I posted last Thursday a woman snapping a cameraphone picture of a guy that exposed himself to her on the New York City subway, and how she’d posted it on Flickr and given it to police. The story’s now a dual-meme phenomenon (with citizen journalism, sort of), as the New York Daily News ran the photo and a story about it on the front page of Saturday’s edition. Hopefully this well help get the perv caught.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about converging mobile and fixed lines with technologies like UMA. The common thinking goes that mobile networks will grab traffic from fixed lines when users can take advantage of the benefits of mobile networks and the cheap prices of fixed VoIP in a single device — but I’m beginning to get a little skeptical converged products will live up to the hype.

There’s no doubt that something like UMA sounds great. I’d love to be able to get the rates of my Vonage connection, particularly on international calls, on my mobile phone from any hotspot. Just thinking about what that could do to ridiculous international roaming rates sounds great, too. But there are a couple obstacles I see. First is the assumption that converged mobile services will grab a lot of traffic from fixed lines. One study recently said that two-thirds of Western European mobile calls are made from the home or office, which says to me that people aren’t always choosing the cheapest alternative.

Granted, there’s a lot of uncertainty in drawing my conclusion solely from this figure — there’s no distinction between incoming and outgoing calls, for one thing, and it gives no indication of how many calls still go out over the fixed lines. So are users as interested in always using the lowest-cost option as we assume? Perhaps that’s where the automatic technology can come in, choosing the lowest-cost network available at any given moment. But that can create a pricing problem, since it may not be clear how much a user’s getting charged at any given moment.

The second, and bigger obstacle, is the carriers themselves. The iTunes phone has been conspicuous most by its absence, with some of the delay attributable to carriers being reluctant to introduce a device that essentially cut them out of the value chain. How will carriers with fixed-line corporate relations take to offering a product that will serve to cannibalize fixed-line revenue?

I’m expecting virtual operators to lead the way with UMA, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them use it as a way to get into virtual broadband sales as well. I also expect incumbent carriers to resist offering it as long as they can — after all, why cut prices unless you have to?

In response to my completely unprovoked attack on the advertising industry earlier in the week (42% of Advertising Executives are Dim, finds McKinsey Research), Chris of Aerodeon, a veteran mobile marketing company in the UK, took a slightly more reasonable approach in his comment of explanation.

Thanks Chris for the comment of the week:

Because ad execs make most of their revenue from TV advertising - the sums
involved are thousands of times the magnitude of the typical mobile marketing
campaign - it’s a sad fact that they are recommending media that supports their
bottom line and not the clients objectives.

For all the talk of the death of TV
advertising - there is still no better way to communicate your brand to a mass
audience and influence consumer buying behaviour in a short period of time to a
national population - this will change with fragmentation of TV but the process
isn’t going to happen as fast as everyone believes.

The mobile industry may want
ad dollars that are destined for TV to be rerouted to to SMS/WAP campaigns but
consumers needs to catch up too. I think mobile will be very important part of
the mix and we’ll see it commanding more and more share of digital budget every
year from here on in, but TV won’t go away - its just too damn effective for
brand Goliaths who want to hit 10 million people in a 30 second spot.

Just because operators in Europe are reluctant to get into location-based services and their cousins in the US are dragging their heels over implementing Directive 911, doesn’t mean that the rest of us have given up on LBS.

Pasta and Vinegar reports that The University of Southern California has launched a Location-Based Mobile Media Course, for students who want to find out more about this area and who may well be the true visionaries of what LBS can deliver in the future.

The course, led by Julian Bleecker (pictured) promises to be pretty hands-on, requiring students to "design and develop a project that addresses the opportunities
presented by locative mobile and pervasive media concepts". I’m sure that they’ll do better than the current rash of kid and employee tracking. Yawn.

One of the course papers is worth a read if you’re into this area - The
Geospatial Web: A Call to Action. What We Still Need to Build for an Insanely
Cool Open Geospatial Web by Mike Liebhold. In this, Mike explains the true vision of what this is all about:

We’ll be able to view and utilize tags, pages, and
graphic data about places far richer than the current yellow pages and
commercial POIs (points of interest): environmental details; live, in-place
cultural information, entertainment, and games; history, mythology, and social
information about people nearby; geodemographics; micro-local commercial
information; safety information based on data about health, accidents, and
crime; political data, facilities details, and local public services; physical
objects’ material composition and origins; links to manufacturers’ sites and
help desks; instructions on uses; stories about prior use; user annotations;
digital graffiti; user-created art; and location-tagged messages.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

var _hbEC=0,_hbE=new Array;function _hbEvent(a,b){b=_hbE[_hbEC++]=new Object();b._N=a;b._C=0;return b;}
var hbx=_hbEvent(”pv”);hbx.vpc=”HBX0100u”;hbx.gn=”ehg-oreilly.hitbox.com”;

var jlw = “JLW: www.oreillynet.com,/a/network/2005/05/10/geospatialweb.html”;

hbx.acct=”DM52040214SV;DM520404M4ZR”; //ACCOUNT NUMBER(S)
hbx.pn=”The+Geospatial+Web-++A+Call+to+Action”; //PAGE NAME(S)
hbx.mlc=”/a/network/2005/05/10/;/OReilly+Network/a/network/2005/05/10/”; //MULTI-LEVEL CONTENT CATEGORY
hbx.pndef=”title”; //DEFAULT PAGE NAME
hbx.ctdef=”full”; //DEFAULT CONTENT CATEGORY

hbx.lt=”auto”; //LINK TRACKING
hbx.dlf=”n”; //DOWNLOAD FILTER
hbx.dft=”n”; //DOWNLOAD FILE NAMING
hbx.elf=”n”; //EXIT LINK FILTER

//SEGMENTS AND FUNNELS
hbx.seg=”"; //VISITOR SEGMENTATION
hbx.fnl=”"; //FUNNELS

//CAMPAIGNS
hbx.cmp=”"; //CAMPAIGN ID
hbx.cmpn=”CMP”; //CAMPAIGN ID IN QUERY
hbx.hra=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE
hbx.hqsr=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE IN REFERRAL QUERY
hbx.hqsp=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE IN QUERY
hbx.hlt=”"; //LEAD TRACKING
hbx.hla=”"; //LEAD ATTRIBUTE
hbx.gp=”"; //CAMPAIGN GOAL
hbx.gpn=”"; //CAMPAIGN GOAL IN QUERY
hbx.hcn=”"; //CONVERSION ATTRIBUTE
hbx.hcv=”"; //CONVERSION VALUE
hbx.cp=”null”; //LEGACY CAMPAIGN
hbx.cpd=”"; //CAMPAIGN DOMAIN

//CUSTOM VARIABLES
hbx.ci=”";//CUSTOMER ID
hbx.hc1=”";//CUSTOM 1
hbx.hc2=”";//CUSTOM 2
hbx.hc3=”";//CUSTOM 3
hbx.hc4=”";//CUSTOM 4
hbx.pec=”";//ERROR CODES

var _hbEC=0,_hbE=new Array;function _hbEvent(a,b){b=_hbE[_hbEC++]=new Object();b._N=a;b._C=0;return b;}
var hbx=_hbEvent(”pv”);hbx.vpc=”HBX0100u”;hbx.gn=”ehg-oreilly.hitbox.com”;

var jlw = “JLW: www.oreillynet.com,/a/network/2005/05/10/geospatialweb.html”;

hbx.acct=”DM52040214SV;DM520404M4ZR”; //ACCOUNT NUMBER(S)
hbx.pn=”The+Geospatial+Web-++A+Call+to+Action”; //PAGE NAME(S)
hbx.mlc=”/a/network/2005/05/10/;/OReilly+Network/a/network/2005/05/10/”; //MULTI-LEVEL CONTENT CATEGORY
hbx.pndef=”title”; //DEFAULT PAGE NAME
hbx.ctdef=”full”; //DEFAULT CONTENT CATEGORY

hbx.lt=”auto”; //LINK TRACKING
hbx.dlf=”n”; //DOWNLOAD FILTER
hbx.dft=”n”; //DOWNLOAD FILE NAMING
hbx.elf=”n”; //EXIT LINK FILTER

//SEGMENTS AND FUNNELS
hbx.seg=”"; //VISITOR SEGMENTATION
hbx.fnl=”"; //FUNNELS

//CAMPAIGNS
hbx.cmp=”"; //CAMPAIGN ID
hbx.cmpn=”CMP”; //CAMPAIGN ID IN QUERY
hbx.hra=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE
hbx.hqsr=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE IN REFERRAL QUERY
hbx.hqsp=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE IN QUERY
hbx.hlt=”"; //LEAD TRACKING
hbx.hla=”"; //LEAD ATTRIBUTE
hbx.gp=”"; //CAMPAIGN GOAL
hbx.gpn=”"; //CAMPAIGN GOAL IN QUERY
hbx.hcn=”"; //CONVERSION ATTRIBUTE
hbx.hcv=”"; //CONVERSION VALUE
hbx.cp=”null”; //LEGACY CAMPAIGN
hbx.cpd=”"; //CAMPAIGN DOMAIN

//CUSTOM VARIABLES
hbx.ci=”";//CUSTOMER ID
hbx.hc1=”";//CUSTOM 1
hbx.hc2=”";//CUSTOM 2
hbx.hc3=”";//CUSTOM 3
hbx.hc4=”";//CUSTOM 4
hbx.pec=”";//ERROR CODES

var _hbEC=0,_hbE=new Array;function _hbEvent(a,b){b=_hbE[_hbEC++]=new Object();b._N=a;b._C=0;return b;}
var hbx=_hbEvent(”pv”);hbx.vpc=”HBX0100u”;hbx.gn=”ehg-oreilly.hitbox.com”;

var jlw = “JLW: www.oreillynet.com,/a/network/2005/05/10/geospatialweb.html”;

hbx.acct=”DM52040214SV;DM520404M4ZR”; //ACCOUNT NUMBER(S)
hbx.pn=”The+Geospatial+Web-++A+Call+to+Action”; //PAGE NAME(S)
hbx.mlc=”/a/network/2005/05/10/;/OReilly+Network/a/network/2005/05/10/”; //MULTI-LEVEL CONTENT CATEGORY
hbx.pndef=”title”; //DEFAULT PAGE NAME
hbx.ctdef=”full”; //DEFAULT CONTENT CATEGORY

hbx.lt=”auto”; //LINK TRACKING
hbx.dlf=”n”; //DOWNLOAD FILTER
hbx.dft=”n”; //DOWNLOAD FILE NAMING
hbx.elf=”n”; //EXIT LINK FILTER

//SEGMENTS AND FUNNELS
hbx.seg=”"; //VISITOR SEGMENTATION
hbx.fnl=”"; //FUNNELS

//CAMPAIGNS
hbx.cmp=”"; //CAMPAIGN ID
hbx.cmpn=”CMP”; //CAMPAIGN ID IN QUERY
hbx.hra=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE
hbx.hqsr=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE IN REFERRAL QUERY
hbx.hqsp=”"; //RESPONSE ATTRIBUTE IN QUERY
hbx.hlt=”"; //LEAD TRACKING
hbx.hla=”"; //LEAD ATTRIBUTE
hbx.gp=”"; //CAMPAIGN GOAL
hbx.gpn=”"; //CAMPAIGN GOAL IN QUERY
hbx.hcn=”"; //CONVERSION ATTRIBUTE
hbx.hcv=”"; //CONVERSION VALUE
hbx.cp=”null”; //LEGACY CAMPAIGN
hbx.cpd=”"; //CAMPAIGN DOMAIN

//CUSTOM VARIABLES
hbx.ci=”";//CUSTOMER ID
hbx.hc1=”";//CUSTOM 1
hbx.hc2=”";//CUSTOM 2
hbx.hc3=”";//CUSTOM 3
hbx.hc4=”";//CUSTOM 4
hbx.pec=”";//ERROR CODES

It can be too easy to focus on the mistakes operators make when you’re blogging - a bit like restaurant critics usually have something to critisise with even the best meal. After all, a constant diet of "Golly gosh, it was just scrumptious and the service was fab" would be a little boring for the reader.

But operators do frequently do admirable things and it’s only fair that we recognise this too.

O2 have just announced that for their forthcoming i-mode launch in the UK, they’re sticking to the spirit (if not quite the percentage) of the revenue splits i-mode offered content owners in Japan. O2 will keep a more than reasonable 14%, leaving their partners with a generous 86%, if you need help with the maths.

So if you’re a content owner in the UK, guess which operator is now first on your wish list?

This comes a mere few weeks after O2 showed that they were listening to their customers, as well as bloggers, and changed the way they delivered MMS.

Anyway, this is great news for the UK content industry and a hearty congrats to O2 for getting it right. Let’s hope the other operators follow your lead in due course, though this might be a bit too much to wish for right now.

Gartner’s come out with its assessment of the second-quarter handset market, and there aren’t any surprises, really: Nokia and Motorola continue to eke out gains, while Samsung continues to drop, along with Siemens.

Most stories compare the current quarter’s results to the same quarter last year; I think that looking at last quarter’s share percentages provide a better idea of a company’s momentum and recent execution against its rivals. For instance, in the second quarter of 2004, Samsung had 12.1% share, while in this quarter, it has 12.8%. Those figures mask the fact that the company lost half a point of share from the first quarter of this year.

So here’s how things look comparing this quarter to last quarter:

The biggest movement is from Nokia and Motorola, which are consolidating their lead at the top of the pack. The is reflective of a wider trend of consolidation — the share of companies outside the top 6 dropped by a couple of points. Nokia’s price cuts and the low end and the filling out of its mid-tier look to be helping, while Motorola continues to ride the popularity of just one model — the RAZR. Sony Ericsson, too, looks to have its latest reincarnation of the T610 midrange handset in the K750. Samsung, though, keeps falling. My guess would be that consumers are tired of its one-trick-pony approach to handset design and turning away from its ever-present silver clamshells.

I guess it’s a little late to be outlining the challenges for the manufacturers for the third quarter, since it’s nearly over, so we’ll say the challeges “going forward”: Nokia’s got to continue filling in its product line, not the least of which the middle and low tier and in 3G, where it’s only got 17% of the market. While the N series and 8800 are nice phones, they’re just too expensive to move in mass quantities.

It’s a similar story for Motorola: it’s been riding the RAZR for a good while now, but where are the rest of its hot new designs? The delay of the iTunes phone has been well documented, and all the signs says that when (if?) it ever comes out, it’s going to be a real disappointment, a real step back in looks from the RAZR. There’s supposed to be a slew of models to follow in the RAZR’s footsteps, in terms of both design and annoying names, but they better get a move on lest somebody else seize the Motomomentum.

Samsung’s got to find some new designers. The silver flip stuff has gotten old, and their other designs — or rather their other design, the slider — doesn’t inspire much confidence. Sony Ericsson is well-placed, with the aforementioned K750, and it will be looking to get a boost from its Walkman range. Sometimes I get the impression SE doesn’t mind being a minor player in the market: I think its products are generally pretty solid, and it’s got some hot models in Japan it could adapt for the West that would go over very well. One final question mark is what will happen to Siemens’ market share, as it’s hard to see BenQ hanging on to it.

The idea of mobile sousveillance/coveillance/equiveillance has got legs. Today, Boing Boing links to a Flickr post by a woman that says she snapped a picture of a guy that exposed himself to her on the New York City subway. She later took the photo to police, hoping it would help them catch the guy, but apparently he’s still at large. His face (and moving hands) are all over the Web now, though.

One of the annoying side effects of living in an iPod world is that I frequently find myself having to repeat what I just said, as the other person turns off/down their iPod.

And at the risk of sounding like a real old fart, I’m always muttering warnings to my kids like "it’s too loud, you know" to which they respond "What?" as they turn down their iPods. At which point, I repeat myself (again).

It’s gratifying then (at least for my personal credibility) that doctors in Australia are saying that iPod users (well, any MP3 users actually) are risking long term hearing loss as they are playing them TOO LOUDLY.

In fact, a random survey found that 25% of owners were listening at dangerous volumes - which is thought to be in excess of 80 decibels. By way of comparison, a busy street is 70 decibels and a pneumatic drill is 100.

Apparently, the first danger sign is a ringing in your ears.Or that could just be because your companion has just slapped you round the head as they get fed up with saying everything twice, everything twice.

You have been warned.

Story via W2Forum (registration required). Image from iPod Lounge.

One of my pet themes here is that we’re moving steadily to a world where it’s increasingly easy to access digital data via the mobile phone. As broadband download speeds become the norm, using your mobile to see web pages, will be as commonplace as calling someone.

Of course, many people are already doing this already via WAP, despite relatively slow speeds and that many websites aren’t optimised for mobile access. For instance, in the UK, the ugly duckling (remember WAP is crap?) has grown into a 1.8 billion page impressions a month swan.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg and the use of WAP is limited to a few sites and tasks (like looking up train times) and can’t really be argued to have reached the mainstream yet. This is going to change.

It’s difficult to imagine all the consequences of this. But one struck me this morning, reading an article in The Guardian Online, Reviews on a Plate, about London Eating. London Eating is a pretty simple idea. It’s a site where ordinary diners can post reviews of restaurants - citizen restaurant critics, if you like.

This has proved to be pretty popular, enjoying 100,000 new posts every month and getting 650,000 unique visits, which surely must be a serious percentage of regular restaurant diners in the London area.

The great thing about this is that because they’re written by ordinary people, they reflect the kind of service that you or I would probably experience.Because if restaurant staff see AA Gill or Michael Winner (two famous restaurant critics) walk in their door that evening, they’re obviously going to pull out all the stops for them, even if it penalises other diners. And these guys are just too well known to go incognito.

Now, this is bad news for a not-so-good restaurant. Many people are obviously influenced by such a site when planning a meal out.

But if this guide were easily usable with your mobile phone, imagine what it might do to passing trade? If there’s three or four restaurants in the immediate vicinity, the review on your mobile is certainly going to have an influence on where you decide to spend your money.

Clearly, there are problems with such a system. Competitors can fake reviews or customers with a unjustified grudge can unfairly critique you. But as more and more people start to post to these types of guides, the faux review will start to stand out and we’ll learn to spot the genuine.

This will clearly be an unpleasant and un-nerving experience for many restaurateurs. But if they consistently deliver good value, good service and good food, they have nothing to worry about.

Another example of the shift of the balance of power to the community.

There have been plenty of people, err… pumping up the mobile porn market, not the least of which the mobile porn sellers themselves, billing the content as the ever-elusive “killer app” for mobile. The numbers have been a little suspect all along, whether it’s saying half of Korea has accessed mobile porn, or the supposed billions mobile porn will pull in. But a piece in the Guardian does some calculations, and comes to the conclusion that maybe things aren’t as big as they’re made out to be (no pun intended).

If you buy in to the analyst prediction that mobile porn will be worth $2.3 billion in 2010, there’s a few takeaways: first, that’s not tremendous growth in dollar terms from the $1 billion market they say mobile porn will be this year. Second, there should be well over 3 billion mobile users by 2010, compared with 1 billion today — so porn spending per subscriber won’t even hold steady. Finally, that $2.3 billion would represent just 5% of the overall mobile content market, hardly making it a killer app.

There will always be porn consumers. But it’s hard to believe there are that many dedicated enough to want porn on their mobile phones, as opposed to the TV or internet. As Mike points out at Techdirt, porn helped cable and satellite TV, VCRs, DVD players and the net thrive, mainly because each successive technology offered an improvement in the viewing experience. The only benefit mobile porn offers (alongside a few drawback) is portability, but how many people want to watch porn when they’re on the go, out in public?

But the most interesting comments come from one Julia Dimambro, the MD of mobile porn purveyor Cherry Media, who alleges operators are playing down porn because they don’t want to be seen as promoting it. While carriers do have a love-hate affair with porn, their restraint appears to have more to do with reality about the level of demand setting in than any puritanical leadings, and Ms. Dimambro’s numbers about the popularity of her company’s site seem to prove this.

She said back in February it was getting 1 million hits per month. Now, the Guardian says it gets 300,000 hits a month. The fact that hits are a useless metric aside, the figures raise two possibilities. Either the company’s playing fast and loose with its numbers to try and make the market look bigger than it really is, or it’s seen a dramatic drop over the last six months. Whichever is true, neither one reflects too well on the company or the mobile porn industry.