Archive for October 2008
Come on baby light my file
This was one of the more amusing exhibits at Frieze Art Fair today.
Art meets Geek meets the Doors. Unfortunately, i took the video on my phone and there’s no simple way of rotating the movie (I’m sure there is if i buy QT Pro or another video editing software)
LBS Service – Quick Review
Quick Refresher course on where LBS services are as of Oct 2008
Rummble
http://www.rummble.com
‘Mobile Local Discovery’ (Andrew Scott, Co-Founder, ex Playtext)
Award winning Mobile 2.0, MEX
User selected location – Feeds, photos, Google maps, basic listings, UGC reviews.
Friend invite via 50 Free texts or email.
Early stage development
Moximity
‘It’s all around you’ Austin based new start up (launched Sept 28, 2008)
Looks like a GPS Social Net – claiming to integrate your other social nets which beats having to find new friends or invite old ones. Find friends nearby, location based offers. Seems to be rolling out city by city and I love their use of Google maps for on their sign up page. Sounds pretty cool, and think it’s smart move rolling out city by city.
http://plazes.com
‘Right place, right time’ (Felix Petersen, Co-Founder now head of social activities at Nokia)
Web based and appears to have SMS (but didn’t try this out)
Share your location (neat suggestions provided), updates, see who else is in the area. RSS, update to Facebook, WP, Blogger, good mapping and more – feature rich.
Tech crunch describes it ‘as Twitter with geotagging, points of interest, and social networking
features’ which is pretty fair IMO.
Buzz’d
http://buzzd.com/
‘What’s going on around me right now’
US Based new start-up, with local event UGC reviews, mapping and social nets.
MOMO award winner, just closed series A.
BrightKite
http://brightkite.com/ Currently invite only
Geo Social net with feed for status updates, photos etc..
The other major players have recently been extensively reviewed by Techcrunch. Covered in this review
- Loopt.com – mobile social mapping
- Whrrl (Pelago, funded by Jeff Bezos and T-Mobile)) – social net, google maps, mash up on the mobile
- Where/ Buddy Finder (uLocate) find locatin specific friends, shops, cafes, Zipcars, places listed on Yelp, petrol station and of course Starbucks (yawn)
- Limbo.com categorise users in to frieds, contacts (pulled in from native address phone book), members. Desk site is very weird with a games section. Hmmm?
- Zintin – Standford grads start-up, iPhone only. Seems to have started with the infamous scribble and shake app, which can then be shared on a FB like Wall but now morphing in to something else? Looks quite interesting.
Further reading:
LBS Primer by Tech Crunch is excellent http://tinyurl.com/4rsorr
Anatomy of a failure : lessons learned from failed start-up Meetro, excellent too. http://tinyurl.com/59ouwk
Andrew Finkle http://www.afpr.com/ – Social media blogger also has some great posts on this subject. http://www.afpr.com/
Nokia announces ‘Comes with Music’
So Nokia makes it’s big music play. Key facts:
- Pay-as-you-go + £130 handset
- Catalogue from the Big 4 Majors
- DRM – won’t work on an iPod
- Tracks playable on mobile and PC (2 device)
- After 1 year you can ‘keep the tracks’ if they remain on the same handset or you transfer to a new Nokia handset.
I do support new business models and anything which shakes up the industry and challenges Apple’s dominance but I’m not sure this a good deal for artists or consumers. For the artist, I’m doubt very much they’ll see much of the cake from this deal and it feels like it’s another step towards commoditisation of their output. For the consumer, you’ve now got another proprietary segment of your music- I believe consumers want total interoperability across all devices (a la MP3) – but the real whince for me is that I don’t belive 80% of consumers understand DRM and what they’re actually buying into. It’s only when your PC crashes or you try and swap operating systems that it then dawns on you that you don’t own that music after all – it’s licensed to you by a technology company. But on the plus side, it feels almost free so why wouldn’t the average teenager go for it…look forward to seeing the ads for this service
Full details at Nokia site
