Watch this video.

We covered a few days ago a device that blurs your photo if people try to take a pic of you.

But, of course, some celebs want to be photographed at certain times. The Times Online reports that Nokia is developing a new GPS based “celebrity mode button” that allows you to alert the press to flock to your location.

The UK record industry celebrates its best ever year for album sales, with 237 million sold.

But doesn’t that rather explode the myth that illegal downloads are killing the industry?

Many of us have argued that “risk free” downloading actually exposes you to much music you wouldn’t have normally purchased. And if you really like it, you’ll probably buy the CD anyway.

I was reading Michael Wolff’s excellent Autumn of the Moguls recently and he discusses the state of the music industry.

“Everybody can’t be an outlaw. When everybody does it, it’s normal rather than aberrant behaviour. It’s not the consumer who is on the wrong side of the law, it’s the entertainment industry that’s on the wrong side of economic laws”

Yep. And it doesn’t seem to be hurting the industry anyway. Still, I don’t suppose for a moment that they’ll stop suing kids.

Tom Hume was writing about a friend of his who’s being sued because his kids were downloading - the poor chap didn’t even know what file sharing was, let along that his kids were doing it. And they rejected his offer of £400 ($750) and are demanding the full £2,000 ($3,800).

It’s madness, suing people like this.

Erik’s Weblog tells us how to get your Nokia to spot radar speed traps from your car. It sends out a message alert when it finds one.

1. Enter your menu
2. Select settings
3. Select security settings
4. Select closed user group
5. Select on
6. Enter 00000
7. Press ok
8. Clear back to normal, within a few seconds your phone will display a radar sign with five zero’s next to it. It is now activated.

Unfortunately only Nokia phones have this function. The Cell Phone info display needs to be de-activated. Settings -> Phone Settings -> Cell Info display. Each time you turn off your phone, or even each time you loose contact with your carrier, you’ll have to activate it again… It is done using steps 1 through 5 above, but the number (00000) will be already on the field as a default.

Sounds very cool and even I could manage to set it up!

UPDATE: Sorry, maybe I should have made this slightly more obvious. It’s a joke. It will keep your more gullible Nokia owning friends amused for hours.

According to the FT via Yahoo, Manganese Bronze, the parent company of location based taxi service, Zingo, has sold a stake in the company for just £1. That’s right, no missing “million”.

Zingo cost £13 million to develop and is currently losing about £4 million a year. Funnily enough, its losses aren’t caused by lack of user demand, but failure to sign up enough taxi drivers. This means that during peak times, only 1 in 3 calls successfully order a taxi. I wrote a fuller analysis here, including a prediction that they’d do something like this.

The deal has been made with another taxi company based in Singapore, ComfortDelGro, but who also operate Computer Cab in London. For £1, they get the rights to use the Zingo system in UK, Ireland and Asia and share future profits with Manganese Bronze.

The great thing about Zingo is that it proves that there’s user demand for a location based service. This is encouraging as there a lot of scepticism in the market following the early failure of frankly silly applications like “Find my nearest X”. I mean, who needs to find X’s anyway?

Apparently, the latest weapon employed by football hooligans is - mobile phones. Police searches allow people to keep mobile phones, while confiscating other lethal stuff like knives, guns, bike chains and stuff.

Then they can be used as very handy missiles when you’re in the stadium.

There’s even a healthy trade in old phones around some football clubs, so you don’t have to lob your chavvy 3 phone at the opposing fans.

The New York Times has an article today that’s a re-hash of the video-conferencing-is-finally-happening genre. We’re talking video over the broadband-enabled net, not mobile. And over broadband the quality is pretty good actually.

Having said that, the evidence in the article seems to be entirely anecdotal, backed up by a couple of press releases by companies trying the flog conferencing kit. So much for hard news gathering.

Cheap video conferencing has been available for business usage for some time now, and most systems simply gather dust in remote meeting rooms. Video adds surprisingly little to most business conversations and it can actually detract from the interaction as people tend to feel self-conscious.

Having said that, the NYT does focus on two areas where video can enhance social transactions (and mentions the real killer app - P2P porn, in passing).

The first is grandparent/parent and child interactions. Where the adult is away, it enables them to maintain a relationship with young children far more effectively than just over a phone. And no one gets self-conscious talking to a kid either, so that’s one problem that flies away.

The good news for the industry is that these kids are (obviously) tomorrow’s video conferencing users and that it will be as natural to them as voice calls are to us. “Dad was it true that people could only hear each other on the phone when you were a kid? And did they really eat animals? Yeuh!!”

The other area is in social networking/dating, which is frequently a euphemism for porn anyway. Despite their attempted family values and squeaky clean image, AOL’s early success was based largely on P2P chat porn, which you could argue directly drove the uptake of the internet too in the mid-90’s. So, it’s probably going to be driving video conferencing - if it really does take off.

There is one interesting stat in the article, however. PalTalk, an online video messaging service, has enjoyed 30 million downloads of its free software to date. The basic service is free, which lets you see a still image of the other person, with an upgrade of $40 a year giving you video.

However, downloads are misleading. It’s actual users that are the real test and they claim that 3 million people use it at any one time.

Even if most of these users are, what a man quoted in the article calls, “people who show themselves”, that’s a lot of users.

We’ve noted that hanging decorations off your mobile is big in Japan, much as western kids hang a multitude of key rings form their school bags.

But it seems a new generation of these ornaments have functionality too.

One type gives off a smell when the phone rings - choose from lemon, peach or even ramen noodles and curry. Mmmm, mine’s a vindaloo. Yours for merely $10.

Others consist of little figurines, bursting to go to the loo. And if you pull it (where??) it doesn’t wait any more!

I couldn’t find a photo anywhere. So the image shows the famous Mannekin Pis in Brussels in honour of the highly prolific and talented Regine from the beautifully whimsical We Make Money Not Art and many other blogs. She’s currently visiting Brussels.

UPDATE: Popgadget (Personal Tech for Women) linked to this story. Great site! But they also found a photo and a bit more info. Here’s the photo:

Story originally reported on Et Today.

How to carry your mobile is always a challenge for the man about town - or about country, for that matter. Do you carry it (not convenient), put it in your briefcase (not accessible) or start a handbag habit (Lady Bracknell “A Handbag??”)?

The confusingly named, Black Coat company has the solution - a zip-able T-shirt, which is designed to carry your mobile or iPod. It’s confusing, coz you’re kind of expecting a black coat.

The T can be purchased for $39.

Thanks to Anita, from the ever-excellent RFID Weblog for the link. I won’t make a big thing about her and the Black Coat company being based in Ohio, if you won’t.

There’s an online forum and happening, taking place from November 26 through December 5, which looks like it’s worth checking out here, where you can also sign up to discussions.

It’s the precursor to an interdisciplinary research residency taking place next year at the University of California Humanity Research Institute.

In the last few years, advances in wireless telecommunication, sensor technology, and Geographic Information System tools have inspired a tide of experimental creative projects. Artists are using these tools and location-aware media to renegotiate how communication, navigation, and big data are played out in space. As the landscape and urban streets become the canvas for computer augmented social and physical interaction, what possibilities emerge for practices outside the arts? How can we mutually inspire and inform diverse practices?

The invitation is mainly addressed to artists working in this space, where many (actually most!) of the interesting things are currently happening in Location Based Services - no, we’re not talking “Find my Nearest…Chinese Restaurant”.

Regular readers of this blog know that these emerging areas are where I think the promise of location based services may lie.

Check it out.

Original story: Turbulence.