I spoke with Lee Holz of the LA Times last week, and he wrote a story -- Camera Phones Give Flashers Unexpected Exposure -- about the Thao Nguyen subway wanker. Good summary of the whole affair to date. [tags: sousveillance, friendly_chic407, thao+nguyen], lee+holz, swarms, moblogging

I stumbled onto a new Mososo app called Meetro, based on the instant messaging paradigm but offering the possibility of interacting with random users who happen to be geographically close to you.

It looks interesting, although much of it is unimplemented, and the cockamamie way I was using it -- via Virtual PC -- meant that the server couldn't even hazard a guess about my location. According to Paul Bragiel, of Meetro, they plan an OS X version later this year, as well as rolling out all sorts of other features.

Meetro interoperates with AIM/ICQ, although I didn't see if that includes iChat addresses.

I'll keep you posted as new features roll out. Looks cool, but has a long way to go to be the Nerdvana client I wrote about not too long ago.

I read a post by Howard Rheingold about Nokia Sensor, a bluetooth social mobility app. But, of course (?), it only runs on Nokia phones. Dumb.

[tags: Nokia Sensor]

In case anyone was wondering whether Dodgeball really is a cool idea, they were acquired by Google, announced today:

Q: Why did dodgeball sell to Google? A: As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone. Since we finished grad school, we've been trying to figure out how to grow dodgeball and make it a better service along the way. We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really "got" what we were doing - that is until we met Google.

The people at Google think like us. They looked at us in a "You're two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let's see what you can do with it" type of way. We liked that. Plus, Alex and I are both Google superfans and the people we've met so far are smart, cool and excited about what they're working on.

I will try to track down Dennis Crowley, who I met last year at Supernova, and see what this means for the next stage of Dodgeball. Or maybe Clay Shirky, who I think is one of their advisors.

[Update: 6:53pm ET - Clay has a post at M2M about the acquisition that includes one hundred "w00ts" as well as some insight into what's going on.]

[pointer from Ted Rheingold]

[tags: Google, Dodgeball]

Microsoft is pushing for an ultra-mobile community - 100 million mobile PC holders by 2008.

Microsoft's newest mission is pushing for a Mobile PC for every person. These are not run-of-the-mill laptops or desktop replacements. Microsoft is aiming for broad, general acceptance of a whole new category of carry-everywhere, always-connected computing devices with batteries that last all day long.

Since mobile computing is growing at a rate of 15% greater than computing in general, there is a real demand for mobile connectivity. However, as of yet, mobility has not been long lasting without jacking into a power source after a couple of hours.

Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect, described one such ultra-portable device during his WinHEC keynote Monday. Dubbed the Ultra Mobile 2007, that device was about the size of a paperback book. Gates described it as costing less than $1,000, weighing less than 2 pounds, and having a camera, phone, music player, and video player.

News via Mobile Pipeline.

Google Local has gone mobile. You will now be able to access Google map searches from your XHTML-friendly mobile phone. This expands the Google presence in both the information services area, as well as in the mobile application arena. As Tris Hussey notes, "All Google has to do now is offer RSS feeds on searches and they will seriously win out over Yahoo, MSN, and others." Link thanks to Tris of Wireless Jobs.

Heiko Hebig does a nice little post about some of the things I have been noticing around the topic of mobile blogging, or moblogging. Telco after telco has been coming out with services to tap into what they see going on in the blogosphere (and perhaps with an aim to also push other services such as MMS). But the moblogging services from telcos lack the insight into blogging to actually make them useful tools.

Most mobile blogging tools on the market let you send images, videos, or text to a web location... and, that's it. This captures the whole "posting" thing, pretty much, but does little to reflect the conversations that characterize blogs. Fortunately, there are other companies that have stepped up to the plate. Take, for example, the release by Intercastingcorp of Rabble, a tool encompassing moblogging, social networking, and location-based services.

Create your channel and post location-based media - your favorite places, photos or an up-to-the-minute newsworthy event. It's like putting virtual sticky notes on the world around you. Then connect with your world. Tell Rabble where you are and it will show you who is around you and the media they have created.

Services such as Rabble and Flickr (which offers moblogging of photos with tags) lead the way in creating what Visser, on Smart Mobs, calls “flash communities” and come much closer to how blogs are vehicles for conversations - for interaction and social interaction.

The mobile phone is evolving into a media production and consumption device. Hardly a “phone” anymore, it is a Personal Media Device (PMD). In a few years there will be over a billion people walking around with the equivalent of a radio station, film studio and broadcast network in their pockets, and our definition of “media” is going to change dramatically.

What can we expect from moblogging? As phones evolve, even just slightly, we should see more services popping up that allow us not just to post to our blogs, but to edit posts, view and make comments, host your location to others, share posts with grouped communities, send out trackbacks, and much more.

The guys at EventLab on Art Mobs: a project by Dr. David Gilbert and students from his Organizational Communication Course at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City: "Why should museums and galleries have exclusive control over making audio tours of their exhibits? Make your own audio tour (with music if you like). Why not remix the MoMA for your friends?!"

A recent study predicts 1.2M subscribers to Mobile TV in 2005, from today's quarter million

A leading Wall Street analyst expects 100 million Windows users to own iPods by 2008

Marc riffs on the recent Handwave at Synchronous Social Software, although not about the synchronous aspect of what I was pushing at, but on the geolocation element:

[from Plazes, Gush, and Blog Comment Threading

His wish list goes on to include the 'best of breed' features of IM, geolocation services, RSS feeds, generic presence and trigger alert info, combining the capabilities of Plazes and Gush.

I have two separate sets of comments to make on this... one about the content, and one about where and how I make these comments (!).

Regarding the content: Stowe's wish-list is right on the money -- it deserves a more thoughtful reply than I can give it at the moment, so I merely wanted to flag a few other things swirling around in that space that are starting to address these same needs:

a) BuddySpace, naturally, with its location-centric presence info... not with 'live map' updates yet, but those are coming soon!!

b) Live IP -> Latitude/longitude information can be supplied more easily than the custom app you need to download for Plazes: check out the 'HitMap' in the upper right corner of my blog, which knows where visitors to my page come from, without them having to do anything.... cool, huh? This comes from KMi's Jiri Komzak, the same guy who implemented BuddySpace, and is described some more on KMi's HitMaps page.

c) Updating my colleagues regarding my past/current/future locations? Check out the map in the lower right of my blog gutter, which does exactly this, courtesy Bryan Boyer's IndyJunior!

Regarding Indy Junior -- too much work, man! Editing XML docs and figuring out the coordinates is too hard. But the guys at Plazes could keep a history of my logging in at various Plazes, and depict it as a part of my profile. They do parts of that already, including showing a daily update of new plazes on world and continental maps.

But then Marc wanders off into strange territory, first of all acting apologetic for his writing the post at My Dog, and not here at Get Real, where he is *supposed* to be guest blogging. But the tension inherent in the decision making about whether to blog here or there has led to some interesting speculations about the difficulties inherent in following cross blogthreads:

I'm continually amazed at the fact that blog comment discussion threads are such cumbersome beasts. I wrote previously with pointers to Jon Udell's comments on this and the new generation of Feedster and Bloglines citation bookmarklets. The challenge is to 'slice through the spaghetti' and obtain a sensible view of an emerging discussion thread, even though it is posted in disparate blog entries.

Citation bookmarklets are a stab in the right direction, but they are still too cumbersome. Blogs have the advantage of preserving a sense of self-ownership (hence my posting here rather than in a comment on someone else's blog). Forums and discussion threads have the advantage of preserving some semblance of context. Feeds have the advantage of providing steroid-driven-navigation. There are times and contexts in which any of these may be superior to the others. I think a good challenge is to let the user 'in situ' construct a mix of perspectives, i.e. peruse an 'in-line' (constructed-on-the-fly) comment-thread while reading a blog entry, rather than having to play detective, peruse feeds, or invoke a bookmarklet.

Toward this end, I have been brainstorming over the last few days with Bertrand Sereno, who is experimenting with semantic blogging. He's looking at ways to link blog entries together with semantic tags rather than mere faceless links or trackback pointers: tags that say something about why I'm linking to another entry. A challenge I've posed to Bertrand is to begin at the bookmarklet level and allow the two of us (or more if others join in) to carry on our brainstorming by means of parallel or 'yoked' blog entries, from which our discussion thread can be reconstructed on-demand. Another thing Bertrand is looking at in this respect is the notion of 'free-form' tags a la Flickr and del.icio.us, i.e. tags that are not constrained to be from a limited 'semantically credible' subset in the eyes of some High Priest of Ontology, but rather constructed at whim, in order to see what kind of tagging system evolves.

But what about various blogthreads efforts, like Dave Sifry's Technorati search embedded in MT (which David Weinberger calls "Threadorati")? [Note: I have added threadorati to Get Real, just now, so we can see what happens.]

I saw that a number of folks (including Joi) recently gawked at Plazes, a new social networking/proximity/mobility offering.

Joi Ito

[from Plazes and Wallop]

Yes. Yet another social networking site... I decided to play with this one for awhile before blogging it to make sure it was significantly different. I think it is. Plazes takes your IP address and tries to figure out where you are. If you are in a new "plaze" you can register it by entering the address, uploading pictures, making comments. You can see who is online and where they are. You can see people by how far away they are from you. I imagine that once it gets going, most common hang outs will have lots of comments and pictures and you will be able to find people in your vicinity to hook up with. It's a bit like a laptop version of dodgeball. I'm "Joi" on Plazes.

I'm not all there yet with the model of use, but there is a swarmth (karma) system involved based on creating new "plazes" -- the more you create the more swarmth you get. Presumably you can apply this in some way, but how you exploit swarmth is unclear to me at this time.

I encountered a now fixed Windows bug when I first installed, so it wasn't working until I reinstalled a new beta today. To bad. I could have tagged a few Starbucks in NYC Tu-We.

The service uses a "friends/others" duofold profile model, which I like. I have posted all my IM services there, and made them public, while I make email private, available only to friends.

AT&T Wireless announces a new IM/email capable gadget: the Ogo. Apparently, it is (no kidding) targetted at teen age boys who are phone averse because their voices are prone to cracking:

Tricia Duryee

[from Communications gadget forgoes voice]

Finally, a technological solution for adolescent boys whose voices are changing.
Starting today, they can silently send e-mail and text messages with a gadget aimed at younger audiences: the AT&T Wireless Ogo.

In developing the communications device, AT&T Wireless followed teens to understand their habits.

"The boys joked that they'd never call a girl because their voice might crack," said Stacia Pache, senior director of product marketing, who headed the project. "They are much more comfortable with instant messaging."
That helped lead to Ogo, which will be used for e-mail and instant messaging only -- a rare combination of features in a day when wireless companies typically bundle data services with voice.

I might get one for my 13 year old son, Conrad, who doesn't seem to want a cell phone much, but is forever telling me about how he is chatting with girls via AOL. But there is hope that the device might grow with him -- AT&T Wireless is talking about add-ons -- like camera and phone -- for the Ogo in the next year.

A buddy of mine just got Treo 600, and I am suffering from tremendous gadget lust. I was sniffing around for an IM client for the thing, trying to convince myself that I *didn't* want one because it wouldn't let me stay connected, but, alas, it seems that there are a number of solutions available.

In particular, I stumbled uponVerichat, which is a multi-headed, always on client for the Treo and other Palms and smartphones. While riffling through the feature description, I saw this depiction of what they call "pouncing": tagging a buddies identity, so that when they come online you are notified even if the Treo is in standby mode. This is the product feature of the week.

And of course, now my lust is even worse.

Saw that Moto had won an innovation award for a new product, the IMfree wireless device.

[from Motorola product page: IMfree Wireless Instant Messenger]

Free up the family computer without putting a stop to the fun of instant messaging. The portable, convenient IMfree device goes where your kids want to go -- from their bedroom to the backyard -- without wires or additional monthly fees.

Best Innovations 2004 at CESIMfree lets instant messengers roam almost anywhere around the house -- up to 150 feet from an Internet-connected PC and base station -- so your teens can chat with up to six buddies at a time from the comfort of...wherever. Best of all, with the home computer in less demand, other family members can get their work done at the same time.

Although I am the sort of mental case that has PCs for both my kids, I want one of these for the living room... for me.

Dodgeball (see dodgeball.com), the mobile social networking service, has launched in a bunch of US cities, moving beyond its NYC origins.

[via email]

++ dodgeball now up and running in 10 U.S. cities!

Brand new this week: Austin, Chicago, Portland, Seattle and Washington DC! So two weeks ago: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia. Make sure to tell your friends that live in those far away lands to get on board!

++ Turning in for the night?

Hey, sometimes we want to go to bed early too. We've added the ability to stop receiving messages for the evening. Just send the word "off" to us and we'll close you out for the night. Don't worry though, you'll be back in action the next day.

++ "Help, I've cloned my friends!"

We got a bunch of emails from people who somehow ended up with 4 copies of their friends. Weird, but we think we've got it figured out. If this sounds familiar, log in and check out our new "delete friends" tool.

++ What happened to dodgeball last week?

Some of you might have noticed that we were experiencing some problems last week. We're sorry if we weren't there when you needed us most. The good news is we're back better than ever and should be running smoothly from now on.

So in one email, all the pros and cons of a "successful" launch. Service problems from fast growth, critical new features (like deleting "friends" and the ability to turn the service off) being retrofitted, bugs being stamped out, and expansion -- in this case, into new cities.

I read a piece at Geekzone about a new New Zealand cell service that combines social networking with something like the Plaxo contact sharing service.

Fonetango supports sync backup of the numbers programmed on certain cell phones, but also analyzes the social relationships implied in who has whose number programmed.

"fonetango's awesome new services

The fonetango service is unique in that it is a phone backup, social networking and directory service all in one. What all this means is that fonetango can offer you a range of very useful services that simply haven't been possible in the past.

With fonetango you'll finally be able to find out who is more popular - you or your friend? You can see who's got your number and, if you don't have their's [sic], you can have it automatically added to your phone. You'll even be able to find out who doesn't have your number and if you want, invite them to get it. If they accept your invitation then your number will automatically be added to their address book!"

AgileMobile.com has announced availability of AgileMessenger. a mobile instant messaging gateway that allows users to login to Yahoo, AOL, ICQ, and MSN at the same time. The download is free , and is now available for Symbian OS compatible phones, including Nokia 7650 / 3650 / 6600 / N-Gage, Sony Ericsson P800 / P900, and Siemens SX1, and MS Windows Smartphones.

According to Credit Cards Magazine, there has been a big uptake in the use of credit cards in Eastern Europe, and to seom extent that has been led by the use of SMS text messaging to counter rampant credit card identity theft:"The biggest obstacle that credit card marketers had to overcome in Hungary was fear of fraud. But consumer concerns about the safety of their cards has led to an important security innovation made possible by the explosive growth of mobile phones in Hungary.

Each time a card is used, the cardholder immediately receives a text message on his cell phone confirming the transaction and advising him of his balance. Initially developed in Hungary, the messaging system is widely used in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is now being introduced to countries in Western Europe."I wish they would set this up here.

[pointer from Gizmodo]

David Deans has a number of perceptive insights about the wackiness of mobile messaging players, and their lack of marketing around mobile IM and SMS email services.

"We still find most people don't know that every U.S. wireless subscriber has a unique e-mail address that corresponds to their mobile phone number. Therefore, they're unaware of basic SMS business applications such as the potential for creating individual short e-mail notes sent to employees, customers and business partners mobile phones (directly from MS Outlook, as an example). As a result, most businesses aren't thinking about the incremental potential to utilize a productivity tool already at their disposal--wireless e-mail distribution lists."

A recent MIT survey reports that the cell phone is the invention most hated, but that we can't live without.

"Americans are ambivalent about their cell phones, TV sets and the like. The rely on such everyday technology, but it drives them nuts.

At the top of the list? The cell phone.

An annual Massachusetts Institute of Technology survey, known as the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, found that among adults asked what invention they hate most but can't live without, 30 percent said the cell phone.

Alarm clocks were a close second, with 25 percent, followed by the television with 23 percent and razors with 14 percent. Microwave ovens, computers and answering machines also earned spots as detested technology."

CNN profiles a Finnish company now shut down by authorities:

"A service promising to answer people's prayers with a text message apparently sent by Jesus has been shut down after complaints by Finland's mobile services watchdog.

The heavenly service offered answers from Jesus in response to a text message prayer at the cost of a hefty 1.20 euros ($1.52) per message, but lasted less than a month."

Sanyo has come up with a new cell phone that uses bone conduction to provide better sound quality in noisy situations:

"The new phone is equipped with a "Sonic Speaker" which transmits sounds through vibrations that move from the skull to the cochlea in the inner ear, instead of relying on the usual method of sound hitting the outer eardrum.

With the new handset, the key to better hearing in a noisy situation is to plug your ears to prevent outside noise from drowning out bone-conducted sounds."

MessageVine, a leading provider of messaging and presence solutions and InphoMatch, a leading provider of global inter-carrier wireless data solutions, announced today a strategic partnership to bring a fully interoperable mobile IM solution to market.

Under this agreement, InphoMatch will host and resell MessageVine presence and instant messaging solutions, based on the MessageVine IM Interlink Server. MessageVine's solution provides carriers with a uniquely integrated platform for mobile IM, including full interoperability with established PC instant messaging networks, so the carrier retains total carrier control of billing processes, user experience and quality of service.

In my research in the mobile IM sector, I have learned that carriers -- many of whom initially signed up with the vendors of the major IM services -- are moving aggressively to bring control of the IM technology in house. However, they are still eager to provide access to the public IM networks, meaning a fully interoperable solution is most attractive. That switch has fueled the growth of companies like MessageVine, who, in particular, has grown very quickly by meeting that market need.

Apparently, its really easy to temporarily stun your SPOT watch, and wipe out the downloaded content:

"Take off a sweater. Touch a thermostat. Have a co-worker touch your watch."