Rob's Blog - September 2005

Trust Me, I'm A Blogger

According to a small peice in New Media Age carried out by Hostway, people prefer to trust reviews in blogs as the best way to get unbiased information on products.

Out of 1,100 users, 77% said what they'd read on a blog would influence their purchasing decisions.

I know I check what other people say about products online, so it's not really a surprise to see others doing the same.

Foggy Eastbourne

It's very foggy in Eastbourne today.

It's impossible to see to the end of the road, yet if you look up you can see blue sky.

It appears the fog caught out some people as my train to London is very empty today.

Phwoar, What A QRtie!

Phwoar, what a QRtie! As The Sun newspaper might say...

Genki Mobile have started tattoing girls in Japan with QR barcodes advertising their mobile site.

Something like this may work well for mobile FHM or Max Power here in the UK. Let's get the High Street Honey's tattoed!

The animated image comes via Wireless Watch Japan.

Guardian Building

The Guardian building has had a change of typeface, but no change in size yet...

Using RDF::Redland On Debian

This had me fooled for a few hours, so I thought i'd just record it here incase anyone else is having the same problem.

When installing the RDF::Redland Perl modules to use Dave Beckett's Redland on Debian with a custom compiled version of Perl, the libraries on CPAN will not work.

Instead, the version of Redland on the current Debian (11th September 2005) is version 1.0.0.2, so you need to download the redland-bindings for 1.0.0.2 on librdf.org, and compile them yourself by running perl Makefile.PL and make, make test and finally make install.

You should now be able to use the RDF::Redland modules successfully.

98% Japanese Music Downloads Are To Mobiles

One interesting statistic I read today was that in Japan 98% of the music download market is to mobile devices, with PC's only taking the remaining 2%.

The report by the Recording Industry Association of Japan said that 108.9 million downloads to mobiles took place last year in the country, making the market worth 13.6bn yen.

This runs contrary to the situation in the West where mobile downloads are still rare in comparision to those by PC.

It will be interesting to see how the future pans out in the UK. Devices are converging, and it won't be much longer before the phone is the dominant music device. The iTunes phone launched today and it does seem to be the way forward. Apple have already come back with the iPod Nano, a lovely bit of hardware, but like all hardware, it will be obsolete in a few years time.

The Times To Use Mobile Barcodes

Reading through last weeks New Media Age I spotted a small press release that The Times has signed up with Hewlett-Packard using their Active Print Glass application.

The promotion enables readers to enter a competition by taking a picture of a barcode with their Series 60 camera phone.

The Times is stressing that this is just a test, but they are keen to gauge reader's reactions to the service.

It's great to see more organisations trying the new technology out here in the UK. The BBC is also using the same technolgy to support it's Coast programme as i have mentioned before.

At present we have a selection of different formats to choose from in this country, where as in Japan the QR code is king. If only the operators would preload a barcode scanning applcation onto their handsets, it would really open the market up and give the mobile internet a real boost it becomes easy for brands to market off portal.

Christian Lindholm To Join Yahoo!

It was only yesterday I commented on the recent recruitments by Yahoo!, and now it seems Yahoo! have hired Christian Lindholm from Nokia.

Christian will be joining Yahoo as VP of Global Mobile Products. If Yahoo! want to crack mobile, then they couldn't have recruited a better person.

Christian is the guy who headed up Lifeblog at Nokia, as well as "fathering" the Series 60 and Navi-key UI.

It really looks as if Yahoo! is the company to watch at the moment.

The Future Of Yahoo!

From looking at the smaller picture, it's interesting to see what Yahoo!'s future vision could be.

They recently bought Flickr, as built (in part) by my ex collegue at emap, Cal Henderson. Flickr (if you've been offline the past year) is the social photo sharing network getting so much attention lately.

They have hired Russell Beattie, the well known mobile technology evangalist and blogger.

Finally, they have just hired my old project supervisor from the University of Kent, Dave Beckett. Dave has been very influential in the development of RDF, the technology that promises to be the cornerstone of the seemingly fabelled Semantic Web.

It seems they see the future to be semantic, social and mobile. It's the way we've been heading, but high profile recruitment just seems to confirm this.

Interesting times!