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Hooray for blog memes. I love it when the bloggeratti pass these around like so many kids on MySpace taking "purity tests".
Of course I couldn't resist either and apparently I'm Iron Man. I think it's because of my perchance for cocktails and building stuff vs. flying around and doing good.
Dave Winer is also Iron Man so I'll totally take it. Calacanis is Green Lantern, but we already knew that.
Take the test yourself and let me know who you are. My results below (the fact that I'm more Catwoman than Superman scares me a bit...)
You are Iron Man
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Inventor. Businessman. Genius. |
Ever notice there are some odd video game movie tie-ins? After spotting a Nacho Libre Nintendo DS game, Mike Monteiro decided to create some of his own movie-themed DS title designs, like Miracle Worker or The Passion of the Christ, and post them to Flickr. (Best comment on Passion: "don't know if this is true, but I hear there's a cheat code that lets you rise on the second day.")
Mike went one better and started a Flickr group called DS Tie-in Games I Wanna Play. He included a small Photoshop kit to help make the titles and the group has expanded beyond movies to books, TV shows, etc.
There are almost 300 titles now and I couldn't help but add some of my own: The Queen, Arrested Development, The Elegant Universe, and Diggnation.
This group is everything I love about the current state of the net: one creative guy has a cool idea and within a week there are a hundred people on Flickr creating and sharing hundreds of pieces of terrific mashed-up content. And some of them are genius.
(Picked this one up from Kottke - and I love his New Yorker game...)
Got the requisite gaggle of corporate holiday cards this year. I know it’s not the greenest thing of me to say, but I do prefer actual physical cards to the e-versions. It’s gotten to the point that I rarely even open email holiday cards anymore. Nine times out of ten I’m reading them on a Blackberry, where all the HTML and Flash goodness are lost anyway and they end up looking like a mess of code. I’ve had e-cards crash my machine; I’ve seen them point to broken sites (got one or two of those this year alone.)
Two of my favorite actual cards from this season’s crop play on the theme of mobile phones as Christmas lights:
From eMbience:
From WiderThan:
And although kind of cheesy, I've got to hand it to the CTIA's card for originality. Their re-imagining of the 12 Days of Christmas:
Nothing says spirit of the season more than $6.5bn in data revenues! (At least not to me...)
By now you may have heard some of this news – last week was a big one for us on the mobile front at MTV Networks.
It began with the formalization of the MTV Networks Mobile Media Group. Rafat does a good job of summing that up here. As we go into 2007 our team will be working harder than ever to push the envelop on mobile content and applications, focus on new innovations, and grow our distribution across carrier and direct-to-consumer channels. We're psyched.
Following on the heels of that announcement was the launch of VH1’s Mobile Junk 20. I love this app. It’s a companion for Web Junk 20 – the VH1 franchise that highlights “best of” viral videos from iFilm. With this new mobile piece, users can watch these videos on their phones, upload their own videos, and share and rate their faves. Online UGC meets on-air show meets mobile interactive video. You can read the press release here.
The next day we announced MTV Mobile’s Bananas. It’s our first cross-carrier, direct-to-consumer mobile content service. We’ve partnered with Motricity who provide back-end mobile content support for the likes of Cingular, Universal Music Group, BET, NBC, and more. Be on the look-out for Bananas spots on MTV & MTV.com. Here’s the full story.
As Jason at Fierce Mobile Content put it, we ended last week much as we started it – by making headlines. This time it was Logo in the spotlight, as Logo’s mobile video channel for gay and lesbian audiences launched on Sprint. The programming is great – comedy, celebrities, sneak peeks of upcoming shows.
With the advent of mobile video, user-generated-content, wide-spread camera-phone usage, a viable direct-to-consumer channel, and bigger, better, stronger, faster networks and handsets, it really is the most exciting time ever to be in the wireless business. The good folks at the Motley Fool seem to think so as well (and they’ve given the thumbs-up to our approach, which is always nice to hear).
All in all this has been a great way to end the year. Here’s to an upwardly mobile (mobily upward?) 2007!
Google speculation is the gift that keeps on giving.
Om Malik points out that Rich Miner, the Mobile VP at Google, used to be at Orange and thus it wouldn’t be so crazy to imagine him working with his old company on a new Google Mobile device.
And could voice recognition play a role in this? An old colleague reminds me that Rich Miner has a PhD in voice recognition and was a founder of speech-based electronic assistant pioneer Wildfire. He came to Orange, in fact, as part of their Wildfire acquisition. (At Organge he ran the OrangeImagineering group; they had a very cool complex in Cambridge I recall…)
Does it surprise us then to discover that any number of Android engineers are ex-Wildfire, and now work at Google?
All of this begins to come into focus when you look at Google’s patent for a “voice interface search engine” which was awarded in April. Makes a lot of sense for mobile phones I would think.
But Google isn’t the only company driving hard at this space. Nuance, another strong speech recognition company (also, oddly, headquartered in Massachusetts – as were Andriod, Wildfire, and OrangeImagineering…) just last week purchased speech-enabled mobile search company MobileVoiceControl.
This law.com article points out that Nuance has a market cap of $1.8bn and:
With its acquisition of Cincinnati-based MobileVoiceControl and its own research, Nuance is squaring off against Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo Inc. and Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. in the effort to develop software that allows people to search the Internet by voice.
The article also mentions that Michael Cohen, one of Nuance’s founders now works – guess where? Yup – Google. This one’s only going to get more interesting…
I have given myself to Google.
I didn’t mean to. I didn’t really want to even. Sure I Google as much as the next guy; it’s my homepage, and I’d be completely lost at work without Google Desktop search (it is indeed the search engine for my brain.) But I wasn’t crazy about Google taking over my desktop completely and besides, I used Mac Mail for my personal email and NetNewsWire for RSS and was perfectly happy with the both of them.
Then last month Google released their new Gmail mobile client and it really impressed me. I downloaded the app to by Blackberry 8700, got myself a free Gmail account, and started playing with it. It’s fantastic. Very clean, very easy to use. I transferred my Outlook contacts in about a minute and started forwarding my Mac Mail. Within about a week I was hooked. When I got my enV and saw how easy and integrated Gmail was with Verizon’s built-in email app Gmail pretty much had me for good.
It wasn’t long before I decided to try out the Google RSS reader. I’m a big fan of RSS applications as nothing beats their speed and ease of use. My favorite is NetNewsWire, which by syncing with a Newsgator account online let me read feeds from different computers. Newsgator has a great Windows Mobile app but I don’t have a Windows Mobile phone so that does nothing for me. Friends encouraged me to give Google Reader a shot and then I noticed that, of course, Google has mobile access to their reader. You can guess what happened from here: switched to Google, loved the experience, never went back.
Now I’m doing more with Google Desktop, experimenting with Google Calendar, and using Gmail and Google RSS Reader many times every day from multiple devices and machines. All of this is synced, and all of this is free. And everything I do is indexed and searchable. What’s not to love?
So is it any surprise that Google is looking to push the mobile envelope more? According to the Guardian of London, Google is in deep talks with mobile carrier Orange to create a branded “Google phone” that incorporates their full suite of mobile apps, and then some.
Their plans centre on a branded Google phone, which would probably also carry Orange's logo. The device would not be revolutionary: manufactured by HTC, a Taiwanese firm specializing in smart phones and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), it might have a screen similar to a video iPod. But it would have built-in Google software which would dramatically improve on the slow and cumbersome experience of surfing the web from a mobile handset.
Honestly, I’m not sure how much an iPhone would appeal to me. But a phone with all my favorite Google apps integrated into the OS and optimized for the device? Google maps with aGPS? Google RSS app with offline browsing? Sign me up.
Om covers the news and points out something very interesting:
Normally, one would not spend too much energy on this bit of news. However, presence of Andy Rubin on Google campus gives us a reason to pause.Who is Rubin? He was one of the co-founders of Danger, the company that makes the Sidekick devices. He sold his last company Android to Google for an undisclosed amount of money, and he has been holed up in Mountain View, California campus of Google, doing something.
Andriod has always been shrouded is mystery – it’s never been entirely clear to the outside world what they were working on before Google snatched them up 16 months ago. But Rubin and his team at Danger were the ones who came up with the idea of caching mobile optimized websites to make them faster to access and easier to read on mobile devices (specifically in their case, the Sidekick). Doing this allowed T-Mobile to offer mobile web access via a flat-rate data plan – a first in the US. And we know that Rubin is interested in location-based services; here’s a demo of a location-aware camera project from his personal site. Google has also been making recent noise about the importance of location to their mobile plans. From a recent CNET interview with Google Mobile head Deep Nishar [via MocoNews]:
The second big category we are focusing on is location-based services. People take their cell phones with them everywhere, and they generally are looking for information in the context of a location. When you're on your mobile device and you type in the keyword "movie," you're likely searching for a movie theater because you want to go see a movie. But if you typed in "movie" on your desktop at home, you may be searching for more general information about movies. With Google Maps, we can show you the location of the nearest movie theater, the times of the shows, and even let you purchase tickets from your phone.
So picture a device that knows where you are, knows what you want, is seamlessly integrated with your newsreader, your email, your calendar, and your documents. Its searches are contextually relevant and it browses faster than other devices as top sites are optimized and cached away somewhere in the Googlecloud. The pieces all exist today and are deployed in one way or another. This new project with Orange looks to me like a way to get them all together and deeply integrate them with the handset.
By why stop at there? Remember when Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “your mobile phone should be free,” at the Web 2.0 conference last month? And recall that Google is actively trying to build free municipal WiFi networks? Now imagine the device described above isn’t a phone provided by a carrier at all – but a Sidekick-like mobile media WiFi device: ad-supported, location aware, chock full of apps, and free to use. I think it’s a comin’. What do you think?
My phone folds open to reveal a decent sized keyboard and yours doesn’t. And it has a 2 megapixel camera (with a sliding camera lens). And its stereo speakers are LOUD, making its full duplex speaker-phone actually useful for conference calls. And have I told you about the music store, the expandable memory, the one-touch access to email, IM, and assisted GPS navigation? How about the fact that with all of this it's still pretty thin at just under 4/5 of an inch?
OK, you’re beginning to see why Verizon calls this phone the EnV.
Full disclosure here: before this particular handset came out I was a huge fan of its predecessor, the LG 9800 (which Verizon called the “V”, not because you could pull off its mask to reveal an alien but because it made a V shape when you opened it up to reveal the keyboard.) As a Verizon customer you either loved this phone or hated it – it was admittedly too bulky and somewhat brick-like. That’s what people would say when I showed it off to them, they’d say “it’s a brick!” I’d say, yeah but look at all these amazing features and they’d go, “it’s a cool brick, sure; but it’s a brick.”
What LG did with this most recent model was to take the LG 9800 and smush it flat. In the smushing (a technical term in the wireless industry, also called “thinnerizing”) the phone also got a little wider and a little longer. To those of us used to carrying a brick in our pockets I think the new design is a perfectly acceptable trade. If this is your first time with this model of phone I think it’ll still seem pretty big to you – a Krzr it ain’t.
The email client on this model is pretty solid as well. From the website it is easy to sync with any POP account (they make it particularly easy to use with Gmail) and the client itself, while not exactly full-featured is pretty clean. Some critics lament Verizon's decision to force users to use their proprietary and expensive client vs. allowing them to choose from some of the more elegant and inexpensive options out there. All I need is a simple window into Gmail and I'm good so, while I take the point, this is enough for me for now. I also like the prominence of IM on this device. The client is pre-loaded and works with AIM, MSN, and Yahoo and once launched it lurks in the background, alerting you to any new message that comes in. I think I'll be mobile AIMing a lot more with this device.
And the mobile music app is finally something worth using. No it's not an iPod quality UI (nor iRiver, Creative, etc.) but with a 1 gig microSD card (it supports up to 2 gigs) it is relatively easy to drag a couple of albums and podcasts over to the phone for the morning commute. I haven't been able to transfer music via Bluetooth although I'm told that's possible. Frankly I think Bluetooth would be too slow to transfer a large amount of audio/video anyway - for true wireless file management to and from the PC I think we'll need to wait for WiFi.
I've got one other issue. While the camera on this bad boy is 2 megapixels and can shoot 1600 x 1200 hi-res images, Verizon won't actually let customers use the phone to send pictures shot at the highest res. Once you choose to shoot hi-res you're locked from doing so on the handset. I've got to imagine that this is a network capacity issue and they don't want their network filled with gigabyte sized images going from phone to phone. I get that. But the issue of course is that this is a mobile phone and thus one expects images one takes to be mobile as well. If I want to send a picture to my Flickr mobile photostream I have to shoot at a lower quality than the phone is capable of. And incredibly useful services like Scanr require images sent to them to be 2 megapixels or greater to work. So Verizon has effectively shut all of their users off from ever using this service. How about allow customers to hi-res pictures but charge us more to do so? For Scanr alone I'd pay a premium for that. As Verizon comes out with higher quality cameras on their phones and people start buying handsets based on this feature I can only imagine that this will become more of an issue with consumers and Verizon will need to find a solution other than simply shutting this down.
Having said all of this, even the lower-res pictures still look great. And it's not the camera so much as the fold-out keyboard that has me sold on this line of devices. Sure, I may be a speed demon triple-tapping the number-pad but I’m not going to use that to email, to IM, to surf WAP, etc. Having a keyboard on your phone really does open up a wider world of apps and functionality.
Is it a Sidekick killer or Blackberry replacer? Not yet. The email app just isn't there yet and contact/calender management doesn't compare to the corporate crack that is Blackberry. But for music, pictures, video, text messaging, WAP surfing, instant messaging, GPS navigation, and 90% of everything you want a phone to do it can't be beat.
