Why Individuated Media are already superseding Mass Media
How use of mobile devices affect the news, entertainment, and information industries.
SonyEricsson, a mobile phone manufacturer, has licensed content from Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network for use to Sony Ericsson phone users around the world. Starting in September, owners of SonyEriccson phones can, if they pay a premium rate, download games, ringtones, screensavers and wallpapers featuring Cartoon Network characters such as Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones, Powerpuff …
Americans usually think of their country as the most technosavvy nation. Few realized just how far behind other countries the U.S. is with mobile phones. e-Marketer today offers a look at just how far behind:
For publishers and broadcasters, what’s the cogent difference between SMS and MMS? “With SMS it’s hard to differentiate and create a premium product,” Sky Sports’ Head of Enterprises Stephen Nuttall tells New Media Age. “With MMS we can provide audio and pictures, such as post-match interviews.”
Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper has motived than a million subscribers to pay about US$1 per month to access its wireless Web site via cell phone, Japan Media Journal reports.
Samsung is marketing a celluar phone that also receives regular VHF and UHF TV broadcasts.
Folks who think that video mobile phones are a thing of the future should read this month’s story in Japan Media Review about the Miura family of Tokyo. The ‘killer app’ of video telephony might just be family time.
The South Pacific island of Niue on Monday become the world’s first nation to provide free wireless Internet access to its entire population. Located east of Tonga in the Cook Island archipelago and formerly known as Savage Island, Niue is approximately 1.5-times the size of Washington, D.C., but with a population of only 1,700 people. …
GMTV — which promotes itself as ‘Britain’s Biggest Breakfast Show’ — has launched what NewMediaAge describes as the UK’s first commercial Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) that circumvent UK mobile network carriers’ ‘walled gardens’ business models and delivers content directly to mobile phone users. Thrice weekly, GMTV viewers who register for the service receive messages from …
Boston Webcaster RadioStorm has begun streaming its music to mobile phone users. The Radio and Internet Newsletter reports that 20,000 to 30,000 mobile phone users are “dialing in” each month. Because that streaming costs users the same as voice calls, most users are dialing in during nights and weekends when their mobile phone networks offer …
Read More “Boston Webcaster Streams to Phones; Nokia and SonyEriccson to MP3”
Channel Seven’s Wireless Ad Watch reports on advertising successes that AvantGo and Vindigo have had using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) as advertising mediums.
The BBC recently reported that SMS has eclipsed voice calls as the most common use of mobile phones among young people in the United Kingdom. A survey by the CCP Group, an company that underwrites personal insurance policies against loss of mobile phones, indicated that more than eight out of ten people under the age …
Celebrating its tenth anniversary of publishing on the Web but without profiting from banner advertising during that period, the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita on its online anniversary began charging for access to its online news archives. To access its archives, a customer uses a mobile phone to send an SMS message to a number listed …
Read More “On 10th Anniversary Online, Polish Paper Begins Charging for Archives”
Editor and Publisher magazine quotes us this week about how publishers are using SMS for delivery of content and also for billing.
While North American governmental bodies lament the rise of spam, the European Parliament is banning it. Effective in October, the Parliament’s Directive 2002/58/EC [(PDF format)] bans unsolicited commercial e-mail within the European Union countries. The directive, which also applies to unsolicited SMS and MMS messages, permits commercial e-mails from any company which has received the …
GoConnect of Australia, which already provides streaming videos to Pocket PC mobile phone using GPRS phone networks, is also offering those videos to those users on less expensive WiFi local networks there, too. GoConnect’s m-Vision streaming service currently includes Austrialian business and sports news, horoscopes, and music videos. Earlier this year, The Age reported that …
Wired.com reports on some of the implications that camera-equipped mobile phones are having on media and society.
To encourage consumer use of MMS — Multimedia Messaging Services, the rich graphics successor to plain-text SMS (Short Messaging Services) — software companies are making deals with mobile phone handset and Mobile Digital Assistants (MDAs) manufacturers to embed MMS software into devices.
The Pioneer Corporation of Japan has developed a wearable computer with a display you can wear on your sleeve. A prototype jacket was shown in Tokyo last week. The wearable color display is composed of active-matrix organic-electroluminescent (OEL) film, a material which was developed four years ago by a variety of manufacturers. These screens are …
Two quotes by Christopher Lydon, formerly of WGBH and American Public Radio, now at Harvard University, speaking at the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies Conference to Boston: “weblogging is the digital equivalent of playing hockey. ‘Oh, sorry, what I just posted about you knocked out you teeth.’” “As a tradition journalist attending this conference, I feel …
On Monday and Tuesday, we’ll be at the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo in Boston, where on Tuesday morning we’ll be sitting on a panel entitled Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms? Here is its description in the conference program: “No business is likely to be more affected by Weblogs than …
What is Moblogging? Well, we’re posting this message by using a Pocket PC Phone from waist-deep in Long Island Sound at Greenwich Point beach in Connecticut. Unwired mobile bogging.
Several large UK banks have scrapped their WAP-banking services this week, following sparse demand by banking customers during the past few years. Halifax and Abbey National have scrap WAP. Many European (and few American) publishers still features WAP as their primary wireless services. They apparently haven’t heard that consumers think it means Worthless Applications Protocol.
eMarketer reports an In-Stat/MDR study showing the current price per multimedia message service (MMS) is now $0.40 (0.34 Euro) in Europe. That’s too high a price for consumers, effectively limiting MMS to business use. However, the study believes that the price per message will decline by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% between …
Although the words Bush and Technology seem incompatible in so many ways, members of the illiterate, hunter-gatherer society known as the San Bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert have begun using handheld Personal Digital Assistants equipped with Global Position System cards to map animal tracks and droppings. When these 21st Century aborigines find tracks or spoor, …
Furthering the convergence of mobile phones and PDAs into single devices for multiple purposes, Nokia’s Bejing research laboratory has developed a phone that recognizes inputs in Chinese language pen strokes. The Nokia 6108 apparently recognizes all or most of the 2,000 characters in the simplified version of the Chinese language alphabet. It also recognizes Latin …
Community publishing has been taken to a new technical level by Stockholm’s N
Perhaps no one knows the answer better than Dave Winer, pioneering technologist and manufacturer of one of the first and most popular blogging softwares. Winer is now on sabbatical as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where he is evangelizing Webblogs and theorizing their impact upon society. …
Covering the IFRA Online Trend conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, our friend Rafat Ali notes the interesting ‘Instant News’ project by Sweden’s Sdysvenska Daglbadet newspaper. It involves instant delivery of news through whatever electronic media the user wants at any pre-designated time: “A user decides, when I’m online, send me breaking news through IM. …
Covering the TV meets the Web conference in Amsterdam, theFeature notes how: “The overwhelming success of mobile voting and alert campaigns around popular television programming prove mobile is a natural extension of TV. The numbers speak volumes – literally. In Spain Operacion Triunfo, a TV talent show, made history as the country’s most ‘interactive event …
“This is a country who defeated Iraq in three weeks, but still can’t figure out SMS.” That was how Kevin Werbach described the U.S. in his keynote speech to the TV Meets the Web conference in Amsterdam.
O2 tries out mobile video. 02 becomes the latest mobile firm to trial video clips via phones, including highlights of Arsenal matches.
I’ve written elsewhere about the rise of multimedia mobile telephone access to the Internet and how online publications outside the U.S. are using SMS as a micropayment solution. The South China Morning Post now reports (requires paid access) that China’s three biggest portal sites are using those methods to revive their finances. Chinese government censorship …
There is a posting on the Online-News listserv today that asks this question about Sybase’s acquition of AvantGo: Do you foresee this changing your wireless/PDA strategy? (Is that question moot?) I think it’s sad to see American publishers mistake PDAs as having anything at all to do with wireless. Yes, I myself carry a MDA …
This blog has lately been quiet because Digital Deliverance is planning to donate the blog to the organization that has been known as the EBook Newsstand Association. That organization, which is dedicate to finding ways for periodical publishers to publish on handheld portable devices, had been changing its name to the Multi-Platform Publishers Association,but may …
We yesterday mentioned the Handspring Treo as an example of a handheld ‘converged device’ that can handle multiple forms of content and communications. Today’s New York Times Technology section reviews (free registration required to read the review) both the Treo and the Motorola V200, another such device. Perhaps borrowing the term for similar futuristic devices …
We have long preached that consumers will soon carry a single portable electronic device for all content usages, rather than carry multiple devices (mobile phone, Personal Digital Assistant, MP3 player, laptop PC, digital camera, etc.) that each deal with only one form of content. We’ve also said that many of these converged devices would begin …