Archive for June, 2008
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.
June 23rd, 2008
Nevermind younger people, sometimes I don’t even get people older than me. Let me explain.
I was speaking to my sister-in-law today and she’s just gotten a new phone, switching from whatever she had before to a new manufacturer (I’d rather not say who, might get me in trouble 
).
She’s had this new phone for a few weeks and finding the interface too much of a hassle to deal with, decided she was going to put the phone on Ebay, get the money back and revert to using her old phone for another year until the contract expired.
It’s incredible to think that this might not actually be an “extreme” behaviour, but simply a reaction to bad user interace or user experience on the phone. What she’s doing is also not informing the company that their UI might be difficult to adapt to, but simply let’s them get on with business as usual. There is currently no way to switch phones on the basis of bad interface but maybe there should be. Clearly the mobile market does not yet allow space for this kind of new business to co-exist along it, but prefers to turn a blind eye and let it live in the “underground economy”.
June 22nd, 2008
Using Blyk? Between 18 and 24? Live in London? Interested in the world of advertising, marketing? Blyk wants to learn from you. Sign up for one of our upcoming Insight Sessions running throughout Summer 2008. Blyk will try to see what makes you tick to make its service better! You’ll be invited to contribute ideas and share your experience as a Blyk user and explore what Blyk could do to improve its service.
A selected few will be chosen to take part and you’ll be given Blyk goodies.
If you think you have what it takes, send a short paragraph (not more than 300 words) on what makes you an ideal candidate and include your contact details (first name, last name and telephone number) to info@shift6.net
June 6th, 2008
A recent research published on this week’s Nature magazine revealed that:
[...]most people, perhaps unsurprisingly, are creatures of habit. They make regular trips to the same few destinations such as work and home, and pepper these with occasional longer forays such as vacations.
The distances people covered varied widely between individuals, but follow a similar pattern — most people move on average a short distance on a daily basis, whereas a few hardy souls move long distances in a short time.
How did they get such information? By tracking people’s mobile phones of course! Sound creepy? They don’t think so:
These patterns might sound obvious, but as data on individual human movements are difficult to come by, researchers haven’t been able to study them precisely. “We don’t really know how humans move around,” says Barabási. “When you look at the population as a whole, there is no way of describing the patterns. The problem with answering this question is that people normally are not tracked — but today we are tracked thanks to the phones we carry with us.”
So Barabási and his colleagues teamed up with a mobile-phone company (unidentified to protect customers’ privacy), who provided them with anonymized data on which transmitter towers had handled the calls and texts for 100,000 individuals over the course of 6 months.
What happens when your data is used in such a way? Who owns it anyway? Even if it’s anonymous, isn’t there something slightly strange about being aware that something as simple as making a call can end up informing scientists and after that designers and companies about how “people” commute. Blyk actually makes you think about that process in a conscience way, it isn’t hidden from you and you know that responding to ads will influence future content. This type of “research” borders on the infringement of privacy.
June 5th, 2008
