Archive for June, 2005

A Dark Day in the History of Media, Part 1

Monday, June 27th, 2005

Raise your hand if you have ever rented a movie. Ok, now raise your hand if you have ever recorded a TV show so that you could watch it later. What if you couldn’t rent a movie? What if VCRs were illegal? It is hard to imagine a world where these basic consumer behaviors didn’t exist. It would be harder to imagine that they almost did but then didn’t because in 1984 Universal Studios sued Sony over their Betamax VCR and won, effectively halting innovation and at the same time the evolution of a media industry that today includes Blockbuster, Netflix, TiVo, every major consumer electronics manufacturer and hundreds of millions of happy consumers parting ways with their hard-earned money.

Ok, now raise your hand if you are part of the $33 billion dollar DVD industry. Yeah, you would have a different job. And the media incumbents collectively would have been $33 billion dollars poorer in 2004. It is a good thing for Universal Studios (and all of the media industry incumbents) that they lost the landmark Sony Betamax case because in retrospect their myopic position at the time, while logical given their view of their industry, would have cost them literally trillions of dollars. Universal Studios at the time thought of themselves as the “the movie industry” and not the “entertainment industry.” They never thought of the VCR as an opportunity – only a threat. They assumed that VCRs could damage their business which was based on box office receipts, even though VCRs had legitimate uses beyond the wholesale piracy of Hollywood movies. That was a reasonable assumption, but it was because of the other legitimate uses of the VCR that Universal lost that case and gained the most important revenue stream in the entertainment industry. The basis of the Betamax decision was that a distributor of a multi-purpose tool cannot be held liable for copyright infringing actions of its users if substantial non-infringing uses of the tool exist.

Grok This
The 9th Circuit found in the MGM v. Grokster case that P2P file sharing services were capable of, and indeed being used for, noninfringing uses. Using the Betamax precedent, they ruled that such services could not be held liable for the infringing actions by their users.

Then today, the Supreme Court disagreed and reversed that decision.

MGM v. Grokster was brought by 28 of the world’s largest entertainment companies against the makers of the Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA filesharing software products in 2001. The entertainment companies hoped to obtain a legal precedent that would hold all technology makers responsible for the infringements committed by the users of their products. Today’s decision against Grokster may well give the entertainment companies that power.

This is one of the Forces Shaping Mobile Media. I mentioned previously my strong belief that the owners of intellectual property rights should have the ability to control and sell their content in whatever way suits them. I also mentioned the importance to the entire value chain of the independence of Device Manufacturers and Application Providers in #2 of 3 posts on the topic of the same title.

The Grokster decision will lead us down an interesting path along the value chain, wherein the incumbent media companies will execute a series of steps to regain control of their content and their resultant revenue streams.

Step 1: Lock Down The Internet
ALL the P2P services get sued into oblivion. It won’t matter if they are primarily using their powers for good. It doesn’t matter that P2P is a more efficient and cost-effective distribution mechanism for homogenous files, nor does it matter that P2P enables viral distribution of legitimate content via a network of overlapping personal networks. The companies that have legitimate business models based on legitimate technology will bear the cost of lawsuits as a result of this decision and will ultimately serve at the pleasure of the incumbent media companies.

Step 2: Lock Down The Device Manufacturers
Revisit the Sony Betamax ruling. It’s not just your VCR that is capable of infringement but also has legitimate uses. It is also your iPod, your PC, your photocopier, your router and your CD burner. From the standpoint of the media incumbents, a three-pronged approach is required to lock down the device manufacturers:

First, if a P2P service is liable for copyright infringement, then a revisitation of what can be construed as “P2P” is in order. If our computers are connected, that is a peering environment and cannot be allowed without oversight and control. Your mobile phone has bluetooth? Not in the near future. By shifting the risk of willful infringement to the device manufacturers of certain enabling technologies, those enabling technologies will be taken out of the devices or will only be allowed if wrapped in some kind of Digital Rights Management scheme.

Second, if a cornerstone of the Grokster ruling was that Grokster and services like it “…are used overwhelmingly for infringement,” then a revisitation of what can be construed as “used overwhelmingly for infringement” is in order. It will only take one lawsuit to get most of the device manufacturers in line. CD and DVD burners will get serious scrutiny. Rather than face the cost of getting sued, many device manufacturers will instead choose to modify their products to please Hollywood.

Third, lobbying and legislation will be a critical component of the incumbent media companies’ efforts to regain control over their media. The Broadcast Flag died in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in ALA vs. FCC, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be taken to Congress. From the EFF: “The broadcast flag rule would have required all signal demodulators to ‘recognize and give effect to’ a broadcast flag, forcing them not to record or output an unencrypted high-def digital signal if the flag were set. This technology mandate, set to take effect July 1, would have stopped the manufacture of open hardware that has enabled us to our own digital television recorders.” Understand what that means – if the entertainment industry gets the rule pushed through somehow, you will no longer be able to record your DTV signal freely to execute your fair use rights.

Step 3: Lock Down The Network Operators
To truly eradicate copyright infringement in a digital connected world, content owners must have complicity from the network operators because they own the pipes. The entertainment industry should assume it cannot eliminate every P2P network. It should further assume, as an element of a strong legal strategy, that it will not win every case against every device manufacturer it pursues. As a hedge, there should be no time wasted going after the network operators. Even after an avalanche of lawsuits, congressional hearings and a lot of time and money spent, the entertainment industry could find itself in not as strong a position as it would like to be. The answer is to take separate steps to achieve the strongest possible position. Without the digital pipes to transfer the content, it won’t matter if you have a device capable of copyright infringement. This will require a two-pronged approach:

First, spread the liability to the network operators. They came close to achieving a precedent in RIAA v. Verizon, which would have required Verizon to disclose the identity of a subscriber who allegedly used KaZaA P2P software to share music online, but Verizon won. Based on today’s ruling in the Grokster case, if I were in their shoes, I would present the argument that the network is an integral part of the P2P solution and should therefore be subject to regulation. If I were them, I would start with college campuses as a stepping stone, because they operate networks within their domains. A ruling in favor there would set the stage to go to the ISPs.

The second prong was accelerated today with a ruling in favor of the FCC in FCC v. Brand X, which essentially upheld a rule that enables cable companies to refuse to share their networks with competing ISPs. This comes down to a technical definition: Under the current rule, cable internet companies are providers of “information services” whereas DSL internet companies are providers of “telecommunication services.” “Information service” providers are not subject to the same regulation as “telecommunication service” providers. Does a decrease in competition mean a decrease in consumer choice? Time will tell.

In my opinion, that is a smallish issue compared to the strategy that I would be crafting if I worked for the cable industry: I would be setting up an argument and spinning up my lobbying machine for a more specific definition of “telecommunication services” and would specifically argue that such services should be limited in some way, for instance to voice, or only those services that are truly “communication” in the traditional sense like between two people. A long shot? Maybe. But if successful, I could own the market for high-speed data and relegate a long list of would-be competitors to services that will be essentially valueless at some point in the future.

There’s a lot to do to ensure that consumers pay for the media that Hollywood creates. It’s a big business, and afterall, it is their content and they have the right to charge as much as they want for it as long as the market will pay for it. As nefarious as all the tactics and maneuvering may seem, if it was your billion dollars at stake, you would be doing whatever you could to protect it, too. Furthermore, everyone should have a right to protect the value of what is legally theirs, and I will always take the position in favor of the incumbent media companies on that issue alone. With respect to all of the issues in this post, I quite honestly believe in the capitalistic pursuit of value through the exploitation of intellectual property rights.

However, my issue with the decisions today is that they come at the great cost of individual freedom. That is what makes today such a dark day in the history of media. I literally felt my personal freedom decrease when I read the decisions today because I know that the only way to truly eradicate copyright infringement is to infringe on your privacy. While certainly not always the case, when legislation dictates what you can or cannot do, there is a good chance that it is not in the best interest of your personal freedom. If the incumbent media companies cannot be certain that the copy of the ::whatever:: you made is going to be used only for personal use, then they have to implement some means of observational control to be sure. (And they will.) And here is the most annoying thing about June 27th, 2005: This is all so that I don’t steal whatever music from whatever American Idol star is considered hot right now. I know there is a market for it, so I’m not commenting on the inherent value of the media itself. Rather, I am comparing the inherent value of my personal freedom to the inherent value of whatever music from whatever American Idol star is considered hot right now. I simply cannot make that equation balance. Between the two, I would give up American Idol before I would give up my ability to freely press ‘record’ on my DVR.

Posted in Mobile Media | 1 Comment »

Phone Call 2.0

Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

The first phone call went like this: “Come here Watson. I want you.” When Alexander Graham Bell called his assistant, Thomas Watson, on March 6th, 1876 he set in motion a revolution in communication that many argue has changed the world more than any other invention, making his patent, 174,465 possibly the most valuable in history.

BTW, when looking up the historical facts on the patent, I discovered something I hadn’t known before: On February 14, 1876, Elisha Gray got to the patent office only two hours after Bell to file for a provisional patent for a similar invention. Interestingly, Bell’s device used a liquid transmitter similar to one invented previously by Gray and unlike anything in his patent filing and also used a metal diaphragm receiver similar to the one built and demonstrated publicly by Gray months earlier. In any case, a legal fight ensued. Gray lost and Bell was awarded the patent. “First to market” sometimes means “by two hours.”

Think about how little the concept of the phone call has changed in the last 150 years. The definition of a phone call has always been “person to person voice communication.” The first real innovation around the basic product was voicemail and we didn’t see that until 1979. Even after that, the innovations we saw in telephony were built around the concept of person to person voice communication. Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Call Return, Caller Blocking, Priority Ringing and Voicemail are all services built around the core product of connecting two people in a person to person voice communication session. Where I live in California, I can subscribe to Three-Way Calling for an additional $3.23 per month. Wow – Three people. That is the best you can do with the basic interface that is the telephone, and it is the first product that extended the reach of an individual wanting to have a conversation with more than one person. Even today, given the prevalence of conference calling, we still only ever talk to maybe a dozen people at a time. That’s not very scalable reach, and it is simply a limitation of the interface.

Communication Urgency vs. Importance
But think about what communication really is. Simply put, communication is the conveyance of ideas through a medium. In Phone Call 1.0, the medium you use is your voice, and the interface limits you to a relatively small audience. It limits you because it is a real-time environment. You have to assemble your audience and deliver your message. There is no way to timeshift your message so that it can be presented to multiple audiences at various times. You place the call, you transact your ideas using your voice and that is the end of it.

When I think about how many times I have called 411 to get the number of the same damn Domino’s pizza up the street, it drives me crazy. Phone Call 1.0 works well in Urgent situations when you need directions, have to educate your salespeople on a new product innovation or want to order a pizza. It is a limitation of the interface that makes me call back multiple times for the number to Domino’s – that information is Important and can be stored near-line as long as I know where to find it and as such lives in the phone book, where there is a color listing with a picture of a pizza, menu, and the phone number, address and directions for Domino’s. In this way, the information is essentially time-shifted. But I don’t carry the phone book around with me everywhere I go and when I am hungry the value of that phone number switches from Important to Urgent and the thing that I do happen to carry around with me everywhere I go is a Phone Call 1.0 interface that I can use to call someone to read me the number from the directory for Domino’s pizza.

Phone Call 1.0 is a very bad interface for Important things like conveying encyclopedic information, communicating complex ideas perhaps requiring pictures or other multimedia or for marketing applications. In the case of the latter, it is downright annoying. Phone Call 1.0 is very good for conveying short bursts of information in real-time sessions.

Telephones are Urgency Devices and they are colliding with Importance applications. The Mobile Phone is the ultimate Urgent Communication Device because it is always with you. People use it in an urgent manner, too; every time I see someone close a business deal at their kid’s soccer event, give some friends last-minute directions to the restaurant while sitting at the table or answering their phone in a movie theater just to satisfy their neurotic compulsion to answer every self-importance-affirming call, I am further convinced of this simple fact.

Well, your mobile phone is not just a mobile phone anymore. It is a mobile connected Personal Media Device, which means three very important things:
1) it can upload multimedia
2) it can download multimedia
3) it is capable of operating in a combined Urgent/Important mode.

So what does this mean? Think about Phone Call 1.0 again for a moment. Have you ever called a friend for a restaurant recommendation or directions? Yes, I think we all have. And they said what? “Try Oceanaire downtown in the Gaslamp Quarter.” And then you had to look up the number yourself because they didn’t have it, right? This happens with surprising frequency. As I was writing this, a coworker just asked me what cab company I use in San Diego.

Today my friend sent me an IM asking for recommendations on good restaurants and bars in San Diego because she is going to be down for the weekend. I immediately listed Bertrand and the beach bar at the W hotel as good bar options and mentioned Oceanaire, Indigo Grill and Parallel 33 for restaurants. Then from my PC I googled these names and found useful links for her on each and sent those over to her via IM. It took me a little more than five minutes, but I was happy to do it for this good friend. Then a funny thing happened. When I went to close the IM window, I hesitated because I felt that I was throwing away valuable information. What if someone else from out of town asks me for a recommendation on bars or restaurants? I will likely give them the same recommendations because they are among my top favorites in San Diego. Then I will have to re-google the information and spend another five minutes.

Phone Call 2.0
Before closing the IM window, I added all of those places to my Rabble Channel. (Channel Shawn, fyi. I know - very creative.) I have essentially “attached” those places to my channel. When I do this, all of those places are immediately available to anyone on Rabble – they do not have to know my Channel. The Places I put on my channel are available to everyone and they can then attach them to their channel. This is distributed populist media production and sharing. But for people who do know my Channel, there is a reason they know it. Most likely they are friends of mine, and now they can go straight to my channel without having to call me for a recommendation.

Last week Derrick and I were in the bay area for business and I was Rabbling around Berkeley to see what was there. I found a channel called CheeseboardPizza. (I possess an unnatural and undiscriminating love of pizza. When I go to New York, I land and take the cab straight to John’s Pizzeria before checking in to my hotel. I like the one on West 44th, not Bleecker. Please feel free to send me recommendations in any city.) People from the bay area know about the CheeseBoard Pizza Cooperative. First of all, it is phenomenal pizza. Secondly, it is sort of a quirky concept that is hard not to love. Imagine the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld sold pizza. You don’t get to specify your toppings. They make one kind of pizza everyday and that is what you get. There is a menu outside that lists the pizza for the day. A Rabbler in Berkeley apparently walks by this menu every morning and takes a picture of the menu and posts it to his channel. Yesterday it was “corn, onions, red bell peppers, feta, mozzarella, garlic, olive oil and cilantro.” Subscribe to Channel CheeseboardPizza and get the menu every day. If it sounds good to you that day, pizza it is. If not, you saved yourself a walk down to 1512 Shattuck Ave. to see the menu yourself. I love this – not only is it a cool use of technology but it fits our ideal of populist media. By viewing Channel CheeseboardPizza, you can download multimedia to your mobile phone to make an informed decision.

I also like this example because it shows how a very unserious piece of media can be both important and urgent, because it is both “What” and “When” information, e.g., “What do I want to eat for lunch today?”

Look Ma, No Voice
Notice that I haven’t even mentioned using voice. I picked this example specifically because it is the type of information that not long ago we all used to retrieve using our voices as the medium and the telephone as the interface.

Now instead of only being able to call someone, you can send text from your mobile phone. But your mobile phone is also a digital camera. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then why settle for 160 characters of text when you can send a picture instead? And if one person might want to see your picture, why not post it to your blog instead so you can share it with the world? Now add a messaging feedback loop so you can interact with other users to create, collect and share information.

Nonvoice multimedia + conversation with the world = evolved communication.

And that is Phone Call 2.0. It is happening without us even knowing it. Almost all of the pieces are in place. What has been missing is a marketplace to effectively transact this information that combines the usefulness of a near-line directory of Important information, the immediacy of “pick up the phone and call” access to Urgent information and most importantly, the context of personal relationships or commonality to filter both kinds of information to make it more useful. By the way, commonality could be as simple as an apparent unholy appreciation for pizza – now that is someone whose opinion I can trust.

Simply put, our personal communication is evolving to include multimedia. That communication is converging on one device, the mobile phone, which is quickly turning into a Personal Media Device. My children will not understand the concept of Phone Call 1.0 – they will live in a world where the media they create will represent them and act as an active proxy. Their friends will not understand the concept of a “phone number,” the artifact of an analog world long gone, and instead will have their own channel – a two-way location-aware media presence through which they will communicate with the world around them. You already see what your mobile phone has evolved into over just the past few years. What will it look like in another three years? Or ten? Now combine that device with an active media communication infrastructure that connects you with the world around you delivering information, entertainment and personal connectivity seamlessly and intuitively to help you find new content, increase your social capital and generally get through the day. That is the future of communication. Think about how few voice calls you make compared to five years ago and how many text messages you send instead. Think of how much you rely on your mobile phone and the fact that it is turning into a mobile connected camcorder and receiver. Now make the final leap – rather than call the number, surf the net or watch the channel, Be The Channel. (And start now with our 1.0 of Phone Call 2.0, Rabble. ;-)

Posted in LMNO | 2 Comments »

BREW2005 Recap

Saturday, June 4th, 2005

First of all, the Hawaiian Tropic girl was very hot. How do I compete with that? I pulled up my pant leg a little bit to show some leg in an effort to attract more attention to our booth, but everyone was still looking at her if you can believe it. I honestly can’t tell you what company she was representing, though, which is kind of funny.

Qualcomm had their best BREW Developers Conference ever this year. It was well-attended and had some great sessions. Nothing ground-breaking was announced, but it was nice to hear John Stratton at Verizon Wireless declare that this is the year for LBS. Location-based applications will be the big thing next year.

Some guy in the audience at our LBS panel made a good point. He asked how big the market really was for LBS applications, because despite all the hype he has never seen any information showing any kind of explosive growth of applications or revenue. Joe Astroth from Autodesk had a great response, I thought, when he said that there aren’t really any LBS “applications” rather LBS will get baked into applications and essentially be invisible to the user. He’s right about that. A truly paradigm-shifting technology like LBS should be indiscernable from magic to the user.

Huey Lewis put on a great show. You don’t think you are a Huey Lewis fan until you realize you know all of the words to all of his songs. Remember in American Psycho when Bateman is killing Owen with an axe?
“In 1987 Huey released this, Fore!, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is ‘Hip To Be Square,’ a song so catchy that most people probably don’t listen to the lyrics. But they should because it’s not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It’s also a personal statement about the band itself.”

So true.

The Rabble, She Is Launch?
A guy from South America saw a product demo and got all excited and wanted to make sure we weren’t selling vapor. “The Rabble, she is launch?” Yes. She is launch. Rabble soft-launched on 11 handsets on Verizon Wireless. Next week we will add the balance of the 22 we support on Verizon Wireless right now. Then the following week we’ll put out a press release. We’ll add other new handsets as they become available. There is demand for mobile blogging, btw: In the first 48 hours Rabble has been up without any announcement, we are averaging a new paying customer about once every five minutes. The early adopters of this product are so incredibly super-cool I can’t believe it. I got a message from one user: “Thanks for creating yet another addictive mobile phone product. lol. I’ve been subscribed for what, less than a week and i’m already hooked. lol. This is great.” I was Rabbling in our booth yesterday and found this post on another Channel: “Of my various addictions –lol- blogging is my favorite. I dont know who came up with this idea, but it beats the hell out of other apps I’ve tried.”

The definition of Rabble is “The lowest or coarsest class of people.” We chose it because to us it signifies the edge of the network. It’s meant to be ironic, like, “Yeah, I’m just the Rabble of the world, so go ahead and discount me. Then watch me and a billion others like me organize and completely disrupt the status quo.” So far, I like what I see. This is going to get really interesting when we have broader distribution and a larger number of users.

We admittedly have to shake out some kinks with the database, and many of the users have been very helpful providing feedback and just helping out in general. Rabble has some UI quirks and behavioral issues, but nothing major and people don’t seem to notice anyway. Maybe it’s just my critical eye. We have a lot of ideas for improvements already for 2.0. If you have suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Frankly, some of the issues are just do to the programming environment. This isn’t the web. Every handset is unique in it’s own beautiful way, causing various challenges and requiring you to basically maintain a hundred unique code bases, all a little different from each other. Mobile application development is not for the faint of heart. All things considered, (not the least of which is our boot-strap budget) I am very proud of Rabble and I am glad our small but quickly growing community of users likes it, too.

We had some great meetings with a bunch of other carriers in the U.S. and around the world, and many agreed to offer Rabble to their subscribers. Everyone else said they wanted it, but carrier business development can be a bit slow. It was a great reception overall, and we will be announcing the availability of Rabble on other carriers very shortly. I would also like to thank Verizon Wireless for embracing this product and showing the vision to promote user-generated content through Rabble.

Rabble Envy
Developer conferences are by definition comprised of mostly developers, which creates sort of a weird environment because there is a lot of competitive intelligence being gathered. Mostly we got some great compliments on the look and feel, and just the completeness of the app. I also noticed some negative space, though. Rabble is the first mobile blogging community ever. (Don’t email me with examples like TextAmerica or whatever. While cool, that is not mobile blogging – that is posting to a blog on the web from your phone. I mean a fully mobile-only, self-contained community of mobile content creators and consumers.) The fact that we beat some other, better funded, people to market seems to irritate them. There were a few guys from a company I have never heard of to whom we showed the app and the response was, “Yeah, well, we are working on something that is going to blow this away.” Sheesh. Thanks for stopping by, guys. Please don’t be bitter. Had you not spent all of your money on the matching embroidered shirts, maybe you would be farther along by now. That’s like 100 lines of code you’re wearing.

A friend of ours went to visit the booth of one company (where they still did not have a working application to show) and asked how their product compared to Rabble. He sent me an email from his Blackberry: “they claim they will be launching on all major carriers and their relevant handsets this year, that they have a dramatically advanced app over rabble with many more hours of user-testing and development, and a tech platform that carriers will be adopting and will give them a much better user experience than apps like rabble and dodgeball.”

They are launching on all major carriers? I would be careful about making such bold predictions. I’ll bet there is at least one major carrier to whom that would be news. In the meantime, their “dramatically advanced over rabble” application can sit there in many more hours of user-testing while we build a community of paying subscribers who love Rabble. Betamax was, by all accounts, better than VHS. I’ll bet there were a lot of people at Sony saying their product was “dramatically advanced” over VHS. That didn’t help. What helps is getting a product to market. We call it “3.1.” That was the first version of Microsoft Windows that was actually useful enough to be commercially viable. But had they not shipped 1.0 when they did and instead waited for all the functionality to be fully baked, they would have missed the market entirely.

We are the first to market and currently have no competition, but it will come. When it does, we will compete on the merits of our product and the swiftness of our strategy. Have a better product? Ship it. It will give consumers more choices and force innovation in the marketplace. I am looking forward to seeing other location-based applications, and particularly those focusing on upstream media. Mostly, I think more applications even vaguely similar to Rabble will help to legitimize the LMNO space and will further define it as its own area of opportunity.

Posted in Mobile Industry | 4 Comments »

Mobile Homesteading

Friday, June 3rd, 2005

If you have ever read any of my longer posts about data analysis and user generated ecosystems, you probably know that I am a fanatic about communities and the data that is generated around them.

It is not very often that you get to see a community come into life and get to watch the development from the beginning. I had a small taste of that when I was drawn to podcasting fairly early after hearing some of the shows by Adam Curry and Dave Winer. I was actually plugged in one of the early Daily Source Codes for my show The $250 Million Radio Show.

The Podcasting Community has since seen some fractures between Adam and Dave. In a further subgroup of podcasting, a group of us music podcasters came together and formed The Association of Music Podcasting to promote independent music podcasts where we obtain the permission of artists to legally podcast their music. We recently experienced some upheavals within that community with the departure of some of our founding members to work on the commercial side of podcasting and the resulting clash of personalities that naturally occur in communities, virtual or otherwise.

Its part of the natural growth of things and I must say it is fascinating to be an active member in a community and to experience the natural ups and downs that occur. It has been a source of some new friendships for me personally, but it has unfortunately been the source of some new found animosity between other groups of people who previously were strangers who would have otherwise never have met each other if not for some common bond facilitated by this strange thing called the Internet.

With that in mind, we embarked this week on the creation of a mobile community built around the premise that at the intersection of all types of user generated content and sophisticated personal media devices are the elements of a new and exciting community of users willing to create and share their media.

You can spend a lot of time thinking what that world will look like. It’s the moment when it comes to life that a community takes on its own characteristics complete with all the various characters, ideas, and paths of its own. We hoped that Rabble would have the right tools and elements to capture the imagination of those who are currently blogging away, or meeting people through social networking sites, or who understand the potential of location based services. At least that was the idea.

From our initial user feedback and some of the characters we have encountered so far, we expect that at the very least it is going to be an interesting and amusing journey with many unforeseen adventures ahead. If you want to witness a new community at birth and want to help stake out your own mobile homestead, download a copy of Rabble today and see if we hit the mark. We think at the very least you will get a small glimpse of what we believe is the future of media.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off