I know 15 cents is not a lot of money, but when you are trying to convince your 60 year old father to send texts, 15 cents is a big hurdle.He can’t fathom why on earth he would pay anything for a short message that is difficult for him to type, when he can pick up the phone and call me for free.I am not sure if it’s a generational thing or if it is really a cost thing, but.nevertheless, t-mobile is not going to make this adoption fight any easier.
First it was Sprint Nextel who raised their SMS rates, then Cingular Wireless and then at that point how could Verizon resist.T-Mobile has now joined the pack by raising individual SMS prices from 10 cents to 15 cents, effective June 1.
On the positive side, for all of you camera phone addict out there, unlike t-mobile’s predecessors, they actually will be decreasing the cost of MMS from 25 cents to 15.
CBS News and Fox News announced partnerships with social networking solutions developer Neighborhood America to enable citizen journalists to upload their user-generated video news reports for possible network broadcast. Fox News’ UR Report service debuted Monday and will enable viewers to submit video clips from their mobile handsets and PCs to the network’s website–according to Neighborhood America, Fox News programs including “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity & Colmes” and “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” will each air user-generated content on a daily basis.
For CBS News, Neighborhood America developed CBS Springboard, bolstering the network’s existing citizen journalism service with mobile access via the company’s 2006 acquisition of wireless solutions provider Movo Mobile. Neighborhood America will also approve all videos uploaded to the CBS News website, further verifying mobile content to guarantee it originates from a local source.
I have been waiting for a long long time to finally blog about this. Sharpcast today introduced a powerful new version of Sharpcast Photos mobile edition, delivering a completely new way to view entire photo collections on mobile phones, share desktop PC and web photos from anywhere, and get camera-phone photos automatically to a person’s PC and the web where they can be enjoyed more easily. The new Sharpcast Photos mobile edition, available today as a free download at www.sharpcast.com/download, gives consumers fast, fully automatic synchronization of their photos between their mobile phone or wireless PDA, all the PCs they use, and the web. Sharpcast Photos is the debut service built on the company’s patent-pending universal push synchronization platform, which marks the first instance where Blackberry-like push synchronization capability is available to the average consumer, outside of an enterprise setting. It automatically backs up photo collections online, organizes them into web albums, and keeps the collection constantly up to date across all of a person’s mobile phone, all their PCs and the web. Sharpcast eliminates the every-day hassles of manual uploading, tedious sharing processes, forgotten backups and sync cables so people can get on with creating and enjoying their media.
Sharpcast Photos mobile edition currently supports Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphones, including popular devices such as the Samsung Blackjack, the Palm Treo 700w, the Motorola Q, and the HTC Star Trek (Cingular 3125) and the UT Starcom 6700, among dozens of others. I tried downloading it on my HTC Excalibur but apparently my Microsoft.Net Compact is not update. Anyways, more phone platforms will be supported in 2007
With the new Sharpcast Photos mobile edition client, photos taken on a person’s phone are instantaneously sent to the web and to their desktop PC, in the background, with absolutely no intervention required on the part of the user. It is true invisible computing. The gentlemen at Sharpcast are always wary when talking with me because they think I focus to much on the mobile side. It is true and I do see there point. The magic thing about Sharpcast is that it does not matter what device you have with you… your pictures and information will always be there.
Photos on the person’s desktop PC and in their online web albums are automatically visible on their mobile phone in full-screen view, without having to rely on sync cables or a mobile web browser. The organization of the albums are kept perfectly intact on the phone, and photos stream instantaneously down to the phone as they are viewed, as if the entire collection is on the phone at all times. The mobile edition is a client customized for mobile phones that allows people to share albums right from their phone directly to other people’s desktop PCs, in such a way that neither the sender or the receiver ever has to worry about the hassle of sync cables, mobile web browsers or cumbersome registrations or sign-ups. It’s faster and simpler than mobile photo sharing has ever been.
Sharpcast Photos is unlike any other photo service due to its continuous multi-way synchronization which keeps a person’s PC in perfect sync with the web and with their mobile phone. For example, when photos are edited in one location such as a home PC, the change is made everywhere else instantaneously and automatically on the person’s other PCs and in their online web albums. If photos are added through a web browser while away from home, those photos automatically appear on the person’s home PC and on their mobile phone.
Because Sharpcast Photos includes powerful desktop software and does not rely solely on web access like most services, people have access to their entire photo collection from anywhere even when they don’t have web access. Changes made to a collection while offline, for example on an airplane, automatically synchronize the next time the person connects to the internet.
Now, To add to this Sharpcast and Alltel Wireless today announced that Sharpcast Photos has been selected as the standard and exclusive photo sharing and synchronization application for Alltel Wireless’ line of Windows Mobile-powered smartphones, including the new Palm Treo 700wx and the UTStarcom PPC6700. Sharpcast Photos will be available on most new Windows Mobile smartphones from Alltel Wireless. Any existing Windows Mobile phone owner can download the application and sign up for their free Sharpcast Photos account at www.sharpcast.com/Alltel.
This is an extremely powerful tool and one that I would definitely keep my eye on.
MobileActive has a great article on a new mobile-to-Internet video communication service called Veeker and their debut of their mobile phone as a video capture and communication device during this year’s U.S. election.
Veekers “Veek The Vote” received over 750 mobile video messages from Americans using the video camera in a mobile phone to show the world where they stood on Election Day (thats a lot compared to Rock the Votes 24 submissions and Video the Votes 96). “Veek the Vote 2006†was the result of a partnership between Veeker and YouthNoise (www.youthnoise.com), the Internet’s first social network for youth dedicated to social change.
“I appreciate the work that activists from across the country, like those on VeekTheVote.com, have done to identify existing problems, and to help protect the rights that we all enjoy,” states recently re-elected U.S. Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) about Veek the Vote 2006.
Snap a photo. Send it to PhotoCrank. Get the picture back personalized with captions etc. Share with your family and friends. At least that is what it says on the PhotoCrank website. Various captions get added based on the email address you send the picture to.
So taking a picture and sending it to golddigger@photocrank.com will cause a picture like the following to be sent back to your phone. The whole shebang will cost you 30 cents billed directly by your carrier… that is if you can remember the plethora of email addresses and their corresponding caption.
I think that PhotoCrank definitely has a future but I still prefer applications like Comeks which has a bunch of captions and editing options directly on my phone and is, most importantly, free.
Simply put, Citizen Calling is an experiment being done by the British Parliaments Home Affairs Committee which is experimenting to see whether mobile phones are a good way for people (especially young people) and their governments to interact. UK Citizens can interact via txt, video, audio, or pictures.
Hey, thats not my dog. What is it doing in my Flickr gallery! That is what this guy who has a blog called the Practicalist (yes, he even has quotes from Richard Rorty) was saying to himself after his cell phone was stolen and who ever it was that stole his cell phone was taking pictures and loading them up to the original owners Flickr account via Shozu (one of my all time favorite mobile applications).
He has some pretty nifty insight on the philo/socio importance of this happening
My cell phone was stolen last Friday. I had it disconnected and arranged to get a replacement. It had been set up with the excellent service from ShoZu to automatically upload all pictures taken with the phone to Flickr. So today, completely surprisingly, I find pictures on my Flickr account of the family of the person who took the phone. I’m not sure they knew what was happening (they replaced the SIM card with their own, clearly, but probably didn’t notice ShoZu), I have no way to find my phone with these pictures, and I’ve disabled my ShoZu account so it won’t happen again. See update, below.
But: what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don’t just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior. The photos are below.
Its also interesting to note that my buddy Andy Tiller (CTO of Shozu) points out that if the guy had enabled Shozu’s contact backup then all he has to do is sign into his Shozu account to see the thief’s friends and family backed up on the blog.
Yesterday my grandparents got new cell phones. the cell phones they had where no longer being serviced and it was time to change. My grandfather got a Razr and my grandmother got a and LG phone, the exact model number of which eludes me at the moment but they are both Cingular branded. I went over to their apartment yesterday to help them out with their new phones ( I have some thoughts on this experience, which I want o write about later) . I loaded their numbers into their phone and taught them how to do a lot of things, one of which was how to send a picture message. It blew them away. I doubt they will ever do it.
You can create your own ringtones, create your own wallpaper (and even sell them)… the day is comming when soon you will be able to invent your own mobile game… but until that longtail day there is the Hungarian based Mobile Games Database which allows you to create your own unique game for your mobile phone!
Simply put the companies technology allows you install a game onto your computer of which you can upload personal images for automatic insertion into a free mobile game.
For now its a Java shooting game so careful which persona who load up.
