“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all…” JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien may be onto something … – and the cell phone industry certainly seems ready to embrace the concept of “One Device to do it all.” Smart phones have become the multi-tool of the 21st century, although I’m personally still eagerly awaiting the first models to feature a folding knife and a pair of pliers in the accessories list. Preferably, this phone would be rubberized, water and dirt proof too.

Meanwhile, I am excited to see that it’s getting easier to use smart phones to find these dirty, wet places. Read more…

I came across this story and I was very impressed with the efficient use of Twitter.

A tragedy unfolded on Monday as two British snowboarders became separated from their party in white-out blizzard conditions in the Swiss resort of Verbier. Sadly, despite the efforts of the rescue team, though both of them were found, only one was still alive.

The tragic events took a Digital Dimension when the members of the party tried to help the rescue team by crowdsourcing mobile numbers and GPS coordinates thanks to the combined use of the Social Media Tool, Twitter & Google Maps. Read more…

Mark Lowenstein recently wrote about LBS and the proliferation of GPS enabled or capable mobile devices. One of the things that I learned from the article is that we are reaching mass market penetration in terms of vehicular GPS devices. This coupled with the mobile phone environment (trending toward ubiquitous GPS capabilities) puts users in an ever localized and networked environment. Did someone say electro/metropolis?

At this time, being someone who feels like they are generally well informed in terms of applications currently available, I would have to agree with Lowenstein in his prediction that there is and perhaps will not be a large market for subscription-based LBS. I think there are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most obvious one has to do with the proliferation of non-mobile internet access (especially in the U.S. market). Compounded with increased mobile Read more…

Posted by Hanson Hosein

“notmyPhone.”  There I said it.  I own or operate five Apple computers, three iPods, two Airports, constantly curse anytime I have to use Windows, and regularly sermonize that Steve Jobs singled-handedly democratized media production.

But in my quest for that one device that can do everything (phone, e-mail, web, pictures, video, GPS, word processing, modem), the iPhone continues to come up short.  And that’s too bad, because it puts any other phone operating system to shame (I know that much just from using the iPod Touch).

I could just be a contrarian happy to challenge the wisdom of the crowd — I didn’t think the Dark Knight was anything special (even on IMAX), preferred Batman Begins, and suspect that Iron Man is the holy grail of superhero movies.  So you just may want to stop reading now if you believe my opinion counts for nothing. Read more…