“With a single press of a button, stream live video of your interactions with police to our secure servers. Know what to do if you’re approached by police on the sidewalk, in the car, in your home, or at a protest. Know what to pay attention to if you experience or witness police misconduct. Fill in the information you need to file an official complaint, and send it automatically to the police department. Use your phone’s location services, camera, and time and date stamps to collect evidence.”
Tag Archives: mobile phones
How smuggled mobile phones are rewiring Brazil’s prisons
It’s easy (for me) to become discouraged about the surveillance state the US (and lots of other countries) has become. How can you resist an entity like the NSA? Perhaps, in the long run, we cannot. But in a twisted way, stories like the one below give me hope.
In Cell to Cell: How Smuggled Mobile Phones Are Rewiring Brazil’s Prisons, Jonathan Franklin describes how Brazil’s prison gangs are using technology.
Wired prisoners change the entire concept of incarceration. Instead of being isolated and punished, the inmate with access to a cell can organize murders, threaten witnesses, plan crimes, and browse online porn to figure out which escort to order up for the next intimate visit. […] Brazilian organized crime leaders continued to have widespread ability to make calls, receive calls, organize conference calls, and even hold virtual trials where gang leaders from different prisons are patched in to a central line to debate the fate of gang members accused of betraying the group’s ironclad rules.
Yes, I get that the gangs are committing awful crimes. But then, so are oppressive governments. We can talk about Right and Wrong at Sunday School, this is about technology.
“Mobile is going to crush Facebook”
“The logic for Facebook’s price decline is that they have a problem in mobile. They can’t offer all the games they can in a browser. They can’t offer the same ads or branding opportunities. All true,” he writes. “If you think mobile will displace online usage from PCs then you should immediately short Google and other ad plays and buy TV stations and networks. If you can’t buy an ad effectively on mobile and no one is using a PC to connect to the internet any more, then the only way to reach an audience is going to be via good old tv. And all that over the top video noise, forgettabout it.”
Bruce Sterling on mobile phones and revolution
“… we’re in the midst of a massive global reinvention. Not just a shift from analog to digital, but a shift from centralized control to distributed systems. From isolated single user experiences to a global social fabric. These mobile devices are the of Gutenberg presses of our generation. This is not a bubble, this is a revolution.” – Blog post
Trends in Consumers’ Time Spent with Media
eMarketer has done some meta-analysis of data from dozens of research firms using a variety of methodologies. The result is a series of estimates of how much time consumers spend with all major media, regardless of multitasking or simultaneous usage, from 2008 to 2010. A few excerpts relating to radio:
The average time spent with all major media combined increased from about 10.6 hours in 2008 to 11 hours in 2010. TV and video (not including online video) captured the lion’s share of all media time, about 40% each year. The internet’s share of media time increased over the same period, from 21.5% to 23.5%, as did mobile’s share, from 5% to 7.5%. The share of time spent with magazines and newspapers fluctuated between 8.5% and 11.5%, while radio and all other media—video games, moves in theaters, outdoor media—declined.
Mobile devices received an average of 50 minutes’ worth of attention every day—the same amount of time allotted to newspapers and magazines combined.
While TV, print and radio will slowly lose ground to digital media. Those trends have been most apparent with print media in recent years, but are now beginning to show up in TV and radio usage as well.
Average time spent listening to the radio each day is 96 min. That still strikes me as a very respectable amount of time. The trend, however, is going the wrong way. What are radio operators doing to reverse it. What can they do to reverse it?
All right everybody, take off your shoes and place them in the containers
5
Missouri’s new governor held a press conference today and reporters who showed up were told they had to leave their cell phones at a reception desk. St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Tony Messenger was one of the reporters:
“Members of the Capitol press corps revolted and demanded reasons. “Security reasons” was the response given by Nixon spokesman Scott Holste, who said it was Nixon’s policy and the governor wouldn’t budge.
At that point, reporters started talking about walking out of the news conference before it began (and I took out my cell phone and Twittered the news). Holste went back to the governor’s private offices, and came back with the verdict. Reporters didn’t have to give up their cell phones.
Asked after the news conference about the policy, Nixon communications director Jack Cardetti said he didn’t believe the cell phone policy had anything to do with security.
“The governor believes when meetings are taking place in the oval office .. that everybody should be focused on the task at hand,” Cardetti said, noting that staff and others who are invited to meetings in the governor’s office follow the same policy. But Cardetti said the policy would not apply to the press, many of whom use their cell phones for reporting purposes.
During the news conference, reporters also noticed a new tiny camera above one of the doors. The camera feeds to a screen on a secretary’s desk that allows her to know when meetings have begun or are finished in the office, Cardetti said. He showed curious reporters the screen that captures the feed. The meetings are not recorded, he said.”
As Colonel Klink would say, “Veeeeeery interesting.”
How about, put your cell phones on vibrate or turn them off? And a wee little camera above one of the doors. Curiouser and curiouser.
One of the comments on Messengers’ blog post asks:
“If there is now a camera that is recording or broadcasting all meetings in the Governors office, should not this be covered under the Sunshine Law and allow the feed to be streaming video on the internet so that we, as taxpayers, can see what is happening in the meetings of our governmental officials?”
But back to the cell phones –and I admit to being both slow and naive– why wouldn’t the governor want reporters to have cell phones during press conferences, assuming one doesn’t buy the “let’s stay focused” explanation?
UPDATE: Missourinet reporter Steve Walsh was at the press conference and snapped a photo of the gov’s tiny camera.
More media predictions for 2009
Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman calls Dianne Mermigas “one of the smartest, most pragmatic media columnists I’ve ever read. She never resorts to hyperbole.” He then points us to her predictions for 2009. A few of my favorites:
“Major advertisers such as automotives, financial services, retail and real estate will not return any time soon; they will be diminished and different when they rebound a year from now. That is a disaster for local media, which could easily see more than half their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009. For instance, automotives generally have comprised 40% of local TV income.
“Local is the new social. Some local TV broadcasters and newspapers will begin to monetize enough to stay in business. Some Internet players will begin to dabble more in this huge void. Relevant local information, social sharing, retail coupons, school and community data, sports scores, car pools, etc. remain a big missed opportunity.It will be delivered to Internet-connected mobile devices, including smartphones. A new player will emerge and do for local content and services online what Craigslist did for regionalized classified advertising.”
“Mobile connectivity will become the core platform. The road to universal WiFi and WiMax may be bumpy, but anywhere, anything interactivity on smartphones, video-friendly PDAs and other wireless mobile devices will be the global screen of choice. Primary drivers will include interactive communications, location-based services and e-transactions.”
I have no idea what 2009 will bring but I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.
21st Century Dating
My friend could hear his college-aged daughter talking in another room. He assumed she was on the phone to her boy friend who lives in another city. After she had been talking long enough to cause concern for the family’s shared mobile minutes, he went in to shut down the marathon call.
Only to discover his daughter video chatting with her beau as they both watched the same movie on TV.
I’m not a father but this would seem to be a good news/bad news situation. The good news is dad doesn’t have to worry about what’s going on in the next room. The bad news is the little punk is always virtually present.
This phenomenon has already made it into our media and advertising.
School closings via text message
I did the sign-on shift for most of my time on the radio. And on days that it snowed (not that often in southeast Missouri), the phone would ring off the hook from parents (and students) asking about school closings. The superintendent would get out early to check the roads and then call the radio stations.
Even though we gave the closings every 5 minutes, the phone never stopped ringing. It was madness.
We got a little snow here in Jefferson City overnight and while Shawna was bringing me my oatmeal, she got a text message from the Jefferson City school system, alerting her there would be no school today.
The school uses texting to communicate a variety of things, even providing updates throughout the day.
I assume the local radio stations still get a call and many people rely heavily on the on-air reports. This is just one more instance of disintermediation. The people with the information (schools) communicating directly to the people who want/need the information (students/parents).
I’m guessing most folks don’t give their mobile numbers to just anybody. And how valuable is it to the schools to have the mobile number of every “customer?”
Do most radio stations have the mobile numbers of the listeners? I would hope so. And are they using those numbers to provide something as valuable as school closing information?
More US mobile phone than Americans 13+
The following stats were featured in a marketing piece I received today. And I’m guessing the numbers are even higher in other developed countries.
85% of Americans have a cell phone (there are actually more US mobile phones than Americans age 13 and older) Source: CTIA Wireless Association- 66% of cell phones in America are equipped with a camera Source: comScore
- 40% of Americans with cell phones send/receive text messages (80% among 13-24 year olds; 63% among 18-27year olds) Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
- 24% of Americans with cell phones send/receive photo or video messages (up 60% in the past year) Source: M:Metrics
And it will just get easier and easier to share those photos and videos. I’m not feeling particularly left out because I probably shoot-and-share more video than the average bear. But I can’t deny my mobilness much longer. Holding out for video iPhone.