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Darren Waters

Learning mobile lessons

  • Darren Waters
  • 15 Feb 08, 10:53 GMT


Hopefully you’ve seen some of the short pieces produced by Rory Cellan Jones from Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress.

It’s part of a project we call rather grandly The Mobile Future, but really it is a low-key trial of mobile video here on the Dot.Life blog.

We’re keen to explore the mobile space, write about it and learn some lessons along the way.

Principally we want to find out how useful mobiles are as journalist tools, how flexible are the web services for mobile video and discover if the ´óÏó´«Ã½ can make use of them in any way.

We’ve started simply: with a mobile phone, a laptop, a wi-fi connection, some online video services and embedding the flash video on the blog.

You can read Rory’s thoughts on his initial experiences here.

Next week we’re going to up the ante and try and cut the laptop out of the equation and make use of the phone to both write blogs, record video, send that video over wi-fi or a cell network to the blog and elsewhere.

I’ll be recording the video on an N95 and using a mobile app called Shozu to push the video out to different places. Shozu is a freely available app which does the heavy lifting for me.

The phone uploads the video to Shozu’s servers and then they push it out to sites like Blip.TV, YouTube and even directly to the ´óÏó´«Ã½.

We’re not affiliated to any of these services or companies; we just wanted to use freely available tools that mobile bloggers have used for ages.

Next week I’m at the in San Francisco and will be focusing in part on mobile gaming. I’m also talking to some key mobile players, like Google and Nokia.

Here are the people I’m talking to and if you want to chip in with any questions or thoughts feel free:

Andy Rubin, creator of Google’s Android
John Shen, head on Nokia’s Research Center, Palo Alto
Ramu Sunkara, chief executive of Qik.com
Bob Morgan, Shozu’s head of operations in North America
Jaakko Kaidesoja, head of Nokia’s N-Gage platform
Michel Guillemot, chief executive of Gameloft
Aside from the focus on mobile, here are some of the key developers I’m interviewing
David Braben, head of Frontier games
Peter Molyneux, head of Lionead
Lou Castle, head of creative development EA LA – and working with Steve Spielberg on a game

I’m also talking to Havok and Ageia about physics in games, and looking at Nvidia’s latest graphics technology.

Comments

  • 1.
  • At 09:30 AM on 18 Feb 2008,
  • Pranav Lal wrote:

Hi, it would be interesting for you to ask whether any of your interviewees like Andy Rubin and John Shen have considered creating accessible games such as those produced by vendors like

  • 2.
  • At 02:37 PM on 18 Feb 2008,
  • Richard Ross wrote:

The mobile reporting stuff you guys are doing is interesting - can't be that long before a very large portion of outside broadcast material comes from mobile devices but it's clear there's still a job for the pro and a good editor!

On GDC - I'd be really interested to know why Nokia decided to ring-fence N-Gage and make it Nseries only: surely there's a much larger market for their numbered series devices? Also, what about the E-Series?

Interesting to hear what Molyneux thinks of the mobile opportunities for games producers. The 'Warcraft on a Mobile' direction seems obvious and I bet he's got some interesting ideas.

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