Kodak have launched a handheld picture viewer, which is surely more doomed than a doomed thing on Planet Doom. It’s slightly larger than a deck of cards and has a pretty measly 32 MB of storage (which can be supplemented by a memory card) and 3 hours viewing on battery.

For this pretty average spec, it’ll sell for around $150.

So why’s it doomed? Firstly, I’m very sceptical that there ever was a demand for a stand alone device like this - surely you’d just look at the photos on your camera, rather than loading them onto another device? Secondly, why would you want one when your mobile phone does what this device purports to do and 100 or so other things too?

Story: Mobile Mag. Picture is Private Frazer from old Brit sitcom, Dad’s Army. UK readers will remember Frazer’s catch phrase “We’re doomed! Doomed I tell ye.”

The Kansas City.com (free subscription required or sign in via my pals at the cheeky Bug Me Not) reports about a new service from Sprint, which got me thinking.

The Sprint Business Mobility Framework is a service that tracks employees’ movements. It sends out alerts to management when they stray outside the designated Geofence and reports a “breadcrumb” trail of where they have been. Finally, it can tell managers which employee is nearest to a given point in the event of a service need - think the nearest taxi or plumber.

I’ve written about these kind of employee tracking devices before and especially about the insensitivity of the companies promoting such schemes. Their CEOs frequently make really funny quips about electric shock therapy and just manage to stop chortling about death squads to round up straying employees.

I’ve also pointed out that studies show that when employees are trusted, productivity increases. The opposite is true; when you patently don’t trust people and use this kind of technology, you’re encouraging them to try to beat the system. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that these systems track devices, not people. So just as we used to clock mates in and clock them out, in the old days of punching bits of card, some employees will find themselves sitting in a warehouse surrounded by colleagues’ mobile phones on Friday afternoons.

If your company is considering one of these services, you have a real personnel issue at the heart of the company and there’s nothing for it - your Board of Directors must resign at once. Anyone who confuses treating a symptom, rather than the disease itself, simply lacks judgment.

In the UK, privacy died years ago as we happily allowed “them” to install CCTV cameras everywhere. So much so, that the average citizen living or working in an urban area gets filmed 70 times a day, or so. This has led, among other things to a rise in hoodies and base ball caps as fashion items among kids, as they seek to avoid identification.

Sure, wearing a hoodie doesn’t make you a criminal. But just as low slung jeans was a homage to the hard homies who had gone to jail (and had their belts taken away) in urban America, hoodies nod at the hard kids who wear them with crime in mind.

And now Bliar wants everyone to carry ID cards. A truly unbelievable waste of public money, as what all these things have in common is that the crims always find a way round them and ordinary citizens are inconvenienced.

Next we have the camera phone in every pocket - and soon it’ll be a video phone. This means that any crime or private moment has a very good chance of being filmed. You snog your girlfriend with a bit of passion, to find a couple of kids are filming you. Or they preempt the action with a little Happy Slapping.

Sting recently had to abandon a skiing holiday, as he was fed up with the crowd of amateur paparazzi following him around.

Russell Beattie was also violated this week, privacy-wise. While he was trying to activate his Boost mobile phone account, he was asked such intrusions as the age of his father and brother - not information he had ever given them.

The other area that springs to mind in this little rant is reputation. One of the next big boom areas (just my opinion) is online reputation management systems. These will collate data on all of us, specifically for prospective employees. Not only will resume/CV accuracy be monitored factually, colleagues’ and managers’ opinions might be collected, leaving no room to hide.

While you might reasonably object to having your name on these databases and possibly even succeed in requesting removal, this may be like being asked to be removed from the employment market altogether. After all, if you ask for removal, you must, de facto, have something to hide.

It’s bad enough having your credit constantly monitored if the company has made a mistake and downgrades you. Apparently, it can take months to get it corrected. But suppose effectively your “right to work” gets accidentally compromised or deliberately so, by a colleague with a grudge?

Finally, while defenders of these systems say that “law aiding citizens have nothing to hide”, this is only relatively true in a democracy. If we ever see a return to some of the regimes (of the left or right) that dominated Europe last century, such exhaustive information on every citizen would make Big Brother look optimistic. And if you automatically think that Big Brother is the TV programme, go and read the complete works of Orwell now and sit at the back of the class until you’ve finished.

While we may think a return to those politics are impossible these days, I don’t think we can be complacent. These schemes all make the rise of such regimes much, much easier than in the past. “Information is power” and all that.

I started this rant about LBS tracking for employees (and let’s throw in child tracking as well - evil trade that it is). But please don’t think I’m against LBS generally - I think it’ll add huge value to our lives and enrich society in many ways. But like all technology, there are good and bad uses for it.

Very often it’s the obvious uses that are inappropriate, while the good ones take a little more thought and crafting to emerge.

Let’s pray that the good uses win out in the end.

Via W2 Forum (subscription required)

A project team at MIT has launched SNIF (Social Networking in Fur) - they just couldn’t resist the “f” there, could they? I’d have gone for MoSoSoDo myself
It’s pretty basic though. Pet owners press “positive” or “negative” buttons on modified dog leads/leashes based on how well their pet interacts with other dogs.

They should combine it with Bowlingual. I wonder how Bowlingual would interpret a greeting sniff?

Story via Iconiculture

Ian Pearson, BT’s much-quoted futurologist, has gone on record as saying that people will soon need a “digital bubble” to protect them from unwanted marketing messages:

“…there will be chips all over the high street relaying information and you will be bombarded with digital information everywhere you go,” said Pearson. “You will need a digital bubble force field ó a shield that lets through what you want and blocks everything else.”

His vision seems identical to that scene in Minority Report, with Tom Cruise’s character striding through a mall being bombarding by advertising holograms.

Unfortunately, what Mr Pearson seems to have overlooked is that this type of marketing would be a clear breach of The Data Protection Act in the UK and thus illegal. Other markets have similar laws - or would introduce them damn quickly if a Minority Report scenario were to emerge.

An alternative scenario, which could be closer to what Mr Pearson has in mind, would be something like Siemen’s Digital Graffiti or Nokia’s Local Marketing Solution. This may involve promotors broadcasting unsolicited messages, but you’d need to have an application on your phone installed and switched on to receive them, and both systems allow filtering of unwanted messages. So, the permission lies in the recieving end, rather than the sending end.

If I were an academic looking for a project, I think a smart, learning filtering system would be a worthy project right now. The challenge would be to have something easy to use, yet sophisticated enough to allow for the nuances of personal preferences. Plus it would have to have the ability to learn on-the-fly based on user reactions.

There’s also an opportunity to build a powerful, trusted third party brand who you allow to do the minutae of your filtering for you. In one sense, this is what we did at ZagMe. One of the reasons why subscribers loved the service was that a lot of filtering was done behind the scenes and they could tweak their own settings as well.

This means that people only got messages they were, at least, very receptive to, which makes the system better for both promotor and customer alike.

Mr Pearson went to on speculate that his “bubbles” would also broadcast personal information about people, like today’s personal home pages on their websites. In other words, he thinks there’s a future for MoSoSo’s too. I think he might be right about that element, at least.

Story via ZD Net. Makes a change from their fixation with reprinting press releases from anti virus companies reporting infestations of mobile viruses, which means that one more single occurrence has been spotted.

Image from The Bubble Man show.

The BBC has started to do a weekly round up of Blogs - Weblog Watch.

While you can’t possibly ever claim any degree of comprehensiveness with a short weekly column, it is interesting evidence of blogs crossing the chasm to the mainstream.

One of the fascinating elements of watching blogging mature as a channel is observing exactly how big media is reacting. There’s a very amusing video of Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show you can download via Crooks and Liars (spotted on Poynter Online). Stewart weighs into the likes of CNN as only he can, showing how their answer to blogging is to get correspondents to read various blogs live on air.

This is far from compelling TV!

Stewart’s piece is very amusing. But it illustrates the point, very powerfully, that big media is bemused and running scared.

All this also seems to indicate that blogging is here to stay, for good or ill.

I’d be interested to know what you and what your company is doing about blogging? Are you getting with the programme or waiting and seeing? Leave a comment and let me know.

Image via Get Blogs.

I’ve elucidated, both here and elsewhere, about why the mobile phone stands a good chance to supplant the iPod and other MP3 players as the mobile music player of choice, as well as some of the obstacles facing it too. But making its way around the blogosphere today is a Wall Street Journal column spelling out why it won’t happen.

While the authors, Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry (who I think are generally pretty sharp) make an argument that’s more compelling than most, they’re still a little off-base. They cite the strength of the Apple/iPod brand as the devices’ biggest strength, saying “cellphones command little brand loyalty” — a viewpoint that’s a bit US-centric, as the WSJ (understandably) tends to lean. Buyers around the world have very strong loyalty to handset brands, while Interbrand’s most recent global brand scorecard (PDF) ranks Apple at just 43, compared to Nokia at number 8 and Sony and Samsung at 20 and 21, respectively (Motorola, the only other handset maker in the top 100, is at 76). It’s also hard to argue that mobile phones are any less important than an iPod as a fashion accessory or expression of coolness, and they’re far more influential than any other music player.

The column also wonders if mobile phones will be able to compete with the iPod on design and function, then finishes up by saying that it’s important to remember that Apple won’t be content to sit on its lead, and will continue to innovate in the music player space. A couple points here: while the iPods mini and shuffle have been great successes, Apple does occasionally misfire: the iPod photo hasn’t kept up much of the buzz of previous editions. But more importantly, mobile phones will evolve as well. It’s unrealistic to think that first-generation music-centric handsets will completely replace the iPod, but they’ll be a first effort, not a final one. Chances are the handset market will move even more quickly than the MP3 player market, given that it’s much more competitive and the innovation isn’t primarily left to one player (ie Apple).

Hanrahan and Fry rightly call into question if carriers will accept a business model that cuts them out of the picture, with early indications being that they won’t. But operators (or some of them, anyway) are also aware of the need to not lock music to the phone, and are offering services that deliver purchased music to both handset and PC. And as far as having to match Apple’s $1 per song price? They’ll have to, or they’ll come up with other solutions, like Yahoo.

The most glaring thing about the column is that Hanrahan and Fry seem completely oblivious to the fact that Apple’s working on an iTunes phone with Motorola (”Who’s to say an iCellphone isn’t a possibility?”). By basing so much of their argument on the iPod and Apple’s actions, you’d think they’d see Apple’s entry into the mobile market as some sort of validation, as well as answering many of their “but will it be as good as the iPod?” questions.

The MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software) arena is clearly hotting up right now, even more so following Google’s purchase of Dodgeball a few weeks back. It’s also interesting that a billion dollar entity like Google still buys tiny little two-men-in-a-garage startups.

So I thought I’d put down some of my thoughts on the sector.

Online YAFRO’s (a term coined by VC’s in response to the endless business plans submitted - Yet Another Friendster Rip Off) were the big boom and fizzle sector of last year. Sites like Friendster and Linked-In attracted significant funding without having much of a clue about a business model. This isn’t such a bad thing - it’s easy to forget that Hotmail, Google and Yahoo! before them all didn’t have much of a business model on launch, which clearly hasn’t held them back.

The problem is that online social networking still doesn’t have much of a model. Linked In is trying to make money from the job search market, while the others play around with various subscription-based revenue generation ideas.

Can the MoSoSo concept fare any better?

The basic idea of a MoSoSo is to overlay a location and time element to the idea of digital networking. So it enables you to find people in your vicinity and at that time for social, sexual/dating or business networking. It’s worth noting that the time variable is often overlooked in analysis of MoSoSo dynamics.

Examples of MoSoSo usage might just be to find out which of your buddies are in the area you’re drinking in. Or find friends of friends, on the basis that if you’re both pals of the same person, you’re likely to have something in common and unlikely that the other will rape you. Or you may want to find other people interested in collecting rare stamps, so you can say “Hi, lovely set of Penny Reds, you’re got there!”. Or find business contacts who are in the market for your services.

All this you can do with your mobile phone. You can use the low-tech Dodgeball way - essentially sending an SMS saying “I’m here, who else is nearby?”. Or more sophisticated methods relying on location identification or the new Nokia Sensor - a Bluetooth-based solution.

The main issue all these ideas face is the old “critical mass” chestnut. If you’re out on the town and fancy a hot date or a cold beer with a pal, you might try this kind of service. But if it fails to turn up anyone, you’re going to lose interest pretty quickly and forget to use it.

This isn’t such a problem if the service is completely automated, simply requiring the use to react. This means that even if critical mass takes time to build, at some point the service will alert the user and stand a chance to gaining usage.

This element is also important anyway, as the best services work with, rather than against, inertia. If you can avoid making the user have to do anything (other than sign up or download an application) you’re making your life and theirs much, much easier.

So I’d say the first requirement for a successful MoSoSo is an automated process, where upon joining or downloading the application, the phone, or server, does all the work.

The second really-nice-to-have would be an existing community to recruit from - the obvious one being an existing online social networking site. But others could include an online dating site or media owner - The FT would be a good one for business networking, for example.

The third element would be distance. Currently Bluetooth works over about 10m, which is far too short. When you factor in the time dimension (don’t forget this is about people being in the same place simultaneously) you’re simply never going to find a target to hit, unless the parameters are really, really wide - like “humanoid, male”.

The exception to this might be at specialist networking events, like trade exhibitions, where a niche market may exist for this type of product.

So, it has to work over greater distances - maybe a square kilometer (?), certainly while critical mass is being built up.

Profiling is also key as the user needs to feel that she’s in control and can change the parameters whenever she wishes.

The final area is the business model. The Nokia angle is to sell more handsets and maybe for the initial download of the application, although I doubt it, in this case. But the real gold is being able to charge by usage, rather than a one-off charge.

I think the answer lies in a hybrid of Premium SMS and phone based application. In other words, you’re allowed top line information for free (eg that there are three available, blonde, female, Aquarians within 100 metres) but you have to pay a small fee to find out who they are and get contact details.

This area also might be ripe for sponsorship by the right brand, if its keen on being seen as a bringing people together or a business networking catalyst.

What have I missed out? Has anyone seen a MoSoSo that they think has legs?

Here’s another very interesting insight from the Impaq Groupís recently-published MOBILE LIFE 1 research.

Here’s today’s top ways people use their mobiles:

1 Voice
2 SMS
3 Switching to silent mode
4 Calculator
5 Taking pictures
6 Surfing WAP sites
7 Using operator portals
8 Mobile search
9 Bluetooth pairing
10 Alert subscriptions

No big surprises there, although I’m a little intrigued to see mobile search coming in at number 8 already. I hadn’t figured on that going really mainstream until next year. So much so, it’s been on my “list if things to post about” for 4 months and I haven’t bothered as I didn’t think it was urgent. I’ll have to do something next week now….

The other notable element is the calculator function - it always scores highly, but no one has ever tried to build on it or exploit this in any way. Maybe because it can’t be improved?

Now (with my best Peter Snow voice) let’s see what happens when we look at tomorrow’s wish list:

Tomorrowís Top Ten 3G Wish List

1 Mobile coupon redemption
2 Parking meter payment
3 Loyalty cards
4 Season tickets
5 Credit/Debit cards
6 Flight check-in
7 Vending machine payment
8 Retail checkout
9 Marketing communications
10 Using your mobile as a key

This is good news for mobile marketers - in at both number 1 and number 9. Cynics will wonder why this is on a wish list, but as I’ve said before, people like getting mobile marketing messages providing that they follow the rules:

1. It’s opt in and therefore not Spam.
2. It’s timely.
3. It’s targeted.
4. It’s relevant.
5. It adds value to the recipient.

It should be all 5, but I’m willing to concede that only 4 might be OK in some circumstances.

It’s also interesting to see that people clearly want to start paying for things with their mobile phone, which is a position I’ve consistently taken here.

But what about the things that are missing? There’s nothing about video calls, downloading video, watching TV, listening to music/audio and playing games all of which are currently attracting gazillions of dollars in investment. This must be pretty worrying for these companies.

But all’s not completely lost, I’d be very surprised if the phone wasn’t used for listening to music and playing games, but am sticking to my healthy sceptisicm about mobile TV and video as being serious, long term profitable markets.

What do you think?

With that, I’ll bid you a very fine weekend. Have a good one and thanks for reading..

Russell

Last week I wrote a post about loyalty programmes and how the big opportunity was a mobile phone based loyalty programme.

Today, the Impaq Group launched their fascinating report MOBILE LIFE 1, which among other things, comes to a remarkably similar conclusion. Their opinion is backed by interviews with some 659 UK consumers and 15 key leaders from the retail, technology, marketing sectors as well as from academia. It’s nice to get such high profile vindication!

The research found that:

Mobile phones and 3G are set to challenge the rules of customer loyalty

small retailers will think about structured loyalty schemes for the first time enticed principally by the low cost of entry and the potentially low cost of ownership

I still think that a winning play in the space will be themed around music based rewards, with participating retailers being those appealing to the youth demographic.

You read it here first.

Image from The Age.com.

I’ve posted a few times about the now infamous case of Kryptonite bike locks - it’s become the classic case study of what happens when you ignore what bloggers are saying. In Kryptonite’s case it’s cost them $12 million so far - and maybe their future.

Now another lock company is suffering a similar fate and - unbelievably - are taking the same head-in-the-sand attitude. Kensington make PC locks - the kind you use to secure your PC to something immovable in an office or hotel room, for instance.

You can see the video here of how the lock can be opened with a bit of cardboard, some gaffer tape and no force at all. It’s already all over the Blogosphere and there’s no mention on Kensington’s website about the problem at all.

It’s obvious what’s going to happen next - the company will have to capitulate and organize a massive product recall. Why don’t they react immediately, with openness, honesty and some humility? “We screwed up, that happens sometimes and we’re really, really sorry. Now, let’s work together to fix it quickly.”

One definition of madness is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result. By that measure, Kensington must be completely out to lunch.

Story spotted on Loic le Meur.