ouroboros

Product Haiku

 Heidi Cody rules.  I mean, c'mon.  Product haiku?  Seriously.  Sweeeeet.  5-7-5, holmes.  Check it.

May 2008: 592 MM of China's 1.3B have mobile phones

Wow.  Not only is that huge from an ownership, personal use and network effect standpoint, consider "China's Mobile Revolution", by Michael Sheridanin, from the UK's 8 June Sunday Times.

"The mobile phone came of age in China...when [the] earthquake ripped through Sichuan province...victims used their phones to call for rescue, soldiers used civilian networks to organize supplies, families used text messages to exchange news of survival or loss and an increasingly angry group of citizens spread word of protests against corruption and lax building standards. The national conversation kept going thanks to a military-style logistics operation by the rival phone companies.

So integrated is the mobile communications device into Chinese society that the authorities have been puzzling for ages over the best way to channel investment for the future...[but] the government may soon discover that regulating the telecoms providers is a minor challenge compared with controlling the citizens who will ultimately use their services to communicate with each other."

In a January post Emily Turrettini noted ABCnet.au's report on "the ability of the Chinese Government to spy on the country's 500 million mobile phone users."  According to ABCnet, "Wang Jianzhou, head of China Mobile, stunned delegates [to the World Economic Forum in Davos] by revealing that the company had unlimited access to the personal data of its [300MM] customers and handed it over to Chinese security officials when demanded. 'We know who you are, but also where you are,' said the CEO."

Thank goodness OUR government and telco operators would never compromise our privacy like that...oh heck.

Neil Perkin's Rocking Presentation on the Changing Physics of Media. Please watch it.

If you haven't seen it yet, you probably didn't catch Charlie the Unicorn before it got 20MM views.

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"Karp Rocks", or "The Innovator's Dilemma", or "My Shiny New Mantra"

Thank you, Publishing 2.0.  Scott Karp's "Google AdWords: A Brief History of Online Advertising Innovation" is a post well worth the read for a look back to when Google's global supremacy was not a foregone conclusion.  In it, Karp lays out the historical context and decisions that set Skynet on their current trajectory.

At the article's conclusion, Karp says this:

"The challenge of innovation is that we are all boxed in by what we know, by our assumptions about how things work...The next Google-like innovation is right in front of us — we just need to see past our own assumptions."

"Forget what you know."

A life philosophy in four words.

Kids Books go Mobile...sweeeet

from TokyoMango via Textually.org: New in Japan: Cell Phone Picture Books

Mobile phone novels were hot last year. But reading an entire novel on your cell phone scrEen, no matter how cool it sounds, can be really tasking. That's why, in March, a Japanese printing company debuted its first cell phone picture book. 

The picture book will be read page by page, like a kamishibai—no scrolling, just clicking from page to page. It will include both popular children's titles and original content. You can buy them online for 100-200 yen each. The company hopes to have 50 titles and 10,000 downloads by September.

:-( Despair

LHC 'Doomsday' Suit

file under 'Sweeeeeet'.

slashdot pops this one:

Mar 27, 2008 22:38:00 GMT smooth wombat writes "a former nuclear safety officer and others are suing the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop the use of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) until its safety is reassessed. The plaintiffs cite three possible 'doomsday' scenarios which might occur if the LHC becomes operational: the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter, the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets or the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter. CERN will hold a public open house meeting on April 6 with word having been spread to some researchers to be prepared to answer questions on microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked."

I'm checking into direct flights right now.  Where the hell is CERN?

PHONES TO OUTSELL TV SETS IN 2008

[shamelessly lifted from textually.org]

Consumers worldwide will buy more multimedia mobile phones than TV sets this year, according to a new report from Research and Markets. [via The Hollywood Reporter]

"The Dublin, Ireland-based firm predicts that 300 million such phones that can play audio and video and browse the Internet will be sold in 2008. Its new report, "Mobile Media 2008: The Third Screen for Entertainment," also found that half the world's population, or 3.3 billion people, now have a mobile phone subscription. "

***Sob***

Thank you, Icanhascheezburger.com, for understanding my pain.

Nokia + Trolltech - OpenSource goodness?

Nokia's making big waves in the OpenSource, app dev and social networking front. 

This Trolltech bit torn shamelessly from Engadget Mobile - (love that graphic)

"In a move meant to bolster its software development prowess, Nokia just announced the acquisition Trolltech. Who's Trolltech? Well, its software can be found in some 10 million devices. In fact, Trolltech's Qt is used by such familiar applications as Skype, Google Earth, and Photoshop Elements while their Qtopia was spotted on a hacked Archos 5 series earlier this month. By acquiring Trolltech's software development frameworks and application platforms, Nokia hopes to help developers create Internet applications that work on PCs and across Nokia devices.  Specifically, Nokia claims that the move will "further increase the competitiveness of S60 and Series 40."

In other words, this helps Nokia connect you and your applications across PC's, mobile devices, etc. - and it gives a ray of hope to folks who've waited a long time for a Symbian overhaul/upgrade.  But wait - there's more - beyond the acquisition of Jaiku and NavTeq, now there are the Facebook rumors.  Finns rock.

Anything that creates a simplified cross platform mobile development landscape is interesting to marketers and will ultimately be for consumers. 

Anything that makes mobile UI better is, well, better.

Heffernan calls it like she sees it

Late, I know, but still worth the pop. In last Sunday's 'The Medium', Virginia Heffernan, wrote a killer column entitled "Art in the Age of Franchising".

I'll quote briefly:

"An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions...Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication, the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans. It’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture. In fact, rhizome art is both lower-brow (“American Idol,” Derek Waters’s “Drunk History”) and more avant-garde (“Battlestar Galactica,” Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area”) than linear, author-controlled narrative, which takes its cues from the middle-class form of the novel."

So you aren't just retrograde if you aren't thinking interactively when it comes to storytelling - you are bourgeoise. I'm not saying - I'm just saying.