Voices » mobile

Cellphone Entertainment Takes Off in Rural India

Eric Bellman — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:02:19 +0000

By Eric Bellman, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

In the furthest reaches of India’s rural heartland, the cellphone is bringing something that television, radio and even newspapers couldn’t deliver: Instant access to music, information, entertainment, news and even worship.

Despite its rapid modernization, many of India’s 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators. So in villages that don’t receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.

This primitive cellular “radio” service was used by close to 20 million Indians last year, phone company executives estimate.

“I call it the poor man’s iTunes,” says Mahesh Prasad, president of Reliance Communications Ltd., one of India’s largest cellular companies. “A villager waiting for a bus has nothing to do. When he wants to kill some time, this is the only entertainment media available.”

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Maybe Instead of Two Cars, You Just Need a Car and a Bicycle

John Gruber — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:03:03 +0000

By John Gruber, Editor, Daring Fireball

One thing that strikes me about Chrome OS and Litl is that neither bother trying to do everything Windows or Mac OS X can do. Not even close. I don’t think either even bothers trying to serve as one’s primary computer.

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Smoking Near Apple Computers Creates Biohazard, Voids Warranty

Laura Northrup — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:01:42 +0000

By Laura Northrup, Assistant Editor, Consumerist

Unless you’ve just arrived in 2009 on a time machine, you know that smoking isn’t good for you. Did you know, that smoking isn’t good for your computer, either? It’s true, at least according to Apple (AAPL).

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Almost Famous: Elemental Technologies' Sam Blackman

Drake Martinet — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:01:48 +0000

By Drake Martinet, Intern, All Things Digital

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We caught up with Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies at the San Francisco NewTeeVee Live conference.

Elemental Technologies hopes to become a major player in the future of online and over-the-air video through its high-performance encoding technology.

Who: Sam Blackman

What: CEO and Chairman of Elemental Technologies.

Why: People want to watch live video on all their devices. Making a new version of a given video for every device is time- and processor-intensive. Elemental says it can replace up to five existing dedicated servers with one of its own, based on its proprietary software.

Where: @elementaltech (Twitter); company blog; Portland (analog place).

Who else: Sam says, “We’re the first-ever company to take advantage of GPUs for video processing,” but Nvidia (NVDA) is the key hardware player.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Barista. Late for the Trolley coffee. It had this really abusive owner. He’d yell at us if we gave a half-pump too much flavoring.

Gadget of the Moment: Lenovo X301. It’s all about the keyboard.

Early Geek Influence: Jack Dudman. He was a neighbor growing up and was Steve Jobs’s math teacher at Reed College.

Wishes There Was an App for That: A really smart public transit app. Like one that knows where I am and can tell me which of the options near me I can go to, to get to my destination fastest.

Sport You Can’t Live Without: Ultimate Frisbee

Bio in 140 Characters

Raised in Oregon. EE at Brown. Time at Intel, then Pixelworks. Left to start Elemental Technologies. Loves work, kids and Ultimate Frisbee.

The Five Questions

Elemental’s products seem pretty hardcore geeky. Break it down for me.

The man on the street today wants to view video on any device at any time. The content owners of that video need to be able to format the video differently for each type of device ["transcoding"]. We make that process much cheaper. At the beginning, we saw that there was going to be a huge increase in the amount of video produced out there, but that it was hard to distribute.

Right now it’s really hard [lots of equipment and time] to create, say, 240 versions of every video [so that they can be viewed quickly on an iPhone and in HD on a laptop, for instance]. Four to five regular CPU [central processing unit] servers can be replaced by one of our servers with a GPU [graphical processing unit] and our software. That means far less cost for businesses and many more video options for the consumer.

Device variations are just exploding. How do you see the changing landscape moving your business?

I don’t see the number of video formats decreasing at all. Every company that [produces] a device wants to control delivery to it. No one is going to dominate the cellphone market. It’s just too big. You can get three percent and have a nice business. As long as that is the way the game is played, our products will be very desirable.

Why are you going to be the first software company to acquire an auto body shop?

That’s my dream. The way our product works is, when we take an order, we just submit the hardware request to Dell (DELL). They plug in a GPU. We take the box and add our software.

The funny story is that we wanted a more custom look, so we found this auto body shop in Portland that takes the bezels [rack server face plates], sands them, cleans them, repaints them and sends them back. They look beautiful, like tons of engineering went into it. Dell will do that for you, but its 20 grand, and we’re a start-up. That’s my dream, a company that doesn’t have any employees who drive to work but owns an auto body shop.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

I know exactly what that was. Turtle graphics. My mother put me in a programming class in kindergarten, and there was this thing called LOGO [where you could use computer instructions to make an onscreen turtle draw something]. I had an hour class where I figured out how to draw a square. I went home that night and wrote down on paper a program that would draw the American flag.

My neighbor had an Apple (AAPL) IIc that I used to input that first program. I probably stayed up all night as a six-year-old doing that and that was it for me. What a genius idea. I mean, kids love seeing results, and there were no visual results [from programming] for a long time. LOGO was the first thing where you could spend about an hour and get visual results.

What tech war are you watching most closely?

There’s a battle looming between Intel (INTC) and Nvidia, as Intel releases their own GPU architecture. We’re trying to be really well-positioned to benefit from that arms race of the FLOPS [the processing performance unit].

The In Living Color Interview

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China Mobile Counts on 3G for Its Growth

Lorraine Luk — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:00:41 +0000

By Lorraine Luk, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

China Mobile Ltd. (CHL), the world’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, is pinning its hopes on new third-generation services such as mobile television and mobile readers to drive growth amid increasing competition and falling voice revenue.

Chairman Wang Jianzhou said Thursday the company plans to launch mobile-reader services next year and is working with Datang Telecom Technology Co., Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. and Hanwang Technology Co. on electronic reading devices.

It is also planning to launch a trial service for mobile TV on third-generation handsets by the end of this year.

Mr. Wang said the company is targeting several million subscribers to its mobile-TV service in the first year and tens of millions of users in the second year.

The new services should help China Mobile achieve profit growth, he said.

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Protecting Offline Privacy

Emily Steel — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:30:27 +0000

By Emily Steel, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers’ personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes.

In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources–including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors’ online behavior–to identify the most receptive audiences for their ads.

At a hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee plans to explore the impact of these practices on consumer privacy, and will hear from witnesses including advertising giant WPP, database-marketing company Acxiom (ACXM), privacy advocates and others.

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Library in a Pocket

Motoko Rich and Brad Stone — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:02:28 +0000

By Motoko Rich and Brad Stone, Reporters, New York Times

With Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, readers can squeeze hundreds of books into a device that is smaller than most hardcovers. For some, that’s not small enough.

Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets–bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.”

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Sony Says Some E-Reader Orders May Miss Christmas

Don Clark — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:40:33 +0000

By Don Clark, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Two high-profile electronic-book readers seeking to challenge Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) Kindle could be scarce under the Christmas tree.

Sony Corp. (SNE) Wednesday said orders for its new Daily Edition Reader–which the company said in August would arrive in time for the holidays–are now expected to ship Dec. 18 through Jan. 8. It added that the actual delivery date can’t be guaranteed.

Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS), which is racing to enter the market with an e-reader called Nook, last week said the latest orders for the product will ship Dec. 18, though it stated it expects those products to arrive by Christmas.

The projections, which both companies linked to strong demand, underscore the difficulties of forecasting orders and coordinating a supply chain that includes component makers, manufacturing services and others.

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Into the Heart of Darkness–Shopping the Beijing iPhone Black Market

Dan Butterfield — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:01:50 +0000

By Dan Butterfield, Blogger, iPhonAsia

The black/grey markets in Beijing will blow your mind! On Saturday and Sunday (November 14/15) I had a chance to do a bit of undercover work. I hired a guide to help me navigate the Zhongguancun shopping mall maze–Hailong, Dinghao and e-World Kemao. Jennifer, my guide/interpreter, was in the market for an iPhone (our ruse) and I was going to buy it for her.

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AT&T's Verizon Ad Battle: Who's Being Hurt Worse?

JR Raphael — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:03:35 +0000

By JR Raphael, Contributor, PC World

First, let’s set the scene: In one corner, you have Verizon (VZ). The company recently launched a series of ads attacking AT&T’s (T) 3G network. The spots, revolving around the phrase “there’s a map for that,” show side-by-side maps of AT&T’s and Verizon’s networks and claim Verizon has five times more 3G coverage. Combine those with the ongoing series of iPhone-bashing Droid commercials, and you’ve got a powerful one-two punch heading straight toward AT&T’s kisser.

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App Watch: Unlock and Warm Up Your Car With Your iPhone

Andrew LaVallee — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:30:33 +0000

By Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

As the temperature drops, some cold-weather commuters are trying out an iPhone app that lets them climb in to an unlocked, pre-heated car.

Directed Electronics, the company that sells the Viper car-alarm system, has developed an accompanying app called SmartStart that lets customers use their phone to lock or unlock the car, or turn the alarm on and off.

“There’s so many apps that are neat but don’t necessarily bring much more utility to the user,” said Kevin Duffy, president of Directed. “This really makes your life better.”

They can also press a button to start it–something customers like because they can avoid a chilly ride this way, he said–open the trunk, or press a panic button that makes the headlights flash and sounds the horn. The panic button doubles as a car finder in crowded parking lots and has been known to be used as a wake-up call as well, he said.

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Matching Wal-Mart, Amazon Offers $100 Gift Cards to BlackBerry Buyers

Eric Savitz — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:00:28 +0000

By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

Matching a recent move by Wal-Mart (WMT), Amazon.com (AMZN) has unveiled a new promotion on Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry phones, giving buyers of certain models who sign up for new 2-year plans free $100 “e-gift cards.” The deal runs from November 14 through November 20. The gift cards will be mailed automatically 6 weeks after the phones are purchased.

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Creating iPhone Apps Far From the Bay Area

Yukari Iwatani Kane — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:00:25 +0000

By Yukari Iwatani Kane, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

The biggest concentration of developers for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone is in Northern California, as a story in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco Bay Area section points out. But the ubiquity of the Internet makes it possible for a software developer anywhere in the world to make apps.

According to Mobclix, which operates the largest ad exchange network on the iPhone, the largest number of app developers come from the U.S., followed by the U.K., Canada, Germany and Australia. But there are developers in such far-flung countries as Malta, Reunion, Brunei, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

One example is Sameer Jain, the 39-year old founder of Net Solutions in Chandigarh, India. He established an iPhone app team alongside his mainstay Web app business almost a year ago. Of about 170 employees, about ten of them work on iPhone apps.

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How AdMob Brings Google Important Competitive Intelligence

Ian Schafer — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:03:38 +0000

By Ian Schafer, Contributor, Ad Age

In case you missed it, Google (GOOG) acquired mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in stock.

There’s a lot of speculation on why, but the obvious reason is that Google wants more direct access to what they are betting heavily on–that mobile is the next great advertising medium. It’s made a huge bet on mobile with Android, which is an obvious move to own the mobile search ad market, but now it’s got its hooks into the mobile display ad market as well.

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Google Plans $750 Million Buyback to Offset AdMob Dilution

Eric Savitz — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:30:55 +0000

By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

Google (GOOG) plans to buy back $750 million of its common stock to offset dilution from shares to be issued in the pending all-stock acquisition of AdMob, CEO Eric Schmidt told Bloomberg yesterday.

In a research note, Broadpoint.Amtech analyst Benjamin Schachter notes that this will be the first time Google has ever repurchased any of its own shares, despite its $22 billion cash position.

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