User Producers in action
August 9, 2005
Discovery Networks Asia & Nokia have a competition running at the moment called "Mobile First Time Filmmakers 2005" that gets users to get arty and do some mobile filmmaking.
The contest, is open to individuals aged 18 and above who are residing in the following countries: Singapore, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand.
The goal of the competition is to "Capture an icon that best defines the values or hopes of your community"
Submissions should be in the form of:
- a maximum of five (5) pictures (in JPEG or JPG format only, of a maximum file size of 100K each); or
- a maximum of one (1) video clip (in 3PG, WMV, MOV, MPEG or AVI format only, of a maximum of thirty (30) seconds in duration).
Entries close Sunday, 4 September 2005, 23:59 hrs (Singapore time).
Fifteen applicants will be short-listed to go to Singapore and learn mobile filmmaking techniques using the new Nokia N90 and use this device to submit their final entries. The winner will be bouncing off the walls with a $10,000 first prize.
Watching shuttle Discovery return….
August 8, 2005
Currently watching the awaited return of the space shuttle Discovery via Nasa’s TV live web coverage.
They have aborted their first pass to land due to low clouds.
Now awaiting their 2nd pass…… God speed guys.
UPDATE: – no go! Have to wait 24 hours. Amazing stuff this Internet thing, check out the comments and you’ll see Brendon Loy is (and will continue) to live Blog the event!
Say hello to User Producers
August 3, 2005
If content is King, then this stuff is the Emperor. As far as I’m concerned, user created content will be the largest consumed globally as we head deeper into the 2Ks.
Imagine this on your mobile & it being the production studio…… <let us meditate on this a second or 2 to let it sink in>
Sites like current.tv are fantastic breeding grounds for the Emperor’s new clothes.
From their website….
We follow the global pulse via Google Current, a real-time view of what the world’s searching for, presented every half-hour around the clock.
We slice the rest of the schedule into short pods — each just a few minutes long — that range far and wide, from international dispatches to profiles of cool people to intelligence on new trends. This is not a traditional TV network; watching Current, you’ll see more, on more topics, from more points of view.
And much of it comes straight from you.
We call it viewer-created content, or VC2, and it’s created in the Current Studio, an online extension of our real studios in San Francisco and LA. Anybody can join in to produce VC2 (and get paid for it) or watch and vote for what goes on TV.
See those four squares in our logo? We call it the cursor, and like an old-school command prompt, it means we’re awaiting input.
Presentation at Australian IDC conference
August 3, 2005
I gave a presentation called "3, the Business of 3G" at IDC’s Asia/Pacific Enterprise Mobility Conference 2005 yesterday of which around 250 corporate & industry decision makers attended. IDC Australia always put on a good event and there was a good turn out of speakers from various facets of the industry.
Great presentation from Paul Osmond, Director of Asia Pacific of RIM (Blackberry).
These guys just go from strength to strength.
- E-mail usage driving wireless device usage
- Main benefits are personal Productivity, Workflow, Immediacy
- Introduced their Mobile Data Service (MDS)
- with 250 ISVs
- 70 SIs
- Key utilities
- OTA device lock or kill & wipe if device stolen
- Extending their device roadmap to other manufacturers
- Motorola – Sony Ericsson – Samsung – HTC – Siemens – Nokia
- Operating system support – Palmsource – Windows Mobile – Symbian
- Focus on Blackberry as a suite of services & applications. Not just e-mail.
Other presentations of note were:
IDC – Warren Chaisatien
- "WLAN is the wireless guinea pig for coporates"
- Wireless is enabling IP convergence for coporations
- CRM is a leading "2nd wave" mobile application
- Major drivers to wireless are (in order of importance)
- Staff efficiency
- Business productivity
- Access to data
- Customer Service
- Main barriers to take up
- Security
- Lack of Standards
- ROI
Nokia – Bob Brace, Vice President of Mobile Solutions
- 3 major market disruptions
- Application mobilisation
- Data & Voice convergence
- Fixed & Mobile Convergence (as opposed to Fixed to Mobile)
- Domain convergence
- Home
- Relax
- Work Mobile
- Work Fixed
- New device trends
- Larger memory – 4GB
- Device as a USB memory stick
I focused on the following in my presentation:
- What is 3G – overview of what can be done with 3G. With focus on aspects like
- always on data
- simultaneous voice & data
- Mobile Broadband data speeds
- secure
- ip network
- Speed is the "killer app"
- What are people doing with 3G
- Many presenters focused on 3G in their presentations as still coming. I demonstrated what companies re doing now with our partner’s products (once the slides are put up on the IDC site you will be able to see the actual partners I discussed)
- Where is 3G going
- Faster data speeds with HSDPA (3.5G)
- IMS type services
- Trends in the mobile market
- Device open operating systems become mainstream (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux)
- 3G & WiFi roaming (NTT DoCoMo – Japan)
- Mobile TV – Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld (DVB-H)
- Citizen Journalism/publishing – video blogging (Scoopt.com)
- Mobile search (www.google.com/xhtml)
- Digital Identity Systems (electronic ID & wallets – “Google me”)
- Digital Social Networks (communities of relevance)
The ugly side of DRM – MediaMax
August 1, 2005
I recently purchased Royksopp’s new album, "The Understanding" and when you put the CD into a PC it autoplays an install for some DRM software called Mediamax. The software does not say what it is on the splash screen, but it is obviously there to stop the CD being copied.
If you disagree to the EULA question it ejects the CD from the PC. This is very badly developed to force an install on a user without explaining what the hell it is doing to the PC.
If you try and play the CD anyway on the PC, all you get is crappy sound like a badly scratched CD (the CD plays fine in non-pc CD players)
I was about to take the CD back to the store to demand my money back when I found this little gem….
AH HA! You can disable Mediamax by turning off Autoplay in Windows and it prevents the DRM driver component from auto-loading. So, once I did that, I could easily add the songs to my digital library, like I do all my CDs.
The major issue with this type of DRM is it is just plain annoying and secondly useless, as it is way to easily circumvented.
Another interesting thing I noticed is that the Phillips CD logo is missing from the CD packaging. So, guess what fails the CD standard……
…. oh and Royksopp rocks!
The Japanese way of mobility – Understanding the Keitai
August 1, 2005
I’ve always tauted that the Japenese use of mobile phones & associated services is very unique compared to other geographies. It’s so unique, in fact, that Professor Kohiyama has written a book called Keitai (Japenese for mobile phone) on the Japanese addiction to mobility.
From August 1st molife newsletter
3G & WiFi roaming
July 29, 2005
Looks like Telstra & Optus have some innovative people with the vision to see that customers want easy, seemless access to the relevant Broadband technology to their situation.
3GPortal had this link to a BWCS article on how the two carriers will create 3G & WiFi roaming capability.
This means that a notebook user can have the 1 account with 2 types of data connection. One type for when they are moving about and the other for when the are stationary in a WiFi hotspot.
NTT DoCoMo in Japan has already launched this service with a converged device called the Motorola M1000.
39 years and counting…
July 26, 2005
Reached a milestone today of 39 years
and I haven’t looked back once. 🙂
and I haven’t looked back once. 🙂
Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes!
Tile interface concept from Sony
July 25, 2005
User interface technologies are fascinating stuff. You could write a whole Blog about it I guess.
Tim Parsons of Profero sent me a link to this Sony Tile interface concept video today….. (~29Mb) and quite frankly, it’s bloody impressive.
Skype video calls to 3G mobiles?
July 25, 2005
I really hope 3G telcos around the globe understand Skype’s Niklas Zennstrom vision of video calls between Skype users and 3G devices. I’m still waiting for voice Skype services on my phone!
On another note, I remember not that long ago when Skype was a small humble VoIP company, not the US$6 to US$10 Billion sized behemoth it is today! 
Universal Convergence 