jjprojects: our social web » mobile

FCC approves net neutrality rules – good compromise or welcoming your new ISP overlords?

John Johnston — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:33:53 +0000

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has adopted new rules in relation to net neutrality, or how internet providers handle traffic and various services.

Democrats on the panel have voted to approve the new enforceable net neutrality rules, which will restrict companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from blocking access to content unfavorable to them.

The Obama Administration has claimed a win in relation to its net neutrality campaign promise, maintaining it represents progress. Others are claiming the measures do not go nearly far enough. Obama has said:

As technology and the market continue to evolve at a rapid pace, my Administration will remain vigilant and see to it that innovation is allowed to flourish, that consumers are protected from abuse, and that the democratic spirit of the Internet remains intact.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans at the FCC and in Congress are opposed to the new measures, with Sen. Kay Baily from Texas labeling it an unprecedented power grab by unelected members. Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell accused the FCC of becoming a vigilante group in order to help Obama with a misguided campaign promise.

However, there has also been disapproval dished out from many net neutrality advocates. The New America Foundation has said the new rules prioritise the profits of corporations such as AT&T over the public, internet entrepreneurs and local businesses. Public Knowledge maintains that the rules fall far short of what they could have been and Free Press has asserted that the rules amount to fake net neutrality. The Institute of Policy Integrity has labeled the new rules “tepid”.

The main criticisms seem to be that while wired broadband providers may not unreasonably (whatever unreasonably means) discriminate against any lawful traffic, the rules don’t apply to wireless providers. Also, “paid prioritisation” has not been banned. This means that providers may be able to set up paid priority access on networks. “Managed services” are allowed over ‘last mile’ broadband. Providers can sell prioritised IP services of any kind.

In short, critics say that the new rules are full of loopholes and grey areas, hence the distinct lack of celebration from net neutrality advocates. As Ars Technica has pointed out, “damning with faint praise” seems to sum up responses from long-time net neutrality supporters.

Read Write Web has a decent rundown of the “six key principles” underpinning the new rules if you are interested in looking a little closer.

Is Foursquare about to offer image uploads at last?

John Johnston — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 02:27:28 +0000

Do these tweets just now from Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley mean Foursquare is about to offer image uploads as part of an app update, at last?

I certainly hope so. I think it really needs it to keep people’s interest up over the longer term. I know he’s said before they have been planning to add the feature. Perhaps now is the time.

Mobile internet use set to soar [stats].

John Johnston — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 01:41:41 +0000

Here are 2 slides I think are interesting in relation to growing mobile internet use around the world.

The slides are from a recent presentation by former Morgan Stanley (now moving to Kleiner Perkins) tech analyst Mary Meeker. The full presentation can be downloaded from here. Click on the images below to see them in a larger size, in a new window.

In short, 3G subscription growth is climbing at very high rates in some countries with very large populations, such as Brazil, China, Indonesia and Russia, and is still around 25-35 percent year on year in many other countries around the world.

Additionally, it’s astonishing how steep the curve is when the Apple iPhone, iTouch and iPad are shown together, in comparison to the first 20 quarters from the launch of some other products and services. It seems clear that mobile still has a big future ahead.

The whole presentation is embedded over at Business Insider.

Can we move as one using social media? Twitter’s Biz Stone thinks so.

John Johnston — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 01:59:26 +0000

Here’s an interesting recent video interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

One point grabbed me as I was listening to the interview. He says:

One particular event opened our eyes to what we had on our hands. That was in March of 2007 at a festival called South by South West….We had about 75,000 users at that point and many of the people at the festival were using Twitter, and this was the first time we were able to see Twitter in the wild, so to speak. And there were a couple of things that happened at that festival that made us realize that people were using our service to come together and move as one…We rushed right back to San Francisco and formed Twitter Incorporated.

I find this interesting in the light of my recent thoughts on what a global civilization, aided by an increasingly social web, might start to look like. Is it possible that sometimes (only sometimes) we may be able to use the social web to come together and act as one, on a larger scale than anything previously achieved? Twitter has certainly become a lot bigger since then.

Web creator Tim Berners–Lee criticizes “some of its most successful inhabitants”.

John Johnston — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 12:16:45 +0000

In a comprehensive new article, Tim Berners–Lee calls for vigilance in maintaining open web standards and neutrality. He asserts that the egalitarian principles the web was founded on 2o years ago, are being threatened in different ways by “some of its most successful inhabitants”. He criticizes the likes of Facebook, Apple, Google, Verizon, some ISPs, even Twitter and Linkedin for various dubious and potentially dubious activities.

He asserts that the walling off of information from the rest of the web by large social networks (such as Facebook) threatens the web’s established universality and decentralization. He points out that large social networks such and Twitter and Linkedin capture users’ (voluntarily offered) data and assemble excellent databases, and then reuse this information to provide a value added service. However, this only happens within their walls, which segments off information and threatens the decentralized nature of the Web. Once we enter our data into one of these networks, it can’t easily be used by us on another site or network. The pages are on the web, but the data are not.

Not such a big deal you say? The stated threat is that the more this kind of structure spreads, the more the web becomes fragmented and the less it becomes a universally accessible information space. Another threat is that any one social network, search engine or web browser could get big and powerful enough to become a monopoly; of course Google and increasingly Facebook spring to mind here.

He also points out that some cable tv companies that provide connectivity are considering the possibility of limiting users to only their content mix. Some wireless internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites which have not made deals with them, and governments both totalitarian and democratic, are monitoring people’s online habits, infringing human rights. My previous post, A year in a labour camp for one retweet!, is a shocking example of these very activities in action.

In terms of lack of openness and centralization, he singles out Apple’s iTunes system, which uses the proprietary “itunes” instead of the standard “http” to locate content. You can only access iTunes using Apple’s propietary iTunes application. You are no longer on the web, it’s walled off. It’s a single shop rather than an open marketplace, controlled by one large company. On a related side note, only today I was looking around for a particular audio book. It turned out that it was $32.99 on iTunes, and $10.47 elsewhere, for the same book.

Yet another development he finds disturbing because it’s off the web, is magazines and newspapers (for example) starting to create smartphone–only apps rather than web apps. You can’t bookmark pages within them or email a page link within an app. You can’t tweet out a page link from an app, without others having the app. He believes it’s better to build web apps that run on smartphone browsers. This may not seem like such a big deal, but if it turns out that one company, one walled garden, has too tight of a hold on the market, it could slow innovation, or worse.

Berners–Lee maintains that if these and other trends continue unchecked, the Web could be “broken into fragmented islands”. The freedom to connect to whichever sites we want could be lost, and this will extend to mobiles devices too. He points out that the web is a critical democracy, one that “makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation.” This could become more fragmented.

There is real food for thought in this article and I encourage you to read the whole thing, as I’ve only touched on some of the issues he mentions. It’s really worth reading when you have time. He makes some excellent points in relation to why we should care about all this. The web is ours. It’s a public resource on which we are coming to depend on more and more, for so many things.

Should we let the web become fragmented, and monopolized by a few big and powerful companies? Should we let governments chip away at our liberty by monitoring and filtering? Do we even have any power to stop these things happening if we want to?

Take Facebook – many people are aware of the walled-garden nature of Facebook, yet it’s grown to over 500 million users and doesn’t look like slowing down. Facebook is starting to make substantial revenue from its walled garden too. It’s a big company now.

Google has become a huge and profitable company is such a short time. It’s continually expanding its operations into new areas with some astonishing technology, while still making the vast majority of its money from advertising. It all seems to unfold before we realize what’s happening and can think of all the possible ramifications. It so often seems to be the case with new technology. We take the good with not so good, because the good seems to outweigh the not so good.

If there are significant dangers, perhaps we are safe in the knowledge that we can collectively change things if we really want to. For instance, at some point, if people decide to leave Facebook en masse, that would be it for Facebook. If Google steps over the line towards the opposite of “Don’t be evil”, we can always stop using Google. If something else that seems better comes along, we’ll start using it. We seem to be fickle like that when it comes to the web.

Foursquare and Facebook Places: educate me, entertain me, supersize me.

John Johnston — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:42:21 +0000

I thought I’d share a couple of nearby Foursquare offers as a snapshot of what’s going on in the geolocation space, just in my local area. Regular readers will know I’ve written a few other posts about Australian businesses experimenting in the geolocation space.

I see we have the University of Technology, Sydney offering a free movie ticket for the Foursquare Mayor of the UTS Library on a certain day. Interesting new way to encourage students to study? If you come an study at the library regularly, we’ll reward you with some entertainment.

Of course we also have fast food chains starting to offer the “supersize me” types of deals we’re all familiar with.

Never to be outdone, I see that Facebook is now introducing Facebook Deals, which is layered on top of Facebook Places, to provide a similar service to local businesses and users of Facebook.

What kind of offers have you seen in your local area? Anything that’s tempted you yet?

Have you tried Instagram iPhone app for image sharing yet?

John Johnston — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:37:27 +0000

Here’s a little iPhone app I’m now using that I think is pretty cool.

Instagr.am is a new image sharing service (currently just for iPhone) that enables you to take a photo, or use an existing photo from your iPhone photo library, and share it. There is also a decent choice of interesting filters you can quickly apply to each photo and preview before uploading.

I think the really handy things about this service are that it’s really easy to use, and that you can crosspost the images to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr if you so desire – greatly increasing the sharing aspect. You can also locate a photo using Foursquare before you share it. As Foursquare doesn’t yet have image uploads the way Gowalla does, it’s a welcome addition.

It’ll be interesting to see how this service develops, if it develops. Surely they’ll be adding platforms other than iPhone, if they have the funds to do so.

If you’ve used Instagram, what do you think of it? Good enough to keep using? If you haven’t, do check it out.

The future is already here: amazing wearable interactive technology.

John Johnston — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:33:04 +0000

One of the criticisms I often hear from people about the web (even social media) and computing in general, is that it tends to divorce us from the ‘real world’. The main criticism seems to be that as we spend more time interacting with screens, we are less present and attentive in the physical world, and with the people around us.

However, it could be argued that with the recent development and popularisation of mobile devices such as smart phones and touch screen tablets, we are increasingly able to interact with the world of data while being more ‘present’ in the physical world. We are no longer stuck in one room in front of a screen. Increasingly, the worlds of computing and digital connectivity are going mobile.

There are also many new applications being developed in response to this new digital mobility. One such development is Google Googles, which just today has been released onto the Google iPhone app, in addition to the existing Android platform. Another example is the recent proliferation of augmented reality apps for mobile platforms.

The embedded video however, shows something on a whole new level in terms of the possibilities of the physical world interacting with the world of data. It’s nothing short of amazing. In the video Pranav Mistry demos his SixthSense wearable device, which allows an incredible degree of interaction between data and the physical world. And to my mind, two of the great things about his invention are that he’s making the technology open source and surprisingly, it’s not expensive!

Are we seeing the future of popular mobile technology here?

Hat tip to David Hood

The Coke Machine Fairy: Coca-Cola joins growing list of companies in Australia using Foursquare.

John Johnston — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:49:37 +0000

Further to my recent posts, Local businesses: to use Foursquare (yet) or not, that is the question’ and 10 examples of businesses in Australia already using Foursquare for marketing, it seems that Coca–Cola has now jumped in with its own contribution to Foursquare markeing. Enter, The Coke Machine Fairy.

I just noticed this a few minutes ago when I visited my local shopping centre, Broadway Shopping Mall. There was a “Nearby Special” banner on display as I checked-in.

It appears that Coke will be leaving “goodies” in Coke machines around Sydney on a daily basis. Instructions on how to play the game can be found here.

Connectivity equals productivity, here’s a powerful reminder.

John Johnston — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:18:48 +0000

I think this TED Talk by Iqbal Quadir is a poignant and powerful reminder that connectivity equals productivity. For those of us who use the web and smart mobile devices daily, it’s easy to forget just how much these enable greater productivity, even if some of our time is spent on more trivial or entertaining activities.

In this inspiring, embedded video, social entrepreneur Iqbal Quadir tells how his experiences as a kid in Bangladesh, and later as an investment banker in New York, led him to start a mobile phone operator connecting 80 million rural Bangladeshi.

In the process, he became a champion of bottom-up development, rather than giving increasing amounts of aid money to top down development, which seems not to be working very well, if at all. In fact, he maintains that it only empowers authorities to maginalise citizens. Even in countries that have grown rich from oil reserves, autocratic regimes have grown hugely wealthy, while poverty among citizens remains entrenched.

Enter Iqbal Quadir. Not long ago in Bangladesh, only one in 500 people had access to a telephone. Quadir points out that “Vasts amounts of wasted time results. The only way people can depend on each other is to connect to each other, which leads to productivity.”

Watch the video to find out how he overcame the significant hurdles involved in what turned out to be a massive connectivity project and business. How could poor people afford to use mobile phones? Who would invest in such a project in such a poor country? This video is a must see.

via Entrepreneur

jjprojects: our social web » mobile

FCC approves net neutrality rules – good compromise or welcoming your new ISP overlords?

Related Posts:

Is Foursquare about to offer image uploads at last?

Related Posts:

Mobile internet use set to soar [stats].

Related Posts:

Can we move as one using social media? Twitter’s Biz Stone thinks so.

Related Posts:

Web creator Tim Berners–Lee criticizes “some of its most successful inhabitants”.

Related Posts:

Foursquare and Facebook Places: educate me, entertain me, supersize me.

Related Posts:

Have you tried Instagram iPhone app for image sharing yet?

Related Posts:

The future is already here: amazing wearable interactive technology.

Related Posts:

The Coke Machine Fairy: Coca-Cola joins growing list of companies in Australia using Foursquare.

Related Posts:

Connectivity equals productivity, here’s a powerful reminder.

Related Posts: