EirePreneur
The 'building a business' scrapbook.


Friday, June 27, 2003  

O2 Ireland FoneBlog growth

On this day last week I checked to see how many subscribers O2 Ireland had to their new Foneblog service. The figure was 179. Exactly one week later it's 305. Hardly earth shattering growth is it? It also seems as if the vast majority of the blogs are as yet nothing more than blank placeholders.

However it should be kept in mind that the population of Ireland in only about 4 million and that O2 introduced this service with a VERY soft launch.

posted by James | 10:30 PM
 

O2 Ireland FoneBlog growth

On this day last week I checked to see how many subscribers O2 Ireland had to their new Foneblog service. The figure was 179. Exactly one week later it's 305. Hardly earth shattering growth is it? It also seems as if the vast majority of the blogs are as yet nothing more than blank placeholders.

However it should be kept in mind that the population of Ireland in only about 4 million and that O2 introduced this service with a VERY soft launch.

posted by James | 10:29 PM


Thursday, June 26, 2003  

Printing from Nokia 3650 to Deskjet 450

Hewlett-Packard has released new software to allow Nokia 3650 users print to the Deskjet 450 mobile printer via Bluetooth. It's available as a free download from HP's website.

Hmmm, and someone once said that Bluetooth was dead!

posted by James | 7:11 PM
 

MMS albums or MMS blogs?
Vodafone Spain has launched a Multimedia Album for Live! [via Telecom.Paper] -

"... extending its Vodafone live! service to offer customers a personal library for the storing of MMS, an extensive image gallery and easy composition and sending of MMS to one or a group of mobile phones, e-mail addresses or to another multimedia album from a mobile or via PC. In addition, the Vodafone Multimedia Album enables customers to exchange messages between their personal Multimedia Albums, as well as to and between individual or groups of mobiles and e-mail accounts."

In Spain, Vodafone is playing cath-up with this service but I wonder if they should have bothered at all. I'm just not convinced of the core idea here, the metaphor of 'albums'. This is yet another example of trying to apply an age old model (sharing physical photographs) to a new technology. It may be necessary from a marketing viewpoint, to give users something they can visualise, but the problem is when the operators limit themselves by applying that metaphor too literally.

The problem is that 'albums' were appropriate in a time when photographs were -


  1. Expensvie to acquire, and therefore....

  2. Only occasionally taken, and also...

  3. Posed (and horribly false)

  4. Only occasionally shared (during family get-togethers), and therefore...

  5. Precious and held for long term storage



In stark contrast, phonetographs (yes it's a horrible word isn't it, I just made it up ;-)) are -


  1. Practically free to acquire, and therefore....

  2. Taken all the time, at any time, and so...

  3. Unposed and thankfully true to real life

  4. Shared instantly with anyone anywere, and thus...

  5. DISPOSABLE!!!



Yes, disposable! Project your imagination to a time, not so far away, when all your friends and family will have camera phones and will blog them to their own fotoblog, as well as instanly MMS you the odd highly relevant or special one. We're talking hundreds of images daily with various degrees of relevancy to your life and the lives of those around you. These images are for the moment, not forever. Disposable.

If I've heard that cousin John is gone backpacking to Australia I may subscribe to the RSS feed of his fotoblog for a whole year to follow his adventure. If my sister has a new child I'll subscribe to her feed for a few months to follow the progress of my new niece and share in their joy. My subscription to the 'image droppings' of the people in my life will vary according to my interest and perceived relevancy. I'm not going to pore over each of the hundreds of daily snapshots but will thoroughly appreciate being able to tune in and out as I please.

Of course 'real' photography and it's storage medium (albums) won't disappear. To suggest that phonecam images are going to replace them is like saying that the internet is going to replace newspapers and books. Nonsense. They are two completely different models of image capture, and the acquired images have completely different life cycles to serve completely different purposes.

So please don't pigeon hole camphone photography with old ideas. The network operators should be looking to the future, like O2 in Ireland with Foneblog, not like Vodafone with their.... albums.

posted by James | 1:14 PM
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