Articles in Mobile
The Economist has published this video which contains a series of interesting statistics about the changing media landscape.
Whilst the stats are US focused, they are representative of the changes that are occuring across the globe.
Be a Football Hero allows you to create a personalised audio commentary.
Select your name, country, and age, and then listen to the professional soccer (football) commentary of yourself performing the ultimate football heroics.
If you like what you hear, you can order the soundtrack as a CD for 14.99 pounds.
The soundtrack is very realistic, and you get to hear your surname and age as you score the match winning goal in the dying minutes.
Looking like a big brother to the iPhone, the CrunchPad tablet PC from Techcrunch is likely to shake up the tablet computing market.
Crunchpad
At 18 mm thick, the tablet only works when connected to the internet. The device takes advantage of clever touch protocols that make for efficient and pleasant consuming of content. Rumoured to be priced at around US$300, the device could become a widely adopted method for reading online content.
Since Apple’s release of the iphone 3GS, there has been lots of discussion around the various tools and applications that will help deliver video content from the phones directly to social networks and to the web.
Tweetreel is one such application seen here in use with video stream from the Michael Jackson memorial
Techcrunch also reports of Facebook’s new iphone app which looks set to amplify the delivery of content from iphones to Facebook.
7-Eleven in Sweden has released an iPhone app, that no only includes a 7/11 store locator, but also includes coupons for free coffee and biscuits. Users key in their phone number and then the unique coupons (that are only valide once) are delivered to the iPhone. April’s free coffee coupons will be followed by free ice cream in May.
Stockholm-based digital agency Lonely Duck developed the application and it had 2500 downloads in it’s first week.
A recent study from Unisys found that 7% of 1200 surveyed Australians currently used their mobiles for web transactions.
The study was part of a global study of over 13,000 participants across 14 countries. 59% said they would not trust their mobile devices to provide a secure transaction
Online transactions using mobiles are gradually overcoming concerns about security in much the same way consumers exercised caution before embracing web based transactions.
Mobile browser Opera have released a demographic report which shows that 88% of their users are male. 14.7 million people used Opera Mini in May 2008, which is a 24.6% increase on the March 2008 numbers.
Their user base is also most popular in the 18-27 year old demographic.
2.9 billion pages were viewed in May, with an average of 200 pages per person.
This graph shows the increase in page views over the last 2 years.
Popular virtual world Second Life is now accessible from 40 mobile devices, with support for additional 3G and Wi-Fi enabled devices including the iPhone planned in the near future.
This is possible thanks to a free beta application available at Vollee,
The technology streams high-end services designed for the PC to mobiles adapting screen size and uses compression to reduce bandwidth.
This type of service will impress die hard MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Playing Games) enthusiasts, but technologies like Vollee could potentially provide more reach to business web applications.
To help promote what is possible with the new digital economy, Bullseye has produced a limited run of T-shirts containing the Semacode of the Bullseye mobile site.
Here’s our creative director Kev proudly modelling the t-shirt, as I point my camera phone at the semacode, which takes my phone directly to the site without having to key in the full URL.
This link lets you tag any URL to create your own semacode.
Here’s a video from Reuters explaining a concept phone now on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art demonstrates Nokia’s vision for how handsets might evolve.
The Morph concept is the result of a collaboration between the Nokia Research Centre and Cambridge University’s nanoscience centre providing a vision of a flexible, multifunction device.
A recent Nielsen study of more than 22,000 active mobile data users, shows gaining acceptance of mobile advertising in the US reports Marketing Charts.
23 percent of US mobile subscribers (58 million people) say they have seen mobile advertising in the previous 30 days.
Half of mobile data users (51 percent, or 28 million people) who recall seeing a mobile ad say they responded to the ad in some way.
Interacting without keyboards has become easier thanks to developments like the iPhone with its intuitive touch screen interface. During its development, Apple patented every aspect of the proprietary technology, leaving little for other mobile-phone manufacturers to improve upon.
But Nokia has filed for their own proprietary “Touch User Interface”, which measures the hand and finger movements in a 3D space around the device. The Nokia S60 3D Touchless Device Control Interface.
As mobile phones and internet access from these devices gets faster, it’s no surprise that advertisers and consumers will start to interact more using them.
Perhaps this example in Japan is what we can expect in the near future. Called Chipuya Town (note site in Japanese), and modelled on the Shibuya shopping district of Tokyo, consumers earn currency by adding friends. This currency is known as Grooves and can be used to purchase accessories for your avatar, apartments and furniture etc.
Motorola has launched a wiki to enable consumers to share information with other consumers.
From the wiki it states …
“Because the possible applications for the Q will always expand, the “ideal” user guide would also be able to grow and change. This wiki is an attempt to do that. It’s a place to capture and share the knowledge of the greater community of Q users. If, for example, you have added a new application to your Q, you could post instructions on how you did it here, for the benefit of all Q users.
