What is going on? Clearly, activity in this sector has nothing to do with distress. Use of mobile content and applications is exploding. And companies large and small are in a land grab mode, acquiring small and promising start-ups in hopes of increasing their mobile presence. IAC and Amazon made investments in iPhone applications recently. Amazon also acquired mobile app maker SnapTell and mobile payments player Boku. “Mobile social networking and mobile content are other key areas of investment,” according to the report. Yes, times are good if you are a mobile entrepreneur.

Turns out the monthly fee is a hassle to some. True, AT&T is simply the conduit for the underlying service from TeleNav in Sunnyvale, Calif. But the carrier still is getting some grief from consumers. One reviewer at ComputerWorld argued that the "free" iPhone app was a "Trojan horse into your wallet." (It's free to install but costs $9.99 a month to use.)

The broader question is whether consumers, who have grown used to free or very inexpensive apps that do a dizzying array of high-tech tasks, will still go for a subscription model. For AT&T and TeleNav, their competitors are TomTom, which showed off its turn-by-turn app last month at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference but has yet to announce a pricing structure, and Google Maps, which provides directions for free but doesn't have some of the bells and whistles of TeleNav. There are also the traditional GPS devices, which cost as little as $99.99, no monthly fee required.

Nokia has lost its overall market share leadership in the worldwide smartphone segment to Apple, based on browser calls for mobile ads.

Why is mobile ad share important? Because in the smartphone segment, the tail wags the dog — apps drive customer loyalty more than hardware features — and Gartner noted in its most recent report on the smartphone market that “services and applications are now instrumental to smartphones’ success.” That report, reflecting first quarter 2009 figures, had Nokia still firmly in the lead. But according to numbers from mobile ad service vendor AdMob, Apple smartphones received 49 percent of ad traffic in May, compared with 32 percent for Nokia.

"It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty."

"Imagine if there was an objective measure for coolness – a number that could be attached to each artist that indicated how ‘cool’ the artist was. We’d be able to do all sorts of interesting things with such a ‘coolness index’. We could make a ‘music makeover’ playlist that would take you from Miley to Miles in 12 songs (consider it a 12-step taste recovery program) or we could create a music rehab playlist that takes you from Amy Winehouse to Kate Nash. But of course, the concept of cool is too hard to nail down. Is Johnny Cash cool? Michael Jackson? Prince? Context, demographics, locale all play a role."

The proposed solution is the adoption of "haptic" display technologies which allow for some tactile feedback from touch screen displays. Apple proposes including a grid of piezoelectronic actuators that can be activated on command. By fluctuating the frequency of these actuators, the user will "feel" different surfaces as their finger moves across it. As an example, a display could include a virtual click wheel which vibrates at a different frequency as the center. Users could easily sense the difference and use the click wheel without having to look at it.

Haptic technology has started gaining adoption in other mobile phones and there had been some talk that Apple might have been looking to adopt it.

"You can copyright a news story, but you can't copyright the news. "The news" just means "things that happen in the world." What would it mean, in practice, to make it illegal to paraphrase a copyrighted news story? Summing up, for example, political events, or a sports controversy, or even a fashion trend, could be interpreted as paraphrasing copyrighted material. So let's ban talking about anything. And banning links will help us make our references even more obscure, by making it impossible for anyone to refer to source materials! Good idea, Posner. This gross oversimplification makes you look none too freedom-loving!

"We all know journalism happens only at newspapers. Better to protect them at all costs than to invest in the murky "future."

Just one month ago we announced the City Budget Watchdog pitch, reporting on San Francisco’s half-billion-dollar hole.

A few things made this pitch unique.

* It was our first “beat pitch.” The deliverable here isn’t a single story – but to cover a topic for a period of time. If we reach our goal, then the bonus is that we will create a follow up pitch and continue covering that topic for an extended period of time.
* We had a gracious matching grant from Ruth Ann Harnisch. If we could raise $1,000 in the first month, our donations would be matched.

We raised $1,710!!!!

Adding the Harnisch Foundation’s grant we are at $2,710 just over half way to our goal!

tutorial for a new social media search engine I want to try out

Collecta, a new real-time search engine, went live in beta on June 18th.They intro themselves on their homepage by saying “The web is alive with real-time information. So why search a stale archive? Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so we can show you results as they happen.” This is ambitious stuff at a time when real-time is the buzzword in both search and social media circles.

To find out more about Collecta I asked their CEO, Gerry Campbell, to answer our patented 5 Questions.

For those willing to dig around, searching for search engines can reveal a treasure trove: The net is rich with specialized search services, all trying to find a way to get their slice of the billions of dollars Google makes every year answering queries.

For this article, we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites. What follows is not a systematic ranking or review, but a general guide to a very vibrant world that few have bothered to explore in depth.

Yet another example of a missed opportunity with Mark Sanford coverage. The missing context is that most people who are partnered/married are only *ostensibly* emotionally/sexually monogamous. The fact that he had a relationship outside his marriage or "crossed other lines" is not surprising, and not news. The news is the hypocrisy of a public representative who made a point of proclaiming "traditional family values" which he chose to flout, while lying to his spouse, staff, and others. The compromised integrity of an elected leader is the story, not the salacious details of his romance.

AP is trying to titillate with this story, which is only a distraction, not an exploration. Poor journalism.

Great shirt for people opposed to polyamory for etymological reasons

"In California, state finance officials will begin issuing IOUs on Thursday if lawmakers and the governor cannot agree on a way to close a $24-billion shortfall. The IOUs would go to local governments, vendors, taxpayers and college students receiving state financial aid. California has issued such IOUs only one other time — in 1992 — since the Great Depression."

"The WOM World / Nokia is a Nokia sponsored resource providing latest news, comment and feedback on all things Nokia from the world of social media and beyond."

Good example of a modular living tutorial.

On the other hand, a bubble isn't always a bad thing. In fact, Internet pioneer, 3COM founder, and Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, believes bubbles are good things. Metcalfe is involved in green tech these days, and he argues that bubbles mean that a particular technology gets all the investment and attention that it needs in order to thrive. Although some people lose money during bubbles, he says ultimately it's good for the technology and the economy as a whole.

So will there be a Smart Grid bubble? Most likely, although it's not clear how large a bubble it will be. But Metcalfe is probably right — the bubble means that the grid will actually become reality.

“Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?

Isn't it time that we stop talking about the sanctity of marriage in this country and start talking about the sanctity of truth? …If you love two (or more) different people equally, is it morally right to repress your love for one of them? Society says yes, but individuals often say no. Hence, infidelity."

case study of how complicated kindle DRM can be

The so called ‘Brinkman committee’ was recently assigned with the task of coming up with course of action for the Dutch newspaper industry. Today, they will present their report (download it here, in Dutch). The most important advice will be to put a special tax on ALL internet access subscriptions.

Every family would pay a 2 euro yearly tax resulting in an extra 12 million a year.

The resulting funds will be used on innovative projects. These innovative projects might help find a solution for the seemingly unavoidable demise of the news industry.

As you would expect there are thousands of angry comments on the online articles who reported on the issue this morning. They compare it to paying a ‘car tax’ to save the Horse-Drawn Carriage Industry. Or taxing email to fund the post office because people are sending less paper around.

Global Voices Advocacy is a project of Global Voices Online. We seek to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists throughout the developing world that is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.

The aim of this network is to raise awareness of online freedom of speech issues, and to share tools and tactics with activists and bloggers facing censorship on different parts of the globe. The network is meant not only to provide support to its members, but also to produce educational guides about anonymous blogging, anti-censorship campaigns, and online organizing. By collaborating with software developers, activists, and bloggers, the network hopes to design new and more appropriate tools to protect our rights on the Internet.

Amazon (AMZN) has acquired Lexcycle, the software company that makes Stanza, a popular iPhone e-book reader. Could this be the team that builds Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle app on the iPhone? The Kindle app that Amazon rolled out earlier this year is functional but basic.

Yes, BUT: AP doesn't mention his twitter ID (@DonBlankenship). D'oh!

Multimedia microblogging tool that ties in to twitter. Need to see how this really works, I think it just truncates….

The AP’s social-networking policy comes as the media at large begins adopting Facebook and Twitter guidelines during a time of explosive growth in online social media. The News Media Guild, representing about 1,000 AP journalists, says the AP’s policy is perhaps the most restrictive the union has seen.

“I am unaware of anything else like that,” Tony Winton, the guild’s president, said in a telephone interview. “Parts of the policy seem to be snuffing out peoples’ First Amendment rights of expression by a company that wraps itself in the First Amendment.”

New York Times Co., publisher of the namesake newspaper, is likely to begin charging users to access its news on mobile devices before it does so on its Web sites, the head of digital operations said.

Times Co. is considering paid subscriptions on devices including Apple Inc.’s iPhone because they allow for less advertising than the Web, Martin Nisenholtz said in an interview today in New York following a speech. The publisher hasn’t yet determined whether or how to charge for access to its sites, he said.

“Mobile offers a better opportunity for paid content,” Nisenholtz said in his remarks. “For publishers to offer their content for free in the mobile platform forever without getting paid very much money, I don’t think it’s going to be tenable.”

The extent of Internet censorship in countries like China is regularly tested, but the testing methods used from within a censored country can entail risk for humans. A benevolent worm can be used for testing instead: the worm’s selfreplication, long the bane of suggested benevolent viruses and worms, is shown to be essential here. We describe the design of this benevolent worm, along with some other related applications for it. A full technical, ethical, and legal analysis
is provided.

"A lot of media companies just don’t seem to get social media (i.e. The Wall Street Journal). But the venerable Associated Press seems to have crossed the line by asking its employees to not only control what they say, but what their friends say. Now its employee union is fighting back."

If you’ve ever thought that your iPhone had the frictional coefficient of a Slip n’ Slide, you’re not alone. A new report from SquareTrade details the accident-prone nature of Apple’s line of smartphones, reporting that over 20% of iPhones have been damaged in the last 22 months. Cracked screens abound.

Talk about burying the lede! This point is at the END of a feature story on polyamory:

"To many, multiple partners may seem like more trouble than they're worth. But Prather said Kumar brings important elements to his marriage: a different point of view, a companion for Bennett, and another person to turn to in hard times. "He's like family; he's on our emergency contact list," Prather said.

And if Bennett and Kumar broke up? "I'd be heartbroken," Prather said.

For Bay area poly folks who want to participate. I plan to be there. Hell, how often do I get to be in a parade!

I don't know how current this info is, but it might be useful

"This guide article will show you how to download video content from numerous sites (YouTube, Google Video, etc) on Mac using two methods. With this guide, you will also konw how to convert and put YouTube videos to iPod with Mac (including Leopard and snow leopard)."

Forrester Research advises CFOs to take a close look at cloud computing for messaging and collaboration and enterprise applications. The payoffs could be noticeable during the current economic downturn. Microsoft, Google, Cisco, IBM and a number of smaller players are ready to take your money for SAAS solutions.

"Simply put, the cloud is the next stage in the evolution of the Internet, though its impact will be far from simple. The democratization of powerful, scalable, industry-standard computing resources coupled with pervasive broadband allows us to store massive amounts of data, then analyze and contextualize that data to create tailored and intuitive services, for both individuals and businesses. In short, the Internet now has memory and something like the ability to reason. This allows us to develop solutions to problems that, if attempted with traditional technologies, would be either too expensive to start or doomed to fail on delivery. Looking across the entire spectrum of information technology, there is one class of solutions for which the cloud is particularly well-suited: collaboration."

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is well known for innovative approaches to government IT. He introduced Google Apps to the city of Washington, D.C. when he was its CTO of back in 2007.

He's brought with him to the federal government a philosophy that cloud computing could save money, facilitate faster procurement and deployment of technologies, and allow government agencies to concentrate more on strategic IT projects.

InformationWeek sat down with him at his office last week to discuss his thoughts about cloud computing in government, and what it would take to make cloud technologies easier to adopt in the federal space.

more fodder for my forthcoming posts on social media & journalism ethics, policies

I've been psychologically profiled via Twitter! Only, um, I dunno what the scores here mean… Hmmmm….

Eric Umansky of Propublica points this out: "Chk out our bailout stuff It's an ongoing commitment, not a single story. (Oh, and it's a bad-ass database). It's Tufte applied to journalism. Whatever it takes to inform readers: data, blog, graphics, etc."

Ethan Z says this is the Africa phone. Might be a good model to get to test crappy cell phones

Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper.

Step 2: Email the file to your professor along with your "here's my assignment" email.

Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is "unfortunately" corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!

"The British Library has put two million digitised pages from 19th century newspapers online, taking research out of its dusty reading rooms into people's homes. The pay-as-you-go service brings a century of history alive from Jack-the-Ripper to WC Grace."

"This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes. It’s based on the old ‘poverty challenge’ idea from The Sims 2, but it turned out to be a lot more interesting with The Sims 3’s living neighborhood features."

voicemail-based interactive mobile phone project from Zimbabwe. Knight News Challenge.