Sometime last night, OS 2.0 was released. You can get it here. I played with it a bit this morning and here are my notes.

Hold down square and move the analog nub to scroll the screen in all directions.

Hold down X on a link to open the link in a new tab.

Hold down square and hit the [L] and [R] trigger buttons to get to the 3 available tabs.

It runs out of memory quickly. Having a couple bloglines pages open and trying to load a 3 megapixel photo gave an out of memory error.

Bloglines-full works but the right frame is very narrow. Use Bloglines mobile.

The PSP input mechanism has improved with completion and a special URL input mode. However, it still sucks.

If you exit the browser but do nothing else (play mp3’s, etc.), it will keep state in the browser and keep your connection alive.

I can’t quite figure out when it will lose my login state on sites like Bloglines, making me type it in again. But it usually keeps it, even when playing a game and coming back to the browser. So I think cookies stay for a while, if not until you explicitly clear them.

I find that I don’t need either of its smart rendering modes. Using the square/analog scroll makes most pages (even the venerable cnn.com) very readable.

When each of the 3 tabs have pages loaded, opening a new page in a tab will prompt you for which tab to use. They are colored and show the doc title to help you pick.

I read in some comments that people said it was slow. I think it’s actually quite fast. Make sure you don’t have powersave mode on for your WiFi. That slows it down a lot.

Another great Mobile Monday here in Los Angeles (special thanks to Marc and Alistair)! Thank you to USC Annnenberg for use of the space, and for sharing your thoughts, research and experiences in the mobile space. Thanks to everyone who came!

There are some very cool projects going on and its great to see that technology and people are coming together in the mobile space. Justin Hall spoke very passionately about creating a very personal avatar, trainable and expressive, who represents its creator and communicates with others, real or virtual. Very nice! He shared some of his stories from Asia and his travels: I never thought I’d see a picture of Fried Kitchen laminated on a Gameboy!

Professor Bleecker presented the Mobile and Pervasive Lab (MaPL) at USC. They’re making apps that make you explore real space in new ways Tracking Agama, mobile confessionals projectCAR, and games that make you get up using the “Vis-a-Vis” framework. Very exciting! They gave us a live demo of stuff they’ll be showing at Siggraph.

From a Market Asia Pacific article:

India appears to be at the forefront of the developing market for mobile phone (and data) services to young people, according to the Website mobic.com, an effort of The Mobile Internet Community (Norway).

A May 20, 2005 posting, using information provided by the Wireless World Forum, a research consultancy, says that the number of young people using mobile voice and data services in the Asia Pacific region will more than double from 71-million in 2004 to 151-million in 2007. This market segment will increase spending by US$3.3-billion for the years 2005 through 2007 to push total spending to US$43-billion in the region.

India’s mobile youth market will grow 300 percent from 2005 through 2007, from 8.3-million to 27.6-million people. This means India will account for 18.3 percent of this large and growing market.

India’s young people spent US$437-million on mobile telephone services in 2004. In 2005 they are likely to spend US$856-million. And by 2007 this expenditure will almost triple to $2.5-billion.

It is clear, also, that this vast interconnected population will create demand for other products of the information age, representing significant market opportunities.

American Idol brought text messaging to the US mainstream. The power here is phenominal - it caused the average american to learn how to use their text messaging features, learn how to type on a phone keypad, and decide to buy SMS buckets! It takes human drama and a social connection to show how technology can enhance your life - there’s no clearer example.

From a Wireless Week article…

The reality show phenomenon “American Idol” did more than just make Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Stoddard, Fantasia Barrino and Carrie Underwood household names. It elevated text messaging to a whole new level, making it a compelling way for TV viewers to affect the outcome of an extremely popular TV show.

In season four of “American Idol,” which wrapped up in May, wireless users and “Idol” watchers were able to use short codes and text messaging to vote for their favorite contestant. They could also enter “Idol” sweepstakes, compete in trivia games, chat with contestants and receive voting reminders. In addition, Cingular Wiewless offered “American Idol” ringtones and wallpapers. With each consecutive season of the show, the text messaging traffic thrives. But does this translate to revenue-generating opportunities for Cingular?

Analysts say the success of “American Idol” is not just the text messaging votes, but the new text messaging customers who sign up for the service because of the show and the ancillary products that subscribers pay to access, such as ringtones. “The votes alone are not what is compelling,” says Linda Barrabee, senior analyst, wireless/mobile at the Yankee Group. “What’s significant is if Cingular brings more customers to text messaging. And the ancillary stuff is where the recurring revenue is.”

THE IDOL IMPACT AT&T Wireless, of course, was the first wireless operator to benefit from the “American Idol” phenomenon when it became the official wireless sponsor of the Fox Network series in 2003. The company reported astounding results from that first campaign, which generated a record-breaking 7.5 million text messages during the season. Two years later, Cingular inherited AT&T’s sponsorship role when it acquired the operator in 2004 and the company has experienced similarly outstanding results.

Cingular Wireless reported that the fourth “American Idol” season generated more than 41.5 million text messages throughout the show’s 12-week voting period, a figure that the company believes is a text-messaging record for the largest volume of messaging occurring during a single campaign in the United States.

…

But it isn’t just the text messaging volume that makes Cingular happy. The company says the additional content offerings, such as trivia games and ringtones, also have grown in popularity. “We saw a tremendous increase in the participation of these programs,” says Cristy Swink, executive director of messaging at Cingular. She attributes that growth to a bigger visibility of the ancillary products by featuring them in Cingular stores and in publications.

Not only did customers buy and participate in these other programs, but their participation helped generate more votes, Swink says. “These programs kept the audience engaged with the show so they were more likely to vote.”

…

For Swink, the special formula that makes a TV show/text messaging campaign tie-in a success is a combination of show popularity and the integration of the messaging element into the program. “The user feels like something is happening because they participated,” Swink says. “That is very important.”

…

MMLA July is on Monday, July 25th!

Monday, July 25th, 2005 7-9pm

The Annenberg Center for Communication
734 West Adams Blvd, LA

Speakers:

Justin Hall (writer and student)
Discusses his “nascent mobile entertainment research project”.

Julian Bleecker (MaPL)
Presenting the Mobile and Pervasive Lab (MaPL) at the University of Southern California.

and

Mobile Monday LA Announcements
Announcements from the mobile industry in Los Angeles. (Open to All Attendees)

MORE INFO & DIRECTIONS: http://www.mobilemonday.la/

Last Saturday on the way back from LA, I was stuck in DC’s Washington Dulles International Airport. There was some severe weather bugging the system up, and the whole airport was shut down until the storm passed. My flight was supposed to leave at 7pm. It was then 10pm, with no relief in sight.

While I was waiting, I really wanted to keep track of the weather system to see if I was going to be there all night or not. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find some updated radar online, so I got to searching on my Sidekick.

The only web site that worked correctly enough on the Sidekick to get images from was NOAA. A good source, but the zoom was so far back, I really couldn’t see how well the airport was doing. I also didn’t exactly know where the airport was on the map.

If I could have used google maps and the doppler radar dashboard widget on my mac, I would have been set. But there was no open wireless AP, the Sidekick didn’t have bluetooth and neither did the Sprint phone I use to test SORA.

There’s also this great program I installed on my sidekick called Weather Underground. It has excellent links to radar, detailed reports, and the like. But for whatever reason it has a time-limitation (not to buy it, just to make sure you upgrade), and it was over the limit. Boo.

So in the end, I just hoped that the ambiguous blob I could see on the Sidekick got smaller. I wound up on a midnight flight back to Pittsburgh, getting home around 2:45am. Not too bad. It would have just been nicer to know what the weather was planning for me.

Maybe I should have just read a book.

Here’s a paper by Philippe Debaty, Patrick Goddi and Alex Vorbau that would seem like a natural extension to that last post about Verizon’s Rabble. It’s too bad I don’t get Mobile Networks and Applications Journal so I could actually read this. Anyone want to send me a copy?

Integrating the physical world with the web to enable context-enhanced mobile services

This work has its roots in the HP Labs Cooltown project, whose core principle is that the integration of our physical world with the Web offers unique opportunities to enable ubiquitous computing applications. This paper describes our latest results in building a model and a software architecture called the Web presence manager (WPM) to support this physical-virtual integration. This software layer implements and specifies the services and information provided by Web representations of physical entities such as people, places, or things. We detail an extensive context-enhanced media-oriented application built on top of our platform. Our application enables mobile and context-aware access to personal contents and rendering on local appliances in a variety of ubiquitous computing environments.

Tagging blogs and posts to locations is nothing new. But this system seems to go a little further. It has topic channels and can be filtered by location and other criteria. Though it’s a start - it is really just bringing desktop blog-trawling mobile. The power really comes when they make it contextually-aware. That’s the tough part.

Rabble Enables Verizon Wireless Customers to Create, Publish and Share Media and Connect with Others Based on Proximity or Areas of Interest

BEDMINSTER, N.J. and SAN DIEGO, July 6 /PRNewswire/ — Verizon Wireless, the nation’s leading wireless provider, and Intercasting Corporation, the first Location-Aware Media Networking Operator (LMNO), today announced the availability of Rabble, the first mobile application designed to empower individuals to create, publish and share media and connect with others based on proximity or areas of interest. With Rabble, Verizon Wireless customers with select Get It Now-enabled phones can use their mobile devices to create and distribute their own content, connecting people by customer-provided location specific information. Rabble turns Get It Now customers into producers, inviting them to create and publish media on their phones enabling them to inform, entertain and interact with others.
Capitalizing on the massive consumer trend toward Internet blogging, Rabble users can publish personalized media channels through certain channels to allow Rabble users to promote themselves, connect with like-minded individuals or groups, give voice to opinions, discuss events, report news, review locales and more. Rabble users define their own limits or rules that govern who can access their channel of information — and this feature allows them to maintain control over the distribution of personal content. Rabble users can conduct powerful searches of user-generated content based on interest, time, location or browse the available community around them to connect with one individual or to many. Though it is the first mobile-centric blogging application, Verizon Wireless Get It Now customers who use many of the top blogging sites can use Rabble as a tool to publish to their existing blog on the Web or import their existing blog to Rabble…

Viral marketing - a combination of techniques that use social networking to spread the word. They are trying to capture what once was the nebulous “word of mouth” by seeding their product appropriately. As we move to the age of TiVos fast-forwarding commercials and pop-up blockers becoming standard, companies need more ways to get into peoples’ heads. Knowing how to control information flow is power, and some are doing it very effectively right now.

From Businesswire:

Americans are bombarded with intrusive advertisements.In response, shell-shocked consumers have embraced the mute button on remote controls, spam filters, digital video recording devices and popup blockers
As a result, marketers and advertisers are coming to two conclusions. Number one is that traditional advertising is ineffective in reaching and convincing consumers to purchase their products. Advertisers realize that they must turn customers into evangelists for their products.
Second, advertising a product can no longer be considered something that begins after a product is manufactured. Rather, advertising must be integrated into the process of creating the product. Forward thinking companies are realizing that they are better off diverting part of their traditional advertising budgets into enhancing the quality quality of the product or to lower the price of the product. Presenting the marketplace with a higher quality product at a compelling price will often spark the viral marketing that is necessary to garner consumers’ attention.
These are a few of the conclusions that were drawn from The Wall Street Transcript’s unique report entitled “Igniting Buzz — Maximizing Returns on Word of Mouth Marketing Campaigns.” This report is the culmination of interviews with veteran marketing professionals from some of America’s largest companies, account executives from some of the most sought-after agencies, and academicians. This report will include case studies, white papers and presentations and will be released at The Wall Street Transcript’s Viral Marketing Conference in New York on September 13, 2005.
This conference will feature discussions on: The Fundamentals of Creating Word of Mouth Marketing; Controlling Buzz; Case Studies for Creating Traditional Buzz; Creating Buzz Through Interactive Online Campaigns; Creating Buzz Through Blogs ; Creating Buzz Through Video Games ; Creating Buzz Through Social Media; Measuring Results of Viral Campaigns; and The Legal Limits on Seeding Buzz.

That said, viral marketers have to be careful that their plans don’t backfire. Case and point, check out this thread over at Russ’ Site. That kind of press can’t be good for business. (Though any press is good press - isn’t that what they say about Tom Cruise?)

In a post on AlwaysOn, it is stated that:

As voice is becoming more and more commoditized importance of wireless data revenues to our industry can t be understated Additionally with the introduction of new technologies such as G.
…
It is no surprise that NTT DoCoMo and KDDI lead the pack - having done ground breaking work in this space since 1998. NTT DoCoMo is by far the leader by earning over $1B/month from data services. Their stated goal is to derive 80% of their revenues from data services by 2010.

Keeping in mind that Japan is usually ahead in this area, it is still a promising trend to see. At this point, media such as VOD and music downloads (especially with the upcoming ITunes phone) remain the most likely to push data revenue in the US to the next level.

Another nice hint of change comes from T-Mobile changing its toplevel WAP page to Google. Even if wireless web usage doesn’t catch on, at least this serves to educate people that phones really do access the internet. The real internet.

My money isn’t on one killer app moving people to use data. Just like picture messaging, ringtone download, and game downloads make up the bulk of the data use we have now - there’s going to be a combination of apps that take it to the next level. Hopefully socially-enabling apps will make up a large percentage of this.