little app that allows you to instant message other people within a 10 metre range by Bluetooth. Free.

So if you're in a meeting, or more likely, a lecture or class room, you can IM your little heart's content - I'll say it again - free.

I've been saying for about a year now that Local Free Messaging was going to be big. Both as a communication device, but also as a file sharing mechanism. This is based on observation, in as much as it's already happening. I've also noted the phenomenon of Courier File Swapping (see below).

But cute little apps like this are going to mean it's going to take off more widely.

It's not perfect as

You need BlueZ (the Linux bluetooth stack) running in order to use btChat!

which might put some off. But if it works, it'll be totally cool.

Courier File Swapping

From previous blog:

Say, A wants to send a file to B locally ie free. But A isn't going to see B soon enough. So A sends it to C who she knows is seeing B soon.

C couriers the file to B, despite having no interest in the file/content himself. And don't forget, all this takes place without paying the operator.

RFID Tags and Kids

Yesterday, I blogged here about Location Tracking children's phones, questioning their effectiveness

until we have RFID tags to track them properly.

Today, it seems that this has already started. Future Now reporting on an article in New Zealand's National Business Review writes:

The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.

The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids' movements.

The chips will be put onto kids' schoolbags, name tags or clothing.

While this might be useful for many things, it's not really going to help with the areas that worry parents. Sure, it'll help you do an automated register of who's in school that day. Or maybe track a child in a large campus in an emergency.

But an abductor can easily dump bags and clothing, the same as they can dump phones. And kids can just as easily lend their mates their RFID tagged gear to create RDIF alibis.

It's only going to be truly effective when you can implant in the child's body, in an undetectable and thus, un-removable, way - difficult, as they're radio transmitters!

Sometimes, even technologists have to recognise that technology may not always have all the solutions. My favourite analogy (that I've used before and make no apology for using again) is that in the 60's NASA spend millions developing a writing instrument that can work in zero gravity. The Russians used pencils!

Pencils in this context are about talking to your kids, developing a relationship of trust and being honest about the dangers the world poses.

Sadly, it's not going to save them if someone targets them for abduction, but neither is a trackable phone or school bag. But it will avoid that false sense of security that can be created by using these tracking devices.

There was once a woman who was paranoid about her child getting his fingers slammed in the door. So she took all the internal doors off her house.

The first time the kid went next door to play, he slammed his fingers in the door.

Bluetooth screen

Spotted on Blueserker quoting the Sony Ericsson Forum Esato (which does break news stories, including Bluejacking):

France Telecom has developed a flexible color screen that can be sewn into clothing and connect with a cellphone via Bluetooth. The cellphone acts a a remote control for the screens, allowing new designs, text or animated images to be drawn. The removable screen is 10cm by 7cm and the rechargeable battery lasts for