…oh and the other reason you need to buy a Nokia N95 8GB….
Unbelievable! Running Quake on a mobile phone! 🙂
http://www.intomobile.com/2007/10/29/video-quake-running-on-nokia-n95-8gb.html
 Posted by Shane Williamson
Great review of the new Nokia N95 8GB
All About Symbian has posted an in-depth review of the new Nokia N95 8GB that is about to hit the markets worldwide.
The review clearly shows that this is not just an update to the memory on the device as the name suggests, but a fairly impressive upgrade to other components such as the new brighter and larger screen.
Posted By Shane Williamson
2Clix stupidity in legal action against Whirlpool Forums reveals bigger problems with their products
2Clix became the latest Blog victim when their idiotic attempt at legal action against the founder of the Australian Whirlpool forums, Mr Simon Wright, when the legal action against a negative post on the Whirlpool Forum site revealed a lot of very unhappy customers with the 2Clix product.
Whirlpool is an online community that was originally setup to help online users by creating an Australian broadband community site where users can share their experiences, good and bad, with other members. Whirlpool has since grown into one, if not the, largest online community site for all things online related. It is a great example of a long lived volunteer online community that has gone from strength to strength.
2Clix will now be remembered for their thoughtless act of stupidity and will no doubt be used as an example time and time again to others that the old Cluetrain adage of "Markets are conversations" is a live and well.
Googling "2Clix" today shows the 5th from top listing titled "2Clix or Not 2Clix?"…..
The overwhelming support Whirlpool got from it’s forum members and the power of the Blogging community swinging into action has finally made 2Clix back down http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=834421
Never cross swords with an online community……… especially one that bites back.
Join Whirlpool! http://forums.whirlpool.net.au 🙂
Posted By Shane Williamson
Halo 3 rules them all.
Who’d have thought a video game and a console one at that, would be the largest entertainment launch of all time. That’s bigger than any previous book, movie, music CD or DVD ever launched before. The Xbox 360 title beat previous U.S. sales records set by blockbuster openings for entertainment events such as the release of “Spider-Man 3” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
Halo 3 has garnered more than US$300 Million in sales in it’s first week worldwide.
Some other tid-bits from the PR…
- It’s the largest pre sold video game with over 1.7 Million copies ordered in the US alone
- More than 2.7 Million gamers have played Halo 3 online in the first week (this increased to over 40 Million in the first day after the opening week)
- Within the first day of its launch, “Halo 3” players worldwide racked up more than 3.6 million hours of online gameplay
Microsoft Press release is here…
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/oct07/10-04Halo3FirstWeekPR.mspx
I guess being a Bungie employee right now would be an incredible experience. Well done guys.
Posted By Shane Williamson
Nokia beats Google to Navteq
How much value would you put on mobile based Location Based Services (LBS)?
Around US$8.1Billion according to Nokia.
Nokia announced this week that they have acquired Navteq who are an in-car & mobile navigation map company based in the US. Whilst you may not remember the name, if you live in the US and have a built in navigation system in your car, it’s more than likely it will be a Navteq system.
This is an interesting play by Nokia as it adds more fuel to the fire that Nokia is leaving the carrier based services behind and they are becoming a direct mobile service provider to their customers. This enables Nokia’s customers to use high end services such as LBS without having to sign up or be locked into a carrier.
With the rise of open operating systems & high capacity hardware in mobiles the future for developers is looking to be an open playing field.
Posted by Shane Williamson
Learning new languages the Web 2.0 way
I’ve always regretted not putting more effort into my German classes at school to learn the language better. I noticed on Micro Persuasion this morning that Steve Rubel has a link to a Web 2.0 language learning site called Mango and it is free no less too.
Mango have created a great interactive multimedia Flash interface that is a wonderful self paced learning system. The audibles are of high quality and whilst the actual German vocabulary is limited it would be good for someone who is about to travel to the country and wants some basic understanding of pronunciation and simple sentence structure
Mango has the following lessons for English speakers,
- German
- Spanish
- Pig Latin
- Russian
- Italian
- Greek
- French
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Japanese
- Mandarin Chinese
Posted by Shane Williamson
A year of Mobile Monday Sydney!
Last Monday was a huge milestone for Tim Parsons, Oliver Weidlich & myself as the co-founders of Mobile Monday Sydney. We had a huge night with over 150 people who came along for the nineMSN sponsored evening. We originally started Mobile Monday Sydney for the Sydney mobile industry to have a dedicated event designed for networking, learning, educating and socialising. We never dreamed that we’d be averaging over 100 people attending per evening and still running this strongly so far down the track.
Our 1 year anniversary last Monday night was celebrated by sharing a Mobile Monday Sydney branded cake with the crowd to celebrate the momentous occasion.
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Our MoMo branded cake!
So a big thanks to Tim & Oliver for their part in making this an amazing industry event that has come a very long way in the year we have been running it. Not to mention our loyal attendees who help by spreading the word and coming along to make the evenings the successes they are.
Myself, Oliver & Tim.
Other Photos of the evening are up on our MoMoSyd Flickr site.
Posted by Shane Williamson
Australian Tivo service doomed.
Whilst the article in The Australian IT states Tivo will fail in Australia for reasons such as it being too difficult to sell and being too costly, the real reason for it’s demise will be that it is anchored to one of Australia’s free to air broadcasters, Channel Seven. Being aligned to a free to air broadcaster will drive their competitors away from the service.
TiVo is a very successful digital video recorder service in the US and many companies around the world refer to it with envious jealousy at it’s household acceptance within the US as the system of choice to digitally record and watch TV content. The independence of the service ensures non biased access to content.
If the service is released in Australia by an incumbent broadcaster, it will be bereft of issues such as fully populated electronic programme guides and even issues around access to high definition digital content from competitors.
Anyone who has access to a Foxtel IQ system will be more than aware of how these issues affect use of the service by how both Channel Seven & Channel 10 continue to stuff up their viewers by not allowing their EPGs to be viewed through the IQ service.
Posted by Shane Williamson
Universal Convergence 