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mobilemedia

(The letters MI stand for MY IMPRESSION)

Mobile Media Con
Friday, April 29, 2005

Jon Bostrom, Senior director of Java in Tech Platforms, Nokia
Helped deploy the first java cell tech with NTT DoCoMo.

Mobil Edge Computing
Handsets should be easy to use and we shouldn’t have to administer them. They should just work.

All parts of the system should be Manageable
Nokia Lifeblog – Point…Click…Blog

Open communication platform. Makes the devices sold my Nokia more interesting.

Nokia N91 Phone
4GB HD audio Player
2M pixel camera
wifi
cell
Bluetooth
WCDMA

Open Environment (languages you can use to program for Nokia products)
C++
Python
Java
Flash
XML

Q: (from participant) What do you think about the other programming environments used by mobile carriers?
A: I like open standards. It fits the most people. Programmers, businesses

Middleware Services on the Edge
Ex. Quake gamming engine. Allows anyone to develop a game on top of the rendering engine. Less work. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Nokia is trying to do the same with Java based middleware for phones.

Client Middleware

Examples of Middleware Services
+ Games Service
+ Picture Service
+ Music Service
+ Info Service

Mange the Edge – by infrastructure owner, Mobile Carriers
Real-time system Monitoring
Push and Pull Apps
Real-time Device Inspection
Remote Provisioning

MI: Big sales pitch for Nokia, Surprised? Seems like folks are wondering how this open model works with all the mobile carriers and their closed systems. I personally think the java based concept is brilliant. Open is good. But to get your phone to work with a service in America you need to buy it from a carrier. Those carriers may not let Java middleware play with there services. Internet access on your phone is key to bypassing internal network services. Also so many devices have crippled services. You can’t movw your sim card to another phone easily.

Q: (ME) Is there a java based web browser that can view straight html available for Nokia devices?
A: “Not “application quality” from Nokia. But there are some garage guys made browsers.”

MI: Having applications for mobile devices that can access the Internet as a whole (web browsers, ssh, email, etc) is ESSENTIAL to providing equal access to ALL and keeping the knowledge barrier low. Future proofing will only happen using Open architectures. Most mobile carriers have a business interest in having closed networks. If a tech they use deprecates that’s ok. They profit from several places by the rebuild of a new network system every few years .

10:00am
Dewayne Hendricks, CEO, Dandin Group
Clarke’s 3rd law
First there was the transition from Foot Speed to Light Speed: First wireless communication

Then we have the transition from Light Speed to Warp Speed.

HAM radio operators have been creating wireless data networks since 1981
Wifi arrives and everyone becomes a HAM. You don’t need a license to broadcast.

U-NII services adopted in 1997
(Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure)
Open spectrum for wireless community networks. Still there.

Can 802.11 tech be piggy backed on U-NII spectrum?

HPWREN
Wireless internet 2

SFLan – 5MegaBit

Q: (participants) Who got the backhaul? (Upstream internet access)
A; The community

Muniwireless.com

Darknet – content shared over the internet that is not searchable from Google and may not be linked via http.
P2p overlay over the global Internet
60%-80% of all global Internet traffic on internet
BitTorrent accounts for 50% of all traffic

Ex. Copies of the Daily Show are being shared via BitTorrent and available very quickly after real time broadcast

+++++++
Mike Outmesguine, co-founder, SoCal Wireless Users group, President and founder, TrnasStellar

Demo of a solar powered backpack with a junction box that shares cell network internet access to be shared via WiFi. Aka the do it yourself Linux wonder called stompbox.

4.9 Ghz Public Safety band

voltaicsystems.com (solar bag)
lpbn.org (linux public broadcasting network)

You Come First – software to manage your personal wifi network
Digital hotspoter – small device to find wifi networks

++++++
Susan “Sooz” Kaup, BostonWAG (Wireless Advocacy Group)

BostonWAG website has:
Free Community Wi-Fi networks directory
HotSpot reviews

Boston Wi-Fi Summit, Access for Everyone
Thursday, May 19th
Science Park
Boston, MA
8:45am – 1pm

MI: The best way to scale and sustain a market is by using networks and apps that allow open access to the Internet.

Being more open to embracing a dialogue with others. Building Trust.
Ex. A big local paper started a conversation with an underground writer critic of the paper and found common ground. Solves issues from both sides. Resolves conflict.

Is advertising in media destroying consumers trust in media (ex. Newspapers)?
Andrew N.: No

MI: Nice tension in the room after the discussion of open wireless networks. Business folks who are concerned most about monetizing and meeting the bottom line are having a hard time understanding how open free stuff fits their world. Not surprising. It fits because consumers are no longer passive buyers. Their sophistication that corporations think they understood is all together a different thing. The american dream has helped to create independant thinkers. If everyone can acheive then everyone looks out for themselves. Ultimate buying power is just that. Power. Power to think different. Power to buy from someone who understands you.

Mobile Media Con
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Day 2: The Future

Intro to IMSC
(Integrated Media Systems Center)

Adam C. Powell, III

USC Immersive Media Lab

Tour has two parts
1. Integration Lab
2. Individual Components

How do you design systems that use continuous media on a system designed for email where 2 milliseconds of error is ok? (ie digital packet based networks, TCP-IP)

Serious Games (new director who invented ‘America’s Army’ a multiplayer game)
* Health – admitting children to hospital
* Biology – learning about how the human body works

IMSC Demos

Haptics – Wayne Zhu
Physical feed back from external devices provided by 3D models and computer interactivity.

3D modeling and Recognition – Philippos Mordohai
3D models created from Stereoptic camera photography of faces. Comparison of two pictures to identify a person automatically.

Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming – Farnoush Anurag
Streaming Video from multiple sources simultaneously to increases speed and raise redundancy.

2020 Classroom – Luciano
First person Computer Games that teach serious subjects like Biology.

1:19
Session 7
Tim Repsher, Mobile, Bakersfield paper

The HOT lead is back! Newspapers can scoop network news with mobile tech.

Local news is key.
“First to know, First to tell”

Know your competitors and their touch points.

Competitive analysis is important. Know Google, yahoo, Graig’s list,…

The mobile niche will show itself.

MI: I’d go even further and say mobile niches will *appear to* INVENT themselves. People who used to be only consumers will invent markets organically. It’s up to ya’ll to be ready to serve the niches just created a minute ago.

www.northwestvoice.com

They built this site by creating ideas then sharing them with the future users. Then they asked the users to put a red x on pages that didn’t make sense to them. No ideas on pages with red Xs were used in the final site.

An Integrated information and customer database is needed. Tag, categorize…make it related.

MI: what’s preventing individuals from producing their own content and other readers from aggregating these reports themselves? Using RSS readers etc.?
A: The local market of Bakersfield isn’t that savvy. They don’t know about RSS

Q (follow up) What happens when they learn about RSS readers? Just like email. Not everyone knew about it then they learned.

A (follow up) Then we’ll move forward and use new methods.

MI: This new change in news gathering and consuming is all about speed. If individuals can gather and share faster than a company then they will prevail. If a business can do it fast then they will retain some advantage.

1:30
Howard Owen, Ventura County Star

Lots of questions asked during this presentation:

How do you confirm that a citizen journalist took a picture, who they say they are, etc.?

What’s the difference between a photo blog and a news site accepting a picture?

Lots of concern in group about validating the authenticity of photos and the people who took them.

Self Selecting Content

“In the future the most popular TV show will be independently created with ess than 5 million viewers.” –Howard Owen

Why aren’t newspapers providing free Wi-Fi access where the users see the web page of the newspaper when they first launch their browser?

2:25pm
Dean Newton, VP, Entertainment Media, Infospace Mobile

40-50% of ringtone sales are Hip Hop songs

“The people who play wireless games are board out of their minds.”
- Hostage Time -

Dean N. doesn’t think people buy cell phones to watch video.

Infospace is launching a music and video service though…

“The core demo that buys mobile media content is tweens thru twenty-four.”

Infospace’s core demo (hip speak for demographic) wants to know if Britney Spears gets married – in real time.

“Apple’s profit numbers are a pimple on a rino’s ass compared to the theft of full length music online.”

LabelTones are audio clips based on content from a major record labels. Adoption of LabelTones is based on new handsets that play them.

Eric Estrada saying something funny is the most popular celebrity FXTone from infospace.

Infospace will never be in the adult content business, but adult cell phone content is huge.

Audio streaming on phones sorta like satellite radio.

+++++++
Side note: A word I’d never really heard before this conference was Monetize.
Definition: Monetize – to turn a concept into a money making opportunity.

+++++++

3:08
Anita Wilhelm, Caterpillar Mobile

“Mobile Media Fun!”

garage cinema research
http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu

UC Berkley working on automatic tagging of photos at Phones

Emerging markets for gaming and camera phones

Automatically tagging photos at the phone.

“No viable method for sharing photos with camera phones.”

Solution:
Sharing the experience

Keeping the memories

Changing the Interaction
Pushing and Pulling images from the phone to other phones.

Q: Do you see the future of software dev for handsets being more open?

J2ME based image software, game based on sms and mms

Automatic Tagging, heuristic patterns and AI algorithms
Who you are
Where you are, semantic location
What you are doing

Anita Wilhelm, Yuri Takhteyev, Risto Sarvas, Nancy VanHouse, and March Davis
Title: Photo Annotation on a Camera Phone
Proc. CHI2004, Vienna, Austri April 24-29, 2004

Risto Sarvas, Erick Herrarte, Anita Wilhelm, Marc Davis.
Title: Metadata Creation System for Mobile Images.
Proc. MobiSys 2004. Boston, Mass. June 6-9, 2004

3:52 pm
Karen Stephenson, President, NetForm

Cultures have always sent images across time.

Go Home – Some people go to homes
The Young and the Restless – Some people have several homes

No Home – some people have no home. Nomads

“Trust is the infrastructure of creating networks.” – Karen Stephenson

We live in a Heterarchy.

Scalable Heterarchy

Global nomadism is transitional between traditional broadcasting and mobile multi-tasking narrow-catching

MI: What’s the OED definition of Heterarchy? of Hierarchy? of Anarchy?

MI:
(Prefix) Heter –
(Sufix) Archy -

Propinquity – like to be in proximity

Mobile Media Con
Tuesday April 26
William C. Weiss, Senior Fellow, the Media Center
8:30pm

“Design your future, try not to predict it.” – William C. Weiss

“Stand in the visible future.” – William C. Weiss

The bicycle seat was based on the horse saddle. It hasn’t changed much.

The future doesn’t change everything.

The Future doesn’t change habits. Except things like catastrophe

Outsiders bring about change.
Ex.
Cokes strategy has a wireless at the vending machines. Using this a space for content. Coke believes it’s in the media business.

GM believes they are in the media business. Vehicle is a mobile environment. On Star snuck the mobile tech into cars using the concern for safety. Now they have a captive audience that trusts them.

Newspapers need to look at these companies that are not traditional or apparent media companies for delivering content.

Where is Coke going to get the content to deliver from the vending machines?

Start with a customer and work the way backwards.

“People want to do what the wish they could do if only they knew how to do it.” – William C. Weiss

Q&A

How should partnerships work?

Users control the networks.
Copyright is important but customers control the content.
Customers act as partners to help you scale.

Will Coke and On Star pay for the privilege to use content?
How much sharing will happen between businesses and between businesses and “customers”?

9:00 am
Mobile Media: The Fox Perspective
Lucy Hood, SVP of Content and Marketing, News Corp.

How many of you are Engineers? How many are English majors?

PITCH VIDEO

TV content delivered to a cell phone, Very Soap Opera style, Adventure

3G

Snag European strategies and methods

Goal to be firs to market

Partners – Cingular, Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile

Mobile Channels – Video Channels on a phone

Fox sees the mobile phone as a new media device.

MY IMPRESSION: Same old corporate Internet marketing stuff. Nothing new here.

Wait a second… Voice Tone? Characters and stars voices as your RING?

MI: cell phones are already too loud… how long are noisy rings going to last?

Chewbacca trying to record a ring tone? Cingular Ad by Fox Competitor

Mobisodes â„¢ (Mobe-is-ode-s)

“How much drama is possible in one minute?”
“Is seduction, murder, identity theft enough drama for one minute?”

Paris Hilton Mobisode of ‘The Simple Life’ SUCKS!

“Mobile systems are closed for ‘security’ and to assure that companies receive payment.”

Do you do exclusive relationships? (exclusive relationship is content/entertainment jargon for a exclusive deal between a content creator and a media distribution company.)
“Both”

Ms. Hood doesn’t see mobile and Internet integrating. Trots out the old concern of how much WAP sucks. I asked about real html browsers in Treo and Sidekicks. She said that these sites have specific coded pages. Yeah I said but its just light html that can easily be created from pages that already exists.

MI: The whole business model is based on a closed system for assuring payment. The whole idea that security is a reason for closed systems is a JOKE! If the people using their devices don’t know the details of how to protect themselves then how are they safe? Even non-technical people need some sort of trusted peer based security audit. With out openness this is impossible.

Using small programming languages for SMS mobile services is another Mirco$oft style Cathedral assembly line business model. This just protects payments from consumers.

9:59 am
Brian Gratch, Prinicpal, Gratch & Associates
The Mobile Experience: Asia, Europe, North America

Mobile adoption rate is at 70% in developing countries. US is teetering near this.

Lots of stats in the form of charts on his slide show. Describing the worlds position in mobile markets.

When carriers figured out how to have interoperable SMS billing there number of messages sent (that equals more $) jumped tens of billions messages sent over a few years. That’s billions of messages sent each month!

Text usage is NOT dominated by young users. 30-35 range is bigger. DUH! J

NOTE: ASK Brian G. about cell and wifi integration or cross over. Ie skype VOIP

Actively sold 20,000 devices that can receive mobile video as described by Fox. (in US)

Definition
Actively Sold: Devices sold and actually activated on a cell network

Mobile Commerce has some time before it takes off.

ARPU – Average Revenue Per User

US data Monthly ARPU

Music and mblogging usage flew up most in the last 12 months. Calling, texting, and games fell most. Based on a ‘Buzz Poll’ – Pictures with phone cameras and blogging from a mobile device is growing

New Pope sends his ‘thoughts for the day’ to all phones in Italy. Vatican alerts press of an announcements after death of John Paul.

Transformation of the Mobile – 3P’s

Personal
Portable
Pedestrian

10:38
Scott Symers, Sony Electronics, Platform Technology Center of America

Involved with IEEE 1394 (aka firewire)

Content protection.
5C ????

NOTE: Ask Scott S. what he thinks about hobbyist (Hackers) changing altering Sony devices like the PS and PSP. (wifi on the PSP is GREAT)

A: Scott S. sees the PSP as a gaming device that they had to include wifi to meet mobile gaming needs and opportunities. No real openness about hacking of devices for the individuals users needs. He did see it as an interesting idea.

PARADIM SHIFT – How to shift major concepts of business quickly?

Mobile network providers see a threat to communication happing “Off network” ex. Using skype to make a phone call

MI: I see a opportunity for business to give, who we used to see as consumers, the tools (platform) like the PSP with wifi and let them accidentally create new markets. Consumers are not purposely creating markets but Alpha Geeks are having fun using devices in ways they were not intended to be used. This disruption of business model is not a disruption but an opportunity. By being NIMBLE companies can adapt to deliver their content, or even better content created by user partners, to device users on the fly. The scalability and longevity of this nimble method of sales could be much more future proof.

A Zen saying of being flexible like a reed in the wind is key to this.

CORAL – working on interoperability of DRM. A framework for multiple DRM schemes collaboration.

“TWO YEARS or less it’s all going to be there”

Scott mentioned trying to predict the future every two years. Then provided two examples of how they failed. ex. 1394 (firewire) being the end all of data transfer from devices. Nope…Internet protocols are where it happens.

11:19
Session 2
Scott Fox, CEO, Global View Partners
Scott Rafer, President & CEO of Feedster

Scott R from Feedster has a background in mobile content from working at Kodak Entertainment.

All You Can Eat services are growing. MetroPCS in bay area.

“Flikr is how MMS should have looked from day one.” –Scott Raefer

Scott R agrees that small html web browsers for devices are working. Google mobile search is the real deal.

“Think Flickr!”

Help local-focused dotcoms make money.

Open source sets the economics

+++++++

Scott F. lost a lot of money in wireless stuff. Notices that young people get digital mobile tech old folks still want voice for free.

The Media biz (music, movies) and the Mobile Network biz are just learning how to talk. They speak very different languages. This leads to serious problems.

This is about SCALE.

Question from Andrew Nachison:
Are there opportunities to partnerships and novel relationships to enable different small orgs to be relevant to large scale deals?

A: Scott F. …not really…

A: Scott R. broadcast model is an assumption by mobile network companies

Side thought: The Town of CH should not pressure a relationship with carriers or telcos because of the quick change of the future. They are not nimble enough. Plus the closed protocols of there systems will only work for short amounts of time. (5 years tops)

Rob mentions a thought of Google and Yahoo at a event he attended “Protocols is not the problem User experience is. If you searching for a restaurant on your cell phone it better be the first hit not the 5 or 6th.”

11:57
Session 3
Rob Enderle, Enderle Group

Video Conferencing doesn’t work.

“Take a tech and find more homes for it. Not create a tech and then search for a home.”

MI: Rob E. seems to think that answering a question is done by pacing back and forth the length of the room and turning his back on the person his talking with (example of a person who asked a question (Scott R. of Feedster) but also others) as he’s talking. Pretty rude. Not sure if he is entirely conscious of it.

OVERALL
Big debate is underneath this whole conversation:
Closed Carrier content delivery (Mobile Networks)
vs.
Open Technology delivery (The Internet)

MI: Are DIY media, like Podcasting, a message from the “markets” about how they want to use media from Content providers? How should corporations listen or not listen to this?

“R&D is digital media is very different that traditional media. ie Print” –Susan Mernit

“If you ever hear someone say, ‘You need to change the behavior of the user’, your in the wrong group.”

What have we heard so far?
The technology is there. No need to create new tech.
We need to see what users want. Not push what we think they need.

+++++++++++

2:00
Jeff Lerbeck, VP and General Manger, Qualcomm | MediaFLO â„¢ business unit.

Broadband networks via cell networks

“The determining factor to determine if a user will want video on their phone is if they love TV. Age has some effect on this, but not as much as some think.”

+ The ability to record and make your own media is not part of this broadband system.+

Three screen theory
Movie Screen > TV Screen > Phone Screen

Media companies claim they never saw the money come from the PC screen so they don’t see it as a four screen theory
Ex. Movie Screen > TV Screen > PC Screen > Phone Screen

MI: By discounting the PC screen as a revenue model media companies are opening a huge opportunity for rethinking consumer created business models.

Definition
FLO – Floor Length Only

MI: OVERALL
This FLO system is another closed system that is being launched to push upon consumers and not consider what they want in a network. Forget what they want in content for a minute. What do users who are now our partners want in functionality that a network provides?

2:42
Session 4 – panel style Q&A

Giles Babinet, CEO, Musiwave
Tome Burgess, CEO, Third Screen Media
Antony Bruno, Senior Write/Digital, Billboard Magazine
Marc Brown, President, Buzznet Inc. buzznet.com

Giles sees a future of subscriptions of $5-10 for “All you can Hit”. Something like 3 full-length songs, 2 ring tones, and 1 ring back.

Buzznet.com is a flickr style photo sharing company/web site.

Ring tones are purchasable without a credit card like iTunes. The cost just goes to the cell phone bill.

All of the music and ring tones are on the server. There is no actual download of this “content”.

Buzznet.com money model
Advertising and licensing

Music companies see wireless devices, both cell phones and wifi enabled devices, as the future device of choice for new markets.

Double delivery – download song on cell phone and computer during same purchase

MI: Is there a timeline strategy of deploying closed systems first then slowly opening them if consumers demand it and certain profit models allow it?

Build large community first then sell access to community to music industry.

Session 5
3:35pm

Mitch Ratcliffe, PersuAdio, Red Herring
Brian Hecht, CEO, Kikucall

The network doesn’t stop at the edge, anymore. – Mitch

www.mydensity.com

Everybody before me asked you to think big. I’m going to ask you to think small. Practical first steps to test the water. –Brian Hecht

Try some of the things many people can use now. Text messages, ring tones, wallpapers

Solutions that work:
Consumer Adoption
Proven marketing Tactics
Workable Economic Model

Stuff that works:
Narrowcasting
Combo IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and text messaging
Paid subscriptions w/traditional marketing tactics

++++++++

Howard Owen says theVenture County Star’s three point strategy is:
1) Local media content
2) Multimedia
3) Citizen Journalism

YAAAAAAAAA! Very Cool Howard.
———-

“We want to be the information nerve center.”

5:30pm
Rafat Ali, editor and publisher, paidcontent.org

“Newspapers do not figure into a mobile market.”

Is the mobile platform geared towards news?

“Phones will born out to be more of a visual medium than text.”

Media companies need to be doing more R&D.

mobilemedia

THE FUTURE:
o Untethered lives: Mobile users in Japan
o Mobile and radio: How the next generation is evolving
o Mobile media: What’s new and next?
o Convergence of peer-to-peer services and free broadband environments (Skype, free WiFi, etc.)

THE BUSINESS CONCERNS:
o How will content and business models evolve for the mobile market?
o Wireless content: Companies and deals to watch
o Mobile and traditional newspapers
o The future of micro content and mobile devices: Applications and meaning for media
o Beyond carriers: Alternative pathways to Anywhere Media

THE POLICY ISSUES:
o FCC and Free Spectrum
o Community wireless: What it is, why it matters, the story in Boston
o Media, wireless and the greater good: Social capital and media

Here is a bit of info about the event from mediacenter.org:
“The Media Center 2005 Mobile Media conference will explore a range of topics examining all aspects of wireless adoption: how to do it, what the benefits will be and how it affects the end user. This is a hands-on, interactive event that will include one-on-one interviews, workshops, issue-driven discussion and focused, high-impact case studies – all with intense attendee participation. ”

This even is sponsored by The Media Center at the American Press Institute. They have a cool blog called MORPH that I’ve been reading for quite awhile. Lots of cool grassroots journalism and new media stuff there.

GET READY! There’s going to be some interesting live blogging and podcasts coming at ya from sunny LA. Let’s hope it doesn’t rain!