Christopher Herot's Weblog

SnapTell

I wrote something on QR Codes last month, which hold a lot of promise as a way of embedding information in an off-line context, such as a print ad or billboard, and tying that to online information.  Now SnapTell, Inc. of Palo Alto has come up with an elegant solution that doesn't require embedding any information at all.  The user snaps a picture of the ad with his or her camera phone and emails in order to be entered into contests, receive special offers, etc.  The current issue of Rolling Stone has five such ads (although one seemed to be missing), identified with a discrete logo.  A separate, full page ad from SnapTell explains the program and gives the email address RS@snaptell.com.  The SnapTell site matches the photograph against their database in order to identify the ad.  The picture recognition appears very robust.    So far, I've received an MP3 inviting me to visit MySpace.com to get a  "valuable coupon" - worth a dollar towards a pizza (talk about indirection!), a free motorcycle ringtone from Allstate, shaving tips from the Edge Gel Girls, and a video clip from the Discovery Channel.  We'll also see how much more spam I get.

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

One of the more memorable talks from recent TED conferences was from Nokia's Jan Chipchase who described what he learned in his travels about how people in the developing world use mobile phones, which along with keys and money is something most people carry with them everywhere.  (At right, a mobile-repair business in Delhi which was probably not factory-authorized).

Chipchase's work is profiled in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, or you can watch the TED video below.  Jan's web site also has an extensive collection of photographs and presentations.

Watching Movies on the Phone

In this clip David Lynch compares the experience of watching a film on the big screen and watching it on a mobile device.  While I too am a fan of le grand écran, and have benefited from the recent investments in theatrical exhibition in Boston, there are times, like when you are on an airplane, where you need to compromise.  As Lynch points out, just don't mistake that experience for the real thing.

This is a clip from the DVD edition of Inland Empire, wth the iPhone parody music and graphics added by an unidentified friend of Brittney Gilbert.

Nokia N95

Nokia has 40% of the worldwide mobile phone market, although most of their success has been outside the USA.  That's too bad, because while Apple has captured the attention of American consumers, Nokia has been selling a far larger quantity of feature-packed phones everywhere else.  I've been using one of them, the N95-3 for the past two weeks.  While it's not the ultimate phone (no QWERTY keypad or touch screen) it does have a lot of capabilities that the iPhone and others lack.  Some notable features:

• HSDPA - AT&T's 3G data network - 10x faster than the EDGE technology on the iPhone
• High quality camera with auto-focus and Carl Zeiss optics.
• GPS - the real thing, not some cell-tower imitation
• Multitasking - so programs can run in the background
• Video capture, video streaming, and video calls
• Laptop tethering
• Open platform

All of this is packed into a phone-sized form factor with a 240x320 color screen.  (The iPhone is 480x320).
The processor is an ARM 1136 which at 320 Mhz is half the speed of the iPhone's ARM 1176JZF, but the N95 also has a TI DSP and a graphics accelerator.  This architecture allows you to hold a high quality phone call while letting other programs run in the background.  For instance you can browse the Web or use Fring to receive your Twitter messages.  (The iPhone pretends to do multi-tasking by suggesting applications save their state when they suspend operation, but they aren't really running when you aren't using them.)

The camera is as good as many pocket cameras and infinitely better than most cell phones.  The following images illustrate the differences among the Palm Treo, the N95 and a Canon ELPH.  (Click on each image for a full-rez version).

Treo	N95	Canon

The Treo will serve as an emergency camera in case space aliens land in your back yard, but you wouldn't bring it with you on as your only camera if you anticipated taking pictures.  The N95, on the other hand, will service in all but the most demanding situations, e.g. available light candids.

The GPS is a pleasant surprise.  It offers quite detailed maps which it downloads on the fly as needed.  It is very fast as it can use the closest cell tower to help the GPS decide which satellites to track.

Perhaps the most promising aspect of the N95 is the complete openness of the platform.  Unlike the iPhone, which was completely closed until recently and now promises to allow applications "approved" by Apple, the N95 offers an completely open environment.  As a result, there are some really interesting applications, such as Fring which offers "over the top" VoIP, Qik, which provides live video streaming from the phone to the Web, and Seesmic which is like Twitter with video.  While the Seesmic application is still in Alpha, if illustrates the promise of an open platform, allowing subscribers to record, upload, and view short video clips.

Mobile Phone Novels in Japan

Today's New York Times has an article by Norimitsu Onishi on Japanese mobile phone novels (keitai shousetsu) entitled Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular.  It describes how more than a million novels have been composed on cell phones and made available on sites such as Maho no i-rando (Majic Island).  Some have been become best sellers (5 of the top 10, selling 400,000 copies each) when republished in book form and one has been made into a movie.  The genre has also benefited from the decision by the Japanese mobile operators to offer unlimited packet data, reducing the instances of "packet death" when subscribers got their first bill.

The stories are mostly written by young women such as Rin, who according to the Sidney Morning Herald is a nursery school teacher from Kokura. When offered in the original serialized form the format offers ample opportunity for the readers to comment while the work is in progress and feel involved in the creative process.

The depth of the works are somewhat limited, with lots of dialog and little scene or character development, not just because the need to punch out lines while riding the train but also because of the limited vocabulary of kanji that can be entered from the mobile keypad.   The distinctive style uses short sentences, emoticons and spaces (to indicate when a character is thinking.)   

An except from Satomi Nakamura's To Love You Again:

Kin Kon Kan Kon (sound of school bell ringing)
(space)
The school bell rang
(space)
"Sigh. We're missing class"
(space) She said with an annoyed expression.

While some bemoan the lowbrow nature of the work, these books are reaching an audience whose book reading has previously been confined to manga if they read books at all.

Some details not covered elsewhere, including excerpts can be found in a September article in the Wall Street Journal.

FCC Terminates Proceeding to Consider Dropping Ban on Cell PHones on Planes

Yesterday the FCC released a Memorandum Opinion and Order terminating the proceeding that was reconsidering its ban on use of cell phones aboard aircraft.  While there was an enormous (and mostly negative) input from the public on the issue, the FCC based its decision on narrow technical grounds - that there was insufficient data on whether airborne cellular use would overwhelm the terrestrial networks.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that companies such as AirCell  LLC are  still sanguine about providing WiFi service aloft.  According to the article, the speed will be "equivalent to WiFi service on the ground" but that voice services such as Skype will be blocked.  On the other hand "cellular service is the top priority in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where social objections to cellphones on airplanes appear to be more muted."  Who knows?  It could still happen here.

Video Snacking

"If anybody says they've figured this out right now, they haven't."
-Christina Norman, President, MTV Music Television

The New York Times Magazine ran a story today, The Shorter, Faster, Cruder, Tinier TV Show, about the possibilities and challenges of video for the "third screen" - P.D.A.'s, iPods, game players and, most importantly, cellphones, using Sway Calloway's made-for-cell series Sway's Hip-Hop Owner's Manual as a case study.  "Filming to the phone" requires tight shots and avoidance of camera motion in order to produce videos that are compelling and clear.  Even the process of holding a meeting to review the material can be a challenge, as in  "Do we all stand behind each other or what?"

Marketing may be less of a problem, since the well-known techniques of getting the attention of 18-24 year-old males still work:

when the network began uploading cellphone clips of the new insult-takedown show "Yo Momma," and gave them titles like "Friday's 'Yo Momma' Sneak Peak," the snippets did O.K., but not great. Then they changed the titles to ones like "Yo Momma Is So Nasty" and "Yo Momma Is So Poor." The clips were consistently among the most-viewed of MTV's mobile shows.

Some memorable additons to the lexicon:

mobisode - short episode of a TV show especially crafted for mobile devices
video snacking - with the implication of brevity and empty calories

Some sites for short-form, consumer-produced videos:

SeeMeTV - British site for 12 second clips.  From 3, a 3G mobile system of Hutchison Whampoa Limited.
Heavy.com
YouTube
Google Video
StupidMedia.net
Weak Game
Mojo Flix
iFilm