Location, Location, Location

Here's a new location-oriented web service: Verve Earth. It's still in beta, but seems to be working pretty well. It's a world map (from Google Maps, I think) that pinpoints the physical locations of websites, blogs, aggregators, and the like. Nice interface, and could be a cool way to do two things: location websites that have some relevance to their physical location, and add a physical dimension to social networking. The SXSW conference is a long distance away from here, but when the VerveEarth map gets populated enough to see websites and bloggers nearby physically as well as topically, it would be pretty easy to set up some sort of "drop in" session.

Consolidation

InformationWeek has suggested that there are reasons Nokia should buy Yahoo!. Five reasons, in fact. They suggest that Nokia needs a stronger desktop presence, that Yahoo would somehow combine with Navteq (recent Nokia acquisition) help cement Nokia's dominance of mobile location services, and that Yahoo could help Nokia grow its market share in North America, which is one of the few markets where it hasn't had much success lately.

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Nokia doesn't need any help in mobile location services, for one thing, and they're trying to build out their own desktop presence with Ovi. Nokia very much wants more success in the US, but I don't see that Yahoo would be that much help.

And the final reason I think it's a non-starter is that a Nokia-Yahoo combination wouldn't make any tools available on mobile devices that aren't already available. It just wouldn't do anybody any good.

Anyway, I'd be astonished if Nokia makes a bid for Yahoo. You read it here first!

TOC Conference

Although I'm not attending O'Reilly's TOC Conference, I'm following the news, blogs, and other coverage. There's plenty of food for thought if you're actually a publisher, although none that hasn't been around for at least ten years.

I picked up a link to, of all things, Harlequin's eHARLEQUIN site. Harlequin publishes romance novels, which are frequently dismissed with a bit of derision, but which lots of people really love. The interesting thing to me is that right on the front page -- this is a publisher's website, remember -- you can choose traditional books, audiobooks, ebooks, "mobile phone", and podcasts.

The mobile phone category is a service; you get stories and some other content delivered to your phone. Not sure yet what the format is, but the screen shot on the site shows a graphic book cover on a mobile display, so it's probably MMS. The "serialized stories" are, I suspect, quite brief. But given the class of devices and service in the US, probably a good choice; at least SMS and MMS tend to be available on many phones, even here.

Portable Wifi

This is pretty cool; JoikuSpot is a downloadable application that turns an S60 phone into a wifi hotspot. Once you have a hotspot that, say, all the folks around the table in the cafe are using with their own devices, you also have a sort of ad-hoc local area network.

One of the things that Apple supports with iTunes is sharing libraries -- on my home wifi network, my daughter's iTunes library is shared, so in the rare even that I want to listen to some hiphop tunes, I can listen to her library. This kind of local sharing is going to spread to other kinds of content because it does something people like, and at the same time mollifies the corporations quivering in fear about content sharing. My theory in that area is that we're just going to have to wait for their panic to subside so they can understand that even though the rest of us recognize that they're talentless leeches who serve nothing but their own selfishness, they're still welcome in the big human tent and we don't intend to turn them out into the gutter.

Anyway, any time it becomes possible to share music or pictures or words with your audience, more music and pictures and words are created. This particular wave is going to involve lots of mobile devices, even though we don't yet have the right devices to do that. There's a pretty good chance these will come first from some unknown little company in California or Japan or China or India or somewhere, hit the mainstream when Apple revises the idea so lots of people love it, and finally hit the infrastructure when the marketing companies like Microsoft and Nokia finally come to grips with the ideas.

Mobile Output

The idea I'm exploring in this blog is using mobile devices as creative tools -- much the same way personal computers have tools for creative work in writing, visual arts, animation, video, and so on. In my previous post I talked about how mobile phones -- which are the most common mobile devices -- inherently foster mutual activities. These can be mutual creative activities, of course.

One interesting development is Qik video, a service for streaming video live from your phone. It works on the Nokia N95, but I'm not sure about others. Robert Scoble used it to stream interviews from the World Economic Forum in Davos. On Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech show he talked about how much of a difference it made that the video was live and had an audience that could participate by suggesting questions to ask.

That's a mutual creative activity if I ever saw one. I've been thinking about what it says about the line between "performer" and "audience". Everybody has an audience sometimes, even if seldom as big an audience as the Scobleizer enjoys. And you're in an audience a lot. Before the existence of "media"; for example in the days of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, when people went to hear a play, I think there was probably less distinction between being an artist and an audient.

The whole "mass media" thing -- like the "mass market" -- was probably an aberration produced by the mind-boggling weirdness of the last century. I think we're getting back to normal, but on the other side of whatever that was.

Mobile = Mutual

Computing devices give you wonderful ways to create new things; graphical, textual, interactive. Generally the creative process is pretty solitary when it involves a computer. Or, well, big parts of it are solitary. But creativity with a mobile computer is more likely to be collaborative. You can interact with people while holding this gadget in your hand. You can mutually set up photos, act in impromptu (or...uh..."promptu"? scripted, I mean) video.

So far the collaborative creativity involving mobile gadgets doesn't really involve the mobile except as a recording device. There aren't any mutual creation tools that link mobiles particularly well. What we need is a bit more infrastructure; software and connectivity that does what's needed: multiple input and editing, some form of automatically keeping the various streams straight, and some way to store the collaborative product.

Sounds pretty straightforward. The only piece of technology that's not really there -- as far as I know -- is a way for mobiles to communicate with a small group, either locally or maybe in a more distributed way.

The Garmin Nuvifone

Garmin's Nuvifone looks like another take on the "what should a mobile phone do" question. You can see two existing, fairly successful approaches, in Nokia phones and the iPhone. Nokia's approach is to answer the question "what should a mobile phone do" this way: everything we can think of, and you can add more if you want. Nokia values features over design and builds devices that are nearly as capable as personal computers -- more capable in some areas. The cost of this, at least the way Nokia does it, is the kind of design quality that Apple chose with the iPhone.

The iPhone does not have as many features as a comparable Nokia phone. Apple chose design over features. It doesn't rival your personal computer -- or even your Nokia phone -- in capability. Instead, it makes more sense to talk about the iPhone in terms of design.

The Nuvifone, which is starting off with the worst name of this bunch, isn't actually available yet. Their site says "available Q3 2008", which probably means sometime in the summer, but could be as late as, say, September. If the pictures can be relied on, the NuviFone emphasizes calling, mapping (of course), web browsing, and text messaging. It's a touch-screen device like the iPhone, and doesn't seem to have even the iPhone's one button on the front.

If you think of a Nokia phone as "phone/computer" and the iPhone as a "phone/media device/browser device", it looks like the Nuvifone is going to be a "phone/mapping device/browser device." The iPhone and Nokia phones can do maps too, of course, and Nokia and the Nuvifone (probably) will do media too. It's just a question of where the emphasis (or in Nokia's case, generality) lies. Is mapping that important in a handheld device? Is it a major selling point?

Based on my experience and observations, no, I don't think mapping is important enough as a feature to propel the Nuvifone deeply into the mass market for that reason alone. It will probably be an outstanding mapping device, as that's Garmin's core capability. But having other phones with mapping capabilities, including several Nokia phones with built-in GPS and the iPhone's new location service, I don't see it as particularly important.

On the other hand, the Nuvifone could turn out to be so good in either design (like iPhone) or general capability (like Nokia) that it becomes quite a hit. Have to wait a few months to find out.