Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

The Jobs of Tomorrow Don’t Exist Yet, But Google Still Wants to Train Your Kids

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Academics, Industry Research, Media, Public Relations (PR), Technology
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October 08, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978584382

The New York Times today posted a ReadWriteWeb story about Google’s recently launched contest to encourage young kids to begin learning to code “The Google Open Source Program is announcing a new outreach effort, aimed at 13- to 18-year-old students around the world. Google Code-in will operate in a similar fashion to Google’s Summer of Code, giving students the opportunity to work in open-source projects.” While this is great PR for Google, and an admirable program to boot, it’s also a fascinating example of how today’s largest and most successful companies are assuming a significant role in the training and formation of their future workforce in the U.S.

A couple of years ago a viral video which featured a flash animated presented titled “Did You Know?” made the rounds and introduced us to incredible factoids about the modern world that we live in. One of the information nuggets that stood out among the many others was ““the top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004… We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist… Using technologies that haven’t been invented… In order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” It was a startling, yet very believable statement, and one that many people have since cited.

A now-dated 2006 Forbes article addressed this fact and listed jobs that don’t yet exist but should be in high demand within 20 years, jobs that will disappear within 20 years, and jobs that will always exist. For example, some jobs that are expected to disappear are booksellers, car technicians, miners, cashiers, and encyclopedia writers (if they haven’t already). The presented jobs of the future were slightly ominous and depressing in a sort of sci-fi way, such as genetic screening technicians, quarantine enforcers, drowned city specialists (Atlantis, anyone?) robot mechanics and space tour guides. Lastly, those jobs that will always be around? Pretty self explanatory. Prostitution is always high on the list, as are politicians, religious leaders, barbers and artists.

However, if everyone can’t be a hair stylist, how do we prepare the world’s children for an entire generation of jobs we don’t even know about? Among educators, the prevailing sentiment is that the best we can do is to arm tomorrow’s kids with problem solving skills, critical thinking skills, and endless curiosity. However, since most teachers are dealing with a very archaic and traditionally designed curriculum, much of the responsibility of training and forming the world’s new thinkers may continue to fall upon the shoulders of the tech giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It is much easier to consider what future skills will be needed when your entire survival as a company depends upon being able to look into a crystal technology ball and anticipate the future needs of an entire world.

Movies In, iPods Out- How the Trapped Chilean Miners are Using Technology to Survive

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Media, Mobile Technology, Social Media, Technology, Tolls/Gadgets
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October 04, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978571983

How does technology play a role in keeping the Chilean miners both psychologically and physically fit?

As modern day technology consumers, many people around the world have integrated their technology use into their ritual of daily habits. For example, studies have shown that at least half of us turn on our computers first thing in the morning, even before we use the bathroom or drink our coffee.

Technology has so ingrained itself into our daily rituals that it is now considered vital to our mental survival, and has factored highly into the list of amenities currently being proffered to the 33 Chilean miners who have been stuck a half-mile below the surface of the earth since August 5th, after an enormous rock slide impeded their exit from the mine.

As Newsweek noted in a recent article, the miners are against an incredible number of odds as a result of the harsh underground living conditions, “To survive, they must endure constant 90 percent humidity, avoid starvation, battle thirst, guard against fungus and bacteria, and stay sane enough to safely do the work necessary to aid their own rescue.”

However, this is not your traditional mining disaster. The 33 Chilean miners are being treated to a modern-day approach to human survival. That means the miners are able to have their laundry done, three hot meals a day and occasionally ice cream.

As Newsweek has reported, the rescue effort’s lead psychiatrist, Alberto Iturra Benavides, is implementing a strategy which leaves the miners “no possible alternative but to survive” until drillers finish rescue holes, an operation whose completion date is estimated for early November.

What’s more amazing than even the basic services of laundry and hot meals is how technology has been able to play a vital role in their daily rituals and the quality of their survival a half-mile down. MSN reported that each weekend the miners have been able to communicate with their families via video chat for nearly eight minutes per miner. Also, as Newsweek reported, “When the miners do get moments to relax, they can watch television  — 13 hours a day, mostly news programs and action movies or comedies, whatever is available that the support team decides won’t be depressing.” Dramatic television and movies are barred, and the news they receive is being censored. The censorship is performed on the miners’ behalf, allowing them only positive and escapist entertainment- nothing too serious or grim.

Interestingly, though television and movies are allowed, personal music players are not. The reason given for this is that they tend to “isolate people from one another.” The rescue operations feel that the most important thing the miners can do is to be there for one another and be united in their efforts to survive. Personal music or game players would impede that effort. Newsweek reports that the lead psychiatrist on the case, Iturra, has proclaimed “What they need is to be together.”

There are, of course, some restraints for what technology may reach the miners. At this stage in the rescue efforts any and all technology must be able to fit through the incredibly narrow holes (approximately 3.19”) which are the sole means of communication and transport between the surface of the earth and the miners.

To continue following the efforts to rescue the 33 trapped miners in Chile, including the possibility that they might be rescued as early as late October check out these links:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/lt_chile_mine_collapse
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/09/16/chile_miners_waiting
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/08/26/mine.disasters.survivors/index.html

Wikipedia, Twitter, Twournal, and the Western Canon

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Academics, Books, Media, Search, Social Media, Technology, Tolls/Gadgets
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September 22, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978539098

Hegel famously proclaimed that “history is a dialectic,” that is, a dialogue between people who may hold differing views, but who seek to accomplish a basis of truth by debating together. In other words, history has no discernible truth, but more closely attains the overall goal of “truth” through discussion from all of the voices of history and their personal accounts of what happened.

This quotation of Hegel’s is often cited in the context of discussions about the literary canon, or the “western canon,” as some refer to it. The term “Western canon” is used to denote the selection of books, music, art and general cultural that have most influenced the shape ofWestern civilization and culture over time.

As demonstrated, a simple search on Wikipedia for either of these terms will tell you much about what they are. However, Wikipedia doesn’t explicitly tell us is that it is also holding the record of how the modern canon is determined, and how the truth of history is being determined by the myriad of voices which contribute to it everyday.

A recent Bits blog from the New York Times mentioned the trail of edits that the Internet provides to anyone who is looking for it. James Bridle, founder of BookTwo is particularly interested in what the future of literature holds, but also how that discussion is playing out and how we can track where the discussion has been. In one of his recent entries Bridle points out that although an article on Wikipedia may tell a specific story, the edits show a process of opinion, correction, and the potential biases of each writer. In this respect Wikipedia, and every constantly updated website represents an archive of evolving information over time. What interests Bridle is the offer of two distinct stories: one that is front-facing to the reader and one that reveals the behind-the-scenes editing, writing and creative process.

To illustrate the point, Bridle selected the topic of the Iraq war as an entry in the Wikipedia canon and had all of the history of the entries surrounding the Iraq War published into physical volumes. In his entry, Bridle writes, “This particular book — or rather, set of books — is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.” Bridle notes that the entire set comes to twelve volumes, which nearly approximates the size of a traditional encyclopedia.

Which brings us to the favorite comparison of Wikipedia and your parents’ Encyclopedia. Is one or the other more reliable? Who gets to decide what is a part of the overall Western canon? Shouldn’t we all be alarmed by a process in which a child may be permitted to contribute to an online encyclopedia which many now claim is an expert source?

In fact, Bridle’s point reminds us of a standard strategy employed to defend the credibility of Wikipedia and its process against its would-be detractors. The strategy is to cite a story central to the process under which the Oxford English Dictionary was compiled in the 19th century. Simon Winchester’s book, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary details a Jekyll and Hyde story of the brilliant but clinically insane Dr. W.C. Minor who provided thousands of entries to the editors of the OED while he was committed at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. In other words, if a mad man may contribute significantly to a tome of the English language which is still very much the authoritative text today, why can a perfectly sane pre-teen not contribute to the modern canon of information about frogs, Major League Baseball, or global warming?Should we be preventing anyone from contributing to the ever-evolving conversation about what is truth and what is history?

As sites such as Twournal –which offers the Narcissistic boon of publishing your very own Tweets through time in print form– begin to proliferate, each of us can possess our very own piece of the modern web canon, whether in print or online. As Twournal describes itself, “Over time tweets can tell a story or remind us of moments. In 20 years we don’t know whether twitter will be around but your Twournal will be. Who knows maybe your great grandkids will dig it up in the attic in the next century.”

That means that each of us now has access to print a credible-looking book of our own (often misspelled) musings and meanderings as representative of history, according to us. Yet in the absence of a forum in which people can engage with our Tweeted observations, there’s no real dialectic. It therefore seems safe to conclude that Hegel would have preferred Wikipedia to Twitter, or to your Twournal.

A Death in the RSS Family- Content Aggregators Sing Their Swan Songs

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Industry Research, Media, Mobile Technology, Search, Social Media, Technology, Tools/Gadgets
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September 22, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978538816

Hear that? It’s the sound of the content aggregator death knell. On October 1st, popular web-based RSS reader and news aggregator Bloglines, run by the team at Ask.com, will discontinue service. When asked why, Ask’s team reported “that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook killed it.”

And Bloglines is only the first. Other aggregators such as Google Reader, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are sure to be next. According to Hitwise, “visits to Google Reader are down 27 percent year-over-year.” The New York Times recently reported “a more pivotal reason that Digg is falling behind, analysts say, is that users are simply spending more time on Facebook and Twitter than they are on Digg.”

How did this happen? Is it truly impossible that content aggregation sites such as Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Digg and ReddIt can not exist side-by-side with the type of social news aggregation offered by Facebook and Twitter? What does this mean for RSS? RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication, is a protocol which helps push website updates to readers around the world so they don’t have to search for new content or endlessly hit refresh on a favorite web page. In 2005 RSS was a game changer. Today? Not so much.

According to the Bloglines message about its own end-date, “the Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience…being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system.”

As a 2009 NeilsenWire also reported, part of this trend comes from the fact that blogs and news sites are no longer the endgame news tool, our friends are. “Socializers trust what their friends have to say and social media acts as an information filtration tool…If your friend creates or links to the content, then you are more likely to believe it and like it. And this thought plays out in the data.”

Does Mark Zuckerberg know that his company has driven content aggregators to the grave? Undoubtedly, yes. A recent New Yorker profile quoted Zuck as saying, “It’s like hardwired into us in a deeper way: you really want to know what’s going on with the people around you.” In fact, Facebook’s Open Graph feature allows users to see which articles their Facebook friends have read, shared, and liked. “Eventually,” the New Yorker observed, “the company hopes that users will read articles, visit restaurants, and watch movies based on what their Facebook friends have recommended, not, say, based on a page that Google’s algorithm sends them to.”

Some argue that content aggregators, or RSS readers, were always destined for the internet graveyard simply because they were too complicated and allowed users to become completely overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of information that was being pushed to them. One thing is for sure, if content aggregators don’t find a way to better integrate with, or at least successfully co-exist with social networking offerings like Facebook and Twitter, they will soon be relegated to the ever-growing category of “old news.”

Fans of NFL Football- First Downs Along with First Adopters?

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Advertising, Industry Research, Marketing, Media, Mobile Technology, Social Media, Sports, Technology, Tools/Gadgets, TV
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September 12, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978513602

As the 2010 regular NFL football season begins, fans are reminded of everything they love about the game- the rushing roar of the home team crowd, the crisp fall weather, the complex plays, the strut and swagger of the scoring players. But fans should also take note of the new technology constantly being deployed and tested on football’s biggest fan base- the TV audience.

It may not be obvious why football fans would be such early technology adopters, but it begins to make more sense as you consider how statistically obsessed and fantasy football-involved the modern fan is. A Democrat and Chronicle article reporting on the effects of technology on modern NFL football consumption reported that one average fan they interviewed for their article is “never without his iPhone as he is constantly fed game updates and statistics each Sunday. At home, he watches games on his new big-screen plasma high-definition television through the Dish Network and writes a fantasy football blog at http://www.ffgeekblog.com.”

The same article listed some interesting stats on NFL media consumption, “While 1 million fans watch NFL games in person each week, an average of 16 million watch on television.” TVbytheNumbers.com reported that, according to Nielsen, this year’s first regular season game between the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints on September 10th was the most watched first regular season game ever.

With technologies such as high definition quality, the virtual visual 1st down line, access to any game via the Sunday Ticket, replays, and other league scores rotating on the screen, there’s no doubt that the ability to consume NFL games on TV is better-than-ever. But at stake are ticket sales for the live games, which suffer in terms of convenience and overall costs. Fewer people buying tickets to live games means more local blackouts. NFL team owners and stadium managers are investigating options such as seatback tv screens to bring that experience to the live game, but mobile and wireless technologies are still reigning supreme.

All of this adds up to make American football fans (college as well as NFL) some of the biggest consumers of home entertainment centers, TV equipment, and cable and satellite TV packages. However, as the future of network and cable TV looms ever more uncertain, and as web-based offerings work harder and harder to enhance the scope of their offerings, it seems inevitable that newly emerging products that incorporate the TV and web-browsing experience such as Google TV and Apple TV are perfectly suited to cater to these NFL early adopters with cutting edge offerings. How they do so and how much they cater to this influential demographic of TV fans still remains to be seen.

Google Instant- Google Just Got Even Faster

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Industry Research, Search, Technology, Tools/Gadgets
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September 08, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978505328

Banking on the fact that people read more quickly than they type, and that they have once again designed a feature that will change the way the world searches for information, Google has launched Google Instant.

Instant provides real-time potential search results based on each letter typed into the query box, and works with lightning-quick speed.

Currently Google claims that Instant “saves two to five seconds per search” and “will cumulatively save people more than 3.5 billion seconds every day, or 11 hours every second.” Was searching taking us all too long before? Was it, say, so tediously long that it was preventing us from spending time with our families or volunteering at our local charities. Not likely. However, there are those who would say that faster is always better.

Still, there are bound to be skeptics, many of whom will and are saying that Instant is merely a ploy to make Google look more cutting-edge, without necessarily representing truly large changes in how Google “organizes the world’s information.” In fact, Google itself admitted that “While the behind-the-scenes engineering that generates those results is a big reason Google gets the majority of searches, it can be hard for average users to notice. The instant results make this much clearer.”

PC Mag compared Google Instant to Bing’s Type Ahead functionality, which has been in place for a while, and found that Google Instant doesn’t necessarily come out on top. Specifically, reviewer Lance Ulanoff mentioned “Google Instant, for now, only works when you’re signed in and may be using some search history to intuit results. It combines type ahead with live results, while Bing only offers you a list of probable word matches. Still, the word matches in Bing are pretty solid, and if Google Instant is showing you a page you weren’t interested in anyway, then what’s the value in it?”

For the skeptics, cynics, and those with sensitive eyeballs, Google Instant does offer the chance to opt out (hint: look to the right of the search box, see the blue link reading: “Instant is on.” Click that), as Gadgetwise reports along with other tips on how to use the new feature.

As Gizmodo reported on the announcement event, Google Instant will be available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8 starting today. Additionally, it is not yet available on browser toolbars or for mobile phones. That rollout is expected to occur in the coming months.

Every new browser innovation that is announced also reminds us again about the delayed promise of the “answer engine,” embodied most famously by the “computational knowledge engine” introduced to us by the Wolfram Alpha people a couple years ago. Answer engines such as Wolfram Alpha, launched in 2009 are supposed to collect and organize all of the information from authoritative databases and engines to obtain the answer to a specific question. In other words, the next step was supposed to be to skip the list of search results, and to send us straight away to the answer backed up by authoritative and well listed information.

Clearly Google has not yet come to adopt that model of search engine, and Wolfram Alpha has not yet even begun to compete with Google’s search market domination. Alas, as users we shall all have to be satisfied with how much faster we are delivered the search results that Google supplies, and follow the progress and promise that answer engines still have yet to deliver on.

Looking for more about Google Instant? Check out Google’s YouTube video about Google Instant.

Ping Reviewers Need to Get a Life- One That Looks at More Than Just Facebook

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Advertising, Industry Research, Marketing, Music, Social Media, Technology
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September 02, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978491523

The new Nano and Apple TV aside, one of the more interesting announcements from Apple during their September 1st music-themed event surrounded Ping, Apple’s new social networking functionality within iTunes.

Unfortunately for Apple, the buzz around Ping isn’t all good, in fact much of it is negative. Reviews are currently expressing their disappointment over the lack of artist buy-in, comment censorship, the lack of Facebook integration, its partnership with LiveNation, and a few of its other features, or lack thereof.

However, many of the negative reviews that Apple is experiencing on Ping’s launch seem to stem from comparison to Facebook. Yet comparing Ping to Facebook is really like comparing those oft-referenced apples and oranges. In reality, Ping should be compared with Pandora, Deezer and other social music sites and recommendation engines that have gone social.

To compare Ping to Facebook is to misunderstand what Ping is attempting to do. Namely, it is attempting to sell you music by helping you to understand what is related to what you have already declared you enjoy. As the New York Times article reviewing Ping described, “With it, users will be able to follow friends and see what music they have bought or enjoyed, what concerts they plan to attend and what music they have reviewed. They will also be able to follow bands and get updates on their new releases, concert tours and other events.”

Ping is clearly attempting to be more music-focused than Facebook, and beyond incorporating the “follow” and “like” capabilities that Twitter and Facebook have made a part of the modern lexicon, the bulk of its resemblance to the world’s largest social networks is in the fact that it wants you to have friends, and to like things, and it wants to know who your friends are and what you like. In essence, it is being a social network.

The act of comparing Ping unnecessarily reiterates Facebook’s position as social networking platform to the world. Yes, Facebook is dominant in the social networking world. But is it the only social network? No.

Of course, there is one feature that Steve Jobs and his team seem to have explicitly designed to be distinct from Facebook, as described by the New York Times article, “Mr. Jobs said Ping would have simple privacy controls. Anyone will be able to follow bands and receive their updates, and users will be able to say whether they want to be followed by anyone or only by people they approve.”

Take that, Mark Zuckerberg.

Old Spice, Chickens, and Bears- Oh My! A Look at the Art of Interactive Advertising

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Academics, Advertising, Art, Branding, Industry Research, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Tools/Gadgets, TV
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September 02, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978491387

Smart advertisers and marketers know that part of building awareness of a brand and attachment to a brand these days involves allowing the consumer to feel as if they are a part of the brand, and the brand is a part of them.

The most innovative way to elicit this feeling among increasingly jaded consumers is to allow them to participate in the way a product is sold to them, or presented to an overall greater audience. In other words, to integrate elements of “interactive or collaborative advertising” into their overall marketing strategy.

Some of this is revolutionary stuff, and is still regarded as too dangerous by most traditional advertising, marketing and brand agencies the world over. Ostensibly, what it means is giving consumers permission to experiment with, and command some control of, a brand. If I may go down a yellow brick road of an analogy, this is no less than cutting down the Wizard’s curtain and revealing the small man behind it, subsequently allowing the consumer to revel in his or her discovery of the small man, and as a result of said revelation, being amply empowered to get Dorothy back from Oz to Kansas his or her self.

But when it works, it works so, so well.

Let us take, for example, the Old Spice Guy. If you’ve never seen or heard of Isaiah Mustafa, or any of the YouTube response videos that the company launched in response to Tweets it was receiving, then you must be dead or on a remote desert island with no smartphone. This ad campaign which has incorporate TV ads, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube so well has dominated most of this year’s buzz conversations.

How about something more recent? Tipp-Ex is a correction fluid brand (think White-Out), who recently launched a YouTube video ad campaign which allows the viewer to determine the end of the story. The viewer first watches the setup video where a guy camping with his friend is alerted that a bear is right behind him, and is urged by his friend who is videotaping the event to shoot the bear. The video viewer is at this juncture permitted to decide if the man should shoot the bear, or not. After making the decision, the viewer is redirected to a video in which the camper urges the viewer to rewrite the story.

The whole thing is highly reminiscent of “advertising and design factory,” CP+B’s groundbreaking 2001 “Subservient Chicken” campaign for Burger King, where visitors to the website can type in any command and a man dressed in a chicken suit on a webcam performs the requested function. So while Tipp-Ex’s overall concept isn’t new, their delivery is.

Largely what’s interesting about interactive or collaborative advertising is that it nicely paints the line between earned media and paid media. A company pays to create the initial ad, but then by virtue of the fun of interacting with it and collaborating it, consumers share and continue to virally promote that ad, which is where your earned media begins to kick in.

These concepts aren’t exactly brand new, but their integration into basic marketing strategies is, and increasingly larger companies are beginning to take notice of how much buzz can be generated through earned media without having to necessarily pay for every step of it. In addition, not every company has experienced skyrocketing revenues as a result of investing in interactive advertising, so the science here and how to master it is still relatively new.

One thing’s for sure, however. It sure makes advertising a lot more fun from the consumer perspective.

Get the Feeling You’re Being Followed? You Are.

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Advertising, Industry Research, Marketing, Media, Mobile Technology, Politics, Search, Social Media, Technology, Tools/Gadgets
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August 30, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978482524

At the beginning of this year Mark Zuckerberg famously announced that privacy was dead, stirring the pot and increasing concerns among the majority of internet users that their identities and personal information were being appropriated for capital gain.

Arguably, 2010 has been the year of “location aware technology,” whether the location is two dimensional or three dimensional. These days your computer knows where you’ve been online, where you’re going, and why you buy things there, and your phone can tell any satellite where you physically are on the globe and what advertising you’re passing at that very moment. Clearly, marketers are doing their best to collect as much of that information as possible and to use it.

One of the main issues in the ongoing debate about whether location aware technology and geotagging are net-positive or net-negative developments (or somewhere in between) centers on the concession that advertising and marketing are not going away any time soon. Advertising is an institutionalized facet of American life, especially in major urban centers. That being said, marketers like to argue that with more information they can better speak to a consumer’s interests and needs, as opposed to leading a consumer to buy something he or she doesn’t need.

Leaving that argument for a minute, the real concern here is over privacy, and educating the masses on how to protect their own privacy. A recent article in the New York Times cautioned readers against geotagging photos at their homes, and cited the example of Adam Savage, one half of the “MythBusters” team who had geotagged a Twitter photo of his car in front of his personal residence in the Bay Area. The Times pointed out that by doing Adam Savage had just informed all of his Twitter followers of his personal address, the make and model of his car, and that he was leaving for work at that very moment, “geotags… are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online.”

Now with Facebook Places, a new feature which allows its users to tag their locations in their status updates, and the increasing use of Twitter and FourSquare, organizations such as the ACLU are concerned that the spread of technology is one again outpacing usage education and awareness of the risks of information abuse, “The organization highlighted the element of the new service that allows users to “tag” an accompanying friend and post his or her location to Facebook – even if the friend does not have an iPhone, which is currently the only platform on which the application is available.”

The other side of this coin involves how browsers and advertisers track our movements online. After all, this is a huge market that Facebook plans to tap, 50 percent of Facebook’s over 400 million users log in to the site at least once a day, and more than a quarter of that overall number access the service from mobile devices. However, despite all of the hype, new research shows that most users still decline to announce their location publicly.

According to a recent Forrester Research report, “Just 4 percent of Americans have tried location-based services, and 1 percent use them weekly…Eighty percent of those who have tried them are men, and 70 percent are between 19 and 35.”

Returning to the modern marketer’s argument that the more information they can gather on a person’s interests, habits and locations, the more applicable an ad will be for a consumer, there is strong evidence to support this. Personalized ad retargeting, where ads for specific products that consumers have perused online follow them around while they continue to browse the web, are becoming more pervasive. And marketers are big believers, “‘The overwhelming response has been positive,’ said Aaron Magness, senior director for brand marketing and business development at Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com.”

Still, consumer sentiment about being monitored, whether online or off, reflects overall concern and creepy feelings. Ongoing education about how browsers and advertisers collect behavioral information both online and off might serve to eliminate the two-way mirror feeling that many consumers experience. However, it has not yet proven to completely allay consumer fears and concerns about a potentially serious breach of privacy.

In other words, while consumers feel uncertain as to where all of this leaves their privacy, advertisers are increasingly certain of where consumers stand. Literally.

What Your Phone Says About Your Views on Democracy

Posted: April 19, 2011 in Mobile Technology, Politics, Technology, Tools/Gadgets
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August 18, 2010- http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978453348

Is your phone listening to what you say? What role does your mobile phone play in aiding the government? Have you ever considered which side your phone is on?

In two different countries mobile communications equipment companies are currently under the microscope for two distinct, but very related problems. For Research in Motion (RIM), the popular company which produces the Blackberry, the company stands accused of failing to provide the Indian government with the help it needs to monitor terrorist activity. For Nokia Siemens, it is quite the opposite: they are being sued by a citizen for aiding the Iranian government in ferreting out political dissidents.

In India RIM is in negotiations with the government to find a common ground which would not force RIM to supply the Indian government with access to the corporate email and SMS messages transferred on its Indian networks. RIM is quickly coming up against an August 31st deadline after which time a cease and desist order has been issued, as the New York Times reported, “wireless phone companies said they had received a formal notice from the government to shut off BlackBerry Messenger and corporate e-mail services on Aug. 31.”

RIM, it would seem, is between a rock and a hard place. The rock, in this case, is the enormous potential of the Indian wireless market. The New York Times estimates “there are an estimated one million BlackBerry users here, and the popularity of the devices is growing as more Indians use e-mail and smartphones.” The hard place is its own commitment and reputation as a company which has done more to protect its corporate customers’ privacy. RIM owes its outstanding success, in large part, to the fact that both corporate and government clients believe in its ability to protect the security of their messages. Let us not forget that President Obama has was granted the right to retain his own Blackberry, and has even stepped in to defend the company in this debate.

For the moment, it seems that in order to retain some chance of serving the second wireless market in the world, RIM has conceded to identify corporations whose servers hold readable, or unencrypted, versions of messages. This would then allow Indian authorities to seek access to the messages from the corporation through a court order. Reportedly, Indian authorities are already working to streamline those legal processes to ensure that the government can access the target messages as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, in Iran, Isa Saharkhiz has filed suit against Nokia Siemens for aiding the Iranian government in surveilling its networks to ferret out political dissidents. Saharkhiz claims that cell phone surveillance was instrumental in her arrest in the events following the 2009 presidential election in Iran.

Specifically, Saharkhiz is accusing Nokia Siemens of helping the Iranian government to violate human rights, a charge which aligns with previous claims by Nobel Peace prizewinner Shirin Ebadi, that Nokia Siemens was “sending ‘the Iranian state software and technology that it can use to monitor telephone calls and text messages.’”

A Nokia Siemens spokesperson recently told AFP “We believe that communication and mobile phone technologies play a significant role in the development of societies and the advancement of democracy.” If the American President and his administration are stepping in to attempt to facilitate some type of cooperation between RIM and the Indian government, and Iranian citizens can sue mobile phone companies for conspiring with the government to infringe on human rights, in the modern age, is one’s choice of phone truly also representative of one’s sentiment toward democracy in general?

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