I wrote a post about location based tourism a couple of weeks ago, at the request of a Mobile Weblog reader.

Incidentally, if you have anything you’d like my opinion on, for what it’s worth, drop me a line or leave a comment.

A good example of LBS and tourism is covered by Poynter Online with a post on Time Spots in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

It’s loaded onto a PDA that you can rent from larger hotels:

The device is filled with useful info on events, hotels, restaurants and attractions. In addition, audio tours covering all important points-of-interest are provided, along with games, just in case the points of interest do not entertain you at all.

But the PDA is also connected; for the flat fee you pay, you can send e-mails, visit Amsterdam-related mobile Web sites, and call other Timespots users, as well as a large number of hotels, restaurants and tourist services. And the mobile device has a camera on board that allows you to take snapshots and e-mail them to your friends and relatives or your weblog.

The PDA is also GPS enabled meaning it can do obvious stuff like “where am I?” and “find my nearest coffee bar, I fancy a spliff”. Well, you’d hope so.

But as Poynter notes, it would also be cool to have less obvious things like what the street looked like say, 10 years ago or what historical events took place there.

Or where the nearest coffee bar is, or have I said that?

Here’s a picture of the famous JFK “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963

You can read the speech here, if you like.

I couldn’t help contrast this to Mr Bush’s visit next week to Mainz. The German government is basically putting the whole town into lock down. They’re closing roads, schools and even rivers for the day as well as imposing a 37 mile exclusion zone for air traffic.

Meanwhile, there will be a “Red Zone” where no unauthorized personnel will be admitted.

As far as the mobile angle is concerned though, there are plenty of rumours that they’re going to shut down the GSM network - or perhaps have the ability to request a shut down if they need to.

It’s one thing to protect Mr Bush. It’s another to inconvenience the good burghers of Mainz. But isn’t it another thing altogether to endanger their lives by depriving them access to the emergency services on their mobiles?

Thanks to Irakli for pointing me to the story.

There seem to have been a flurry of people lately, claiming to jam mobile phones - for “fun”. Or maybe it’s a flurry of stories, which all seem to lead back to the New York Post one here.

You can buy one in the US for upwards of $250, which seems quite a lot of money to spend just to annoy people - or perhaps to stop people annoying you.

Having said that, the fine (in theory) is $11,000 for using one, which implies it’s a brave or a rich person’s game.

If you’re puzzled by the Bluejacking reference in the headline, you can read more here. More harmless fun for kids!

CNet posts a story (via JK on the Run) that the Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France have turned a mobile phone into a document scanner.

In other words, take any camera phone with a res of 1 megapixel or more, point it at a text document (or say, a white board) and click. The resulting image can be transfered to another phone or perhaps more interestingly, to a computer, for printing or editing via OCR.

Apart from the obvious James Bond and/or corporate espionage applications, it does make the whole process of scanning and archiving much easier and quicker.

But it also enables you to record for later use all of text-based messages and memos we see every day. For instance, if you see a memo on a Notice Board, you can take a snap and refer to it at your leisure. Or send it to a colleague by MMS (OK, let’s assume it works) or bluetooth it to your pc and email it.

The launch is expected later in the year.

If you’re in the scanning business yourself, maybe a change of career would be apposite?

Israeli company, Natural Widget, has launched Natural Recorder, an application that automatically records every phone call you make or receive.

If you have a Nokia Series 60 phone, you can download and install the software for $11.95. Thereafter, all your calls are recorded until you choose to delete them.

While recording a phone call isn’t that difficult, what’s actually clever about this is the memory management system. It claims that you’ll never run out of memory, as the phone automatically deletes the oldest messages to free up more space - unless you’ve specifically saved them.

This is a great app for say, clarifying a previous conversation you’ve forgotten the details of. But, it’s one more reason to get a shag phone if you don’t want your partner listening to all those calls that you’ve forgotten to delete.

It also means that we’ll have to assume that, like email and sms, voice calls will potentially live forever and be able to listened to by everyone else in the world.

So be careful with those endearments and indiscretions. They may well come back to haunt you.

Story source: Israel 21 C

Mobile PC has a list of the Top 100 Gadgets of All Time.

It’s got some great photos, but it must have been quite a challenge to put together and bound to be a little controversial!

What have they left out, that you’d have put in?

There’s some fascinating ones here, like Number 18, pictured above.

MOTOROLA DYNATAC 8000X, 1983
Ten years after Motorola researcher Martin Cooper placed the world’s first cellular call, the rest of the world got its shot. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X brought mobile calling to the masses (or about 300,000 very wealthy people) for just $3,995 plus outrageously high usage fees. Fortunately, the 8000X offered only one hour of talk time, so it was difficult to rack up stratospheric bills.

How times have changed.

An amusing ad from French mobile service, SFR.

A mobile keeps things truly personal - unlike an answerfone.

And here’s another good one doing the rounds. A Sysadmin’s dream.

Have a great weekend.

Russell

Hurray! The UK leads the world in something again. Unfortunately, it’s just pirated TV programmes download from Bit Torrent networks.

18.5% of all piracy is happening in the UK, ahead of Australia at 15.6% and the US at 7.3% according to research by Envisional.

The report concludes that the main driver (apart from high broadband penetration) is that people want access to the latest programing from the US. They want this season’s Simpsons and 24.

So why don’t broadcaster think about synching launches? Then users could go legal. Or maybe sell programmes on demand once they’ve been been broadcast. I’d pay $5 for a new Simpson’s episode.

Whatever they do, they need to do something quickly before it spirals out of control, like the music file sharing networks. Give users a legal option if the demand is there.

Story from Net Imperative.

On Monday Motorola announced a strategic alliance with Skype, the Voice over IP service.

For those that don’t know, VoIP lets you make pretty good calls over the net. And because it’s going over the net, it’s free providing you have a connection and a device capable of interfacing like this. Historically, this is generally a computer, with a mike and speakers if you want to talk to and hear the other person.

Skype is free to download and free to use, meaning you can make free phone calls all over the world. And 71 million people have downloaded it, so far.

To date, that’s mainly meant that landline operators are loosing revenue and this is going to escalate horrendously in the coming years - especially when cordless VoIP handsets (like “real” phones) come on the market. This is expected to happen this year.

The double whammy for landline operators is that more and more people are choosing to “cut the cord” or decide just to own a mobile from now on.

But the Motorola announcement means that soon we’ll be able to make Skype calls on our mobiles. Actually, it’s not just Motorola that’s the issue here - all the handset companies are looking at bundling VoIP capabilities.

This means that we can bypass the mobile network operator’s voice tariff altogether from our mobile phone. And if we’re at home or in range of a hotspot, we can bypass the operator altogether and still make calls.

The one redeeming piece of news is that switching from one network to another as we’re truly roaming is not reality yet - although it’s only a matter of time. So the idea of walking down a street and the handset seamlessly selecting the cheapest network is not possible. But if you’re sitting in a hot spot and don’t need to move out of the zone while you call, that will work fine. Now.

So what would you do if you’re an operator? Voice is still overwhelmingly the “killer app” of mobile, accounting for the lion’s share of revenues. Supposing a significant part of that will be lost to VoIP? Which, realistically, is highly likely.

There are really only two routes available.

Firstly, you can try to stop VoIP happening. You can refuse to sell handsets that have the features that enable this. You can try to stop users making VoIP calls with whatever weapons you happen to have in your armoury, fair or foul.

As an example, Verizon tried this sort of approach recently in relation to local file sharing, by disabling Bluetooth on their handsets. Much hue and cry followed and a class action has been filed to try to force Verizon to back down.

Top tip: If your customers start suing you, you’re usually wrong. Even if Verizon win the case, they’ll loose their customers, so it a Pyhrric victory, at best.

The point, I think, is that trying to prevent progress is not a useful or successful management technique - it just doesn’t work. Fighting market trends is only going to have any positive results in the very short term. But before too long, you’ll be swamped and forced into an ungainly retreat.

We’re seeing this happen in the music industry daily, as desperate record company bosses try to stop the free file sharing networks. This is in spite of being majorly responsible to their set up and growth by refusing to sanction legal operations until it was far too late.

And despite any actual evidence that file sharing harms revenues.

The only other approach is to shrug (Gallically, if you manage it - the French do shrugging so well) and although it feels counter-intuitive, embrace these changes. You have to run as fast as you can towards the approaching danger. Seek out handsets which are VoIP compatible and market the new service aggressively to your users.

While cannibalism will obviously occur and threaten your revenues, it’s better that you do this and still maintain your relationship with your customer. There will be other services that you can sell them and you may survive as a company and still even be profitable. You may even figure out a way of making more money from them.

If you don’t do this, it’s a sure fact that someone else will, maybe one of those nasty little MVNO’s with nothing to loose and unimaginable riches to gain. And that’s when giants are in real danger of toppling slowly over, never to get back up.

I’d be quite surprised if any of the biggies have the guts to take this approach. Human nature is to go into denial at times like this. But it’s happening and bold decisions are needed.

Anyone agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment - it makes me go all weak and shivery when you do that.

Firstly, we had music file sharing, which hasn’t gone away by any means despite the rather desperate attempts of the RIAA and the quaintly named BPI to bully customers through the courts.

Then we had the MPAA shutting down sites using Bit Torrent to distribute legitimate files and some of their member’s films.

Now apparently TV execs are wetting themselves as it seems programmes are making it out there too.

The New York Times (via Emergic) writes:

Millions of viewers are now watching illegal copies of television programs - even full seasons copied from popular DVD’s - that are flitting about the Internet, thanks to other new programs that allow users to upload and download the large files quickly. And entrepreneurial souls are busily concocting even newer applications, including one that searches the Internet for illegal copies of any television shows you may desire and automatically downloads them to your computer.

Not surprisingly, the repercussions - particularly the rapidly growing number of shows available for the plucking online - terrify industry executives, who remember only too well what Napster and other file-sharing programs did to the music industry. They fret that if unchecked, rampant trading of files will threaten the riches of the relatively new and surprisingly lucrative television DVD business. It could endanger sales of television shows to international markets and into syndication. And it could further endanger what for the past 50 years has been television’s economic linchpin: the 30-second commercial.

Unfortunately, the 30-second commercial has actually expired, it’s just that no one has actually noticed it. It’s been killed off by market forces that are impossible to resist - TiVo and the web are part of it, sure.

But advertisers are starting to switch budgets heavily to online now. New research from Starcom shows online growing at 52%. Why? It’s accountable, targeted and affordable, even for the smallest businesses. It’s opened up the long tail of advertisers and no one knows how big that untapped market actually is.

Other news on the media. Rupert Murdoch, famously sceptical about “new” media has gathered his top management to work out a new strategy for the internet. He can smell the money shifting and clearly wants a slice of the new pie. As probably the best strategic media man of the last 100 years (no matter what else one thinks of his style of business), this is an important indicator.

I wonder if blogging will be on the agenda? Not so for Michael Wolff, acerbic New Yorker columnist and writer of the classic Burn Rate and the interesting, but inconclusive Autumn of the Moguls. I think it was inconclusive as he’s too close to his subject (the collpase of media) and failed to see what’s actually happening to the media he was writing about.

Here’s how BuzzMachine reported a recent speech about blogging:

At some point in the ’50s Truman Capote was asked about Jack Kerouac, and he said, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” which is to some degree how I feel about blogs. I even hate saying the word blog. I hate being forced to say the word blog.

Well, they do have impact. Part of it is actually involved with a kind of further devaluation of information because what it sets up is this constant second guessing of information. Which is not necessarily bad but it does lower the value of all information. You undermine that authority of information. But having been around this business now for some time I’ve learned that nothing lasts too long. By all rights, 18 months from now we should be looking back at this and all kind of embarrassed to say the word blog — I hope.

I think he’s wrong. I think he’s very wrong. I also think he’s an arrogant prick to suggest that somehow old media journalists are inherently superior. But most of all, I think he’s running scared. His well-paid and prestigious job’s on the line ultimately and the only way he can cope is to regress into denial.

What exciting and fast moving times we live in!