Oliver over at Mobile Crunch wrote up a post on Pheeder. Seemed pretty cool so I went on over to the site to check it out. Its really really cool. Their are lots of way to explain what Pheeder does. Here is the way I explained it to my Grandfather:
Imagine if their was a number I could call and leave a message on an answering machine. Now imagine that once I am done the machine calls anyone who signed up to receive messages from me and plays the recording.
Magic. That is what Pheeder does. From the website: Just call Pheeder, leave a message, hang up, and seconds later all of your friends receive the message at the very same instant on their phones. Then, if they want, they can reply to your message, or forward your message on to their friends.
The power of word of mouth at its viralist
I have created a MOpocket Pheeder feed here where you can sign up and receive live cell phone news as if Mopocket was calling you itself.
But of course, such a service has a plethora of uses. I plan on creating an Oberman Family feed as well as a feed to get important messages out to the debate team I coach about meetings, assignments etc… There are a plethora of uses and I can think of some political ones myself ;-).
Pheeder is pretty smartmobby.
Right now, however, the service seems to be locked down to one cell phone number equals one feed scenario.. but I can imagine that changing soon.
The service is free, with the exception of the amount of minutes you use up listening or recording a message.
There was a service like this that I blogged about in an article on how to create your own ringtones called WapDial (which now appears to be down) which ran a similar service except that WAPDIAL also turned your recording into an AMR (for ringtones), WAV and MP3 file (all of which could also be syndicated). I would love to see that added as a feature on Pheeder.
WapDial was also a 212 number… I wonder if its the same people? Anyways, Oliver says:
This is one of those technologies that I think could go either way. It could become wildely popular and ultimately be so regularly used by so many people that we wonder how we lived without it or it could be a novelty that’s fun for a while but never really gets the critical mass that it requires for any of the technologies we’re seeing now to jump the shark and become a mainstream - we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
This really is one of those why didn’t I think of that ideas. But it makes sense right? Engineers have developed a system for taking anonymous cell-phone location information and turning it into an illuminated traffic map that identifies congestion in real time. To answer your question, these types of signals are produced whether someone is talking on them or not. Pretty nifty.
Anyone that could have seen the hours I wasted last night trying to install the maps for the US West Coast onto my TREO 650 for a trip to L.A I am taking would find it as humorous as I did to wake up this morning and discover the news that TOMTOM , the GPS software I use on my Treo, just released the long awaited new version of their mobile PDA GPS software the Navigator 6.
New features include:
Users of NAVIGATOR 6 can also take advantage of TomTom’s innovative desktop software application TomTom HOME, which enables users to easily manage, download, store and transfer content and services to their device. TomTom HOME is compatible with both a PC and MAC.
TomTom NAVIGATOR 6 also includes TomTom’s innovative TomTom Buddies service, enabling authorised TomTom users to locate each other and send instant messages*.
TomTom will unveil both a regional and European version of NAVIGATOR 6. The regional version will come with detailed maps of a customer’s country or region, as well as including the major roads in Western Europe, for seamless cross border navigation. The European version features complete door-to-door navigation anywhere in Western Europe.
Interesting article in Forbes on Six Innovations That Will Change Your Life. I wont rehash the article only to say that if you are interested in such subjects as m-commerce (maying by stiff with your phone), social networking and issues of presence, the mobile web, ubiquitous media, health tools for your mobile phone and or GPS then check it out.
The New York Times reported on February 5 that the general in charge of Army recruiting “has plans to attract teenagers with video games, Web sites, cell phone text messages, and helicopter simulators in 18-wheelers.â€
These new approaches have become necessary, because “the economy is growing, and there is more and more opposition being voiced by parents and at high schools.”
The article describes in depth the Army’s new strategy to reach out to tech-savvy, young Americans. Although it mentions text messaging, it is unclear exactly how the medium will be used. It is clear, however, that Internet-capable phones can access the Army’s recruiting chat room.
I visited the chat room and found the conversation to be quite intriguing. There, in real time, you find our nation’s youth signing up for life-changing career moves. Potential recruits ask a wide range of questions about the specific details of military life and get immediate feedback from what seems to be a very capable staff.
These uses of mobile technology stand in stark contrast to the employment of mobile platforms by insurgents in Iraq. Cell phones form the basis of their communication networks and are even used to detonate improvised explosive devices (IED’s).
The disparate uses of mobile technology by both sides in the current conflict highlight underlying cultural differences. The questions that the American recruits asked in the chat room were all about how serving in the Army can improve their own lives and those of their families; they asked about bonuses, benefits, and education opportunities. The focus was on what the Army could do for them.
I can only imagine how different al Qaeda’s recruiting approach is. There is no way one can be convinced to become a suicide bomber in a chat room; that forum could never convey the urgency, desperation, and warped sense of honor required to take one’s own life.
While I commend the Army recruiting program for its outside-the-box initiatives, I am concerned that traditional recruiting methods have met with less and less success. Perhaps if there is one unsettling conclusion to be made, it is that our enemy thinks there is a lot more at stake in this war than we do.
Captain Lucas Cioffi returned from a one-year deployment to Baghdad in 2005.
You can also read some of Captain Cioffi’s earlier thoughts about mobile technology and the army here.
Anyways, this weeks Carnival is jammed pack with exciting posts and stuff! Including the winners of last months Hosting and blog posts awards. Back in May, we announced that Khosla Ventures would be sponsoring the Carnival of the Mobilists, as their way of reaching out to the blogging community and everyone in mobile. The sponsorship would take the form of two monthly prizes - $500 for the best host of the month and $250 for the best post. We’re delighted to say that the votes are now counted, the recounts processed, chads examined and the appeals considered and we can announce the June winners. Go to Smartmobs post for more.
The Carnival of the Mobilists is a weekly tour through blog posts of people in the center rings of design, development and implementation of our new global mobile communications. Mobilists bloggers enter their posts and you read the finest, freshest writing in the field. (If you are a blogger, you can enter too. The details are here.) The Carnival travels each week to a host site, which this week is SmartMobs.
With the unfortunate events that are occurring presently in the Middle East I thought it would be a good time to bring to your attention a little project underway by my pal Erik Sundelof (a fellows at Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, a program that aims to develop technology to advance humanitarian goals in underserved communities).
Erik thought it would be interesting to see what the people on the ground (on both sides) are seeing and be able to report back live as it happens. So Erik has set up a Typepad blog that both sides can post to via their cell phones. The system uses a positioning solution developed Erik while a fellow at Stanford. The positioning system allows an end user, amongst other things, to determine if the mobile content was really sent from near or on location. Erik also built an SMSBlog for MobileActive.org, the online community for mobile technology and social activism.
But all of this is really part of his larger “In The Field Online” project in which Erik imagines every cell phone as a citizen media outlet. The point is to allow people ‘in the field’ to report news stories (or any other types of content for that matter) to the web using just a cell phone, but is developed in such a way as to be extremely extensible. As such one can basically push any piece of information - text, audio, graphic, picture, video from any cell phone to the web. It is the natural extension to citizen journalism as it creates the vehicle for people without internet to be able to get their voices heard on the internet.
The idea just came naturally to him:
I started to think about what would be my first thought after a car bomb went off. Certainly not to run to an Internet cafe. That’s probably the last thing I would think about. But I might call my friends with my cell phone to tell them I’m all right. Then you have your phone out, so now the possibility is that you could also record that, shoot it and send it to Reuters, the BBC or wherever. That would be a great tool to really create a vehicle and channel for those people to get their frustration out, that would help the democracy part.
Recently Erik was interviewed by Mark Glaser at MediaShift PBS to talk about citizen media and the future of its implications on the media landscape. “I truly believe cell phones are the right way to go here.” Erik tells me. “Combine this with the proper business model and you have a really powerful tool.” Or as Erik himself put it in the interview:
“The key here is that the media organizations need to realize they are losing control. They can’t really control [the news] now because people are posting this stuff to other blogs. I think it would be better to merge traditional reporting with citizen media rather than have a [totally] new media.
To take the best of the old fashioned news organizations and bring in the power of the bloggers, because you have so many people investigating. Mix them and you have an extremely good organization and you’ll have content that’s really important in finding out the truth.”
So, in the spirit of the project, people in Israel or Lebanon can now post to the blog by simply sending an SMS to the number +1 650 455 2692 (yes it’s a US number but this is an experiment more or less, Erik is working on getting a more local number). Pictures can be sent via MMS (as well as just posting) by sending an Email to mms@inthefieldonline.net. All messages for now must start with a “TP” and end with a “STOP.” If you want to include a title in your message, text as follows: “TP” add a title here “BODY” yada yada “STOP.” WIthin the next couple of days, Erik has told me that the capability to post videos to the blog will also be made available.
If you are not reporting on the crisis in the Middle East but want to try Erik’s tool out anyways try this very simple showcase here - http://inthefieldonline.net/showcase. Step by step instructions are as follows:
2. Choose to send that via a Picture Message/Multimedia Message/MMS (or email if you would prefer that)
3. Send this message to show@inthefieldonline.net (of course short-codes are supported.)
4. Just watch the computer screen and you will see the post pop up on its own.
The simplicity also exists for SMS:s and it has been tested in most continents.
At the moment, he’s working on a cooler version of the service in the hopes of attracting Silicon Valley funding, or perhaps paying customers who run newspaper sites or other media outlets. So VC listen up. MOblogging could possibly be the next big thing. The blog Mobhappy has already made this easy for you to understand. His hope is to build an open source software platform with a programming code that can be improved and modified by anyone; to enable people to send in photos or video to central sites or to their blogs or websites of their choice. The simpler, the better.
If you are a volunteer nonprofit organization or political campaign you are probably very interested already.
The interview by the way is fantastic and has loads of information and answers to questions you might have about the technology.
My friend Taran Rampersad from Knowprose (from Trinidad) has been saying it for a while now: When it comes to the use of mobile technology for emergency situations the first step is to have the technology setup before the disaster occurs. When SMS emergency systems are planned for, they can save lives. Seems like a smart idea right? Seems logical. But you would be surprised how many times a disaster somewhere in the world would occur and only after the fact do all these mobile activists race to the scene to start building and throwing together something like an emergency SMS call through center. This seems odd, right? Especially when disaster after disaster proves that “the things that worked for communication in all disasters were Ham radio and SMS text messaging.”
I mean, its true. Just think about it. The first images from the horrible Tsunami that hit Thailand all came from MMS pictures via cameraphones. Our first image from inside the Super Dome in New Orleans during Katrina came to us when someone in the Dome was able to send out an MMS to his brother. The reason for this is simply because mobile messaging platforms like SMS can handle much more traffic than the standard mobile phone call or the land line call.
This became Taran’s mission. Over and over again, like a doomsday profit, Taran told people that we must set up these systems BEFORE the disaster strikes. Taran thought he was spitting in the wind! But then he discovered that a group of people on the other side of the planet, in Indonesia, who he did not know and has never spoken with, did what he has been saying and, sadly, has actually had to use it….
Plazes, the popular German built Web 2.0 Social Networking technology that brings the concept of physical presence to the web and thus coined the phrase “to plaze” just released a Beta version of its mobile platform. The mobile Plazer works a lot like its big brother. The main difference between the desktop and the mobile version is that the mobile version uses GSM/3G cell tower IDs to identify your location instead of a router´s MAC ID. Once it figures out where you are, it will immediately present you with a list of Plazes that are nearby of which you can either identify being currentky at or create a New Plaze if your option is not present. If the cell tower is unknown to Plazes you have to input an address for your current location and you will receive a list of Plazes for the immediate vicinity of the Plaze (i.e. the restaurant you are) is at that location, choose that one from the list and you´re done. If not you can create a new Plaze and you will be put there instantly.
Not only will this allow Plazers to keep track of there buddies on the go… but for the first time it will also allow people to Plaze places that do not traditionally have Wifi hotspots, like your favorite 5 start restaurant, theater or Grandma’s apartment.
To make it work, the Plazer app needs a working internet connection. This should be plain internet, but WAP also seems to work. I have been connecting using my Cingular GPRS connection and while that is not a 3G cell tower, yet., it is working just fine. The application uses as little network traffic as possible with Plaze setting estimating taking up to no more than 20kb of network traffic for creating or selecting a Plaze. Plazer also sends periodic pings to the server to keep you online, that also causes network traffic. It’s 7.5kb per hour maximum. But be warned and switch it off, if your not sure about your data plan or are data roaming.
For now, only those Mobile-Suave American’s carrying Series 60 Symbian phones will be able to get a taste of what Plazes Beta-Mobile has to offer. But even then it will only be a taste since most of us American S60 carrying mobilists are not yet connecting to a 3G GSM tower (unless of course you are lucky enough to live in one of those cities where Cingular is testing out there HSPDA network. S0 for now, American’s capable of using the service while out and about in the United States will have to rely on the manual input. Which is fine… the UI makes it really easy. Its just the dial-pad that makes it annoying (still waiting for that Nokia E70).
But its a great sign of what is about to come, and I know for a fact that the people over at Plazes are already contemplating what the inevitable integration of GPS into mobile phones means for their application. When it comes to location tagging no one seems to have grasped it better then Plazes.
Of course there are a few bugs and bound to be more. But first of all, its Beta and that is what Beta is for and secondly, the overall truth is that Plazes mobile brings mobile location tagging closer to an everyday reality than most applications trying to do the same thing before it.
Oliver over at Mobile Crunch wrote up a post on Pheeder. Seemed pretty cool so I went on over to the site to check it out. Its really really cool. Their are lots of way to explain what Pheeder does. Here is the way I explained it to my Grandfather:
