How’s this for awesome? I am of course buying into the hype that is everything Apple, particularly the iPhone, which is yet to be released in Australia.
Vodafone announced today they have signed a deal to sell the iPhone in ten of its global markets, including Australia, ‘later this year’.
Tuesday 6 May 2008
Vodafone to offer Apple’s iPhone in ten markets
Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.
You have plenty of other multi-purpose phones - smart phone, PDA phone, Pocket PC phone - all of which do lots of good things. Is the iPhone the best? How does it rate against the others?
The mobile world is advancing towards that mythical ‘all-in-one’ device that can not only effectively meet the demand for multimedia use of phone, video, audio, image and web, but also realistically meet the needs of those publishing content on the go.
It’s a mobile revolution. The Nokia N95 can’t be bad if it’s the mobile platform of choice for the Reuters Mojo team, so does the iPhone live up to the hype?
Share:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
In a rush to get this post out, I buried it in another article, Email Old News to Gen C.
It reappears now because it needed to be republished in its own right as a review of Twitter usage in Australian media and politics.
———-
In Australia, very few news organisations use Twitter. As full disclosure, before I continue, I work at The Courier Mail, a News Limited paper.
An informal audit of a selection of Australian media and their Twitter presence
I am assuming the unused Twitter accounts above belong to these publications, but it’s entirely possible someone could simply be ’squatting’ on the Twitter user names. I set up Twitter accounts for all of The Courier Mail’s news sections in early October last year, making our newspaper one of the only two news outlets in Australia using Twitter (that I have found), and definitely one of the largest media contributors to Twitter by number of content categories, but not necessarily volume of content.
The Courier Mail’s current crop of 20 Twitter user accounts are providing free SMS/IM updates on topics ranging from sports, to business, to breaking news, all with tinyurl links to the original story content. I’m now trying to find time to play around with a Facebook page for The Courier Mail, although I rarely have any spare hours at home to spend doing that.
During the process of setting up these Twitter accounts, I did a search to see if other Australian news outlets were already using Twitter.
Of News Limited mastheads, apart from The Courier Mail, none of the other existing News Ltd Twitter users have posted.
Of Fairfax mastheads, only The Age has a single feed, last updated in May 2007.
The ABC has two feeds - one of which I follow to receive local news alerts on my mobile phone.
In the UK, the BBC and Sky have a larger selection of Twitter updates that can be followed.
The 2007 federal election was approaching when I was working on the Courier Mail Twitter accounts so, having already written a story about politics and social networking, I had a look at what political parties had on Twitter.
At the time the results were:
Greens: http://twitter.com/Greens
Three updates in total, all on August 2, 2007, that are worth mentioning.
The Greens have established a twitter and are testing it. 04:11 PM August 02, 2007
Do you receive my Greens twitter? 04:26 PM August 02, 2007
Hrrrmmm, if I was 14 I’d know exactly what would happen 06:39 PM August 02, 2007
In 2008, however, the Greens seem to have got their act together with a Twitter page feeding from the Greens Blog website. https://twitter.com/greensblog
I also didn’t find this during the election last year , but https://twitter.com/kevinrudd is another spoof Twitter account.
The possibilities of Twitter as a quick and easy mass distribution method would be well utilised by politicians.
Share:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Qtrax, a new online music service, has made 25 million songs available for free and legal download.
Qtrax requires a software download, much like the iTunes store, to browse, play and download the songs. The service is said to be supported by limited advertising around the Qtrax player window.
The Mac version of the Qtrax music player software isn’t due for release until March 18.
In a largely speculative post last month, I wondered about the possibilities of Hulu, News Corp’s new online video venture.
Since then I’ve received my beta testing login details. With a great deal of excitement I went to Hulu.com to see what fantastic wonders would be presented to me.
None. If you’re in Australia, bad luck - it’s a case of look, but don’t touch.
For now, Hulu is a U.S. service only. That said, our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide. This requires clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific geography and will take time.
Being limited to North America because of distribution rights, international users are agonisingly teased by a long list of currently popular TV shows they can’t watch - Arrested Development, Family Guy, Scrubs, King of The Hill, My Name is Earl, The Office… the list goes on, and unless you have a beta login to Hulu (get on the waiting list) none of those links will get you anywhere.
With a login, choosing any episode from one of those shows takes you to the video player screen, right to the excited point of ‘Loading Video’ before slapping you in the face - rejection.
But I want to take advantage of the options alongside the video player - share, embed, watch it full screen! Hopefully it’s not too long before something is up and running for Australia.
In a desperate attempt to see the video player in action, I tried some older shows in the hope they were no longer affected by distribution rights. Thankfully, even Doogie Howser episodes (Breaking Up is Hard to Doogie) from 1989 were unavailable.
Share:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
In a continuing push to break new ground in digital media, ABC (Australia) has released ABC Now, a desktop media player for select ABC digital content.
The potential of this application is huge. When I read the description of what it would do, I couldn’t wait to try it. Unfortunately the interface isn’t entirely user-friendly at the moment, but it’s in beta, so expect something great to come.
For what is obviously planned for this media player the ABC is again demonstrating why Australians go to them for original online audio and video content - because they try to make it easily accessible.
Often they succeed in the attempt, and that’s why their podcasts and vodcasts have enjoyed such popularity. ABC digital content has succeeded because it is available. If there’s not much to choose from, people move on. The ABC’s integration online of text, audio and video content is impressive, to say the least.
If you haven’t seen it, check out an example of their in-page video player on this story.
Share:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
The Reuters mojo (Mobile Journalism) team has been field-testing the exclusive use of a Nokia N95 mobile phone for filing picture, video, and text content.
Tests have been conducted all over the world, and while the phone’s video quality isn’t great, it’s certainly a lot closer to the perfect mobile journalist than anyone else has effectively come.
See their mojo site, but the toolkit consists of the N95 phone, a collapsable keyboard with phone bracket, mini tripod for video use of phone, directional microphone and a solar charging mobile power source for the phone.
The solar power source is probably not necessary for your average city journo, but as their description says, the solar charger came in handy in Senegal.Fair enough.
Earlier this year it was announced that News Corporation was developing a YouTube killer. It was to be their own video serving site that was going to deliver full-length TV shows in a partnership with NBC, rather than the perceived notion (misguided I think) of the worthless fare served up on YouTube.
The News Ltd paper I work for (full disclosure) went so far as to declare in March 2007 that “YouTube’s dominance of online video content is about to end”.
Hulu.com is the outworking of that effort and is now in beta, and it’s looking pretty good.
Something very few news sites are doing today is incorporating social networking opportunities into their structure. Even less are incorporating social networking into their video content - which remains for the most part clunky and unappealing.
Hopefully Hulu will change that for News Ltd/Corp. This aspect of the current beta player is promising.
The “embed” function allows you to set in and out points, so you can embed just a selected chunk of a video clip on your blog.
I really hope this technology gets rolled out to all News Ltd/Corp sites, because it will exponentially enhance video content accessibility.
I’ve been thinking for a while, perhaps reading elsewhere, that Twitter could be applied to business communications. Twitter messages can be read via an RSS feed, or the real-time free text messages to registered ‘followers’.
Twitters (messages left on Twitter) are limited in length, much like a text message on a phone, but would be very handy for imparting brief, quick instructions to everyone in a work group immediately on their mobile phone.
…using Twitter as a messaging endpoint in what Rohit Khare calls a “syndication oriented architecture,” or SynOA. Jon Udell and Rohit talked about this on IT Conversations a few weeks ago.
I’m using Twitter in a similar way in my class this semester. My students are writing servers that send updates to a Twitter account via the Twitter API. Anyone can then subscribe to those updates through RSS, via SMS, or simply by going to the Web page. Easy, simple, and pretty effective.
An interesting timeline of how the Digg’s built up. A single-author niche blog pulls 50,000, then 80,000 page views on consecutive days, up from an average of 1,000/day since being launched only 10 days beforehand. But do the general online newsreading population use Digg, or is it just the geek’s domain?
The Pew Research Center has released a report about online video usage in the US that shows more than half of all adults have downloaded online video at some point, and 20% regularly watch online video every day.
If you weren’t aware, Australia has nearly the slowest broadband and most expensive telecommunications services in the developed (OECD) world, running second-last and third-highest, respectively.
“Markets with healthy levels of competition have led the introduction of innovative services and appealing pricing packages,” the report said.
I expect broadband prices in Australia will drop when Telstra is finally opened up to widespread competition, and so I impatiently wait.
An excellent site for Australians looking to compare broadband packages, as well as quality of service (they list over 6,000 plans and 250 providers), is broadband CHOICE.
Share:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
The other day I mentioned a few digital video cameras. Camera site camcorderinfo.com has a comparison review of four good compact digital video cameras:
The most basic and free video editing software (as in, you don’t have to go download/install it because it’s already on your computer) is usually okay for basic video users.
For Windows users there’s Windows Movie Maker, while I’ve found iMovie for the Mac is an ample resource for those quick edits and exports.
If you don’t have any video software that you can use on your hard drive, or are up for a little experimentation, there are a lot of online editing solutions. I would recommend not trying them on dialup (as I have to at home).
Mashable has put together a very comprehensive resource.
There’s more information there than anyone can reasonably be expected to digest, and the following are just the categories under which they list resources:
Live Video Communications
Online Video How-to
Online Video Editors
Online Video Converters
Video sharing
Video hosting
Video organization and management
Vidcasts & vlogging
Video mashups
Mobile video apps
Video search
Online video downloading services
Miscellaneous tools
Online TV
They also have other posts in the series, with the Online Photography Toolbox, Blogging Toolbox, and Online Productivity Toolbox.
Share:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I’ve signed up to a few popular sites to see how useful they are - and because I’m a complete nerd. I did hold off for a quite a while on signing up to some of these, but I now feel it’s almost a responsibility to be involved and try to understand them more.
I honestly haven’t put much effort into expanding my social networks across these sites yet, and hadn’t visited some for several months before writing this post.
How’s this for awesome? I am of course buying into the hype that is everything Apple, particularly the iPhone, which is yet to be released in Australia.
Fairfax masthead sites
News Limited masthead sites
I set up Twitter accounts for all of The Courier Mail’s news sections in early October last year, making our newspaper one of the only two news outlets in Australia using Twitter (that I have found), and definitely one of the largest media contributors to Twitter by number of content categories, but not necessarily volume of content. 
In a largely speculative 
