Archive for April, 2007
Monday, April 30th, 2007
360KID keeps a close eye on technology, gaming, education, and generational trends because what happens in these additional areas also has an impact on children’s lives. What trends are they currently watching and projecting five years out? Specific trends in the technology space include: social networking, toys, video games, education, and computing.
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Monday, April 30th, 2007
By Peggy Anne Salz - PAIDCONTENT.ORG
After connecting with 150,000 people from 104 countries as part of an online brainstorming session, IBM has identified the key five innovations it claims will transform how people around the world work, play and live over the next five years.
The “Next Five in Five” are:
— Remote access to healthcare, paving the way to improved healthcare in developing countries.
– Real-time translation technologies will be embedded into mobile phones, handheld devices and cars.
– The popular online immersive destinations, such as Second Life, will evolve into a full-fledged 3D Internet, allowing new kinds of interactive education, communication and consumer experiences.
– Nanotechnology will improve environmental planning and protection, even paving the way for a “smart” water distribution system that would resemble a utility grid.
– Mobile devices will read our minds, thanks to presence technology and a mix of intuitive UIs and learning technologies. IBM’s vision: “When a user enters a meeting room with several people, the mobile phone will automatically divert to voice mail. Your favorite pizza joint will know when you’re on your way home after a late night and ping you with a special-price, take-home meal just for you.”
Granted the last may sound a bit far-fetched, but the scenario is closer than you think. Personalized mobile search providers including Denmark’s MobilePeople and Finland’s Leiki are fine-tuning solutions designed to transform the mobile phone into an electronic concierge service by intuiting users’ requirements from clues such as location, past queries and click-stream. Moreover, IBM tells us it and Norway’s biggest telecommunications group (not named) are “testing technology to allow mobile devices and networks to learn about users’ whereabouts and preferences as they commute, work and travel.”
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Monday, April 30th, 2007
Pepsi has started its largest ever Bluetooth based marketing campaign, allowing people to download a video clip to their mobile phone from poster adverts.
The campaign to deliver viral video clips, which went live on April 2nd, runs for two months in outdoor advertising locations consisting of bus shelters in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Denver and Orange County, and pay phone kiosks in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Each of the media networks has integrated Qwikker’s Bluetooth content distribution technology into their street furniture. Any consumer with a Bluetooth enabled phone is able to download free video clips from a Pepsi Smash advertisement. The viral video clips being distributed are five “Pass The Mic” clips of freestyle hip hop, provided by Yahoo! Music.
In the first week of the Pepsi campaign, opt-in rates to download content were reported to be 27% across the network.
Karen Robinson, CEO of Prime Point Media said, “Bluetooth delivers a truly interactive user experience. It supercharges a campaign by allowing delivery of brand-driven content to a consumer’s cell phone, a part of their daily lives. By enabling specific 700,000 phone kiosk locations with Qwikker Bluetooth technology, we can physically target the campaign to maximize contextual relevance, such as point-of-sale support at convenience stores for Pepsi.”
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Thursday, April 26th, 2007
Story by editor Paul Resnikoff, on location in Nashville, TN.
As the ringtone continues to flatten, the mobile music sector is eyeing a number of future earners. That includes usual suspects like full-track, OTA (over-the-air) downloads and ringback tones, though a number of combination packages and windowing experiments are also in play. Discussing the matter at the recent Digital Summit in Nashville on Tuesday, Universal Music Mobile vice president of Sales and Licensing Julie Lee also pointed to a “broadening of genres and formats,” a plan that opens a myriad of possibilities. And according to Lee, packaged plays will help to stimulate consumer interest, as will the emerging, OTA sector. Others concurred, including Sony BMG senior vice president and general manager of US Digital Sales, Adam Mirabella. The executive noted that formats like ringback tones, currently soft in the United States, could gain some life if bundled with the more familiar ringtone.
Mirabella also described a transformed approach towards mobile assets, one that now involves the artist at the earliest stages. “It now starts with the creative process of the artist,” Mirabella said. That means less reformatting and backtracking, and more customized plays. The shift is part of a “major proliferation in SKUs,” according to Mirabella, an acronym that describes a unique product identifier. Like its online cousin, the mobile platform has spawned a number of new products, and more opportunities to capture a sale.
The bullish and energized tone differs from a rather depressed major label outlook, though the mobile music niche suffers from a number of early-stage disappointments. Perhaps the heavily-hyped sector still needs time to grow, though its promise of immense convenience, on-the-go discovery, and converged elegance has failed to ignite a revenue explosion, at least in the United States. “You’d think that would represent a profound improvement in sales,” mused moderator Dave Ulmer, a senior director of Entertainment Products at Motorola.
Indeed, the results have left providers like Sprint a bit disappointed in certain arenas, especially alongside nosebleed consumer responses in markets like Japan. Just recently, Sprint drastically lowered per-unit pricing on its OTA offering, a move that followed tepid consumer response. A major culprit could be the practice of sideloading, which allows consumers to simply shift PC-based contents onto their mobile devices. According to Mark Nagel, director of entertainment services at Cingular (AT&T), that is a “major component” in a larger entertainment portfolio for the carrier, one that includes paid options. But the company does not offer an OTA option, a move that signals a wait-and-see attitude towards the emerging format.
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Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
Good Call: Telemundo, Others Cater to Demo’s Penchant for Cellphones
By Laura Martinez Ruiz-Velasco ADAGE
Published: April 23, 2007
Text messaging is so passe. Starting this month, subscribers to AT&T Wireless’ Media Net Latino package can watch the best kisses, love scenes and action chases from “El Zorro,” the telenovela based on the Zorro legend that is co-produced by NBC Universal’s Telemundo and Sony Pictures.
Tuned Up: Mun2 pushes music.
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Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Boys and younger teens are more likely than girls or older teens to post false information on their online profiles; 64% of profile-owning boys post fake information compared with 50% of girls who do the same. Younger and older teens exhibit another split, with 69% of younger teens posting fake information versus 48% of older teens, all according to a new report from Pew Internet & American Life Project reports.
How Teens Use Social Networking Sites
* 55% of online teens have profiles
* 82% of profile creators have included their first name in their profiles
* 79% have included photos of themselves
* 66% have included photos of their friends
* 61% have included the name of their city or town
* 49% have included the name of their school
* 40% have included their instant message screen name
* 40% have streamed audio to their profile
* 39% have linked to their blog
* 29% have included their email address
* 29% have included their last names
* 29% have included videos
* 2% have included their cell phone numbers
* 6% of online teens
* 11% of profile-owning teens post their first and last names on publicly-accessible profiles
* 3% of online teens
* 5% of profile-owning teens disclose their full names, photos of themselves and the town where they live in publicly-viewable profiles
Most teens are using the social networks to stay in touch with people they already know, either friends that they see a lot (91% of social networking teens have done this) or friends that they rarely see in person (82%). 49% of social network users say they use the networks to make new friends. 32% of online teens have been contacted by strangers online – this could be any kind of online contact, not necessarily contact through social network sites. 21% of teens who have been contacted by strangers have engaged an online stranger to find out more information about that person (that translates to 7% of all online teens). 23% of teens who have been contacted by a stranger online say they felt scared or uncomfortable because of the online encounter (that translates to 7% of all online teens).
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Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
From KENRADIO.COM
A new study by Ipsos analyzed online video behaviors, at the end of 2006 58% of Americans age 12 or older, with Internet access, had streamed some form of video content online…100 million Americans, or 44% of the overall US population age 12 or older. The YouTube phenomenon has caught on with Americans, and given their appetite for video, the ability to select and watch exactly what you want online has become a strong lure for many consumers. And it’s instant gratification for entertainment lovers. The report goes further to say that 28% of Americans age 12+ have downloaded a digital video file, with a significant amount of overlap between these two types of digital video formats - so many consumers who stream video also experiment with downloading video online. Teens and young adults are the most likely to stream video online: three in four of all teens age 12-17 and young adults age 18-24 in the US have ever streamed digital video content online. The demographic of the typical video streamer skews younger, are more likely to have higher incomes, and be highly educated.
Teens and young adults, on average, have stored 20% of their entire video library either digitally (stored on a hard drive) and/or have burned this content onto DVD-R, says the report. The size of consumers’ digital video libraries will continue to grow as the streaming and downloading market matures. Shorter video clips are by far the most preferred type of video file accessed today by Internet users. Three quarters of all digital video streamers have streamed short news or sports clips, while two thirds have streamed amateur or homemade video clips. 40% of those that have streamed or downloaded video content have accessed YouTube, and many in the past 30 days. Other video file sharing sites such as MySpace and Google Video are also common destinations for video streamers, with about one in five ever having accessed these two sites overall.
Most Americans still have never streamed or downloaded a full-length TV show or movie. However, despite the relatively low prevalence levels of downloading movies and TV shows among US adults today, many appear to find the idea appealing: 43% of all digital video downloaders and streamers express some level of interest in downloading full length movies in the near future, while 38% express interest in full length TV show downloads. The most common barriers to downloading are users’ unwillingness to pay for this content, as well as a perceived difficulty or inability to burn these files onto DVD.
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Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
by Steve Smith, Tuesday, April 10, 2007
THE MOBILE PHONE’S POTENTIAL AS a portable powerhouse of user-generated content remains more theoretical than real. As every mobile blogging vendor has pitched me for two years, the phone is the “perfect computing device.” It not only connects to the Web, but it has a built-in voice recorder, a Web cam and text entry. Most PCs boast only a few of these capabilities. Yes, indeed, as a blog entry tool, or as any kind of content posting device, the cell phone is the ideal device. End of pitch. Nice try, I think to myself.
If only things really worked this way. My phone just seems to laugh at me when I try to send a photo. Even when the cryptic interface does put me in a place where I can enter a recipient’s email address, the process just hangs and eventually crashes. I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football or fly a kite. “Got you, again, sucka!” my phone is saying… if phones had thought balloons.
I am just too paranoid and too old, apparently. This is not a hard process for phone-addicted youth. Michael Baker, CEO of iqzone, tells me that his phone-based classified ads system is testing well with college kids who vaulted the photo-emailing hurdle long ago. “The switch point is 35-years-old,” says Baker, who is surveying his test group at Arizona State University. “They have no trouble with e-mailing a picture. Every one of them has done it and there is no learning curve for them.”
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Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
From KENRADIO.COM
The number of broadband subscribers worldwide at 281.3 million as at end 2006, this represents growth of 31% for the year, according to a report from Point Topic. The top ten list of broadband countries shows little change although China continues to close the gap on the US, down to 5.4 million from 8.6 million a year ago, after adding more than 14 million lines in 2006.
However France was the country that achieved the highest growth in the top 10 in 2006 with over 40%. Although other countries outside the top 10 are growing faster in percentage terms (India with 152%, Turkey 88%) the net adds in the ‘Top 10′ broadband world generally continue to outstrip other countries. Worldwide, DSL remains the most popular broadband access technology with a 65.7% market share. DSL accounts for 87% of all broadband subscribers in the Middle East and Africa ? the fastest growing broadband region ? and 82% in the European Union (EU). The EU added 17.5 million DSL subscribers in the year to maintain its position as the world?s number one broadband and DSL region. Of the other broadband access technologies, fiber to the home or other close location (FTTx), now delivers more than 10% of broadband services across the world. Less than 1% of broadband is delivered by satellite, accounting for 784,750 subscribers.
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Sunday, April 1st, 2007
From 123Mobiles.com
A century ago, communicating in a hurry meant sending a telegram. If you needed to go yourself, you went by train.
Flash forward to today’s world of e-mail-ready smartphones and 3G wireless access. If you think those are handy, then get ready: Newer technology is emerging that will significantly change how we stay in touch when we are mobile — nearly as much as telephones and airplanes have changed lives over the last 100 years.
We asked several futurists and industry experts to describe these mobile technologies and their impact on our lives. They aren’t talking about maybe-someday technologies, but applications that will be here in the next year or two. Some of them are even starting to be available now.
It’s a good time to be mobile.
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