A judge in a US federal court in New York has ordered Google to hand over the entire YouTube logging database, revealing the viewing habits and history of YouTube users. While I’m optimistic that this order will get reversed — as it violates the Video Privacy Protection Act and completely tramples individuals’ privacy solely because Viacom is too lazy to follow DMCA takedown processes — it’s still appalling. Both because it’s a horrible decision by a federal judge, but also because Viacom thinks that this is an acceptable way to act in lieu of finding a modern business model.
So, accordingly, I suggest we give Viacom what they want. Watch videos like the one I made and embedded below. Make your own, and upload them to YouTube, use the tag “screwyouviacom” — and be sure to upload an extra copy and mark it Private, since Viacom also wants every private video users have uploaded. Spread them around, make them show up in these logs and maybe Viacom will notice that they’re not helping their business, they’re alienating their audience by trampling all over its privacy.
The overwhelming impression that you get when attending any mobile event is that everyone there is a bloke wearing either a grey suit or a blazer/chinos combo. In fact, at a recent event, I had to smile as I overheard someone arranging to meet someone they didn’t know when they said
“I’m wearing a blue blazer, light blue shirt and chinos” as if this would help identify him in some way.
But there are a whole bunch of talented non-blokes out there and Mobile Entertainment runs a feature today in which the Top 50 Women in Mobile are profiled.
Congratulations to Mobile Entertainment for the initiative and to all the women on the list, especially the ones I nominated. I just hope they still speak to us lesser mortals from now on - by which I obviously mean, men.
I’ve been spending a while playing with Nimbuzz, a service that aggregates IM and VoIP for your mobile (currently S60 and Java). I’m really impressed, particularly as there have been so many other aggregators with similar goals that have failed miserably. It pretty much does what you’d expect and hope: you enter in your details for your various IM accounts, and it pulls them all into the Nimbuzz app on your mobile, where you can text or voice chat from them.
It does this stuff better than native apps in many cases — for instance, I think it does Skype better than the official Skype mobile app. It’s worked well for me over a Wi-Fi connection (voice quality of a chat from a Skype user on PC to my mobile was perfect), and I imagine it would do well on 3G. For those of us on 2.5G nets, you can switch from pure VoIP to a local dial-in bridge (much the way the 3 Skypephone works, etc.).
One additional feature Nimbuzz offers that I think is quite cool are a selection of widgets, which you can use to integrate Nimbuzz into your social-networking profiles. For instance, the image here is from my Facebook profile. By putting the Nimbuzz app in my profile, people can click on the various buttons to contact me in different ways. The widgets currently work with more than 20 social-networking sites, and you can also use them in your email signature. So somebody could click on the “call me” button, and if I’m logged in on PC or mobile, they can start a VoIP call with me, and so on. It’s nice to see this sort of integration with existing social networks, rather than trying to force users to adopt something completely new. It’s also great that Nimbuzz can extend these networks to mobile, often in more complete ways than the networks’ native mobile services offer.
Nimbuzz said this week that they’d raised a second round of funding of $15 million, which they’ll certainly need to negotiate this crowded market, but I think they have a good shot as I’ve been pretty impressed with the service thus far. The business model — of course — remains the biggest issue, but they’ve said they’re looking into white-label services as well as some mobile advertising plays. One other sticking point: the S60 client is a 1.1 megabyte download, which is pretty hefty.
Andrew recently asked a question from the floor at a conference in which he called me the “Grandfather of Mobile Marketing”. While I appreciated the sentiment, I told the assembled delegates that in fact, I was the Godfather
I was speaking yesterday at the Broadband Connect conference in London. I couldn’t stay and mix as much as I’d have liked, but it was full of delegates and speakers who don’t often collide with the pure mobile technology and advertising worlds that I normally inhabit. This is interesting, as it gives some new perspectives that I hadn’t necessarily thought about before.
The biggest such perspective is that the destruction of the walled gardens of TV broadcast are going to tumble down in the same way that it happened on the web and more latterly on the mobile web. I guess it’ll also happen eventually in mobile access as we get more choice over how we connect to The Cloud for our voice and data needs.
I was obviously peripherally aware of the walled gardens of broadcast being threatened eventually. After all, just as in nature, the walled gardens always decay and fall down at some point, allowing a natural habitat to return and dominate over the artificial and controlled environment. However, I didn’t realise that it was quite this imminent in broadcast TV. Already you can get some Sky programmes without a subscription and if you’re prepared to go illegal and Bit Torrent, you can get pretty much anything you want.
Also, as the great and remarkably geeky, Stephen Fry pointed out in his latest Podgram, the BBC’s iPlayer has accelerated this process by liberating their content. Sure, it can only be accessed by UK residents currently, but as any 15 year old will show you, getting around this restriction is trivial for a screen ager.
There’s lots of chaos coming down the line in the next decade - and possibly chaos is the natural order of things in the future. But chaos leads to lots of opportunities for the brave and the fast. There’s simply never been a better time to be a fledgling entrepreneur. What’s your idea and what are you going to do about it?
If you’re still trying to figure out what this new, open-source Symbian will be all about, check out The Symbian Foundation unwrapped” by Rafe Blandford over at All About Symbian. Rafe knows as much about Symbian as anybody, and has posted the definitive piece on this big development.
First, the multiple UIs and platforms on top of the Symbian OS — S60, UIQ and MOAP — are disappearing and will be integrated into a single, unified platform with a common UI framework (with S60 at the core). That’s a big advancement in itself.
Second, Symbian will be available royalty-free. Anybody that wants to use it in handsets, or have access to the complete code, will just have to join the Symbian Foundation for $1500 a year. That essentially erases Android’s price advantage, and could lead to a raft of Symbian-based devices for the mid- and low-tier from OEM vendors.
Third, this should significantly enhance the ability of the Symbian platform to support custom UIs. As I’ve written before, this will be a key area of competition for mobile OSes, and the ability for manufacturers to create their own UI enhancements will be crucial. See my comment on that earlier post for a bit of I told you so :): “Perhaps it’s something that can change in future — making it easier for people to create custom UIs on top of Symbian, rather than having to license one of the existing ones.” Add in the ability for operators to further customize the UI of said devices (witness AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone as initial supporters of the Symbian foundation), and there could be an even bigger push here. And maybe we will see that Facebook mobile UI, too…
As I said, this is a big, big deal. The Symbian OS has essentially become free, and this is a smart move on Nokia’s part as it stands to gain significantly from the further spread of Symbian and S60. It’s a significant answer to Android, and a good response to the iPhone as it should allow for a lot of innovation in the UI. What do you think?
I’ll have some more on the Symbian news in a bit, but thought I’d get this up first. Russell’s apparently a bit of a mobile history buff, and something he’s mentioned before is Hutchison’s Rabbit phone system, which it launched in May 1992… and shut down in December 1993. Rabbit was a great big cordless phone system. Users carried a Rabbit handset around, and when they were within 100m of a Rabbit transmitter, they could make calls. Incoming calls simply weren’t offered — so it’s hard not to see the limited attraction of this sort of service.
Fast forward to 2008, and the Rabbit history lesson is still useful, what with the launch of mobile VoIP services that work only over Wi-Fi, or even with services calling themselves “mobile” phone networks. Check out UK01, which bills itself as “the UK’s 6th mobile phone network.” The company behind UK01 won one of the low-power GSM licenses offered by Ofcom last year, so they’re rolling out their picocells on “hundreds of payphone kiosks”. Interesting, right?
Give a spotter’s badge to Patrick at SMS Text News, who noticed an important detail on the site’s instructions page: “When you leave the UK01 location simply change SIM cards.” Meaning put the SIM from your real operator back into your phone. UK01 does give you a number so people can call you, but that call will only go through if you’re in range of one of their picocells (the site doesn’t give any indication where they are, by the way) and have the SIM in. Otherwise, it’s voicemail.
Sound familiar?
(Also, yes, I did notice that UK01’s site is at http://uk01.mobi, and it doesn’t seem to serve up mobile content if you visit it from a handset browser, and it of course fails the ready.mobi test. And yes, I thought that thing was supposed to be against the rules of .mobi, as it sort of undermines the whole position that when people see a .mobi site, they know it’s for their mobile phone, and so on…)
Hard on the heels of yesterday’s announcement from Google that the launch of Android would be delayed from the second quarter to the fourth, is a potentially huge one from Symbian that could make Android completely irrelevant when devices eventually do start to ship.
It’s too early to see exactly how the Symbian news will play out. But the bottom line is that Nokia are buying all their partners out (including Sony Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens), while simultaneously establishing the Symbian Foundation, an open source, royalty-free platform in conjunction with industry giants, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.
According to AdMob Metrics, Symbian already has a 55% share in the market globally [added to clarify: of the Smartphone sector] and considerably higher in some markets. These stats are skewed towards mobile web users obviously, but I don’t think that’s misrepresenting anything in this case. But trying to play catchup in a market where Google is still very much a novice, is going to be very hard.
Of course, even if Android doesn’t work at all for Google, they don’t really care in the wider scheme of things, provided that more and more people come to the mobile web via an Android-like experience, Google will still benefit by being able to serve up ads. At least that’s the theory posited in a new Wired article today, for which Chetan Sharma (buy his book) was interviewed.
And if they don’t? Not much downside. If the only thing Android achieves — as Page knew before Rubin walked into Google three years ago — is getting more people to spend more time online, then Google still profits. More users mean more people viewing pages with Google ads. If they’re doing that from an Android phone, great. If not, but they’re on a phone made more Web-friendly thanks to competitive pressure from Google, that’s also fine. “I hope it’s Android,” Page says. But either way, Google wins.
Of course, it’s not quite as black and white as that. Android doesn’t really need to apply this type of pressure anymore - now we have the iPhone. Android doesn’t need to provide an open source alternative - we have Symbian and Linux. And there’s also an implicit assumption that all these ads in the new mobile world will be Google’s.
This one shows Martin Cooper, widely regarded as the Father of the Mobile. The photo was taken back in 1983, although the mobile looks much smaller and sleeker than I remember them being in those days.
It’s not a new idea though as the first working prototype was deployed in 1922 in Chicago, as a radio telephone used by the police. I had no idea that Sting was that old.
I’ve been spending a while playing with 
