One of the more bizarre mini-rants I witnessed at CTIA was the representative of a major record label publicly berating operators about holding back the mobile music industry, with the accusation that they “just didn’t get it”. This from a sector who couldn’t even see “it”, let alone get it for the last 6 years. [...]
I posted a couple of weeks ago about a mobile version of Pop Idol, that was billed as “The People’s Idol” from Finland.
But now we have a true People’s Idol, as the people have wrested the Idol concept away from the media. In a real demonstration of community power and User Generated Content, I present [...]
Apologies to Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, but sometimes you just need a title. Anyhow, I just wanted to point to two posts fellow Mobilist Rudy de Waele’s written this week that were both pretty excellent.
First, on gotomobile, he takes Russell’s recent posts about Google as well as what I wrote about mobile design [...]
Have you ever had someone explain in detail how Marlboro ciggies were owned by the Klu Klux Klan, pointing as evidence to Ks and horses on the packaging?
Or the one about Procter & Gamble donating a proportion on profits to the Church of Satan? That logo of theirs gives the game away apparently.
The trouble is [...]
There’s been a bit of an uproar in the US the last couple of weeks over the online sale of people’s mobile phone records. The basic idea is that you go to one of these Web sites, pay $100 or $150, give them a phone number, and within a few hours, they send you the [...]
I’ve talked before about how cameraphones are proving their social value, whether it’s as sousveillance tools, or empowering stupid criminals, or how they’re helping supplant actual memories with digital ones. But, I’m fairly convinced I’ve been missing the real value of cameraphones: to provide evidence to our friends for otherwise unbelievable anecdotes.
I say this after [...]
You’ve undoubtedly heard about the Sony DRM Rootkit fiasco. Just to recap, Sony BMG CDs installed a rootkit as part of their copy-protection scheme. The software hides itself on Windows computers, and acts like malware, and can break systems if users try to remove it. It even phones home back to Sony — some people [...]
A commenter on Russell’s earlier post about Gizmondo execs and their interesting management payment plans turned us on to a little further scandal earlier in the week regarding some previous extracurricular activities of some of their executive team — apparently some of them had done some time in Sweden for fraud and organized crime.
In an [...]
I’ve been pretty upfront lately about my distaste for copy protection and DRM. I have no problem paying for content; I just don’t like having my options of how I choose to enjoy it being limited by the short-sighted greed of companies looking to lock me in to their proprietary products. People in general do [...]
NYC police have arrested a man they believe to be the guy caught on cameraphone exposing himself to a woman on the city’s subway. Behold the power of the cameraphone.