by
Chris Gilbey
on February 13, 2008 02:42PM (EST)
I moved house two weeks ago and haven't been able to get online at the new house so there haven't been any opportunities to blog.
Put it down to Telstra! They told me that I could have an ADSL connection at the new address prior to moving, and then after a week I got an SMS message on my cell phone telling me there was a problem with my account and asking me to call. So I called in last Friday - about two seconds after the SMS - and the guy at the call centre just told me that there was a problem and he didn't know what it was.
So on Monday I called in again. This time the guy I spoke to was somewhat quizzical. He said that according to the records they had explained on the previous Friday that there was no port availability in the area for ADSL. I explained that the guy I spoke to didn't have a clue as to what the problem was.... a total disconnect.
Anyway, then the guy at Telstra offered me a new solution: buy their mobile service! Now for the 5-7 gig of data that I normally consume a month that would end up costing me about $500 per month! Now I understand why so many people in Australia are disgusted with Telstra!
Hopefully under the Rudd government things will improve.... We shall see..
Videoegg allows websites to publish video clips easily. They nailed 12 million dollars more of Venture Capital overnight to expand the business. Video is going to be everywhere.
New Studies say mobile TV audiences grew 45% to 3.7 million subscribers in Q2 2006.
So far news, weather and sports channels top out as most watched
mobile TV content. $86 million
dollars of revenue was booked Q2, an increase of 67% since Q1; 344 mill annualized. Revenue now growing faster than subscribers. That's the leading edge of a boom.
It seems to be clear - to us here at Perceptric, anyway - that video is the next big thing. NBT on the web, on the phone, on every device in fact.
Amazing thing is that even though it is pretty clear that video is here in a big way, the game is still just in its infancy.
Yesterday I had a meeting with the guys who are doing the back end of the current Telstra "Street Idol" promotion. Two things were really interesting about this: the number of entrants was very low. But that is off set by the thought that it is PR value that they may be looking for rather than volume; the other is that there is no search capability. The only way you can access the content that has been posted (which by the way you have to first move off your phone and over to your PC with a side-load and then upload via a web site) is through a list, one by one.
The interesting thing about this is that it seems to indicate that Telstra is seriously keen to get any content up on their phone platform, in order to get some visibility (I hear their 3G numbers are very low) and/or the back end technology in the space is not as well developed as all the industry players would have us all believe.
I can truly report that the X Media Lab mentorship program in Melbourne over the last weekend was a total blast. I sat in as a mentor for some companies - and also sat in on our One Minute World project with a number of mentors from various companies and backgrounds...
Here is a quick overview on some of the mentors and their experience
Chloe Sladden - VP Strategic Partnerships at Current TV. Current TV is the interactive TV play that was initiated by Al Gore in the US. Very interesting propostion with a considerable amount of consumer created content. Chloe has tremendous experience in TV, consumer created content - brilliant!
Brian Seth Hurst - CEO, Opportunity Management. Here is another person with a big vision and an even bigger heart. Great guy who has been involved in developing interface design for companies like TiVo, AOL and many others. This guy has an intimate knowledge of TV and Internet convergence.
Jennifer Lewis - Cross Media Editor for The Straits Times. Jennifer has been responsible for the vision and execution of bringing the oldest newspaper in Singapore into the 21st Century by creating a citizen journalism play called STOMP. A revolutionary play.
Paul Daly - Director - Innovation at M.Net. M-Net is a play that brings together Telstra, Alcatel and Channel 7 in Australia to create and leverage content into the mobile space. He has extensive experience in the space and is a very calm and clear thinker. Fantastic to get access to his mind.
Neeraj Roy - MD and CEO, Hungama Mobile. Neeraj runs a mobile company in Mumbai that has access to more Bollywood content than any other company in the world. His company delivers content across a huge percentage of the global population and he is one the of the most connected people in the space anywhere. And a fantastic guy too!
Brad Keeling - famous in Australia as part of the original One Tel team, Brad remains a truly gifted marketer and has is now VP Marketing of Slice Wireless, one of the big mobile media publishers in Europe. Brad has an enormous understanding of the mobile content market world wide.
Each one of these mentors has a tremendous amount of experience. These were just a few of the people that I met over the weekend. All very approachable too.
I pay credit to Meegan Elliot and Brendan Harkin for putting the event together!
From an article in the Washington Post about the impact of mobile/cell phone technology in the Congo:
Worldwide, there are more than 2.4 billion cellphone users, with more
than 1,000 new customers added every minute, according to industry
analysts. About 59 percent of users are in developing countries, making
cellphones the first telecommunications technology in history to have
more users there than in the developed world.
Could this be the big tipping point in technology? And the reason: It is cheaper to build cell towers than to lay copper wire. And since there are more people where there is little old copper infrastructure, this is only going to increase. Which in turn has got to mean that the cultural mores of Africa, India, China etc are going to start to be the drivers of what we see and consume on mobile within the next few years...
Great Gadgets get the heart racing. Yesterday evening at 6 pm, people began lining up outside the Santa Monica T Mobile office. This morning, 14 hours later, they got the chance to buy the Sidekick3 phone. The line was a block long. The T Mobile blurb
" Talk, text, IM, e-mail – it’s up to you. You can even surf the real
Internet – not watered-down Web sites. Bring your music with you
everywhere thanks to the built-in MP3 player – and capture the action
with the 1.3 megapixel camera"
Get it? Its still a phone. But its moving out there into gadgetry land. Got tonnes of other stuff. They couldn't wait to get them fast enough. Now the new owners will want more. More things to see, do, use. The blood is moving faster in the mobile device sector.
One of the most important topics of our time is this issue of Internet Neutrality. There is a great blog by Tom Evslin about this that everyone should read.
We absolutely can not afford to have the telcos determine the rules by which people communicate with each other. The democracy of ideas is what is at stake. If the telcos have their way they will control the flow of information entirely. That - would be a totally 1984 scenario.
I had read about the new Lycos phone and it seemed to promise some pretty competitive and compelling features. Only problem is that I wasn't able to register to trial the **extra** services that come from being a Gold Member.
Not sure what the problem is. Even when trying to send an email via "contact us" I had to re-enter the information 3 times because they wanted a phone contact number and it turned out that you couldn't use brackets to enter the area code or spaces.... I would have thought that if you were going to launch a new and competitive product to skype you would at least want to get your customer interactions as simple and foolproof as possible.... And this sort of stuff shouldn't be rocket science....
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