Donnerstag, 16. Dezember 2004

You Can't Speak and Surf at the Same Time!. There's an interesting interview on The Feature with Nokia's games guru Greg Costikyan. It's slightly downbeat, which is a little odd when you consider mobile gaming is about to explode. If you believe analysts, of course and when they agree with me, I do :-) But there's one thing that I'd never thought about before, although if you asked me outright I'd have known the answer: Given the difficulty of inputting text on a mobile device, being able to use voice makes absolute sense, and after all, these are voice devices, right? However, given the way data technology has been implemented on mobile phones, it is essentially impossible to make both a conventional voice and a data connection simultaneously, which I find astonishing, because this strikes me as key for a whole slew of mobile applications and not just games. For example if I'm looking up restaurant listings on my phone, I want to be able to chat with my sweetie at the same time about where we're going to go to dinner. However, unless you are going to put in two sets of circuitry and make two simultaneous connections, there's really no way to do it other than by doing it all as data and packetizing the voice and doing voice over IP at the same time. However, with current networks [Pathway to Glory], the bandwidth is kind of not there. The reason the N-Gage title works is it's a World War II title and it's a single duplex, somewhat fuzzy voice, which makes perfect sense in the context of the game because it sounds a lot like military radio. Doesn't this make the operators' worst possible nightmare - Skype or another Voice over IP system - inevitable? Then operators loose the majority of their revenue, as juicy and profitable voice calls still make up the bulk of their business. Sure, they'll still have data revenues derived from using the phone to make data calls, including VoIP. But that would surely drive the market further into commoditisation and the inevitable price war that accompanies this type of market. [The Mobile Technology Weblog] 4:03:17 PM    comment []

$26,500 for a Virtual Island?!. A Project Entropia player, known as [OE]Deathifier[base '], recently purchased the first-ever virtual island for $26,500 in an online auction. Wow. Sure, the game features a real cash economy, meaning that Deathifier could conceivably turn this treasure into a budding profit, but[sigma] c[base ']mon, this brings new meaning to a place called, Neverland! For more on the virtual entrepreneur[base ']s plans, click here. [Joystiq] 3:56:13 PM    comment []

Mobiado Professional. The last thing "crafted on a CNC machine" I had next to my face was a pair of hand-made brass knuckles outside of my 10th grade "bowling education" class. The Mobiado Professional looks a lot less stitchy, although it still has plenty of hard edges in its aircraft aluminum body to be used as a weapon should duty call. These couture phones come unlocked and ready to work on almost any worldwide GSM network and run an OS based on Nokia's Series 40 platform, meaning all the requisite minimums, like VGA camera and Bluetooth and MP3 playback are all here. Unfortunately the horse/griffin on the back appears to be standard-issue[~]you'd think for $1,200 you could go horseless. Mobiado, I hope you come to your senses. Product Home Page [Mobiado via SlashPhone] [Gizmodo] 3:31:37 PM    comment []

The Age of the Pro:Am. It seems that we're entering a new age where amateurs are beginning to produce work that competes and even exceeds the quality of that produced by professionals. This has pretty much always been the case with artists - if you're a painter, a sculptor or even a novelist, you normally have to start out as an amateur, pursuing your vocation as a hobby. But this is now slowly permeating into other areas. Blogging is an obvious one. Now we have the tools, everyone has the potential to produce news and comment, as well as consume it. There's a great 8 minute video here is you haven't seen it. It's difficult to load as I suspect their servers are a little overwhelmed. But it takes the perspective of looking back from 2014, when the great news organisations have folded and ordinary people generate the news and analysis. Then we have Wired's report of school teacher George Masters' advertisement he produced for the iPod. Its been viewed by about 40,000 people and is generally rated as good as anything any as agency could produce. Watch it here. For me, there's a couple of interesting things here. Firstly, George was able to do this without any brief from Apple. Why? Because as a user of the product he understands everything he needs to know about the brand, its positioning and values. Secondly, he spent 5 months producing it, a couple of hours at a time. Think about that. 5 months producing something he wasn't getting paid for and he probably thought would be seen by about 10 people. If you can make your brand users as passionate as this about your product, the world really will beat a path to your door. Not only will they create a powerful word of mouth marketing campaign, they'll even produce your advertising for you! I expect that this trend of the Pro:Am will continue and next on the horizon will be the music and film industries. I think short films in particular will have a Renaissance with 1.5 billion personal screens out there - commonly known as mobile phones. And shorts are the prefect length for viewing on your mobile. Anyone any ideas about other industries that might be affected? Leave a comment if you have any ideas. Don't be shy now! [The Mobile Technology Weblog] 2:39:14 PM    comment []

BlackBerry: Still legal (for now). So maybe you haven[base ']t been following every twist and turn of NTP[base ']s ongoing patent lawsuit against Research In Motion, but there[base ']s some good news and some bad news for all the Crackberryheadz out there (god, we did not just write that). A few months back NTP won their patent lawsuit against RIM and were granted an injunction that prevented RIM from selling, making, or servicing BlackBerrys here in the United States. Obviously sort of messed with RIM[base ']s main business, which, you know, consists of selling, making, and servicing BlackBerrys. RIM was able to save themselves from oblivion by immediately getting the injunction stayed pending appeal, and yesterday they got half of what they wanted. The US Court of Appeals vacated the injunction (which means RIM can keep selling BlackBerrys for right now), but also upheld an earlier court[base ']s ruling that RIM infringed on eleven of NTP[base ']s patents, so unless they can get NTP[base ']s patents overturned they[base ']re going to have to figure out some sort of licensing arrangement with them in order to keep doing business in this country. [Engadget] 2:35:18 PM    comment []