B. Mann Consulting

I've now got ShoZu on my Nokia 6630 setup to easily send video to my blip.tv account*. Lots of Gnomedex video going up.

Most fun was lamenting about the lack of Nokia smartphones to buy here in North America with Bre Pettis (someone *needs* to give Bre a phone for his Phonetagger alter-ego) and Will Pate. Short story here is: Nokia, forget about buzz marketing to give away phones -- there are people that just want to *buy* your high end phones.

Watch the Video

And I'm going to repeat what I said to Nokia before about encouraging carriers (especially in Canada):

My top hint on what Nokia should do? Forget the free phones: continue to sell great phones, but pressure Fido and Rogers to offer a "citizen journalism" data package so people in Canada can use all the cool features. The HipTop plan from Fido is $25/month for unlimited data...I think there would be a ton of people that would pay that to be able to upload pictures to Flickr on the fly and use all of the other great features that Nokia phones can enable (*cough* ShoZu *cough*).

I'm currently still in Torino, Italy, although I'm heading out to Milan, then Bologna tomorrow, and will be in Brussels by the end of the week in time for FOSDEM.

I'm writing a bit about mobile technologies here in Italy over on 2010.dailyvancouver.com (check the Tech Talk section). I've got a Vodaphone SIM for my Nokia 6630 with UMTS-based 3G service (around 350kbps) and the experience has been fantastic.

So, while we had our symposium, the relative maturity of the European vs. Canadian mobile technologies certainly did come up. One example I used was how there is a mobile data plan here that gives you 9GB of transfer for 40EU. On Fido, which is my provider back home, this would cost $270,000 based on the listed per MB charges of $30. Actually, I did the calculation in my head initially and everyone was shocked/amused by the figure of $27,000...and then we figured out we were still an order of magnitude off!

I can't remember what exactly prompted it: I wanted an application for my cellphone that *wasn't* a productivity app, that *wasn't* the half-finished handiwork of a lone developer, and that did just work. So I ended up buying a game.

My phone is a Nokia 6630, running on the Series 60 platform. The Fido site does sell applications, including games. It was basically useless for looking for stuff. My phone isn't sold by Fido, and they only offer browsing by type of phone. There is no way to say what platform your phone is.

Luckily, the Mobile Gamer site in the UK was great. Right at the top of the site, you can filter everything available by your model of phone, and mine was listed, so I got a full page of Nokia 6630 games. I browsed around for a bit, and settled on Might & Magic -- the same name of a game that I remember playing on the Apple IIe. Actually, the graphics on my phone look better than an Apple IIe.

Getting the game was ridiculously easy. I entered in my full phone number, including the +1 to show it's in North America. I paid via PayPal. Moments later, I got an SMS with the URL of a download. I clicked on it in my phone. It downloaded the installer. The installer launched, and downloaded the rest of the game.

That is what seamless delivery of mobile content is all about. I didn't try it, but I suspect I could have navigated the site directly, and completed the entire experience via my phone's browser. Hmmm...pay for something via PayPal, have it delivered immediately around an identity-based infrastructure that's encrypted. Skype + eBay ring any bells now?