This discussion from Boards.ie about the problems of MMS picture resizing when sending cross network is getting more and more interesting, if a little technical.
No longer married to TV, the elusive young male demographics’ wandering eyes are locked squarely on their PCs. A new survey shows traditional media use among 18- to 34-year-old men is down across newspapers, magazines and television—especially among the younger end of this category."
"Oh jolly good", I can hear the operators thinking, "We do internet and data so that's good for us too..... isn't it?". Well no, it's not really unless you get a clue about the whole direction you're going with 3G and exclusive content deals. Because, what the survey illustrates is that the 18-34 male demographic is also turning away from content in preference of contact. Sure, plain surfing is part of the mix but interactive multiplayer games (virtual contact) and email/IM comprise alot of the new time spent online.
It seems the latest moblogging twist is 'handwritten moblogging' using the new generation of digital pens -
"The Nokia Digital Pen and Sony Ericsson's Chatpen both let users turn ordinary scribbles and doodles into digital images that can be sent via email or multimedia messaging service (MMS). One web logger has put together computer code to automatically convert these doodles into weblog postings."
Of course the disadvantages are that pictures of text are so much more inefficient that normal text and can't be quoted, googled, trackbacked and so on. Still, I can think of several situations where this could be really useful.
I think 2004 is going to be the breakthrough year for moblogging. Most of the elements were in place last year except for one - location/positioning. GPS based systems like Wherify's will fix that.
According to The Inquirer a British company called Vemotion is claiming a first in allowing owners of the current generation of smartphones to view a live TV show over GPRS. It seems to be a bit costly though.
I have to agree with Tom's analysis that people who propose a mobile specific TLD are really missing the point -
Why is there an assumption that the mass market of mobile users want to know about URLs, or where the services they access reside? Do cable TV viewers care what frequencies are used to distribute different channels? Do satellite users care which satellite is used to broadcast their favourite channels? Of course not."
We techies badly need to step back more often and realise that the assumptions we make about the mass population are wildly inaccurate and that regardless how wonderful our idealised vision is we can't just force our philosophy on the great unwashed.
"More than half of Chinese mobile phone users are still undecided whether to use multimedia message services that allow for the transmission of pictures between handsets due several factors, including the high retail prices of the special handsets, according to the latest survey by a Shanghai consulting firm."
But this factor and the others are cost related or technical. They do not hint at an indifference to MMS. Operators need to realise that there is a cash cow waiting to be milked here if they can just find the right price point.
