With emails from “the new” at&t (AKA “the old” Cingular) and Apple flooding out to hungry fans, myself included, I have a question: How will Apple’s iTunes music and video walled garden play, if at all, with the rest of at&t’s walled gardens? As near as can be interpreted from the various, and limited, public statements, iPhone will allow side-loading from the user’s PC of iTunes content. (No word as of yet whether users will be allowed to download new content OTA directly from the iTunes store, although the EDGE network speed would make this possibility a painful one, if realized.)
Whereas at&t’s normal, or feature, phones allow access to several music services, again via side-loading, but not, curiously, Apple’s iTunes. (The older Motorola devices that allowed users to side-load iTunes content are quickly fading from at&t’s catalog.) Video provides an even starker contrast. iPhone users can side-load full, feature-length movies purchased from iTunes, but at&t feature phone users are limited to streaming clips of the rather slim selection made available by their Cingular Video service.
So, in sum:
- iPhone - Users can sideload iTunes music and video content to their heart’s desire, but can’t download when they are out and about, even if they wanted to at 2G speeds
- at&t feature phones - Users can sideload everything BUT iTunes on most devices; They can download streaming video, but from a limited selection of content
At the very least, it appears both partners are content to have their own walled gardens, and corresponding streaming vs. side-loading standards. I, for one, am eager to see how these new neighbors socialize.
Any honest guy will tell you that a successful night encompasses 3 things. 1) Your good buddies, 2) Alcohol and 3) Eye Candy. If any of these ingredients are missing the night out can turn for the worse pretty quickly. Now, the first two are easy to come by but the 3rd element is always a hit or a miss… that is, of course, until HoneyAlert.com a new niche SMS marketing tool dedicated to alerting you via text message about where all the good looking girls (Honeys) are.
Is it just me or do I see this service getting abused by bars just reporting that there are hot girl there?
Anyways, for 20 pounds a year (the service is currently only launched in the UK with US service in the works) you will receive regular text alerts updating you as to the status of where all the “fit” girls are.
What kind of smartmob is this called?
Here are some example text alerts:
EH2 Henry Js 6-8 girls out for a works do. 7+ outa 10.
EH1 Candy Bar George St. fit birds are taking over the place, I’m not joking.
B1 52 Degrees North a 21st birthday party of about ten mostly all pretty hot .
PO13 Stunners just walked into HaHa bar. All 8 or 9 outa 10. Marvellous norks
What’s a nork?
Anyways, the service is completely participatory allowing you to take your stalker skills to a whole new level in allowing you to become a “spotter” and text in to report when you see a gaggle of geese (or so they say) You can also make a little dough with your stalker skills as HoneyAlert will pay a percentage of the money generated from all text message alerts out to the person that sends them the intel.
I can imagine called StudAlert.com coming soon as well… or are girls just not that desperate?
There’s an interesting read online from the BBC about the convergence happening between our digital and physical lives thanks to the wonders of mobile technology. A quick quote from the article:
“IBM’s master inventor Zygmunt Lozinski explained his vision does not simply involve accessing Second Life from your phone - it involves using your mobile as a bridge between the virtual world and the real world.” (emphasis mine)
A good read especially because of it’s highly sought after status on Techmeme today and the implications that it has about people’s growing understanding on what mobile really has to offer and how it compares vis-a-vis the beloved Web 2.0.
Do not say that Telus did not warn you when they justified briefly providing adult services on their deck after reviewing its customers’ mobile Web browsing habits. The company found, he said, that 13 of the 25 most-popular sites were “adult content. Telus had to end their little fling with sin but, as I predicted, thats not going to stop the porn industry from going mobile.
Check out todays announcement by Spanish adult entertainment conglomerate Cherrysauce of Moistmob a new off-deck WAP site presided over by porn “actress†Tera Patrick on which she will also maintain a blog featuring Moistmob news, content updates, promotions, and personal entries in which she’ll update fans as to who’s been doing what to her, how often, and in which orifices.
Very nice. Its going to be interesting to see how the inevitability of adult mobile content plays out in the market.
People who are familiar with Canada’s Telus Mobile cute little monkey mascot might have been surprised to find them wandering around the outskirts of Hall 7 at last weeks 3GSM in Barcelona Spain. For those of you that may not know what I am talking about, Hall 7 was the mobile content hall that also showcased a whole area of mobile porn providers.
According to an article in todays New York Times Telus is now providing its customers with on-deck soft-core pornography for download onto their mobile devices making them the first service in North America to sell sex related mobile content over the phone.
There was not much fanfare about it when they added it to the deck allowing, after a credit card age verification check, customers to buy naked photos of men or woman for 3 Canadian dollars or 1 - 2 minute video clips for 4 Canadian dollars.
According to Telus the decision to provide adult content came after viewing what people where searching on the mobile web off-deck.
Jim Johannsson, a Telus spokesman in Edmonton, Alberta, said the company decided to offer the new service after reviewing its customers’ mobile Web browsing habits. The company found, he said, that 13 of the 25 most-popular sites were what he called “adult content.â€â€œI was surprised that there was this much going on,†he said.
Mr. Johannsson said Telus was aware of the stigma that is attached to companies that provide sex-related content. But, he said, “we saw that a lot of clients were going to adult entertainment Web sites, so we came to grips with the reality that this is a use of cellphones today.â€
In the area of mobile security the move is smart in that off-deck mobile adult content could be filled with all sorts of malicious code, virus’ and the works. Giving people the ability to download content from the carrier provides a safe alternative for users.
Besides calling into question deep concerns over the issue of viewing such content in private spaces, the move to provide such content has already been condemned by the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, British Columbia, the companies home town. A boycott of Telus is of course in the works, but Telus’ competitors (which do not provide mobile porn) provide said adult content on their other media outlets of which they are corporately bound to.
But before they try to give Telus to hard of a spanking, perhaps they should consider that Telus’ mascot is a monkey monkey.
Myxer.com (a service of mVisible), known for being a place where you can easily make and share mobile content (especially, but not limited to Ringtones), today announced the launch of MyxerMagic – a free download that lets users send any online image to their mobile phone right from their existing web browser (kind of like the Google Send To Phone extension but goes way beyond text!). From my first looks at the product it appears that MyxerMagic truly eliminates the need for file downloads, format conversions, serial or Bluetooth connections, and other tedious operations that have previously been required to get content to mobile phones.
The browser extension can be downloaded for free at www.myxermagic.com. Essentially, It extends the functionality of Internet Explorer or Firefox to add a “Myxer - Send image to phone!†command into the right mouse-click menu. Users also have the ability to send images to friends’ and family members’ mobile phones (spam potential?).
But of course, for those of you that are anal about your mobile content , MyxerMagic comes with a powerful web-based image editor to re-size, re-shape, or otherwise manipulate images to best fit a phone’s display. Like all of Myxer’s functionality, MyxerMagic works with ANY mobile device (that accepts MMS) and is carrier-independent, meaning it doesn’t matter which provider the user’s phone is with or what plan they are on.
“Myxer is about more than just customizing your mobile phone with ringtones and wallpapers – it’s really about leveraging the respective strengths of the internet and the mobile phone to make digital content easily discoverable and accessible anywhere you are,†said Myk Willis, founder and chief technology officer of mVisible Technologies, Inc., the company behind Myxer. “MyxerMagic completely rewrites the rules of how user-generated content is consumed, because for the first time ever, all digital content is one click away from being mobile content.â€
And he is right! In the future Willis envisions expanding the service to be able to pull ANY web content, from video, sound clips video, text, whatever, thus truly turning any web content into mobile content.
The potential for this taking off is huge. The ability to scrape content form any online venue or site or home-page (besides creating possible copy-write issues) has immense possibilities especially in the areas of viral marketing and messaging. Imagine something like a politician saying something stupid. Within an hour its on the web and within another our people are simply ubiquitously right clicking their mouse and sending the sound clip to their mobile phone as a ringtone. Or perhaps a picture of Tom Cruise delivering a baby on the side of an LA freeway makes its way onto the web. Technology like Myxermagic makes it easy to spread it to mobile wall papers throughout the country.
Of course MMS message rates will apply but I think that MMS has finally found an application to bring it to the marketing forefront.
Ok, as a die hard 24 fan iI have to write about the mobile marketing blitz being done around the series. As many of you know, the above add played a couple of times during the 4 hour season 6 premier. The commercial asked 24 fans to text “24″ to the Shortcode “Jack” which they, stupidly, do not show as being 5225.
I picked up my phone immediately only to get a message from Jack telling me that I entered an invalid number. I then realized that this was a Sprint thing and I could not participate… something I also consider to be a pretty interesting choice.
I mean, I get it. Sprint is a major sponsor of the show and all the cell phones used in 24 are sprint phones (like when Jack Bauer blew up a bomb strapped to a terrorist with his Sprint Treo 650. But I also noticed some sponsorship mention from “the new” AT&T wireless. Shouldn’t non Sprint users get some 24 mobile love as well?
Anyways, I knew that my work has a plethora of Sprint Power vision phones (a requirement to play) so I knew I could just do it tomorrow.
As soon as I got into work I asked for a Sprint phone to play with, texted “24″ to 5225 and boom!
Thanks for your interest in 24! Go to the following link and check back often for cool stuff!! http://gospv.com/24
I was using a Motorola KRZR and I have to admit that it was not to intuitive on how to click the link. I ended up having to go to options which then gave me the option of going to the link. But anyways…
It brings you to a screen with the 25 Logos. with 5 options 1) Watch Exclusive Sneak Peaks 2) The Game 3) Experts Quiz 4) Survival Guide 5) Maps and Directions (because Bauer uses the Sprint navigation service during the premier episodes).
Selecting the exclusive sneak peak option actually brings you to a Fox general sneak peak menu for various other choices. The “Game” which I was most excited to see was unavailable. The Experts Quiz brought you to a page of some pretty tough questions on the series, I really need to brush up (6-10). They said I should check back soon for more quizzes.
The survival guide is a neat little section that teaches you how to be like Jack in any situation (for entertainment purposes only). In this case how to survive a cougar attack (something I once read in the Survival Guide Handbook that was lying around a friends bathroom). My favorite bits: “Never show fear or weakness in front of the cougar,” Never carry raw meat on your person, such as hot dogs, chopped sirloin, steaks, etc. Cougars are prone to advance toward the smell of raw meat.”
The Maps and Directions option allows you to “navigate in true CTU agent style. But all it really brings you is to a page where you can get Trible or TeleNav or AllSport or Geocache services.
Could they have done more than this, of course they could (who does not want a CTU office ringtone). The wallpaper on the phone in the television ad is pretty cool as well. And the Mobile section on the 24 home page seems to be a dead link (sign of things to come?) But for the most part its a good promotion and a bit of fun while we wait till next monday at 9.
The announcement before the Blue Man Group’s “How To be A Mega Star” apparently asks the audience to leave their cell phones on even, G-d forbid, take pictures of the show with their camera phones. The Blue Man Group has apparently teamed up with a company called Counts Media which uses a technology they have dubbed Mobkastr. I have not yet seen the show or the technology live but Cnet reporter Daniel Terdiman was in the audience and had some interesting things to say that everyone exploring the mobile medium for marking purpose should read.
The point of Mobkastr is to enhance the live show experience allowing audience members to opt-in to to receive an interactive stream of text messages that tie in directly to the How to be a Megastar Tour 2.0 live show. According to Puck Quinn, Blue Man Group’s artistic director, the concept of Mobkastr in the context of “How to be a Megastar” was to offer viewers some extra explanation of the symbols and metaphors on display during the show, and to do so in a way that enhances their experience. Seems simple enough.
However, when Terdiman opted in to the system by texting “Blue” to the shorcode 62578 he thought the message “Get 60 texts and replies. $1.99 to opt in. Standard msg rates also apply. T&C’s mobkastr.com. Send STOP to opt out, or HELP for help. Send NEXT to begin now,” was an advertisement and ignored it. This prevented him from taking part in the text message part of the show as the show went on. What happened here? Well Terdiman thought it was an advertisement. I would have thought it was excessive. 2 bucks more to take part in the show! 60 text messages with standard msg rates also applying!” Are they nuts! I have enough trouble getting college kids to receive 1 or 2 text messages from their favorite political candidate. 2 bucks I could go for but not paying the standard messaging rates as well.
The interactions are very cool and, if you have seen the show, very Blue Man. One interesting bit information was how the Mobkastr system knew which messages to send out and when. According to Pyle several additional prompts to the entire audience to text in codewords were meant to signal specific points in the show’s progress to the Mobkastr servers, since rock concerts don’t always proceed with precise timing.
Thus, Pyle said, the codewords were meant to alert the Mobkastr servers that those specific points in the show had been reached and that it was now appropriate to proceed with a new round of messages.
All this is great… but if it is not ubiquitous enough for a reporter from CNET to get it what does it mean about its usability level.
But perhaps this fits the Blue Man Group philosophy of technology. “We both worship technology and we’re technophobes,” Quinn said. “We’re the first to love a new technology and point out that this is worthless.”
Don’t you love these bad names for the SMS marketing infrastructure.
This is not the first time Blue Man has played with the mobile medium. Also check out this.
Moconews ran an interesting story on how Newspapers are beginning to take on the mobile medium.
Still, even if there is no defined business model mobile content is often good at building brand and attracting customers. “Papers typically get slews of sign-ups for severe weather alerts when storms are approaching, while the other top draw is breaking news. And all of it serves to build a paper’s relationship with readers, especially the much-sought-after younger demographic.â€
The article also talks about how for the most part Newspapers are going for advertising. And for the most part the mobile marketing is meant to drive people back to the paper, says Matt Jones at USA Today.
All that is said and good but if the papers want to learn anything, say from Conde Nast, they should look into ways that mobile can make their newspaper interactive i.e doing such things as text message ads or games or votes or coupons etc etc etc. When physical world connection stuff gets better I am sure doing stuff with bar codes an camera phones are in the works as well.
If they don’t take advantage of making their own newspapers interactive via mobile… you can bet that those companies also playing with the mobile medium who advertise in the paper will.
I have already written about the clever Snakes On Plane marketing ploy in which you can a personalize a message of Samuel L Jackson to call your friend and tell them to go see the upcoming Snakes On A Plane Movie. Well now, the studio’s are also focusing a bit more on bringing the internet marketing buzz success of Snakes On A Plane to your mobile in a much more specific manner.
Mobile music site Mixxer is unveiling an exclusive “Snakes on a Plane” mini-site featuring ringtones, video clips, screensavers and user-generated content inspired by the movie. Mobile content can be downloaded for free and shared among users.
The Mixxer site currently supports 19 wireless carriers in the United States.
The “Snakes on a Plane” film, starring Samuel L. Jackson, hits theaters on Aug. 18.
With emails from “the new” at&t (AKA “the old” Cingular) and Apple flooding out to hungry fans, myself included, I have a question: How will Apple’s iTunes music and video walled garden play, if at all, with the rest of at&t’s walled gardens? As near as can be interpreted from the various, and limited, public statements, iPhone will allow side-loading from the user’s PC of iTunes content. (No word as of yet whether users will be allowed to download new content OTA directly from the iTunes store, although the EDGE network speed would make this possibility a painful one, if realized.)
You can also make a little dough with your stalker skills as HoneyAlert will pay a percentage of the money generated from all text message alerts out to the person that sends them the intel.
There’s 
