20min writes that Swisscom doesn't want Skype on its UMTS phones. See article from July 14: UMTS: Swisscom blockt Dienst für Internet-Telefonie

Jürg Stuker writes about it on his blog too.

Via Patrice (f2f)

Mobile communication has an increasing impact on people's lives and society. Ubiquitous media influence the way users relate to their surroundings, and data services like text and pictures lead to a culture shaped by thumbs. Representing several years of research into the social and cultural effects of mobile phone use, this volume assembles fascinating approaches and new insights of leading scientists and practitioners. The book contains the results of a first international survey on the social consequences of mobile phones. It provides a comprehensive inventory of today's issues and an outlook in mobile media, society and their future study.

Peter Glotz, Stefan Bertschi(eds.)
Thumb Culture
The Meaning of Mobile Phones for Society

Oktober 2005, ca. 280 S., kart., ca. 26,80 €
ISBN: 3-89942-403-4

Bestellen

Via Genevieve

Mobile Phones in public transports (from 2001)

Connecting people
One of the things they have noticed is that people are constantly holding their mobile phones, checking if they have missed a call or if they are receiving a message. While some might say this is a sign of the tyranny of the mobile, for Dr Bell, it is a liberating device. "They allow me to stay in touch with my family, with my friends," said Dr Bell.

"They've created all those new types of conversations I can have. And people say the same thing about e-mail and the internet - this allows me to stay in touch with my family in other parts of the world. They create new opportunities for the same really important sorts of social relationships," she said.

See also:
Geneviève Bell's Intel Page: Technology and Ethnographic Research

Via Tages-Anzeiger, Digital

Originally via Daniels Blog

Cyworld Control Room in Seoul, Photo from Wikipedia

Stefan Hayden criticizes Chris Pirillo and comes with some interesting thoughts about Cyworld.

Cyworld really is revolutionary in it’s inclusion of elements from other places. Chris blows the service off as some kind of glorified geocities where you have to pay for backgrounds but it reality it is so much more. If I had to define it, after doing some research on it, I would more associate it to SecondLife. SecondLife has a monthly fee like World of Warcraft but you can pay extra money to buy things like land or whatever. While there have been detailed studies of online game economies since Ultima Online every one always seems to be surprised when actual money starts to come in to the picture.

[...] The trick seems to be offering something for free and then making available other stuff to buy. It’s a model cropping up all over the place. iTunes is a free download and does a great job on managing people’s music and now it even lets you manage your podcasts. Oh and if you’re up to it you can purchase music from one of the largest online music stores in the world. Google Earth is a free download with amazing functionality and with a small fee can also be upgraded to even more powerful features. It’s this kind of pseudo-shareware that seems to becoming very pervasive in the online market the way it was with video games in the early 90s.

See also:
Marc Canter and Cyworld

I guess that what is now http://mobile.kaywa.com/mobile needs also to become http://mobile.kaywa.mobi
But what will we do with the different country suffixes for the same subdomains?

***

New .mobi suffix points to wireless Web sites

The new .mobi suffix was approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) at a Luxemburg meeting on Monday.

See also:
mTLD bekommt Top-Level-Domain .mobi (de)
Tim Berners-Lee's concerns

Industry moves to ease using Net via cellphone

Fant said 12 to 14 percent of mobile phone users browse the Internet with their cellphones, but the vast majority are in Japan and South Korea. He attributed American and European reluctance to use the Internet capabilities of cellphones to the failure of websites to be cellphone-friendly.

''The devices are ready. The networks are ready. The technology exists. It just hasn't been deployed," he said.

Mobile MUSE (Media-rich Urban Shared Experience), the first project of its kind in Canada, is moving forward to meet the growing demands worldwide for wireless applications that offer users of cell phones and PDA’s more than voice communications and text messaging.

See more at
Mobile Muse site
and
Mobile MUSE epress kit

Future Perfect

Jan Chipchase, a colleague of Matt Jones' in user-research at Nokia, has started a new blog called ‘Future Perfect’, wherein he posts snippets of his experiences travelling the globe studying the use of technology.

Via Blackbeltjones and Emily

Cellphone customers put new technologies on hold

To break out of the downward spiral, many operators have tried to increase income from data services like Internet access; ring tones; photo multimedia messages, called MMS; music downloads; video downloads, and even streaming video.

It's so clear for me that this would not work, that I do not understand how telcos could repeat and repeat it again. It's the same with the PDF copies of newspapers.
This simply will not work!

"I take photos with my phone quite a bit, but I rarely send them to others," Koenig said. "What I tend to do is hold up the phone and show people the pictures."

He just needs a mobile blog - KAYWA promo ;) - and he will even see more benefits. But I totally agree, showing the pictures to others in meatspace is one of the first and natural things you do once you start using a camera phone.

[...] "I think there is still some skepticism concerning mobile data among some analysts because there had been inflated expectations about the rapidity of the uptake," Ferguson said. "What we're doing here is building a new medium. There is no doubt in my mind that the long-term prognosis for mobile content is very, very good. What a lot of people don't remember is that SMS was also very slow," he said.

I fully agree, but that content will be mostly generated by users themselves. The mobile phone is a social thing more than anything else. Broadcasting content just will not work.

Tags: Mobile Content, New Medium


Via Moconews

Googleing Cyworld mobile, I found this interesting bit of information:

SK Telecom upgraded the "Notification" function that has been offered since July of 2004; those subscribed to the service will be notified whenever a new comment or message is posted on their homepages starting on March 11. One notification per day will be provided free of charge.

Slowly, slowly more people see it coming: Social Machines (original article by Wade Roush)

After a decade of hype about “mobility,” personal computing has finally and irreversibly cut its bonds to the desktop and has moved into devices we can carry everywhere. We’re using this newly portable computing power to connect with others in ways no one predicted—and we won’t be easily parted from our new tools.

[...]

The arrival of continuous computing means that people who live in populated areas of developed countries (and increasingly, developing ones such as China and India) can spend entire days inside a kind of invisible, portable “information field.” This field is created by constant, largely automated cooperation between

1. the digital devices people carry, such as laptops, media players, and camera phones
2. the wireline and wireless networks that serve people’s locations as they travel about, and
3. the Internet and its growing collection of Web-based tools for finding information and communicating and collaborating with other people.

[...]

And this, in the end, is what’s truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We’ve used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that’s changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent “on the computer” no longer feels like time taken away from real life.

Via zengestrom.com