Special thanks to Yonatan for contributing to this intial stage of research. Here are some links he found detailing the current cellular standards and providers in Africa:

statistics
Network Operators

Interesting Notes: In Kenya, as aforementioned, South Africa and Swaziland (a small country right above South Africa) the major cellular service providers seem to offer nationwide MMS messaging. However, the standard in Africa is still GSM which is second generation mobile technology,in the class of 2G, while GPRS is 2.5G, EDGE is 2.75G and UMTS is 3G. Mobileafrica, a website dedicated to reporting mobile news and technology developments in Africa, seems to suggest that development is headed toward 3G.

more research notes available soon

Posted by Cat at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, after signing up for radar and posting some pictures, I just realized that I am sick and tired of signing up for all these different media sites!!!! Now, when I take a picture, what am I going to do....send it to flickr and radar and freeformed, post it to myspace. Too much. There needs to be one great site that does everything I want it to. (which is why I'm creating it)

Posted by Cat at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I finally got around to using radar and, of course, I have a couple of observations, and maybe a few complaints. The first interesting thing I noticed previously was that when I log in I am automatically presented with pictures from my friends (well actually, frienD, as I have only one radar friend so far). Then, when I upload pictures, my pictures become part of a stream that includes my friend's pictures sorted (I am assuming) by most recently posted...interesting. In addition, all of the comments appear at the bottom of each photograph and their are no descriptions, just comments. This seems to be an attempt to address the idea of having a communal space where people who know each other can speak through media. The other interesting thing, which makes sense given their mobile strategy, is that they not only provide means to search and comment through your mobile phone, but they have a java app available for download that will allow you to post and communicate with the site in an easier fashion. I haven't downloaded to the Nokia yet (wonder if my Nextel would support it???).

The problems? Well, first, while I appreciate the convenience of seeing new pictures by my friends when I first log in, perhaps there could be a better way to organize this so that one piece of media has a connection to another piece of media that is relevant. I see that they offer the ability to form and join groups. But this only seems to be a way to organize your friends. I cannot see any way to upload media to a specific group, nor is there a way to search for groups that you may want to be a part of. In fact, the only way it seems to become part of a group is to be invited, The other significant problem is, if I see someone who has posted a comment on my friend's page who I may want to invite to be my friend, why should I have to know their email address? Shouldn't their be a way to simply invite them on the site itself?? Yes, flickr does piss me off when strange people who have pornographic photos all over the place add me as a contact, so I understand the need to have some sort of privacy functionality. But maybe it could be an approval situation (sort of like myspace..although I think their method is equally as annoying) where someone could accept your invitation. Also, and again I'm sure this is for privacy reasons, why is it that I cannot see other users photos that they have labeled public by clicking on their name. Since there is no way to search for users (or media for that matter), if someone posts a commment to a picture taken by one of my friends , there is a good possibility that I may know the person, or at least want to see what pictures they have posted. This is actually somewhat anti-social and if privacy is the reason, they could simply make the default 'private so only my friends can see' (flickr again) and then give people the option of making their pictures totally private or public.

In my previous post, I had not meant to suggest that I think something of this nature would REPLACE flickr entirely. I don't think that is possible just yet. However, given that mobile phone camera's are only getting better, I think it is safe to assume that a large portion of people, especially those who mostly photograph to keep their memories and who otherwise may not have the need to actually buy a digital camera, will use their phones to take pictures. In this regard, an app that attempts to create a mobile media community may be the next big thing. There will always be the need, at least in the near future, to have sites like flickr that cater to those without camera phone capabilities or those who simply can't handle the horrible quality of their phone's pictures. But providing a clean, easy to use and relevant site dedicated to storing and communicating through mobile phone media will be, not only a good idea, but necessary (hello...freeformed!) Wonder if radar is considering video???

Posted by Cat at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been a Nextel user since the 90s. It actually happened somewhat against my will when my father, always eager to try new gadgets, discovered Netel's walkie talkie feature. This basically meant that his overbearing voice could come out of my phone at any time, although I quickly learned how to use the silent feature. When I bought my first Nextel I hated the phone, it was large, ugly and no one had ever heard of it. That was soon to change. It seemed like overnight, Nextel spread like wild fire through westchester and the bronx, to the point that 'hit me up on your two-way' became a househols saying. And at first, Nextel seemed quite able to meet the demands of its growing subscriber base. They were continously adding new features and functionality, changing their phones to meet a younger and more demanding client base and expanding there network extensively, I can still remember the days when a road trip would take me to some out-of-way-no-where-land and the only phone that had service was mine. It seemed to be a revolution at the time, with my friends and I looking down on non-nextel users thinking, 'these people are just not in the know'. But then, something happened.

I'm not familiar enough with the history of Nextel's corporate game plan to know for sure, but it seems that they spent an enormous amount of time, money and marketing to promote what they thought would be the next big thing, 'the nationwide network'. This feature would allow me in my home in new york to two-way someone across the country in LA.....and it worked. I remember distinctly the first day it came out because my father and his brother from Texas were playing around with it all day long. Unfortunately, as cool as this was for current Nextel users who had friends and family living far away, I think this was their first, although not only, huge miscalculation. Firstly, they failed to realize that many people used the two-way feature to get in touch with friends living within a close geographical distance whom they saw on a daily basis, rather then as a substitute for a phone call. Second, and most importantly, the effort exerted attempting to create this feature left them way behind in the race to create capable media enabled phones. My phone, an i860, which came out roughly over a year ago and was the first Nextel camera phone I owned, takes completely horrible pictures and won't even let me send video. And as I became more interested in these features, along with many other consumers, I grew to dislike my poor Nextel more and more, a trend that seems to have disseminated across a large portion of my friendship circle as many people I know who once swore by Nextel have traded their two-way for something that more easily handles MP3s.

I myself recently bought a Nokia 6682. Unfortuntely, my contract with Nextel ends in 2007 (and I'm still not sure I could give up my two-way). I only use the phone for data, which probably qualifies me in the category of extreme-nerd. At first, I loved it, but now I'm not so sure. I couldn't figure out exactly what was bothering me until I read this article linked by Alex Bisceglie on his blog.. The Nokia, while having extremely more sophisticated features and functionality just didn't feel right. The article talks about consumer frustration with complicated phone interfaces, but also mentioned one thing that until now I never really realized, Nextel's (which is actually now Sprint Nextel, although I still find the association annoying so I mostly just ignore it) dedication to simple phones. I had never really thought about how easy it was to navigate through my phone until I bought another one. Going into the specifics would be silly, but my two most extreme personal annoyances about the Nokia are, it insists on calling people in my contacts list unless it is locked (which is stupid, my nextel never has to be 'locked') and it doesn't show the damn time on the screen (which is very high up there on reasons why I look at my phone's screen for no apparent reason). Although I found the article slightly ridiculous in assuming that the company is doing something right because their customers spend the most amount of money on data, perhaps there is something to the simple phone.

Perhaps I won't get rid of my poor Nextel afterall. However, I must insist that if they want to keep us dedicated customers, who have been there since the beginning when they had fleets instead of a massive two-way network, they have to make some huge changes. Perhaps their next big plan should be to take the idea of the simple phone and make the best simple phone ever. Just a suggestion.

Posted by Cat at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Could this, radar.net, be the new flickr. It seems to be a beta version of a photo sharing website with an emphasis on mobile posting. I actually really like the site design. Its dramatic and pretty intuitive. Unlike flickr, which has always put an emphasis on searching for pictures, this site seems to put more of an emphasis on sharing pictures from your mobile phone with friends. It allows you to invite friends by email with a special code. But under their privacy settings, they specify that no one can find you on radar unless they are invited, which is interesting since most social networking websites put an emphasis on being able to find friends through the site. In that vain, they have no search functions, further emphasizing that this is not a place to find media either (I wonder how this will work in the long run).

They have commenting functionality but no tagging functionality (is tagging really dead?) And they also neglected to include the ability to upload from your computer, which actually may be smart since it puts the site in a special niche to only be used with your camera phone. I have signed up but haven't used it yet. I think I probably will. Very interesting, we'll see what happens.

Posted by Cat at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was pointed to this article by Alex Bisceglie and was glad to see that Amnesty is finally addressing this incredibly important issue. Its seemed to me inevitable for quite a while, that the need to wage a campaign against online censorship would become the next fight against the repression of individual freedoms. Many people became quite enraged to hear that companies like Google were submitting to the opressive regimes of countries like China and blocking politically sensitive material. However, the problem becomes even more severe when you're no longer talking about websites being blocked, but about people being jailed for their contributions to the online conversation or having their every online move watched and cataloged.

Amnesty has already collected 7064 signatures through their new website challenging Internet censhorship (one of them being mine). But this is not nearly enough. As someone significantly interested in the role that average people can play in both the documenting, publishing and transmission of original stories and media, to me the concept of preventing such information from becomming available poses a significant threat to the grassroots media movement, to the recording of human rights violations and to the ability of the Internet to serve as a medium for the sharing of relevant ideas. To a certain extent, I also feel that it is naive of anyone to assume that Internet censorship, if unchallenged, will remain a problem in only a select few countries. It is probably true that we have yet to really realize how much information is actually being blocked. Amnesty is working with OpenNet Initiative, whose aim is to document patterns of Internet content filtering and surveillance worldwide, in an attempt to raise awarness as to how pervasive the problem is becoming.

This is a map detailing ONI global filtering findings.
Check it out and sign the pledge.

Posted by Cat at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Read about this on Shawn Van Every's blog. Sounds pretty interesting, I am imagining different uses other then downloading mp3s..hmmmm. Even with limited bandwidth issues it seems that sharring media would be more interesting. I guess I would have to learn more. To bad its only available for series 60 and series 80 Nokia phones.

Posted by Cat at 01:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, over lunch, Yonatan Kelib and I had a very interesting discussion about the current mobile infrastructure in Africa and the potential use of anonymous posting to report government surpressed human rights violations. One thing that we both agreed was that we need to do extensive research into what kind of technology different countries are utilizing. Kenya recently announced the release of a 3gp infrastructure that, theorectically, would support the sending of video across a network. However, there is littlle documentation as to how extensive the network is. Mobile phones are exploding all over Africa, in fact in South Africa the poor living in shanty towns are more likely to have a cell phone then running water. But the question still remains, how many of these phones are camera phones, how many countries have technology to support multimedia messenging and who is actually controlling these networks, the telecommunication companies or the government?

We also extensively discussed the issue of anonymous posting in countries where the governement poses a significant threat to those transmitting imagery outside of the country that they would deem 'illegal' or 'offensive'. One thing we thought may be a possibility is satelite phones that would rely on a network outside the government's control. We both plan on doing research into all of these issues.

Posted by Cat at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lately, I have found myself thinking a lot about the questions surrounding the protection of identity online. Before six months ago my online pressence was almost non-existent because I was one of those people very wary of putting my personal information out there and quite disinterested in the concept of networking through online forums. It just wasn't part of who I was. Now, with flickr, my blog, my website (and yes, even myspace) who I am is readily available to anyone who cares. Its not so much that something inside me fundamentally changed or even that I became less nervous. I simply found myself realizing that there were advantages to this kind of indetification (in most cases) and couldn't resist participating. But just because the advantage of social communication is real, whether it be sharing photographs with your friends, taking about topics of interest to you or even screwing around on mysace, that does not mean that issues of protecting your identity are irrelevant, in fact they are probably more relevant then ever before.

The issue becomes compounded even further when you are no longer talking about protecting yourself or your children from online stalkers (although this is vitally important, as a mother and a sister to a twelve year old, and a stalk victim myself, I find the prospect of strangers being able to infultrate yours or a young child's life to be incredibly scary. However, the issue here may have more to do with technology education, which most schools in this country fail at miserably, perfering as with sex to advocate some form of abstinence rather then realizing that kids are going to do what they are going to regardless and that safety and protection should be the ultimate goals rather then blind ignorance). However, what may be the next step in this conversation is how do we take advantage of the amazing ability to create and communicate immediately and use it for purposes of knowledge and relevant conversation while still repsecting issues of privavcy and safety. I recently had conversations along these lines durring my meeting with members of witness.org.

As mentioned in previous posts, witness has similar goals to us at FreeFormed in being able to create a platform within which people who otherwise would not have a voice to publish video of things that may otherwise not be seen in a way that is unfiltered and immediate through mobile posting. Being able to utilize your mobile phone to record such things as crimes, protests and human rights violations has the potential to be incredibly powerful and also, as I recently realized, incredibly dangerous. While we in this country enjoy a certain level of some kind of freedom, which is certainly somewhat questionable at this point, in many countries where people could benefit from this kind of immediate publishing technology, specifically Africa, it is often the government itself that is the problem. And with most oppressive governments having complete control of the telecommunication systems within their rule, being able to know that certain people are recording and posting things they don't want the outside world to see can be incredibly dangerous for the poster. Our current database at FreeFormed records a user's phone number and identifies each post with that phone number everytime a submission comes in. Even if we didn't do this, the phone company would still know that an mms had been sent to our website and therefor have access to exactly what was sent. I had the idea that prepaid phones may prevent this from being as much of an issue. But then you have to wonder how many prepaid phones have cameras. I know Boost mobile phones do in this country. But even though they are prepaid, they are still connected very specifically to a particular user. And Boost is part of Sprint/nextel so I am sure they are logging all relevant information about who does what with their phones. (this needs more research).Extending functionality of FreeFormed to include a call-in feature, which people could ideally use from pay phones, may be a small part of the answer, but then you lose the visual component. And as I learned quickly through studying the history of photography, a picture is very much worth a thousand words.

The other issue that you quickly run into is privacy. It is amazing that, especially in Africa, more people have mobile phones then house phones. But with the mobile phone becoming so ubiquitous and with most mobile phones now coming with some form of camera, the potential to violate privacy rights increases exponentially. It is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it is amazing that regular people can now create their own answer to the inconsistencies of the mass media. But on the hand, if mobile posting has the advantage of being able to be unfiltered and immediate, then when it comes to privacy, those advantages become severe disadvantages. What if, for instance, someone captures video of a rape in a country where nothing is being done about such crimes. Is it okay to post it? Does the benefit of transmitting information to educate people about the truth of what is going on outweigh the obvious violation of the rape victim's privacy? And regardless of the ethical or moral question, how would you stop such posting from occuring? Yes, you could police a site (in the same way myspace claims to) but you would never find everything (they never do). And who decides what is a violation of privacy and what is not? The previous case is a bit extreme, but what about a much less obvious situation where someone who was innocently filmed in a much less precarious situation feels that their rights have been violated. Where do you draw the line and how do you even identify what the line is?

more on this subject to come

Posted by Cat at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

YouTube launched a mobile posting video platform earlier this month and I missed it. (I blame the fact that it coinsided with the last day of the ITP Spring Show). This is actually somewhat of a big deal because YouTube is, as far as I know, the first large scale user created video site to enable this kind of uploading. Although I don't really like a whole lot of the content on YouTube in general, their organization is very similar to the ideas that I had for FreeFormed. Well, I guess it was bound to happen. Let the competition begin.

Posted by Cat at 03:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

abazab, Inc., who indetify themselves as 'providers of personal expression and communication products that make social networking more interactive', released a product in beta version at the beginning of this month that they say will allow anyone with a camera phone to post video, photos and voice messages to any web page that accepts html snippets.

Press release

I went to their website. Apparently whatever they are doing is quite secretive as there is little information as to what this 'widget' will actually do. I signed up so hopefully they will send me more info. To early to tell if this is interesting, but one thing I can say is that, while being able to post to any website is a potentially powerful tool, how is that going to work?? Also doesn't seem to encourage any sense of media community. I guess this could be something to watch for, though.

Posted by Cat at 03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Am I the only one who is not a hundred percent thrilled with flickr's little makeover? Some of their slight changes over the past few months have been rather nice, but this new page structure is making me slightly irritated. I am not a web designer by far and I am usually the first to sing flickr's praises, I mean I have been having a slight love affair with the site for quite some time now. But their redsign feels slightly strange and off balance to me. My largest complaint- I was very happy having the list of my photo sets on the left hand side of my page. The change of displaying them on the right is not working at all. I guess it is not so much that I dislike the new look, I mean its not all that much different, I just think if they were going to take the time to change something they could've made it much better.

Also, interesting note, when I upload pictures from my nextel, it seems that flickr has no idea where they are coming from. When I upload pictures from my Nokia or any digital camera, the model is listed very nicely amidst all the other relevant info about the picture. This is totally irrelevant, simply a further signal that Nextel is outdated.

Posted by Cat at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, so maybe I am not in the know, but I had no idea that this site supports mobile posting. I didnt even really know what the site was until I started to notice some of my more myspace-addicted friends posting pictures from photobucket as comments on my profile. So, in the interest of research, I figured I would check it out. I dont know if i just have bad luck, but when I tried to register and login it wouldn't accept the username and password I had registered with. I asked them to email my info it to the email I provided, just in case i screwed something up....i have yet to see an email from them. This is not good and after several minutes of trying to figure out if I was doing something wrong, I gave up. However, I was able to learn some stuff from their public pages. First, again like eyespot, their mobile posting feature is so buried in their site that I would have missed it if i wasn't so mobile conscious. At first glance, they seem like flickr for teenagers, publically stating the option to post video and photos to myspace (hence all the myspace photobucket comments) and offering a wide range of pseudo photo sharing services....searching, printing photos, creating calendars, strange moving image slide shows, etc. Again tagging and commenting were no where to be found. Even worse their definition of groups seems to be predetermined categories rather then user generated. I admit that without signing in I couldn't get the full picture but now I hardly think its worth it

I suppose I can see why some teenager with the intention of posting images or video to myspace or their blog would want to use this. But it seems overkill, if that is the only purpose, to include mobile posting. Plus, I had to wonder, why wouldn't they allow users to comment and tag. Do they not think it is relevant, do they not see that as part of their pupose, or are they the one's not in the know? Also missing from each photo/video was any kind of context....what is this, where is it from? Why do I care about some piece of media if it only provides me with a one way coversation? All in all it was a waste of my time....

Posted by Cat at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who has known me for longer then a few days knows how much I love my PC. I used a MAC for six years in undergrad and in many work situations to follow. Yes, it was OS 9 for the most part, but I just perfer Windows, not because it is SO superior but because it is my personal preference (I need my right click without having to buy a special right-click mouse). But the PC guru may have to buy a MAC soon, once they fix the glitches with the Intel Macs. Among some of the advantages, I recently realized, as I am currently getting myself up to speed with XHTML and CSS, would be the ability to make sure that my website looks good on a Mac and in Safari. Wouldn't want to leave all you wonderful Mac users in the dust. Not sure I COULD ever make the 'switch' (like I said....right click) but it may be a good investment. Now someone tell me when these new Macs are going to work properly?

Posted by Cat at 03:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had visited eyespot.com before when an email was circulated by Dan O'Sullivan higlighting their new video mixing capability. Unfortuntely, mostly due to not exploring the site extensively, I missed much of the point. Thanks to a recent email about their mobile posting capability from Shawn Van Every I decided to take another look. I signed up and it was quite easy to input my phone info and thus receive my own unique email address to send video to the site (not to self- perhaps FreeFormed should do this, although how do we then deal with issues of annonimity??). Unfortuntely, (maybe?) the content that has been posted so far, highlighted specifically in their top ten 'most popular' posts, seems to be relatively trivial. Among the posts, their was video of a dog and a woman in sexy lingerie (need I say more). Still what they are doing has the potential to be interesting, especially given the video mixer, which is something I haven't really seen, at least not on a site that supports mobile posting. But perhaps the lack of relevant media content highlights the reasons why Shawn specified to us early on that we needed to gear FreeFormed towards a specific set of users. I also think that eyespot is underplaying the mobile posting capability, if I hadn't known to look for it I probably wouldn't have found it. This is probably intentional but, while it is important to support the upload-form-your-computer capability, if their purpose in any way includes seriously supporting mobile video, perhaps they should be more vocal about it. I also searched through their groups and forums, groups being user created 'forums' and forums being something else entirely. The most popular groups also for the most part seemed to be slightly uninteresting (perhaps reinforcing Megan's concept of including digs or some form of relevance rating...maybe?),

As far as user interface goes, it seems very simple but also very non-functional. I spent a half hour trying to figure out where I could tag or comment on something. I would've thought that this functionality didn't exist had I not seen 'tags' on the front page of my profile page. Perhaps you can't do this.....in which case they need to fix that immediately. The only interesting feature, which I had been pushing for with FreeFormed, was the inclusion of giving users their own blog. However, in seeing how they organized the blog I see what Megan's issues with this idea were, The blog posts are completely seperate from the media, which I suppose is fine if you're not blogging about the media....but then go get a blog on blogger....right? And if the blog posts are related to media content they should be displayed with the media rather then as a seperate entity. Perhaps this is why we opted for extended comment fields instead.

All in all, I was not as impressed as I thought I would be. Again, interesting concept, but the functionality falls short of what I would've expected. They could've taken a few hints from flickr.

Posted by Cat at 03:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ITP spring show actually proved to be a very good forum to preview and discuss the mobile posting website free4md.com created by myself, Megan MacMurray, Nanna Halinen and Jadie Oh. Although we found it somewhat difficult to persuade people to register for the site amid the crowds, confusion and strange objects/noises in the immediate environment, we received a considerable amount of interest. Our site even got written up by rhizome.org. All in all it was a relatively nice review, althought they did point out FreeFormed's ultimate shortfall, the user interface design, which needs to be fixed immediately. Unfortunately, none of us are web designers and if it wasn't for Jadie's hard work on the css and Nanna's design ideas we probably wouldn't have had ANY kind of design. My plan is to ultimately convert the site from perl to php, which is proving to be somewhat of a challenge because my excitement to create new functionality seems to be far exceeding my desire to implement a new language. In either case, we are hoping by the end of the summer to have something more pleasing to look at, a design that functions more intuitively and a considerable amount of new features.

Tomorrow Nanna and I are meeting with Bryan Nunez from Witness.org, a non-rofit organization that seems somewhat interested in FreeFormed as well as possibly hiring us to help them with their mobile posting platform currently in the works. Given their interest in assisting and teaching activist groups how to use video to document human rights violations, among other interests, we feel that working with them, even in an internship capacity, may prove to be an excellent fit. We'll see.

Posted by Cat at 07:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the course of my research on the current use of mobile posting (and through the informed suggestion of a friend of mine, Yonatan) I discovered an interesting applicaion a few weeks ago that apparently was just released today The actual phone, the Helio Hero, was created by a Korean company Pantech, with the selling point of being a high-end multimedia device allowing users to commiunicate and post images to myspace using a proprietary software application. The actual service plan is a joint venture between SK Telecom and Earthlink. But before myspace addicts get excited, look at the coverage area.

While this idea may seem initially to be trivial and not particularily exciting to those with higher goals for mobile communication (as a side note, they are currently not supporting video posting, which may have something to do with myspace's poor handling of user generated video content in general), the all-in membership plan seems quite competitive, escpecially for a start-up company with no users. The real question is, will anyone use this and is it relevant if they do. A very good point was made by Dennis Crowley, founder of dodgeball in my dynamic web development class a couple weeks ago. In discussing their creation of the dodgeball website, he made a comment that the reason they were able to rely on the fact that people would understand the concept of aggregating friends together online was because of general familiarity with friendster. I believe that the current structure and use of myspace is not conducive to anything particularily interesting occuring as it relates to mobile posting. But as the second most visited site on the web, If myspace users do in fact utilize this platform it could certainly increase familiarity, which perhaps makes it a relevant thing to watch. I'd like to see what happens.

Posted by Cat at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)