It’s a slow news week so far this week, so I’d like to share my enthusiasm for the Helio Ocean, a smartphone in the vein of the Sidekick III, but with much more functionality and 3g network access. It’s a very slick design, with a dual slide Qwerty keypad, which makes it more messaging and email friendly than the iPhone, and a nine-key keypad for phone dialing. Its proprietary software includes an easy to use UI, with an email inbox for numerous email and messaging accounts, GPS photo and friend tagging, a multimedia emporium, and a browser. Helio is losing a ton of money, but the Ocean holds the promise to revive the Company’s prospects. The Ocean will be available for $295 this Spring. Check out the video!
[UPDATE - 5/13/07: I checked out the Ocean at the Helio store in Palo Alto today. They had sold through their inventory and had a waiting list for the next arriving shipment on Tuesday. It has a very solid, quality feel, but is a bit thick and heavy. I did not have a chance to try out all the cool proprietary software. So, I’m still impressed, but not quite enough to break my current mobile phone contract.]
I just watched Scoble’s video about Urban Seeder, a new website in beta that invents a new paradigm for technology to assist meeting people you see in the real world. Urban Seeder was born out of a year long thesis project by its founder, who researched how people flirt and find love. It’s an interesting approach, since most consumer entrepreneurial ventures are born out of the instinct of its creators, and not a deep analysis of consumer behavior. (Large corporations, on the other hand, often have reams of market research and consumer insights data to support the viability and potential of a new product or service, as a way to mitigate risk.)
It’s clear that the founder’s research indicated there was a need for a method to safely allow relationships to seed and grow anonymously, and offer a way to seed a relationship more effectively than a casual passing, which can be a missed opportunity, and less forward than giving out a phone number.
However, does the site go too far in its attempt to alter conventional flirting behavior? The site will sell personalized and wearable patterned clothes and accessories that are recognizable by other users of the service, for example, and if you have an interest in meeting the person, you can take their picture and the service will recognize the pattern and point you to the person’s online space. How strange of a behavior is that? Will you really want to take a picture of someone, because you hope to meet them, and not have the guts to introduce yourself?
Or, you can give out seed cards, which have a code that directs you to a private and personal online space, which includes where you will be on a given night. But, do you really want to respond, or go to a physical place where the giver of the seed card will be, without knowing what the person looks like? (the site seems to favor anonymously giving out seed cards, and yes, I know that’s a superficial question, but I would bet a very real issue. There’s a reason why Hot or Not is so successful.)
This leads me to ponder a fundamental innovation question: Is it possible for an innovative solution to be too unfamiliar to be widely adopted, even if it’s clearly better than its current competition? For example, I think the Segway is an incredibly good way for people to commute within cities. It’s possible to travel at a much faster pace and to travel a farther distance than walking. It doesn’t require finding a parking space, or sitting in traffic for extended periods of time, as you often must do with a car, and it produces no harmful emissions. Yet, it has not been widely adopted. To what extent is this a question of affordability vs. marketing or a challenge of altering behavior? (another example of an innovative product that significantly improves life is Tivo, which has taken ten years to be widely adopted vs. Google, which arguably was adopted extremely quickly, because it offered an incremental and not revolutionary innovation.)
Also interesting to me is Urban Seeder’s use of video to demonstrate how the service can be used. Video can be an extremely effective way to communicate how innovative concepts function.
Spinvox, a UK-based company, started accepting this week users in the United States. The service, which is mostly distributed through cell phone carriers, converts voicemails to text for either email or SMS delivery. To see how the service works, visit this site, call the number, and leave a message. A few minutes later, the message will be posted to the blog! This is great efficiency tool, but can also be used to screen calls. While in a meeting, voice messages can be converted to SMS messages delivered to your mobile device, so you can elect whether or not to return the call right away. [thanks, techcrunch]
The technology to foresee traffic in real-time (vs. snapshots) will soon be a reality. Acura and Cadillac have started to bundle the technology into their navigation packages. IntelliOne Technologies is testing its Need4Speed technology, which gathers data by tracking the movement of mobile phones within cars to provide real-time traffic conditions. [via autoblog]
Virgin Mobile USA is launching a program June 14 whereby people can earn up to 75 minutes of free talk time a month simply by watching 30 second ads and answering a few easy questions to prove they were paying attention. Virgin has 4 million (mostly teenage) consumers. [via nyt]
When I wrote about Moving Mannequins, I thought about all kinds of possibilities, including the idea of a mobile phone remote controlled lifelike, robotic mannequin.
In that vein, LocaModa has devloped an interactive digital mannequin application, which allows consumers to customize a model’s clothes displayed on a large screen using a cell phone as a remote control. LocaModa’s technology works with any phone and any network and does not require the user to download any software.
Other StreetSurfer applications previewed by LocaModa at the Digital Retailing Expo include interactive real estate, travel agent and branded interactive games.
London’s free daily business newspaper, CityAM, has launched a free, mobile version of its daily afternoon podcast. Titan’s Transvision screens at Liverpool Street and Waterloo stations will display a CityAM commercial prompting commuters to enable bluetooth on their mobile phones and download the MP3 podcast.
[via paidcontent]
