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