"......in a networked economy does not go to the people doing the work....."
In, for example, todays music industry, the money does not go to the people doing the work. There are rare exception like Madonna and U2, but the money goes to the distributer.
"...Just look at how long it took the TV writers to get what was obviously due them......"
Um, no. They still do not get what is due to them. I believe for example their download fee kicks in after something like 30 days ( where most of the money is made in the first 30 days ).
No one is due anything. We all have to work and in the US today millions of workers are told to adjust or starve. Writers and musicians are no different. The fact is that the cost of a digital copy is zero.
The other reality is that the existing distribution is trying to use the law to prop up a defunct model.
Take the movie distribution. I live in France but speak English. I see a movie available today in the US, but I am supposed to wait for 6 months to get it legally, when I can get it now on Piratebay? It of course never occurs to them I might pay today, if they would only make it available. They do demand creation but fuck up the fulfillment.
Or take a concert. I recently paid 120 Euros for several nights at the Nice Jazz festival. I want to buy MY concerts that I attended but of course where are they available? Bootlegs on Youtube. Demand creation yet no fulfillment.
etc etc.
With digital copying, they might want to create demand yet throttle this demand in stupid ways ( I do not want DVD's I want 700 MB downloads for my hotel at night on a laptop but no this is not a commercial choice, they fail again to to fulfillment).
So this article makes perfect sense to me. I work with IT contractors who make lots of money. They ALL download films because that is the easiest way to them, not because they are free.
Correct. As a rule the laptop is the main issue. SOMETIMES belts off, SOMETIMES shoes off. Today carrying a guitar through Dusseldorf they asked what it was and I told them it was a tactical nuclear weapon. I told them it was secret. I was not arrested. Some places still have a sense of humor. Zurich is a humor free zone - I was threatened with arrest there last year when I called the screener a fucking idiot - and trust me - he was.
Any Mobile operator would have implemented visual voicemail without an exclusive deal, I would doubt that the integration level was that difficult. Apple might have to have fronted the cost.
Regarding EDGE Apple could have targeted EDGE enabled telcos. The provisioning in France was a joke - I spent 45 minutes in an Orange Shop, and still cannot change levels of iPhone plans online. Orange still has the normal provisioning system in place. So it seems Jobs only cares about the full experience for American customers. The service revenue of course would not happen, but sadly if he wants to destroy the traditional mobile world getting into bed with dinosaurs like Orange is not the way to go.
Regarding billing systems, I doubt there is much integration.
Mobile operators do all kinds of expensive integration ALL the time often with dubious rates of return. ( I have worked for all major European telcos )
Endeavors for neautrality? What does that mean? It is simple - google has the exact same data that allows a person to find a torrent.
Google is a search engine that makes money from many sources INCLUDING leading searchers to copyright material.
Lets look at this another way - man robs grocery stores, but does not charity work. Google robs grocery stores, but it is OK to also break the law because they do some extra stuff that the ordinary burglar does?
If I go to Pirate Bay, I always get there via Google who have direct indexed links of torrent pages, and Google get ad revenue. Either both google and Pirate bay are guilty or neither.
".... The Pirate Bay does not. Look at the name of their site. Look at their logo, for crying out loud. It's a pirate ship with a cassette tape on it! TPB has no claim to legitimacy...."
TPB is up front about allowing people to find files to download. Where they operate they are not breaking the law. Google however pretends that they are not aiding finding files and making cash off the process.
There is no real difference between google and pirate bay except the name. You are free to believe they are different. Common Carrier status? They are a search engine. You ignore that if google really felt bad about aiding finding torrent files they would not index these files. But they do, and they make lots of money doing it.
Regarding your babbling about monopolies and abuse, I have no idea what idea you were trying impart on a simple concept. Any monopoly will always lead to abuse. I am not going to repeat has been well documented about abuse of monopolies.
"......This is a complete abuse of the word "monopoly"......."
It is hard to have a rational discussion when people do not understand the concepts being discussed. Copyright is a government granted monopoly.
Monopoly is an absolute word - like virginity. You cannot be a partial virgin. You are one or you are not.
You might not like the concept of monopoly or la la la la pretend it does not exist but it is.
Also your use of the word pirating is interesting. You believe in Free Market capitalism? Are monopolies bad?
Google is more efficient than pirate bay. It present the direct page with a torrent better than pirate bay. Google makes money off of ads allowing you to find torrents and yet it does not share the revenue with artists.
So how can google be OK to allow me to find a torrent file and pirate bay is not OK? Google could EASILY refuse to index torrent sites yet it does. Think very carefully about this. But no......you have already decided.
Frankly your inability to equate google with pirate bay shows a certain logical deficiency.
Come back when you understand the word monopoly. And virgin.
"....They're making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation......"
So how do we get to Piratebay? Search Google. So now Google is also making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation.
Some people will just copy for free, other people want better ways to buy and access media. And yes, they want more realistic pricing.
The reality lots of people ignore is that copyright is a monopoly so it allows the copyright holder to abuse their position.
Example: We will be bombarded by ads for movie X. I live in Europe and speak English. I am supposed to wait a year after they tease me? Because they are a monopoly I have no choice.
I travel all the time. I hate DVD's I want digital downloads. I do not want HD or even full size copies. I would pay 5 ish Euros a pop. But you know what? I would spend about 15 - 20 Euros a week on movies.
Now I spend zero. Because the monopolists believe that they can use their monopoly to strangle the market and restrain the ways in which people can access as well as when people can access their product.
The problem is I like movies, but these "studios" are the basic ball game. I am ready and waiting to pay.
The reality is that the studio's would perhaps want to make places like piratebay a commercial partner.
People have X amount of budget.
In the 90's I used to buy 20-30 CD's a week. Now I cannot afford that rate. Most of the music I bought on CD I already had bought on Albums. Now I am wiser and poorer the whole music pricing business leaves a bad tastes in my mouth.
People who produce are obligated to understand that the price of duplication is zero. The cost is zero. Now if I buy downloads they charge me CD prices and they can not be bother to even let me know who play on the album.
SO basically the media industry has been shitting on customers for years because as monopolists they can. I actually believe Piratebay is a good way to put pressure on them to change.
People no longer see the value in buying a record from 1968 as digital format at a high price. The digital cost has effectively gone to zero.
What copyright holders refuse to accept is perhaps with the consumer aware of the value, that they simply not prepared to but the music at the price asked.
I am an example, I travel all the time, and in my earlier life I spend thousands of dollars on movies. Now I cannot see movies ( I live in France and most DVD's seem to be in French Dutch and German etc) because I travel and frankly having invested lots of money in kids's DVD that get scratched, I am fed up with the price and the infexibility of delivery.
Now I download a digital files because I can. I would pay 5 Euros a film - no interest in Blue ray etc. No one will offer me a site where I can download a film and pay.
Please don't blah blah stealing to me. I am willing to pay. If they are so inflexible that they refuse in a capable world to sell me their product how I want it, and I can get it for free, well I can and will do this.
When they bother to ask me, perhaps they might learn there are many different ways people will pay.
When the cost of duplication is zero, be careful in how you price your product.
".......Oh, and you can get a 3.5G iPhone-like phone: the Samsung F700; it looks superb, and squeezes a full keyboard into something with roughly the same form factor and look as the iPhone:......"
Funny you should use the phrase uninformed drivel. Which is exactly what your comment about the F700 is. I had a team testing some applications or it, and they wanted to throw it out the windows. Everyone laughed at this piece of shit.
Part of of the problem ( like in Vodafone ) is that they are content centric, not service or application centric. So a lot of Mobile operators have not developed a very good infrastructure for taking a request from an MSISN and hashing it to pass out to a third party service provider or application. We do not want to pass out MSISDN's.
Marketing people do not give a shit about API's. Orange in Europe is the most advanced in terms of Service API's for network service like location.
The technology has been there for a long time, but the marketing will was not there. As I said, they could only imagine location services based upon a resolution that did not exist, so they discarded it completely.
There SHOULD have been by now a massive ecosystem of location/context/presence apps and services. Instead we get Vodafone Live!
As I travel a lot, all i ever wanted was directions to the nearest toilet , ATM and taxi rank for each new airport.
Now GPS phones and Google will eat our lunch on building that Ecosystem.
Mobile Operators have had this ability for years, but they cannot decide what to do.
The other interesting location ability is to "tag" a location with data, so people can come for example to a park, and read comments left in "space".
again.....as mobile operators we sit on our collective ass, listening to idiots like Arun Sarin who has no real ideas how to make money off of data services.
Guy Hands is an expert at securitization of cash flows. I would expect he will break up EMI. I heard he is interested in gaining access to the cash flow from the publishing rights.
Guy Hands is not some nice benevolent guy. He is a ruthless cash making machine.
"....Whole business securitisation:
One of the typical UK innovation is securitisation of whole business cashflows, also known as principal finance, or securitisation of operating company cashflows. This device largely goes to the credit of Guy Hands of Japanese investment bank Nomura......"
By James Sherwood [More by this author] 29th November 2007 14:50 GMT If you're caught short in central London tonight then just text Westminster Council (WC), because it has launched a loo-locating texting service.
Mobile-enabled geeks out on the pi** now need only text the word 'toilet' to 80097 and the service will text you back the street name of your closest water closet. The service is called Sat Lav and was designed by student Gail Knight.
A spokesperson for WC told Register Hardware that its service communicates with nearby mobile phone masts to triangulate your location. Sat Lav includes the details of 40 toilets and covers 8.5 square miles of Westminster.
We couldn't resist a try and so sent a text to Sat Lav. It's a good job we weren't bursting, because the reply took 7-10 minutes to arrive. And when it did come through, the exact location of the toilets were so vague that it would have taken us ages to find them. We'd have burst by then...
It's not so much that Ken Livingstone has suddenly become an avid texter, but more because WC claims that 45,460 litres of urine is at risk from ending up on the city's streets, thanks to those not willing - or unable - to wait.
The service is available now at 25p per text, a little more than spending a penny. Let's hope the money goes to building more outhouses......"
Or my plane could have crashed and I am dead but my phone survived. Whatever.
SMS received: Did you miss your flight? Yes No Do you want to rebook? Yes No?
Fixed
I would assume that one would do a little detailed design and use cases. I was quoting a simple example.
Re:Wow! This is exactly what I always wanted!!!
on
Google Maps GPS Simulator
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Location on a phone has always been potentially very useful as a part of user context. You might not be able to use it as a turn by turn mapping guide, but what the stupid mobile operators forget is that other people could think of useful location services. Example: Travel Agent. I used to fly from Nice to London via Frankfurt a lot. My connection in Frankfurt is at 9:15. If my phone reports that I am in Frankfurt at 9:30 and the flight left at 9:15, then I missed my flight. An application could use this to automatically rebook me.
I order a taxi from an office. Today I wait on the street because I do not know within a minute when he will arrive. With location, when the taxi enters the same cell as me, it could trigger an SMS for me to go down to see taxi. Saving me time and money.
Wap Link: Give me the weather HERE. I remember years ago showing a friend the weather forecast on the phone. After I typed in the City, he asked why? He was right of course , the phone knew what city I was in.
Going for a train - rush or have a cup of coffee and wait? Push the button "Next Train" and application knows you are in work not home and tell you next train from work to home. Or vice a versa.
Too many people stupidly believe that location has no real use unless it can locate a person within meters. The granularity is fine as a basis to give contextual input to many many app.
I could go on and on, but for 7 years the mobile operators have blown their lead in this space all because the idiot marketing people believe that if THEY cannot imagine a service no would could possibly want such a service. I had to laugh at Vodafone idiot CEO in a recent interview discussing how he "owned" location as a service and Apple did not. He owned it for 7 years and did fuck all with it.
At the end of the day, how much should any person get paid? How much more is a guitar player worth than a toilet cleaner? The reality is that a band can create an album with less than 10K dollars worth of equipment, and sell that album......for what? The toilet cleaner will work for minimum wage possibly because he has no other job to accept. Who says a musician deserves more than minimum wages? I am in business, everyone says I have to fight to exist, often with no contracts I get zero income.
So this crap about 10 bucks for an album is crap. The cost of an album is approaching zero. So the price is dictated by market forces. Possibly 10 cents is overpriced for some some songs.
Most musicians are lucky to get 100 bucks each a night to play live. Music as MP3 might help their business worth to increase. In the end, who knows? A song is worth what some one will pay.
Digital media has essentially ended the usefulness of the copyright concept. Monopolies are bad, and we see that allowing record labels to abuse that monopoly has killed their business.
If we examine minimum wage, perhaps the toilet cleaner is envious of a musician getting 50 bucks an hour for a 2 hour gig.
We all have to scrape for a living, no one is mandated to make millions. You have to use your skills to sell people what they will buy.
"....Terrorists are also transient....." So are business people. I travel a lot. I buy stuff sometimes in supermarkets. I was born in Texas. I am white. I like hummas. I like arabic food. I have been to Afghanistan. I have been to Saudi Arabia. I know of hundreds of people who fit my profile.
"..... They've allied themselves with virtually every major mobile phone maker in the market......" A mobile operator joining a consortium like this is meaningless. I used to handle Standards issues for a Large european mobile operator. We sit in committees and decide if we want to join to move it forward or join to obstruct.
People who believe these operators are joining means much are naive. They could be joining to get advance notice of what is going on, perhaps commision one phone as a test in some backwater market.
Things are not what they seem. Mobile operators have no strategy, but they are excellent at spoiling the picnic. Taking away their cash floor will be long and arduous. They turn over vast boxes of cash. They can afford mistakes. This is a long haul battle.
"......As for "You have [...] a lot of zeroes in your sales figures before a developer gets out of bed," he's implying that it will take a long time to be profitable......"
No he means that he believes a lot of phones must ship before any developers get interested in a phone. A phone with only a few customers using it is not that interesting for a developer when there are phone that have millins of users.
So, he is alluding to chicken/egg. Does a developer wait for enough devices to ship, or does he take a punt and start now.
He is wrong of course, with the hype thousands of developers will bite and start developing for the google platform.
".......They get a relationship with the phone companies......"
Um. No. Mobile Operators like subservience. Make a phone, but it must please the Operator. The google phone OS will displease operators, because google will have too much control. Mobile Operators have massive cash flow that is much much bigger than googles cash flow.
Where is Orange? Vodafone? Hutch 3G? The rest of the world? You can have a relationship with an operator as long as you are not a threat. Google is a threat to them. Eventually the mobile operators will be destroyed by their lack of imagination...but in the meantime, this iniative _could_ fail or be less successful that cheerleaders might predict.
Slashdot Mirror
"......in a networked economy does not go to the people doing the work....."
In, for example, todays music industry, the money does not go to the people doing the work. There are rare exception like Madonna and U2, but the money goes to the distributer.
"...Just look at how long it took the TV writers to get what was obviously due them......"
Um, no. They still do not get what is due to them. I believe for example their download fee kicks in after something like 30 days ( where most of the money is made in the first 30 days ).
No one is due anything. We all have to work and in the US today millions of workers are told to adjust or starve. Writers and musicians are no different. The fact is that the cost of a digital copy is zero.
The other reality is that the existing distribution is trying to use the law to prop up a defunct model.
Take the movie distribution. I live in France but speak English. I see a movie available today in the US, but I am supposed to wait for 6 months to get it legally, when I can get it now on Piratebay? It of course never occurs to them I might pay today, if they would only make it available. They do demand creation but fuck up the fulfillment.
Or take a concert. I recently paid 120 Euros for several nights at the Nice Jazz festival. I want to buy MY concerts that I attended but of course where are they available? Bootlegs on Youtube. Demand creation yet no fulfillment.
etc etc.
With digital copying, they might want to create demand yet throttle this demand in stupid ways ( I do not want DVD's I want 700 MB downloads for my hotel at night on a laptop but no this is not a commercial choice, they fail again to to fulfillment).
So this article makes perfect sense to me. I work with IT contractors who make lots of money. They ALL download films because that is the easiest way to them, not because they are free.
Correct. As a rule the laptop is the main issue. SOMETIMES belts off, SOMETIMES shoes off. Today carrying a guitar through Dusseldorf they asked what it was and I told them it was a tactical nuclear weapon. I told them it was secret. I was not arrested. Some places still have a sense of humor. Zurich is a humor free zone - I was threatened with arrest there last year when I called the screener a fucking idiot - and trust me - he was.
Any Mobile operator would have implemented visual voicemail without an exclusive deal, I would doubt that the integration level was that difficult. Apple might have to have fronted the cost.
Regarding EDGE Apple could have targeted EDGE enabled telcos. The provisioning in France was a joke - I spent 45 minutes in an Orange Shop, and still cannot change levels of iPhone plans online. Orange still has the normal provisioning system in place. So it seems Jobs only cares about the full experience for American customers. The service revenue of course would not happen, but sadly if he wants to destroy the traditional mobile world getting into bed with dinosaurs like Orange is not the way to go.
Regarding billing systems, I doubt there is much integration.
Mobile operators do all kinds of expensive integration ALL the time often with dubious rates of return. ( I have worked for all major European telcos )
Endeavors for neautrality? What does that mean? It is simple - google has the exact same data that allows a person to find a torrent.
Google is a search engine that makes money from many sources INCLUDING leading searchers to copyright material.
Lets look at this another way - man robs grocery stores, but does not charity work. Google robs grocery stores, but it is OK to also break the law because they do some extra stuff that the ordinary burglar does?
If I go to Pirate Bay, I always get there via Google who have direct indexed links of torrent pages, and Google get ad revenue. Either both google and Pirate bay are guilty or neither.
".... The Pirate Bay does not. Look at the name of their site. Look at their logo, for crying out loud. It's a pirate ship with a cassette tape on it! TPB has no claim to legitimacy...."
TPB is up front about allowing people to find files to download. Where they operate they are not breaking the law. Google however pretends that they are not aiding finding files and making cash off the process.
There is no real difference between google and pirate bay except the name. You are free to believe they are different. Common Carrier status? They are a search engine. You ignore that if google really felt bad about aiding finding torrent files they would not index these files. But they do, and they make lots of money doing it.
Regarding your babbling about monopolies and abuse, I have no idea what idea you were trying impart on a simple concept. Any monopoly will always lead to abuse. I am not going to repeat has been well documented about abuse of monopolies.
"......This is a complete abuse of the word "monopoly"......."
It is hard to have a rational discussion when people do not understand the concepts being discussed. Copyright is a government granted monopoly.
Monopoly is an absolute word - like virginity. You cannot be a partial virgin. You are one or you are not.
You might not like the concept of monopoly or la la la la pretend it does not exist but it is.
Also your use of the word pirating is interesting. You believe in Free Market capitalism? Are monopolies bad?
Google is more efficient than pirate bay. It present the direct page with a torrent better than pirate bay. Google makes money off of ads allowing you to find torrents and yet it does not share the revenue with artists.
So how can google be OK to allow me to find a torrent file and pirate bay is not OK? Google could EASILY refuse to index torrent sites yet it does. Think very carefully about this. But no......you have already decided.
Frankly your inability to equate google with pirate bay shows a certain logical deficiency.
Come back when you understand the word monopoly. And virgin.
"....They're making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation......"
So how do we get to Piratebay? Search Google. So now Google is also making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation.
Some people will just copy for free, other people want better ways to buy and access media. And yes, they want more realistic pricing.
The reality lots of people ignore is that copyright is a monopoly so it allows the copyright holder to abuse their position.
Example: We will be bombarded by ads for movie X. I live in Europe and speak English. I am supposed to wait a year after they tease me? Because they are a monopoly I have no choice.
I travel all the time. I hate DVD's I want digital downloads. I do not want HD or even full size copies. I would pay 5 ish Euros a pop. But you know what? I would spend about 15 - 20 Euros a week on movies.
Now I spend zero. Because the monopolists believe that they can use their monopoly to strangle the market and restrain the ways in which people can access as well as when people can access their product.
The problem is I like movies, but these "studios" are the basic ball game. I am ready and waiting to pay.
The reality is that the studio's would perhaps want to make places like piratebay a commercial partner.
People have X amount of budget.
In the 90's I used to buy 20-30 CD's a week. Now I cannot afford that rate. Most of the music I bought on CD I already had bought on Albums. Now I am wiser and poorer the whole music pricing business leaves a bad tastes in my mouth.
People who produce are obligated to understand that the price of duplication is zero. The cost is zero. Now if I buy downloads they charge me CD prices and they can not be bother to even let me know who play on the album.
SO basically the media industry has been shitting on customers for years because as monopolists they can. I actually believe Piratebay is a good way to put pressure on them to change.
People no longer see the value in buying a record from 1968 as digital format at a high price. The digital cost has effectively gone to zero.
What copyright holders refuse to accept is perhaps with the consumer aware of the value, that they simply not prepared to but the music at the price asked.
I am an example, I travel all the time, and in my earlier life I spend thousands of dollars on movies. Now I cannot see movies ( I live in France and most DVD's seem to be in French Dutch and German etc) because I travel and frankly having invested lots of money in kids's DVD that get scratched, I am fed up with the price and the infexibility of delivery.
Now I download a digital files because I can. I would pay 5 Euros a film - no interest in Blue ray etc. No one will offer me a site where I can download a film and pay.
Please don't blah blah stealing to me. I am willing to pay. If they are so inflexible that they refuse in a capable world to sell me their product how I want it, and I can get it for free, well I can and will do this.
When they bother to ask me, perhaps they might learn there are many different ways people will pay.
When the cost of duplication is zero, be careful in how you price your product.
They have no clue.
So who knows a proxy in the UK to mask out IP's?
"Is "Chinaman" offensive? Sure, to a lot of people"
I am an Irishman. Should I be offended?
Some people are offended by the sun shining.
So any Chinese who are offended, raise your hands.
But wait! I just remembered. Free speech always offends SOMEONE.
".......Oh, and you can get a 3.5G iPhone-like phone: the Samsung F700; it looks superb, and squeezes a full keyboard into something with roughly the same form factor and look as the iPhone:......"
Funny you should use the phrase uninformed drivel. Which is exactly what your comment about the F700 is. I had a team testing some applications or it, and they wanted to throw it out the windows. Everyone laughed at this piece of shit.
Part of of the problem ( like in Vodafone ) is that they are content centric, not service or application centric. So a lot of Mobile operators have not developed a very good infrastructure for taking a request from an MSISN and hashing it to pass out to a third party service provider or application. We do not want to pass out MSISDN's.
Marketing people do not give a shit about API's. Orange in Europe is the most advanced in terms of Service API's for network service like location.
The technology has been there for a long time, but the marketing will was not there. As I said, they could only imagine location services based upon a resolution that did not exist, so they discarded it completely.
There SHOULD have been by now a massive ecosystem of location/context/presence apps and services. Instead we get Vodafone Live!
As I travel a lot, all i ever wanted was directions to the nearest toilet , ATM and taxi rank for each new airport.
Now GPS phones and Google will eat our lunch on building that Ecosystem.
Mobile Operators have had this ability for years, but they cannot decide what to do.
The other interesting location ability is to "tag" a location with data, so people can come for example to a park, and read comments left in "space".
again.....as mobile operators we sit on our collective ass, listening to idiots like Arun Sarin who has no real ideas how to make money off of data services.
Guy Hands is an expert at securitization of cash flows. I would expect he will break up EMI. I heard he is interested in gaining access to the cash flow from the publishing rights.
Guy Hands is not some nice benevolent guy. He is a ruthless cash making machine.
"....Whole business securitisation:
One of the typical UK innovation is securitisation of whole business cashflows, also known as principal finance, or securitisation of operating company cashflows. This device largely goes to the credit of Guy Hands of Japanese investment bank Nomura......"
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/11/29/westminster_satlav_texting_service/
Again, just a loose location is enough....
"....Spend-a-penny SMS service starts flowing
By James Sherwood [More by this author]
29th November 2007 14:50 GMT
If you're caught short in central London tonight then just text Westminster Council (WC), because it has launched a loo-locating texting service.
Mobile-enabled geeks out on the pi** now need only text the word 'toilet' to 80097 and the service will text you back the street name of your closest water closet. The service is called Sat Lav and was designed by student Gail Knight.
A spokesperson for WC told Register Hardware that its service communicates with nearby mobile phone masts to triangulate your location. Sat Lav includes the details of 40 toilets and covers 8.5 square miles of Westminster.
We couldn't resist a try and so sent a text to Sat Lav. It's a good job we weren't bursting, because the reply took 7-10 minutes to arrive. And when it did come through, the exact location of the toilets were so vague that it would have taken us ages to find them. We'd have burst by then...
It's not so much that Ken Livingstone has suddenly become an avid texter, but more because WC claims that 45,460 litres of urine is at risk from ending up on the city's streets, thanks to those not willing - or unable - to wait.
The service is available now at 25p per text, a little more than spending a penny. Let's hope the money goes to building more outhouses......"
Or my plane could have crashed and I am dead but my phone survived. Whatever.
SMS received: Did you miss your flight? Yes No
Do you want to rebook? Yes No?
Fixed
I would assume that one would do a little detailed design and use cases. I was quoting a simple example.
Location on a phone has always been potentially very useful as a part of user context. You might not be able to use it as a turn by turn mapping guide, but what the stupid mobile operators forget is that other people could think of useful location services. Example: Travel Agent. I used to fly from Nice to London via Frankfurt a lot. My connection in Frankfurt is at 9:15. If my phone reports that I am in Frankfurt at 9:30 and the flight left at 9:15, then I missed my flight. An application could use this to automatically rebook me.
I order a taxi from an office. Today I wait on the street because I do not know within a minute when he will arrive. With location, when the taxi enters the same cell as me, it could trigger an SMS for me to go down to see taxi. Saving me time and money.
Wap Link: Give me the weather HERE. I remember years ago showing a friend the weather forecast on the phone. After I typed in the City, he asked why? He was right of course , the phone knew what city I was in.
Going for a train - rush or have a cup of coffee and wait? Push the button "Next Train" and application knows you are in work not home and tell you next train from work to home. Or vice a versa.
Too many people stupidly believe that location has no real use unless it can locate a person within meters. The granularity is fine as a basis to give contextual input to many many app.
I could go on and on, but for 7 years the mobile operators have blown their lead in this space all because the idiot marketing people believe that if THEY cannot imagine a service no would could possibly want such a service. I had to laugh at Vodafone idiot CEO in a recent interview discussing how he "owned" location as a service and Apple did not. He owned it for 7 years and did fuck all with it.
At the end of the day, how much should any person get paid? How much more is a guitar player worth than a toilet cleaner? The reality is that a band can create an album with less than 10K dollars worth of equipment, and sell that album......for what? The toilet cleaner will work for minimum wage possibly because he has no other job to accept. Who says a musician deserves more than minimum wages? I am in business, everyone says I have to fight to exist, often with no contracts I get zero income.
So this crap about 10 bucks for an album is crap. The cost of an album is approaching zero. So the price is dictated by market forces. Possibly 10 cents is overpriced for some some songs.
Most musicians are lucky to get 100 bucks each a night to play live. Music as MP3 might help their business worth to increase. In the end, who knows? A song is worth what some one will pay.
Digital media has essentially ended the usefulness of the copyright concept. Monopolies are bad, and we see that allowing record labels to abuse that monopoly has killed their business.
If we examine minimum wage, perhaps the toilet cleaner is envious of a musician getting 50 bucks an hour for a 2 hour gig.
We all have to scrape for a living, no one is mandated to make millions. You have to use your skills to sell people what they will buy.
".....First of all, the 650 thousand number you claim is discredited......"
Ummmm I think you forgot to add substance as to exactly how this has been discredited. Feel free to flesh this statement out.
"....castrated......."
and.....Multics for the Many, Unix for the One. I was waiting for you to point this out. Thanks.
"....Terrorists are also transient....." So are business people. I travel a lot. I buy stuff sometimes in supermarkets. I was born in Texas. I am white. I like hummas. I like arabic food. I have been to Afghanistan. I have been to Saudi Arabia. I know of hundreds of people who fit my profile.
So am I a terrorist? Or a business traveller?
This type of search is USELESS.
"..... They've allied themselves with virtually every major mobile phone maker in the market......" A mobile operator joining a consortium like this is meaningless. I used to handle Standards issues for a Large european mobile operator. We sit in committees and decide if we want to join to move it forward or join to obstruct.
People who believe these operators are joining means much are naive. They could be joining to get advance notice of what is going on, perhaps commision one phone as a test in some backwater market.
Things are not what they seem. Mobile operators have no strategy, but they are excellent at spoiling the picnic. Taking away their cash floor will be long and arduous. They turn over vast boxes of cash. They can afford mistakes. This is a long haul battle.
"......As for "You have [...] a lot of zeroes in your sales figures before a developer gets out of bed," he's implying that it will take a long time to be profitable. ....."
No he means that he believes a lot of phones must ship before any developers get interested in a phone. A phone with only a few customers using it is not that interesting for a developer when there are phone that have millins of users.
So, he is alluding to chicken/egg. Does a developer wait for enough devices to ship, or does he take a punt and start now.
He is wrong of course, with the hype thousands of developers will bite and start developing for the google platform.
".......They get a relationship with the phone companies......"
Um. No. Mobile Operators like subservience. Make a phone, but it must please the Operator. The google phone OS will displease operators, because google will have too much control. Mobile Operators have massive cash flow that is much much bigger than googles cash flow.
Where is Orange? Vodafone? Hutch 3G? The rest of the world? You can have a relationship with an operator as long as you are not a threat. Google is a threat to them. Eventually the mobile operators will be destroyed by their lack of imagination...but in the meantime, this iniative _could_ fail or be less successful that cheerleaders might predict.