Kartik Iyer, President - Initiative, a part of Lintas Media Group, believe that online and mobile phones will be important communication vehicles.

4:30:49 AM    comment   

The telecom industry consultants at Olista have found that 64% of mobile phone users give up on sexy services like picture messaging, web browsing, and ringtone downloads almost immediately after experiencing any form of difficulty.

While obviously these boys are trying to sell something, namely their "innovative solutions that enable mobile operators to differentiate themselves by delivering a better user experience and proactive customer care," the fact that this commissioned study came back with some interesting and comparatively significant information is important.

Services like picture messaging and mobile web, especially when they are not self-apparent, are almost impossible to sell to Americans. I suspect, and this is me suspecting, it's because we have too many distractions and we don't really expect our phones to be cool so we don't expect much from them. If I can't send my mom a picture message because she uses Verizon and I use T-Mobile, then screw it... nobody's getting a picture message. That little bump ruined the experience for me. I mean imagine if I tried to send an email and an error appeared 8 out of 10 times I pressed send, I sure as hell wouldn't bother with that email.

There are obviously exceptions to that rule, but not many. An anecdote—I was just over in Germany and was meeting with a bunch of guys who all had Blackberries. On the ground the US, the Blackberry was their lifeline. It, like OS X and porn, just worked. No setup issues, no concerns: they just pulled it out of their pockets and WOW! EMAIL!

So imagine their horror when because of a T-Mobile fuck-up they couldn't get their email. It took fifteen overseas calls to get things right. There is a fine line between clever and stupid, and all it takes is one bump in the road to make a beloved cellphone carrier your enemy.

So carriers (YEAH?) Carriers! (YEAH?) Do your customers not use your mobile services? (HELL YEAH!) It's because they don't work right right away. If I have to enter all my crazy addresses and GPRS crap into my Nokia, I don't want to even think about. Send us periodic updates, via SMS. Give us an immediate free trial and keep giving us a free trial every few months, just to remind us what's up, kind of like HBO used to do—one free week of Hard Bodies 2 over and over again probably turned a lot of people on to premium cable. Send us a little booklet that says "Hey, this December, send 50 free picture messages. Here's how. We'll tell you when you're over your limit and how to buy more access. If your phone doesn't appear in this book, visit YOURPHONEISCOOL.COM."

Consider my own experience, for example. I rarely use mobile services like web browsing or picture messaging. In fact, I NEVER use them. I can name maybe three times when I tried picture messaging or browsing and I've consistently been let down. And I'm the prime candidate for it. I need 24/7 web access, but I'm not going to use my cellie for it. I just know that I will have a better experience with a 12-inch Powerbook than I ever will having to navigate T-Zones and VCasts and WAP settings. It just never became compelling for me—and I'm a guy who gets a new phone every few months and has played with everything from the brick Nokia to a PEBL. It's just never been compelling and, after hearing all sorts of bad things about EVDO et al, nothing has compelled me to rethink my attitude.

I'd like to hear comments from people who like and don't like mobile data services.

Most people give up on mobile data [TheInquirer]

4:30:31 AM    comment   

One reason why Rupert Murdoch is who he is, is because he has been blessed with this ability to cut through the crap, and get straight to the point. In an article in Wall Street Journal (sub required), he talks about his interest in AOL, and why others are jostling to get a piece of the action.

“Microsoft, who’d clearly like to damage Google, would like to get that search switched to Microsoft search, which has very little critical mass. Google heard about it and thought they better defend their turf, and now other people are sniffing around it, Comcast, Yahoo and so on … Google is as much an advertising machine as a technology company, and they’re very brilliant.”

So there it is folks - Google’s game plan. No need for coherence as long as you can attach advertising to it. Or as I like to say, a company that makes profits one page-view at a time.

4:29:55 AM    comment   

Amazon.com has out-googled Google with its creepily brilliant Mechanical Turk service, a means of embedding human beings in software code. If you're writing a program that requires a task that people can do better than computers (identifying buildings in a photograph, say), you can write a few lines of code to tap into the required human intelligence through Mechanical Turk. The request automatically gets posted on the Turk site, and people carry out the Human Intelligence Task, or HIT, for a fee set by the programmer, with Amazon taking a commission.

As Amazon explains, this turns the usual computer-human interface on its, uh, head:

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

I have no clue how useful Mechanical Turk will prove immediately, but Philipp Lenssen (who foresaw the service in a remarkable post earlier this year) thinks the "potential is immense." Certainly, the implications are mind-bending. In an essay I discussed last week, George Dyson described how the Internet provides a platform, or operating system, that enables computers to harness and learn from the work of people: "Operating systems make it easier for human beings to operate computers. They also make it easier for computers to operate human beings." Google uses this capacity implicitly by basing its search engine on human actions and decisions - as we make our daily strolls through the Web, Google gets smarter. Amazon's Mechanical Turk uses the capacity explicitly, turning people into a "human layer" in software.

But let's not get too comfortable in our new role. No one, after all, is indispensable.

4:20:42 AM    comment