Back in January, I wrote my predictions for the year, one of which was

More and more mobile virus stories will hit the headlines. Only for the real story to emerge that to catch one you’d have to be as unlucky as to get struck by lightening on a clear day while standing in a rubber suit at the bottom of a swimming pool.

The normally excellent ZDNews has another of these non-stories, which appears to be nothing more than a Symantec Press Release, reprinted unquestioningly and practically verbatim.

The thrust of the “article” is that most Americans are aware of the threat of viruses on their phone. But who couldn’t be when an obliging press reprints every scare story circulated by the virus protection companies?

Despite this awareness, most users don’t seem to take the threat very seriously.

Here’s a typical statement:

While the spread of such malicious software has been negligible so far, some security companies have become concerned about the possible rise of Trojan horses and other attacks targeting smartphones.

Note the word “negligible”.

and

“We do see more smartphone threats coming in the future, but for now, your PC is probably under much greater risk of attack,” he [ Matt Ekram, mobile security product manager at Symantec] said

Hey - don’t tell anyone, but the reason these companies exist is to sell anti-virus software. Therefore, these press releases are just trying to soften us up for their marketing messages.

In order to install Cabir, you have to be unlucky enough to get it first. You’re more likely to get pecked to death by a passing duck, quite frankly.

Then you’re asked if you want to install an application you haven’t downloaded on purpose and don’t know what it is. If you’re stupid enough to press “yes” the first time, you’re then asked if you really want to do this, again.

So if you do manage to install it after this, you deserve it, as you’re officially a moron and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a mobile phone.

I’m not saying that mobile viruses won’t ever be a threat, but until they are, please can we stop trying to make a story when there simply isn’t one?

In other words, can we stop rehashing press releases and try and remember what journalism is?

End of rant.

Have a great weekend. Here in Bavaria, we have the Maypole raising ceremonies. This is preceded the night before by everyone guarding the Maypole from being kidnapped by rival villages. And everyone knows that guarding is done much better while drinking beer, so everyone must reluctantly drink for the safety of the Maypole.

If your Maypole is guarded too fiercely and you can’t stop the other villages pinching it, you have to pay them a ransom of …. beer. You probably guessed that part.

Russell

Image from Flickr

Proving that the spirit of the empire is still alive and well, Alfie Dennen and Mat Brown’s moblogUK swept aside their larger and better funded rivals to win Gold in Web User review of moblogs.

The plucky duo left competitors like 6 Apart and Buzznet weeping in helpless rage as the judges gave moblogUK a full five stars for their free and popular service.

Nice to see them bounce back from the attack of the giant plushy monster a few months back.

See Alfie’s blog for the full review, which doesn’t appear to be online at the magazine yet.

Reuters reports that, research group, Informa forecast 125 million people will be watching mobile TV by 2010. This excludes streaming/downloading video, by the way - we’re talking the traditional one-to-many model.

If they’re right, this is actually rather pitiful - it’s a little less than 6% of worldwide penetration of mobile phones. It means that any return on investment by market for a launch will be hard to achieve.

Informa’s stance is in marked contrast to ABI’s which I wrote about a few weeks ago, who were more bullish than the Minotaur.

But, what I don’t understand is how anyone can make a sensible judgment about this, without taking into account costs. If you ask Martin or Mary Mobile if they want TV on their phone, they’ll shrug and say “Sure, baby”. If you say, “Will you pay $20 a month in subscription and data charges?”, I don’t think they’ll be quite so sure and at today’s rates, it could well be more than this.

So maybe there’s a case for Informa being the bullish ones. With ABI completely out to lunch on planet Zob.

If you’re wondering about the bloke in the tarzan outfit, by the way, he’s a chap whose AOL handle is the Minotaur. Who said AOL members were all boring?

Near Near Future has an amusing story about a Footsteps of Hans Christian Andersen tour in Copenhagen.

Tourists follow a route marked with 2000 white footsteps on the pavement. Then, at strategic points, they dial in with their mobile phones to listen to an audio narrative about the great man.

A nice idea and an example of many more we’ll see cropping up all over the world.

What makes this funny though is that someone has remixed the tour by adding extra footsteps……into gay clubs. The great man was famously gay - a fact that is generally ignored by mainstream society. So the remixing is thought to be the work of the gay movement, showing a nice sense of humour at the same time.

However, it does also point to a potential problem with any physical marker/hyperlink, connecting people to digital information. The physical link can be sabotaged or altered by the unscrupulous or plain mischievous.

Supposing you “click” on Shakespeare’s house for more information, but you’re taken to say an adult site with Elizabethan wenches doing their stuff? Or even re-directed to a local Shakespeare souvenir shop?

That’s why this type of project needs to be self-policing, using Wikipedia principles.

Net Imperative reports that the Yahoo! portal will come pre-installed on some of Nokia’s new phones - Series 60 high end smart phones.

Yahoo! Entertainment services will allow Nokia users to download ringtones, wallpapers and games.

I’m sure the seasoned thinkers of Nokia have thought this through, but what are the operators going to think? Currently, about 2/3 of all content goes through operator portals (depending on which market we’re talking about).

I don’t think they’ll just shrug and let it happen. In fact, the words I would least attribute to an operator are sentiments along the lines of “Hey! Great! Yahoo! bundled on phones. This is good news for the user as it introduces genuine choice into the marketplace. Let market forces decide - we’re totally confident in our product, pricing and overall loyalty of our customers. Bring it on.”

They’ll much more likely persuade Nokia to take it off, or take it off themselves before it gets to the user.

Having said that, users can obviously access Yahoo! themselves (unless they’re in a closed network, like 3). So they will have to face competition at some point, so this kind of reaction would seem a little short-sighted and a waste of energy all round.

I think that this is little more than an attempt by Nokia to wrest some power back from operators in the continual tug of war between handset manufacturers and operators.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t feel very hopeful for this deal. After the initial hype, will we ever hear of it again?

Yuck, that Happy Slapping story has left a nasty taste. So here’s a story that panders to our higher senses altogether.

Again, from We Make Money Not Art comes the F+R Hugs Lycra shirt. The shirt hooks up over a mobile network and via a series of sensors, the wearer receives a simulated hug from a loved one.

The shirts receive the input of heart beat, touch and body temperature of the remote loved one, recreating (through actuators embedded in the shirt) over distance the pulsation, physical pressure, and warmth of a real hug.

During the testing of the shirts, major intensity points were identified on upper arms, on the upper back part during a condolatory hug, around the waistline, neck, shoulders, and hips. In these strategic spots were placed soft technological sandwiches containing the hugging output actuators.

Ahhhh.

But, I believe these “thinking of you, without interrupting you too much” tools will become important in the future of our relationships over the phone. Sure, it might be a high-tech shirt that hugs. Or it could just be something that happens on your phone - maybe it pulses in some way, or glows, or the screen flashes.

It’s already the social norm for dating young couples to sms each other religiously first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It’s the modern equivalent of those long (landline) calls we used to have with the “you hang up first”, “no you”, “no, you” “love you”, “love you”, “I love you more”, “you hang up first”. And just as you were in BIG trouble if you did hang up first, you’re toast if you don’t send those sms’s when you’re meant to.

This simply fulfills a very important human need - a sort of grooming ritual. A transactional analyst would call it a stroking ritual, if Eric Berne’s original studies were updated to today’s context.

So we’ll see many more of these types of low key, ritualistic communication over our phones. This is but the first generation.

I’ve written before about Happy Slapping here and here. Basically, it’s the practice of slapping an unsuspecting person hard, while their friends (can people like this have friends?) film the action and reaction on their video phones.

The videos are then shared over the web and passed from phone to phone by Bluetooth.

Firstly, it sounds like it’s a bit of an urban myth, exaggerated by the media, including bloggers. Some have accused me of making this up.

Secondly, it actually sounds like little harmless, if high-spirited, fun. I’m sure everyone’s youth had a few semi-violent incidents and we grew up OK.

Blogger, Alfie Dennen, has done some great investigation and put together and put together a video of some of the clips (via Textually) that are doing the rounds.

You can view the video here.

BUT before you do, I have to say that it’s very nasty and features raw criminal violence. While it starts off with prankish slapping, it deteriorates very quickly into acts of blatant criminal violence. I only bothered watching a few minutes, before I felt compelled to switch off. It’s grim, it’s not funny and I hope these kids are sent to gaol.

However, it is another incident of a blogger making the news.

Nokia announced its new multimedia-centric N-series, with the N91 music phone grabbing much of the attention and already being called an “iPod killer”. For starters, it’s got a 4-gigabyte hard drive, support for all the major digital music formats (bar Apple’s DRM-ed AAC files) and dedicated music controls, and a laundry list of other features: WCDMA and EDGE support, 802.11b/g, Visual Radio, USB 2.0 and the Series 60 user interface on top of the Symbian 9.0 operating system.

The N91 is scheduled for release “by the end of 2005″, when there will likely be more competition than just Samsung’s 3GB music phone. (I’m not taking any bets on whether or not the iTunes phone will be out or even announced by then.)

Gizmodo reports the N91 “doesn’t support Napster To Go”, but probably will in the next revision. I’ll interpret this to mean it doesn’t support the Microsoft DRM that Nokia announced it was licensing at 3GSM in February. It does support OMA DRM 2.0, but that’s of little use to end users. Presumably, Nokia didn’t license the MS DRM to not use it — which raises an interesting question. If carriers have balked at the iTunes phone because it cuts them out of the revenue stream for downloads, how will they feel about phones that will let people use Napster or Real’s new subscription service?

It’s hard to think they’d react too differently, although carriers that have bought Nokia’s white-label download store may overlook this in favor of getting devices that can use it. Of course, the best solution would probably be to partner with somebody like Napster or Real and offer it to their subscribers. The services would love the extra revenues, and an operator that embraces these devices and makes them a joy to use will have a compelling, differentiated offering from its rivals, most of which will inevitably recoil in horror at the thought of letting users put their own music on to mobile phones.

I meant to post this last week, but it slipped through the cracks. Fortunately Matt Maier at MobilePlaya picked it up: Warp Records’s cool Bleep.com download store (which sells un-DRMed music) will let users choose snippets of songs from Bleep’s catalog and make their own ringtone.

Ki-Bi Mobile Technologies have just raised £10m ($19m) via institutional investors in London according to Globes Online.

That’s the boring bit out of the way, apart from that it’s a vote of confidence by professional investors, most of whom don’t know their mobile from their microwave.

[By the way, a little known fact about the launch of 3 is that it was the investors who insisted on structuring the whole launch around video calling. Management knew there was little demand for it. Not to mention that there was little point in focusing on your Achilles Heel. In order to make a video call, you need to know someone else who has one - so even if you believe in the concept, it's a definite Phase 2 part of the roll out.]

Anyway, Ki-Bi are an interesting company, as it happens. They make credit card sized cards (a bit like the old paybox phone cards) that make phone navigation a whole lot easier. You just take your card, put it next to the mike on the mobile and press the card in a specific place.

Then, hey presto, your phone goes and gets the content you want and downloads it. The content can be anything for your mobile, ranging from applications, ringtones, logos, games or music tracks.

From a content owner perspective, it’s a way of getting round the mobile operator portal, if you need to. Approximately 2/3 of mobile content is sold via the operators and if you can’t get on there for whatever reason, it makes life pretty difficult.

As important, the push and download angle means no clumsy inputting of WAP addresses, or navigating uninspiring menus, or even sending off a quick sms.

Is it a good long term bet? Despite my catty remarks about professional institutional investors (not having a go at VC’s here), I think it probably is. I can’t see mobiles being “easy” to navigate quickly, so if there’s a demand for the cards at distribution and user levels, there’s plenty of life in this yet.

And it stimulates inpulse purchase of content.

In the future, we’ll probably have voice commends for this kind of thing, but Ki-Bi are pretty well positioned to go after this sector as well, in due course.

Obviously, the big unknown at this point is what it costs to buy/distribute one. I’ve asked the question and will let you know if I find out.

So what do you think? Is Ki-Bi on to a winner?