Small things please small minds, I had overlooked the following post in my email box from the Interesting People email list from April 12, 2006:
A correction published in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal: "The wireless technology called CDMA stands for code division multiple access. An article Thursday about an investigation of Qualcomm Inc. incorrectly said the acronym stands for code division multiple complaints."
A correction published in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal: "The wireless technology called CDMA stands for code division multiple access. An article Thursday about an investigation of Qualcomm Inc. incorrectly said the acronym stands for code division multiple complaints."
Or maybe it does when people see the size of licence fees that Qualcomm often demand ;-)?
Over at Trend Watching the latest concept that they've written about is Info Lust. This seems to be a mix of new and old ideas that are increasingly becoming of their time. Put simply Info Lust is the addiction that consumers have become to getting instant access to any kind of useful and relevant information.
It encompasses the benefit of the web as a information provider meaning that consumers purchase habits tending towards what economists would call a perfect marketplace where they know what is the best of the best for any given item through sites like epinions and the very best price based comparison shopping sites. This isn't a new concept, six years ago I was hyping evenbetter.com and launched DealTime in the UK.
Trend Watching claim that is driven by the consumer need to be in 'power and empowered'. Where this is moving on from previous incarnations is always-on ability to interrogate and receive answers through mobile devices and 'real-world' objects.
Key drivers include:
- Micro-publishing
- Web 2.0 traits like mash-ups, open API hacks (Pricenoia does price comparison across different Amazon sites using the company's APIs to provide the relevant data)
- Opinion and review sites like SeatGuru
- Mobile websites including mobile local search and review sites like SeatGuru Mobile (which is also great to use on a normal computer because of its clean design)
- Dumb Objects, Smart codes: from SMS short codes to variations on tbar-codeode. Using camera equipped mobiles to input bar codes directly into a phone and request information across the web. Apparently Amazon is big on this in Japan. More information are held in QRCodes that can be in magazines, again Japan has led the way with reader software available for many of their common mobile phones. There are also other competitors like mCode, UpCode, ColorCode and ShotCode. The article also highlighted Neom whose Paperclick system uses server side image recognition technology to provide users with information based on bar codes, short codes or brand names.
- Customer-generated codes allowing them to communicate a public message to those in the know on a t-shirt, sticker or web site. This could make a mockery of all the monitoring services getting to grips with blogs in the right hands.
- Audio recognition like Shazam
- Mobile audio guides including user-generated ones like Yellow Arrow or commercially-provided ones like the service Stet Hellas used to provide around the ruins of Athens seven years ago
- Intelligent packaging (like the power meter strips built into Duracell batteries)
- RFID
- Bluecasting
