I was lucky enough to get an invitation to a reception tied to the The Media Center’s conference on Mobile Media. It was a case in point of the number of people, and industries, who are starting to see the special place that the mobile phone has in daily life.

The Media Center’s Andrew Nachison has stressed before, and did so again tonight that we aren’t just part of a technology trend, but also a social one with some interesting behavioral implications. In a flashy presentation they pointed out examples that point to change: blogs have effected traditional media; organizations are changing in the face of a creative, vocal, and selective audience (who now have more power to effect and create). A recent example that some of you may have read: The Vatican is now asking people to e-mail/sms the pope! It isn’t that these channels of communication between audience and producer didn’t exist before (As the BBC pointed out people still call into radio stations, write letter’s to the editor, and fax), but now there is greater power in the richness of the interactions between the communities who share common interestes, and with those industries who serve them. We in the technology space probably take it for granted that these are obvious developments, but The Media Center reminds us that these are large organizations who traditionally don’t move with early adopters, but here they are, changing. It says something big.

I had a great chance to chat with Marc Brown, Anita Wilhelm, Alistair Jeffs and many new faces from all over. It was great to “imagine” with people who had spent the entire day thinking about mobility and what it means!

Check out this patent filed back in 1998:

Online churn reduction and loyalty system

A method and system are disclosed for providing subscriber loyalty and retention techniques These techniques are suitable for mobile devices with small screens and limited keypad communication. This system and method allows mobile subscribers who have been identified as being likely candidates for churning, to efficiently, visually and interactively, review an offer for a mobile service plan better meeting the subscriber’s needs. The subscriber can review and execute the offer using the display and interface of a mobile device.

This is an excellent idea that (as far as I know) was never implemented by a carrier. If the predictions were accurate and the frequency of messages was about every 2 months, who wouldn’t want to be notified which plans could save you money? I wonder how much carriers make off of plans that exceed usage - does this amount exceed money lost from churn related to pricing?

Here is a gallery hosted by Macromedia of some of the cool things you can do with Flash Lite. It was posted a couple months ago with this press release:

CANNES, France — Macromedia Announces Flash Content Contest Winners at 3GSM World Congress 2005
Macromedia (Nasdaq:MACR) today announced its mobile Flash developer community is expanding rapidly and developing award-winning work, as evidenced by the winners of the Macromedia Flash Content Contest at3GSM World Congress 2005. NYC Traffic was selected as the Grand Prize Winner in addition to eight category winners, all of which demonstrate the ease of use and power of Flash applications for mobile devices.
The contest took place in conjunction with the Macromedia Mobile Developer Program, which supports wireless developers and other content professionals worldwide who are interested in mobilizing their Flash and non-Flash assets. Developers in the program have access to a broad range of services and information to help them design, develop, and market Flash applications and content for wireless mobile devices, including mobile-specific tools and content development kits, training, and support. To join the Macromedia Mobile Developer Program, please visit www.macromedia.com/mobile…

No doubt it can produce awesome interfaces. But the providers have to catch up with reliable and affordable data plans to feed it from the back end so that they can actually be useful. Plus we are far from wide manufacturer adoption here, so it’s not a technology I’m ready to push my company towards at this point.

Nonetheless, it has gotten big on DoCoMo phones, so maybe it has a chance to get to the mobile-data back-woods known as the US.

Melodico of Seattle seem like they’re trying to jumpstart a mobile DRM’d music sharing app.

They released this press release in February:

SEATTLE — Melodeo, Inc. today announced new peer-to-peer music sharing functionality with its Melodeo Mobile Music Solution. Availableduring the first quarter in Europe, mobile phone users will be able to securely send full tracks that they have purchased, from one mobile phone to another mobile phone via Bluetooth wireless technology. Melodeo, a Seattle-based company, provides music to wireless subscribers through its Mobile Music Solution. The Mobile Music Solution resides directly on the user’s wireless phone, allowing consumers to quickly and easily shop, preview, purchase/download over the air, and play and store full-length music tracks…

From the website, I see that it’s made for carrier integration. They want to be the mobile iTunes music store. Problem is, Apple and Motorola are trying to take iTunes mobile as well. But since they are having a bit of trouble selling the hardware and Apple’s attutude to carriers, maybe Melodico has a shot at sneaking in first?

They say on their website:

Melodeo has created solutions for Symbian Series 60 and UIQ, Java, Windows Mobile, and BREW, and can build the client directly into handsets.

Which is cool! That beats out the grand total of 1 supported Moto phone that iTunes is pushing now. Plus, this lets you actually get and trade songs while mobile and not just download them from your collection. However, if you can’t transfer music to your pc and play it on your other music players, I don’t think it’s worth the purchase.

So the big question still remains: Do people want songs that bad that they won’t wait to get home and probably pay less?

We have been playing with MPowerPlayer for a while now, but up until now, we haven’t been able to get it to run SORA. SORA would crash immediately with a NullPointerException that was coming from deep in the bowels of MPowerPlayer’s j2me implementation itself.

Last week, though, Nate finally got it working, after some hard core investigation, and a bit of forum searching. It turned out to be a difference in a particular aspect of the ClassLoader security implementation within MPowerPlayer. It also turns out that their implementation is not only legitimate, but probably more secure in this aspect that every other implementation we have test with. Luckily the fix was relatively simple, and compatible with the existing devices that we support.

Nate implemented the fix, and we’ve got SORA running in MPowerPlayer now. So I have to give some serious props to Nate for getting this working, and to the MPowerPlayer developers for a such a cool tool, and for good support on their forums.

Besides just being cool, MPowerPlayer gives us a great in-house tool for testing. Because it is so much easier to setup and use than other emulators, and is not Windows specific (Tomo is mostly OS X these days!), we can easily set it up, for example, for a game designer or graphic artist to use in testing gameplay and game content.

Now if we can just figure out how to best utilize all those bloomin’ configuration parameters.

This application is for a relatively straight-forward idea. It’s been over a year since its submission, and I found no issued patents that seem to match it. So it is most likely dead.

Though the idea is extremely simple, as virtual world and MMORPG product segments grow, they’re going to start incorporating this idea - SORA has been doing it for a while. It’s an excellent device to keep people tied to the game - especially online worlds accessed through mobile devices.

Sending messages in response to events occurring on a gaming service:

Alerts are transmitted to subscribers to an alerts service in response to events that occur within a gaming environment. Communication within the gaming environment is limited to specific game consoles and the gaming service. A subscriber to the alert notification service can be alerted when a friend joins the gaming service to play a game, or can select other events for which an alert is requested to be sent to the subscriber. In response to any predetermined event occurring within the gaming environment, an alerts service provides an alert or message that is transmitted through a secure firewall and outside the gaming environment. The alert message can be in the form of a pop-up that appears on a user’s instant messaging service, or an email, or a message that is transmitted through a mobile communication service to a cell phone or other portable communication device.

Looks like this patent was intended for an XBox-Live application, and I found some ties between the authors and Microsoft. But since Microsoft isn’t named officially on the patent, I’m guessing it’s not theirs. Does anyone know if MS usually keeps the company name off patents?

I just read Russ’ rant on the Treo line and PalmOne and figured I’d add my specific comments about the Treo line, since my wife just purchased a 600 on Sunday.

The driving factor behind my wife’s purchase of the device was the large catalog of medical software available for Palms and the ubiquity of the devices in her hospital. She’s a medical student, and has seen the use of PDAs (mostly Palm) become pervasive enough for her to feel like she’s missing the boat if she doesn’t have one. She also wanted to be able to deal with her email and do some IM on breaks during her longer rotations.

I’m not going to get into a full review of the unit. That’s been done way too many times on other sites. But I will get into a couple major thoughts I had:

The Treo 600, like all Palms, cannot multitask. Two programs cannot have access to the network connectoon at the same time. Therefore, email can’t be downloaded when browsing the web, your IM session gets terminated when you switch out of it (though VeriChat tries its best to be slick about dealing with that), and various other network usage annoyances happen that make the power-user grumble.

As far as data apps go, The Treo 600 is a Palm with a phone attached. Integration is barely the word for this. Basically, it feels the same as the experience with a bluetooth palm - only with faster connection times since the bluetooth connection step is removed. Each app needs to explicitly grab the network handle and/or connect. It’s really clunky compared to my sidekick - which keeps multitasking network access open all the time for all applications on the device.

Those were my major gripes with the device (well, along with the relatively weak EMail program it ships with). Again, the advantage Palm and the Treos have is the huge back catalog of software available, and the support of a dedicated user base. The medical profession is part of that user base.

For enterprise email and scheduling, the Blackberry beats it hands down. I’ve owned one of these and can attest to how seamless and rock solid it is.

For a device to integrate data into an average person’s life, many devices come closer than the Treo. My Sidekick does very well - and phones with smaller form factors are starting to come close too, such as the LG F9100. Sure these phones can’t be considered true smartphones. But as far as enabling persistent access to EMail, IM and web in a way that a casual user would be willing to accept into their life, they are moving along the right track - much more so than the Treos.

So I agree with Russ. Aside from specific markets like medicine, where does this leave Palm?

From PRNewswire-FirstCall:

With the use of email, instant messaging and cell phones on the rise, almost half of the adults surveyed nationally feel that vocabulary skills of young people are declining as a result. What effect will this have on the future success of our nation’s youth? The Reader’s Digest National Word Power Challenge(SM) commissioned a national telephone survey(1) of 1,000 adults, 18 and older, to gauge how these new modes of communication may be affecting the vocabulary skills of today’s kids. The results of this study, released today, show 45% of the respondents feel that kids’ vocabulary is declining; 26% believe these skills are improving; 21% think vocabulary skills remain the same, and 8% had no opinion.

The survey also found that career, overwhelmingly, is the area of life that has the greatest impact for a strong vocabulary (75% cite it). When asked which area had the second greatest impact, 65% say relationships. The higher the education level of the adult, the greater the feeling that career will be most positively impacted by having a strong vocabulary.

I think there’s a good cross-section of ages represented on gaming bulletin boards - I’ve been visiting some of those recently to read about PSP news. I found that there really is a wide distribution of vocabulary and “effort” in creating reasonable posts that seems to loosely follow age (as far as I can tell from the info that is given).

The good news is that depth of thought tends to follow grammar and vocabulary closely. People who have something interesting to say write it in a way that will get it read seriously. When you see a terribly-written post, it usually is some sort of flame or useless comment. What I’m trying to say is that I think when people of all ages know it matters, they speak properly, and if they aren’t able to, they find themselves at a disadvantage.

This would relegate chat-speak to being merely a slang, which really doesn’t bother me personally. I think the rule of thumb is, if your kid is speaking l33t h@xor speak all the time, they don’t have important enough things going on in their lives to motivate them to speak seriously - and that’s the core problem.

We had a great turn out for the first Mobile Monday in Los Angeles! Thanks to all! While we had no presentations this time, we all had a chance to meet and share with people who are building, researching and imagining the mobile space! Look forward to seeing you all at our next meeting on May 18, 2005, right before E3!

A party phone!

More stats which you knew in your head all along (though those Sorrent stats seem a bit high - but I’m not complaining):

From Rider Research:

Some 16 million teens and tweens in the states own cell phones, according to NOP World Technology. Its “mKids Study” reveals that nearly half–44%–of 10- to 18-year-olds own a wireless phone. The study was conducted in the top 25 markets and found that ownership among 12- to 14-year-olds increased from 13% in February 2002 to 40% in December 2004. The majority–73%–of 18-year-olds own cell phones, a 15% increase from 2002. Some 75% of 15- to 17-year-olds carry cell phones, up from 42% in 2002.

From Businesswire:

Sorrent partnered with research firm U30 Group to study the usage and purchasing behavior of consumers of mobile entertainment.; Among the research findings which will be released in greater detail in the coming weeks was the emergence of “tweens,” defined as youth ages 10 to 13 years old, as the market segment with greatest frequency of mobile gaming In addition, results showed tweens as among the top segments in overall usage of mobile content. . Tweens: Generation Mobile Tweens led mobile game usage in this year’s study with more than 84 percent playing mobile games one or more times per day. This compares to 64 percent of the general population of mobile gamers playing one or more times per day. In addition, nearly 80 percent of tweens play games on their phone while at home and more than 40 percent share mobile games and entertainment with family members and friends. Beyond gaming , Sorrent’s research found tweens to be active users of other mobile applications. 82 percent of tweens actively text message, 83 percent use ringtones and half of tweens surveyed use picture mail.