Samstag, 11. Dezember 2004

Google Suggest:The Movie (No mobile version yet). Google just rolled out Google Suggest, which basically helps you find what you[base ']re searching for by suggesting words based on popularity. Over on Davenetics.com there was a list of A-Z, so we thought it would fun to go through the alphabet and record it so you can see the words suggested as of December 10th, 2004. We tried to use Google suggest on our Windows Mobile Smartphone (Orange[base ']s SPV C500) but it didn[base ']t work (image here). Not that we expected it to, but if it did, that would have been a great app for mobile searching. Click here to view (WindowsMedia). [Engadget] 8:46:47 PM    comment []

Daniels Wood Land Tree Houses. A far cry above your average tree house, Daniels Wood Land Tree Houses are best known for their appearance in an episode of last season[base ']s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC. Each tree house comes with the playhouse and a log. The playhouse is made from cedar or pine and the log is a part of a real tree which is hollowed out using a chainsaw. Kids can enter the treehouse through a doorway in the log and climb up a ladder to the trap door. A standard tree house (Daniels takes custom design orders also) stands 14 feet tall and can be customized with several options. [Luxist] 8:45:34 PM    comment []

Next Gen Mobile Billing Explained. Billing platforms are the engines that power the ship of mobile commerce. One of the leaders in this sector is Qpass. I interviewed Kenneth Parkinson, Director of Business Development for Qpass EMEA to get the low down on their product and his thoughts on the direction of the mobile industry. In a nutshell, please can you tell my readers what your company does? Qpass provides mobile commerce software to mobile operators including Cingular, Nextel, Alltel, Boost Mobile and Dobson. These customers utilise Qpass[base '] Prosperity Series software as an overlay to existing business systems to efficiently manage mobile commerce payment and settlement, content partner relationships, service bundle creation and customer care in mobile or Wi-Fi networks. With more than 75 million subscribers using our platform today, we are able to deliver $25M of revenue for our mobile operator customers in a single month. And why that[base ']s important? It is estimated that the m-commerce market will be worth o32 billion by 2009 (source: Juniper Research). Prosperity Series is the only comprehensive services management platform on the market in Europe today, enabling MNOs to efficiently manage mobile content and services to take advantage of the great business opportunity offered by mobile commerce. Do you think MNO[base ']s lack of adequate billing systems is holding the content industry back and if so, do you have any evidence to support that? We conducted a survey in September 2004 of mobile content providers who operate in Europe. The survey revealed that inadequate business systems are holding back the development of mobile commerce amongst mobile phone users in Europe. The study found that 85 per cent of mobile content providers believe that European MNOs are constrained by poor or inadequate systems for mobile commerce. Additionally, 70 per cent of mobile content providers reported that they deemed this situation unacceptable and reported that European MNOs have inadequate business systems compared to MNOs in other geographical regions. Mobile commerce content providers jointly ranked time-to-market for new content and the inability to link seamlessly into MNO billing systems as the key issues holding back consumer adoption of m-commerce and future revenue growth. An inability to support a flexible pricing model and a lack of real-time sales analysis data from MNOs were jointly ranked as the second issue holding back consumer adoption and revenue growth. Where do you see the big growth areas being for mobile content? Any services which will drive revenue from outside of the current focus areas of ringtones and logos. Thus the trends that we are seeing in the US where we are able to analyze data for more than 50% of the addressable subscriber base, show us that today the fastest grow area is in games. We do however believe that as the mobile phone moves to also become the mobile music device; music will be another growth area driven by the same youth sector. In addition we have been approached by a number of operators who are interested in developing a number of enterprise specific applications in the future. Why do you think it is that MNO[base ']s have been slow to adopt next generation billing? Surely, it[base ']s their lifeblood [^] like a supermarket not installing tills? There are several reasons for this, the main one being that MNOs were able to piece together systems to manage functions such as pSMS efficiently for several years. Now that GPRS handsets are widely available, as well as 3G networks, the opportunities for consumers to download mobile content and utilise their phones as payment mechanisms are greater than ever before. However there is an obvious reluctance for the MNOs to upgrade billing systems since this type of project can typically take between 5 to 10 years to complete and the cost is similarly high. That is the advantage of the Qpass Prosperity Series software solution in that it acts as an overlay to existing Billing and OSS systems. Thus even if a MNO has 19 different billing systems (as one of our customers did have!) the interface for content providers and other parties is common at the Qpass solution layer. One reason why P2P music file sharing exploded was that the record industry refused to consider a legitimate sales channel via the web. Do you see any parallels with mobile content? In other words, if MNO[base ']s don[base ']t provide what people want, will they get it underground? There is a great similarity between these two [base "]channels[per thou], since they are both driven by the market group in the main. Operators are going to need to be careful not to disintermediate themselves from the value chain and simply become a [base "]pipe[per thou] allowing delivery of digital goods. This in some way has been already seen in Europe through the introduction of Premium SMS, where the user has greater freedom to choose from where he would like to buy his goods. This will move from a national solution to an international solution with the introduction of Simpay next year. Make three predictions for the next for the mobile industry for the next 3 years. a) Data services revenue for mobile operators will far outstrip the revenues associated with traditional voice calls. b) Vodafone will make a more recognisable footprint in the US. c) I will still not be able to maintain a 3G connection while using my data-card in my PC on the Eurostar train journey from London to Paris! Who do you most admire in the mobile industry? I admire the many mobile content providers in the industry that are producing wonderfully creative games, ringtones and other downloads. They often operate on the frontiers of the industry and are helping to drive it forward. Who[base ']s the most influential person in mobile today? There is no, one single person I could identify as the most influential although any of the current CEO[base ']s of the top six European operators would be good candidates. I will be keeping my eye on Stelios as he launches his new MVNO and be interested to see if he can succeed in the mobile space. Will Apple launch an iPhone? If they do, I think it will probably be the best looking and most usable mobile phone on the market (and will definitely be on my Christmas list!). [The Mobile Technology Weblog] 6:34:08 PM    comment []

Salad bar hacking. Mark Frauenfelder: This is the best thing I've seen in a long while. Robyn Miller sez: "This is a photo from a Chinese PDF manual. The manual explains, via text and a lot of fun photos, how to cram as much food as possible on one of those tiny Pizza Hut bowls at the salad bar. They're only allowed one trip. My cousin lives in Beijing. When he goes to Pizza Hut, he says this is what most people are busy building." (Click image for enlargement) [Eyebeam reBlog] 10:38:35 AM    comment []

Design the Door of the Future. designboom and COCIF international design competition "'a door to paradise' we are looking for a timeless HOME INTERIOR door design, which takes into account formal and technological innovation, its ease of use, originality and practicality for manufacturing. a broad variety of materials might be used: wood, metal, glass, plastics,..." [Eyebeam reBlog] 10:37:26 AM    comment []

P2P television?. Guido Ciburski, a television software engineer, wants to launch Cybersky, a Web service that aims to do for TV what already applies to music and video, which can be downloaded free from the internet. At the end of January, his company, TC Unterhaltungselektronic, will unveil its Cybersky TV web service which will enable broadband users to distribute video programmes free, and exchange them with others. Viewers will need a television connected to a computer set up to upload a chosen television programme on to the internet, where other viewers will be able to download and broadcast it on their own sets almost instantaneously. As soon as one subscriber uploads a programme on site, it becomes immediately available to other participants. So, the more subscribers, the greater the choice of programmes. The concept has alarmed Germany's established TV companies, and is likely to concern other broadcasters around the world. Cybersky's response to charges that it will be illegally broadcasting copyrighted programmes without permission is that its peer-to-peer system does not technically amount to distribution. His company is used to going to court to defend its innovations. Six years ago, they developed a device called the TeleFairy which enabled viewers to skip TV advertising. Germany's broadcasters sued but a five-year legal battle ended in victory for the inventors last summer. Via The Independent. [we make money not art] 10:35:42 AM    comment []

"Instant City", the music building game automat. "Instant city" is an installation, developed by Sibylle Hauert and Daniel Reichmuth and Volker Böhm, that allows players at a table to create architecture using semi-transparent building blocks and in the process make different modular compositions audible. A spot light hangs over the table and under the glass game board are light sensors. Each arrangement of the building blocks establishes a filter dimming down the intensity of the spotlight. The resulting variations are registered by the sensor field under the glass plate. Each of these gray scale values corresponds to a particular parameter of the selected "instant city" composition. However, what is heard depends upon where the building blocks are placed, how high they are, how many are on the table, and the sequence in which they are used. So far, eight musicians have produced special compositions which serve as the basic music building kits of instant city. Since the game doesn't have an aim or goal which one can follow, every action becomes a demonstration of the playing personality. With every block that the player plays, he betrays something about himself: some feel overwhelmed by the limitless possibilities; mathematically oriented players will try to proceed strategically while esthetes might want to build elegant constructions, etc. And as more players gather around the table, it becomes something like a social game: leaders might want to build up high, saboteur want to disrupt or destroy, etc. First spotted in the fabulous aminima. [we make money not art] 10:33:49 AM    comment []

i hear him talking during the comercials, alone, arguing.. [Eyebeam reBlog] 2:25:30 AM    comment []

Are cell phones new media?. re-narrating cities via nomadic technologies "Multiuser environments in cyberspace have frequently been regarded as utopian spaces in which users could project their imagination. When communities are shaped in a hybrid space, mobile phones become new media tools for creating novel and unpredictable imaginary spaces, re-narrating cities. Fixed Internet users do not have the ability to move through physical space. But the emergence of nomadic interfaces represents a chance for such imaginary spaces to be enacted and constructed in physical space. Nomadic technologies have a twofold role in the construction of playful/narrative spaces. First, they allow virtual spaces to be mobile, bringing them into the physical world. Second, when used to play games, they free the game from the game board or the computer screen, making it possible to use the city space as the game domain." from Are cell phones new media? by Adriana de Souza e Silva [Related] [Eyebeam reBlog] 1:19:14 AM    comment []

Location Based Gaming. While location-based services have been written off by many, rumours of its death are greatly exaggerated, in my opinion. What tends to happen with any new technology is that the vendors hype it up and cite all kinds of ways we might use it. Unfortunately and somewhat inevitably, they get these ways very wrong. So everyone slags it off, looses interest and looks for the next big, sure fire winner. In the meantime, a few developers find the technology lying unloved and abandoned, play around with it, talk to some real users and come up with a couple of ideas that will work. Slowly, more and more users take it up until suddenly, as if by magic, we have a mainstream success that everyone's using. Take WAP which has gone from "WAP is crap" to "russell me hair and call me Frankie, did you know that WAP in the UK has over 1 billion page impressions a month and is growing 20% year on year?" in just under 4 years. We're at the stage with Location Based Services now of developers quietly working on cool stuff, while operators have essentially lost interest. If you like, we're changing from vendor push to user pull and that's an exciting time. Big caveat here: it's only exciting if the operators install the technology to enable these new services. Location based gaming is one area about to explode. We had Swordfish a few months ago. And now we have Raygun, as featured on the wonderful We Make Money Not Art. A cell phone loaded with RayGun software emits [base "]spectral[per thou] energy that lets you attract and track ghosts. Unfortunately, the energy also annoys the ghosts, so you[base ']d better [base "]ionize[per thou] them before they get to you. The twist: RayGun is a GPS game, and to play it you have to move through the real world[~]that is, running around using your real feet. To aim the raygun at a ghost, you move toward it. Moving quickly increases the raygun[base ']s range. You can adjust your beam to long and narrow (good for zapping ghosts while they[base ']re still far away) or short and wide (good for zapping them when they[base ']re closing in on you). The longer you play, the more ghosts you attract, and the faster you have to move to stay ahead. LBS gaming is going to be very big, take it from me. [The Mobile Technology Weblog] 1:17:24 AM    comment []