After having co-produced the First International Moblogging Conference, the first conference on mobile weblogs and camera phone culture in July of 2003, I feel a need to comment on Jeff Pulver's upcoming conference on camera phones in MAUI, C | Summit 2004. (For the details on the 2003 1IMC, go to the The Totally Unofficial 1IMC wiki .)
What a wonderful idea to have a summit on camera phones on Maui! And to have it sponsored by HP and Nokia, no less. And to have a whole day set aside for golf! I've never been to Maui. I'm sure it is wonderful. Do they have fast 3G networks there? Do they have lots of users with GPS and/or 2 megapixel camera phones there?
I hate to say this because it sounds snide, but unless you live in Japan, you don't/can't really understand the impact of camera cellphones, and mobile photography on the users, especially the youth. The camera phones in the US are limited and the bandwidth is still slow, not to mention with many parts of the nation unserviced by cellular networks. In Japan, close to 90% of the phones have cameras, and the shift to 3G networks is well underway with NTT's FOMA and AU's WIN.
They have invited someone who is billed as "America's #1 Trend Detector." Why do you need to hear a highly paid consultant tell you what you can see for yourself on a 2 hour stroll through the streets of Tokyo? Or stop by any of the mobile phone stores in Japan and just try to find a handset without a camera. Hard to do these days. Camera phones are here to stay and they are very popular, especially with youth. Duh.
I would, however, pay money to hear Alan Reiter speak. And the dude from DoCoMo, Carl Hirano, sounds pretty interesting too.
Here's what I would do if I did another mobile weblog/camera phone conference:
- Do it in Tokyo. No other city has as many camera-equipped handsets in use. No other city has as many 3G networks. There is no better place to explore the future of camera phones than in Japan. Period. End of story. Hawaii? Hello?!?!
- Invite real users to speak about how they use the cameras, the phones and the Internet together. The (non-manufacturer) speakers at Pulver's conference have, I would wager, no significant experience with camera phones or mobile photography culture. Pulver has invited some incredibly smart and wise people to this conference, but they don't have experience with 3G networks, nor camera-phones. The users in Japan are pushing the boundaries of camera cellphones. They are doing things with this marriage of cellphone and camera that the manufacturers, the networks, the mass media, the consultants, cannot even imagine. Those are the people you want to hear from at a conference on camera cellphones.
hum... yeah... I totally agree Gen of course. I feel that they could have talked to us, organisers of the 1IMC and that might have prevented their conference looking so much like a clichee (GOLF!?)... This Hawaii thing will be "HP and Nokia s little endeavour in the world of moblogging", talk about an echo chamber... Good for them... will it be broadcasted in English and Japanese? probably not, how many real users of 3G / moblogging phones will go?? NONE will they invite all the brilliant people that we might have invited at 2IMC? NO. That conference looks like a big stunt, and it was not organised BY the people...
btw, FOMA is 3G but AU WIN is 3G Flat Fee... all the latest AU phones (about 15 of them) are 3G by default unlike Docomo and Voda (and most have GPS functions). AU 3G subscribers: 12M, Docomo: 3M
but in a positive note, that s the kind of kick in the balls that we might need to put a 2IMC together...? New York could do the trick... any news from New York?
Hate to go against you on this one buddy, but for my money I'd do it in Hong Kong.
Reason 1. While nearly everyone in Tokyo has a cell phone, last I heard the per capita in HK was well over 1 for every man, woman, and child. The reason I will explain in a minute.
Reason 2. While definitely not the English speaking capital of the world, diversity of language, and information in English, Chinese, and Japanese would make it a much more international conference.
Reason 3. Transportation and logistics wouldn't suck.
While Japan has an edge when it comes to technology and usage, it still lives in a bubble. Technology and trends in Japan can take years to appear outside, meanwhile commonplace items elsewhere may never even show up in Japan. *cough* *Blackberry* *cough* *cough*.
While Japan has more cameraphone than anywhere else in the world, the balance is slowly reversing. The new lines of Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samgung, and Sony Ericcson, are all heavy in cameraphones. HK adds not only a heavily reliant cell sphone culture, but the ability to use SIM cards to easily upgrade your handset to a newer version. More mobilcentric townies may have mulpile cellphones to compliment outing, modd, or even fashion (see Reason 1). When it comes to diversity, the isolated network of Japan will eventually leave it out of the running on global trends.
Reason 4. Innovation. What have you done for me lately? It's been a whlie since Japan has come up with the "killer" cell phone app. Cameras were neat, now everyone's got em. Movies flopped. Crappy tower based GPS is too twitchy for any practical use. GSM systems are using SMS messaging to "push" advertisement of local establishments to customers in the nearby area (restarant adds, coupons, etc.) Bluetooth, now on almost all high end phones, give laptop and pda connectivity, wireless headsets, and gps keychains. and Where's my $"@#$! Blackberry!
Japan's definintely cool. But not the alpha and omega of mobile trends anymore.
I agree that HK would probably be better for an 2IMC actually, China and Korea have a tech level almost similar to Japan and potentially more customers... That s a very good remark.
Now on the GPS thing I have to disagree and you have to start reading my blog. Crappy they are not, a collaboration between cell towers and satellites gives me an accuracy of 5m-20m inddor and outdoor at any time and at the heart of Tokyo "urban canyons". That s better than any handy GPS can claim. Movies flopped because who want to pay 20,000 yen a month to download them a 50KBps... AU's WIN (and its Channels) downloads them at close to 2MB/s and TV is the most wanted feature on phone in Japan according to a recent study (Vodafone's just released a second TV phone).
Now HK might be more central, but they still have the crappy cell tower, no Satellite GPS, no TV oncellphones.
Now, I totally agree to what you said about that bad cough of yours... no blackburry, no Treo, no Clie-phone... what the hell is going on...
but yeah, a good compromise between the Executive C Summit (TM!!) in Maui (!?) and the very SXSW/Garage 2IMC in Tokyo would have been the very SXSW/Garage 2IMC in HK... ;-)
I have to agree in part with Kakyou: I live in Tokyo and don't feel there is much innovative going on with cell phone technology anymore.
I'm also, on a whole, very skeptical of the power of camera phones and moblogging in general. I realize on a blog like this it might be akin to preaching aethiesm to the Pope, but still here is my rather mundane assesment of cell phone culture and tech from the trenches:
No "normal" person I know uses a phone to blog. There are some iMode sites that have bbses which people communicate through -- bbses for "event" groups which rent clubs and have DJ/VJ units. But I see no one specifically moving information to the web-web via a cellphone. Furthermore, I never see anyone who uploads images via a camera phone to online sources (aside form joi ito, etc etc). I was doing it for a while out of sheer novelty, but my monthly packet charges brought an end to that (Docomo). Furthermore, I feel like the community makes a harsh and negative distinction between uploading via the camera and popping your memory stick out, plugging it into the computer and copying the images over that way. When the fact of the matter is we're not even dealing with time senstive data most of the time. If that picture of a dog is uploaded in real time or 10 minutes after, does it affect the purpose or inherent worth of that image?
Mobile phones are good things, I think. They're convenient to capture bits and pieces of your life without having to worry about carrying around a camera. Although with cameras like the new Digital Elph (s80?) being smaller than most cell phones, one has to wonder if something like that doesn't make more sense, if for nothing other than the sake of posterity. But I suppose if I'm thinking posterity I'm missing the point of moBlogging, which is to capture something with immediacy.
>No "normal" person I know uses a phone to blog.
My wife does it. She finds it easier to do from her keitai than from the Mac.
Most of the rest of cm's gist, about this not really changing the world, I agree with. Not sure that introducing moblogging will help most folk in africa, unfortunately...
While Tokyo is a great place to see "moblogging" behavior in action, the general phenomenon of self-publishing photos on the Web (not much different, as cm points out) is well-established in the West, and in fact seems more widespread than in Japan.
Nokia and HP are studying this very closely, and creating some interesting tools[1,2]. While "garage conferences" are cool and hip and a lot of great ideas emerge from them, it is also useful to have big companies paying sociologists and anthropologists to study these phenomeona, so that there is actual qualitative data and not just anecdotes. Nokia and HP have been doing this for several years. NTT is just now getting around to it[3].
So don't be so fast to dismiss the rest of the world. It's not all about hardware. In fact, from here on out I would say it is all about user-centered design of software, something Japanese companies have traditionally sucked at.
[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3497596.stm
[2]http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-48.html
[3]http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/002955.html
Some of us are definitely interested and inspired to organize the 2IMC. Several New Yorkers are on the list, so the realistic place seems to be there for logistical purposes and sponsorship possibilities.
Now the focus seems to be to get the main organizer identified...
I have identified an academic, with the perfect background, to lead on the 2IMC...
Ryan, there are many Japanese academics studying the uptake and behavior of Japanese keitai users and keitai culture, but that data rarely makes it out of Japan. Mimi Ito's probably the best bridge between Japan and the West with respect to keitai culture, but there's a lot more going on here that even I dont know about.
That's my point, in fact.
I haven't posted to this site before so I hope this comment doesn't come across as opportunistic (or worse, naive).
Although I decided to pass on the golf I decided to make the trip out to C-summit and see what all the fuss was about. I hope it's not 'all hat and no cattle'. My sense is that there will be a mix of interesting ideas and utter flakiness. However it shakes out I will be there and will be posting reports of the days activities. If anyone is interested in following the conference and posting commentary/rebuttles/other please do. The URL is:
http://blueherenow.com/blueherenow/now/c_summit.php
Mike.