Written on November 30, 2008 – 1:44 am Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
In an ironically hypocritical turn, India’s terrorists used Western made technology to highlight their hatred for the West and what it represents.
Amongst granades, ammunition magazines, credit cards, food rations and thousands of dollars of cash found in terrorists backpacks lay one vital piece of tracking equipment - Blackberry’s.
After all cable television feeds had been cut to the two luxury hotels and office block, the gunmen had planned ahead and used Blackberry’s to monitor the situation and global reaction. The terrorists used the smartphone to track the status of their other planned sites of terror and the police/army response. Also however, the used the now iconic device to see first hand the public reaction to the atrocities, both locally and worldwide.
It’s difficult to be certain as to whether the Blackberry’s were a well planned pre-thought or a clever after-thought once the television feeds had been cut. Either way, the young assassins were tech savvy enough to know that amongst thousands of foreigners probably lay hundreds of blackberry devices - all perfectly powerful enough to give them real time updates of the horrific action & anti-terrorist re-action around them.
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This Monday we retired our Blackberries and replaced them with our brand new iPhone 3Gs.
We have used the Blackberries extensively for work, travel, play, on our way to the office, in the office, during conferences, meetings and while swimming, during cooking and in our bathtubs. We dropped it, almost drowned it, overheated it and lost it while skiing and found it back again. We photographed the stars and ourselves and wrote many thousands of email and read even more.
Now it is time to say goodbye. We thought about ceremoniously burying them somewhere in the woods to give them the respect they deserve, but why not ask you? What do you think we should do with these trusted machines? Should we give them to you? Burn them? Recycle them? Keep them? Just forget about them? Tell us!
Written on October 30, 2008 – 3:14 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The people from Perk Mobile are helping companies out which have no idea what to do with “this new mobile web thing”. Some of the world’s largest companies ask the New Yorkers to figure out problems concerning mobile devices and software.
But the consultant life alone isn’t enough for them. They need some excitement - something weird. I know one of the founders personally, even consider him a great friend, and seriously, I haven’t met anyone with such a bizarre sense of humor that even comes close to his. I could go into details here, but let’s skip that for now and see how these New York city boys fulfill their somewhat freaky needs.
What about… a zombie-themed location-based game? Grab your Blackberry, hit the streets of Manhattan, and slash some random strangers. You might even become friends afterwards. That’s basically the idea behind Mobile Dead. It uses GPS (or other location data) to find your position and the position of your enemies. You’ll recognize them by their color. Humans are blue, zombies green.
Of course it’s a bit more sophisticated than that, as you can also pick up items along the way. Such as health packages and weapons. Use the latter in fights, which consists of taking turns in slashing. You hit, wait for the nasty reply, and hit again.
It will be interesting times for the developers, as they need a lot of participants before the game becomes interesting. Supporting of the iPhone, Android, and other smart phones will definitely help. One thing is for sure, they’ve picked the right city. Everybody’s commuting all the time over there.
Written on October 17, 2008 – 12:49 pm Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
The UK mobile social media platform Next2Friends launched the world’s first ‘Live’ mobile video broadcasting application for the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl today.
The Blackberries aren’t the only one devices supported. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Motorola, Samsung are also fully supported by the Next2Friends social mobile network.
This move tappes a segment of industry which nobody has entered so far. To start streaming from your Pearl or Curve, all you need to do is head over to Next2Friends, complete the 60 second free signup, and install the application. You can see a demo in the video below:
Next2Friends Live enables people to share their lives from anywhere, from broadcasting the little things that make up the day, to capturing a must-see-moment, to bringing happenings across the world closer to home.
Some of the new features that have recently been incorporated are one click streaming, the ability to zoom, pause or re-start live streams and automatic quality selection that guarantees the best streaming experience independent of location, carrier or connection speeds.
Right after this launch Next2Friends also announced the Live embeddable Flash widget which allows you to display live videos on your website or anywhere you can use HTML code. Check out an example on Dotlizard.com.
RIm has announced their iPhone killer recently. They call it the “BlackBerry Storm” and it is supposed the be their answer to the Apple iPhone.
It looks more like a direct reply actually. A reply that quotes most of the original message too and doesn’t add much. Do you know those replies? You write a long, funny and intelligent story and anxiously await a reply only to get your whole message back with one sentence at the top?
That is what the Blackberry Storm is like.
Even worse: the online demo looks and feels terribly low tech. The “Typing and Email” demo is supposed to show me how cool and fast text entry is on the Blackberry Storm. We recorded what it looks like here so you can get look too:
32.4 for the Blackberry Storm VS 22.3 on the iPhone! Ugh!
You could argue that this is ‘just’ a demo and the real product will be much cooler, but isn’t that a bit weird? Take a look at the movies for the iPhone. Like this one. High production values, terrible slick and amazingly cool. If you manage to ignore the slick sales guy.
Maybe the demo just sucks on a Mac and works a lot better on a PC but how much sense would that make? If you are going to compete with the iPhone you better make sure your demos work well on the Mac as I’m sure a very large part of iPhone users also own Macs.
Well no, RIM is not interested in any Mac users, at all. You can Sync your desktop iTunes® music files using BlackBerry® Media Sync, unless you have a Mac. It only works with Windows, as explained in Fine Print bullet number 9.
I have been a loyal Crackberry user for years. I used, abused, trashed and lost more than 10 Blackberries since I started using them in 2003. I was just as excited about the Blackberry Pearl and Blackberry Curve when they came out as I am about the iPhone. The Blackberry Storm however is ‘too little, too late’ for me.
Okay, one thing is cool: “At 3.2 megapixels, you can take sharp, print-quality pictures using the BlackBerry Storm smartphone. You can also rely on the auto focus and auto flash to help you capture the moment”. Just don’t forget to buy a few microSD cards because the only has 1GB of internal memory.
Since the iPhone was announced Blackberry users suddenly felt less special. Weren’t THEY the ones that were always connected, always on and always in sync? Flashing a Blackberry Curve or Pearl just didn’t make an impression anymore. But there was just no way we could switch from our trusted Blackberrys and get used to that innovative onscreen keyboard that the iPhone made such headlines with. As a RIM executive said
“I could just never get the feel for it because, well, there is nothing to feel.”
Fortunately you can now get a preview of Research in Motions iPhone killer. Will it kill the iPhone? Definitely not. But it will get us Blackberry users back some self esteem:
Written on November 30, 2008 – 1:44 am
In an ironically hypocritical turn, India’s terrorists used Western made technology to highlight their hatred for the West and what it represents.
Written on November 21, 2008 – 10:22 am
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Written on October 30, 2008 – 3:14 pm
Written on October 17, 2008 – 12:49 pm
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