Question: What does a mobile community look like? What is the toolset and what are the enablers?
- Small bursts of activity and information seem to be working best. Lots of information doesn’t translate well.
- 60% of people with a handset have access to the mobile Internet. 30% of those people use it.
- Text messaging, games, and cameras are key. “There is a phone 2.0 happening.”
- “Its about me and my presence information that can be updated and read on a mobile device. “
- There is lots of money going into the location based services.
- “Not many community opportunities in the mobile space.”
- Multi-user gaming is happening via mobile spaces. In the next year you’ll start seeing some more interesting stuff happening with geopresense.
Question: Where do they intersect with or extend existing communities?
Question: What is the ROI of mobile communities?
- Tremendous ecommerce opportunities.
- Twitter and facebook can’t monitize it.
- Status updates make facebook sticky. You can monitize the “passive intimacy”.
- The idea is that it’s “I am the news”.
- Commerce and fundraising are extremely restrictive so it would be hard to leverage mobile devices.
- Text messages from grandchildren and photo-sharing from children.
Question: What if it never had a connection to the web? What is the difference?
- The mobility is the difference. You don’t take your laptop with you. But your phone goes everywhere.
- The input constraints screen size, keyboard, etc.
- Some people have mobile phones that don’t have a connection elsewhere.
- Nokia is supposed to call them “Multimedia Computers”
- Who is to say that screens will be a constraint in 10 years?
- Designing for each and every browser is a nightmare problem.
- 128×128 up to 640×480 devices. If you offer a service you have to deal with that.
- Could a wifi network displace the carriers?
- If you are in a space where more than 50% of the people are updating presence and twittering.
- There is a huge potential for apps to leverage the strong ties contained in the address book. What about the weak ties?
- What are “mobile only” communities? Mobile home users that never connect for real? Dodgeball?
- There is nothing that is better than the PC experience. It’s obvious that there are possibilities, but there is no glue or service that exists soley in the mobile space.
- “The thing that’s coming next from mobile isn’t really here. “
- Location based services could be huge, but it’s hard to get the data. Until you get location there is less available than a PC.
- e911 doesn’t know where you really are. But your phone is always broadcasting your location. Any phone that doesn’t have geo-location won’t be turned on from verizon. The FBI, however, knows where the phone is.
Question: Mobile community and real world geographic communities?
Question: How do you work with or around device constraints? What is a minimal acceptable experience and what would be ideal. What do the curves for technology?
- Operators are a constraint. They don’t open up the devices. Apple is the most recent to lock down.
- When will a phone know where I am? The carriers want to charge 25 cents to let your location out to you or other applications.
Question: Do political campaigns leverage the mobile space?
Some space in “action alert” mobiles to get people to call up their congressmen. They are also used for event organizations like “get out and vote” or campaign rallies.
Question: What apps or services or sites to people in this room use?
- Facebook status
- google maps
- Google reader
- Twitter people
- Flicker to upload flicker
- Frucall – Sign up to use cell phone to get pricing about objects. Just enter the product number. Local comparison shopping and reviews.
- Witsets is an RSS aggregator.
- Use yahoo IM via a blackberry/java application
- Yahoo go
Question: Is there a service that you can use to manage massive group texting?
There is a free service where people can sign up to make a group where they all share messages. There are some web sites.
Example: http://www.zemble.com/ and www.textmob.com are free services.
Group text message admins.
Question: What would be a geolocation community that you could imagine?
- There is real interest in disaster response to find people.
- Broadcasting your dating preferences and matching you to people near you.
- Geo-games ala pac-manhatten.