By 2011, says e-Marketer, online and mobile will shoulder 56% of music spending worldwide - over three times the share reported for 2007. So, while the CD takes a scratching at the digital love-in, subscription services such as Vodafone Live and the 3 New Music Club indicate that the mobile industry is really making room for music. Quite clearly, the sales proposition of downloads on-the-move is just too nutritious to resist.
Of course, if mobile is buddying-up with online, it may also have to consider replicating the veritable throng of extra-curricular music content that the net now boasts. Indeed, you don’t have to look too far these days to find flickr-happy audiophiles opening up our musical horizons with more videos, audio, blogs and forum threads than you can shake a USB stick at.
Enter Vodafone + Madonna. This deliciously commercial mash-up offers genuine exclusives (pre-release tracks and Read more >>
From a great report on Ypulse mashup, a conference in San Francisco on youth and mobile
The device is inconsequential compared to the content
Never let anyone tell you you’re too young to do anything. This fabulous 18 year old tinkerer from Mombasa invented a system that enables mobile phone owners to remotely lock and track their car when it’s being hijacked.
“The system, that Mbetsa created by combining technology from projects that he has completed in the past. The real-time system uses a combination of voice, DTMF and SMS text messages over cell-based phone service to carry codes and messages that allow control of some of a vehicles’ electrical systems including the ignition to manage vehicle activation and disabling remotely in real time.
Another feature of the system is the capacity to poll the vehicle owner by mobile phone for permission to start when the ignition is turned in real time as well as eavesdrop on conversation in the vehicle.”
What I really like here is that he has no formal training and that has probably been an advantage to him and his idea. Creativity comes in various shapes and sizes and his ability to learn from hands on experience probably wouldn’t have brought him to the same result if he’d gone to engineering school, a form of innovation businesses and academia will have to deal with and recognise.
Check out the video taken from the TV report. If anything, I hope he gets the financial backing he needs to push this product onto the market.
by Inma Martinez 8 July 2008
In case you didn’t know, telecom operators and software startups developing mobile services are still in full-combat battle. If this is something that means nothing to you because you live the happy life of not caring about who develops videogames or the next Jamba ringtone, then give this post a miss, really. But if you are part of this quest or feel curious about why not, at this stage of the game, you cannot pretty much watch TV on your mobile or fry Sunday eggs on it or print money from it - some even dared to say back in 1999 “surf the Internet”!, then stay on because this post brings news to all of us Earthlings….
Mobile 2.0 barcelona promised to be just another cute, small-sized but good, conference. And in Barcelona, with its weather and Read more >>
Not that this is my favorite place to link to, but for once Valleywag had a great article quoting some thoughts from Esther Dyson:
Responding to Bob Iannucci of Nokia in a conversation on the challenges of making money off of emerging networks of users, urged businesses to “appeal to people’s pride rather than their avarice”
I definitely think this is something really key for Blyk users as well, to feel that they are involved in a relationship with the network because it brings them personal value and not just freebies, as well as a sense of community, of building something new and of getting smarter products.
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