1 Mixed Reality Killer App
OK a ‘give us your comment’ competition. Below an oldie but goody clip from CeBit 2006 but what do you think is the main killer application for this particular synchronous interface? – (no sneaking ideas by reading the hundreds of comments on it’s YouTube page!).
2 iPhone Home
Above ‘me browsing the lamp site on me lil’iPhone (I have big fingers BTW).
I am beginning to love (read, depend) on my little iPhone (when I don’t unintentionally brick it adding alpha level apps) and one of it’s coolest features of course is web browsing (including YouTube video watching etc:) over WiFi. So although this is old’ish news from December it’s worth posting about. The iPhone browsing market share is huge compared with all the other mobile devices out there. Net Applications last quarter of 07 report showed that it had nearly 0.1% of the total share of browser platforms used to view the web. That is a significant number firstly as it is the most used browser platform after computer screens (coming in at 10th place) and when you think it had been out in the US for around 5 months vs 10 years of the millions of Windows CE and Palm devices – who could only muster about 2/3 of iPhones share. Very significant.
If like me you have been browsing the web on a mobile phone or my last favourite a Palm TX you do have to ask yourself why the sudden dominance? Seamless integration with Firefox or Safari when you doc your phone to a mac (all the bookmarks just fly across)? The wonderful two finger zoom feature, making the experience much more tactile and fun? The nice chunky keyboard that pops up when you are entering urls, especially in landscape mode with its large screen? The fact that the most popular sites like YouTube actually work!? Perhaps because you can actually fill in forms and ‘do’ your social networks? We would be interested in other reasons we all think the iPhone is such a great mobile browsing device?
Here is a quick snapshot of the top 11 of the list, again pointing out iPhone is the next top browser after larger screen computer based systems:
1. View Trend Windows XP – 78.37%
2. View Trend Windows Vista – 9.19%
3. View Trend MacIntel – 3.59%
4. View Trend Mac OS – 3.22%
5. View Trend Windows 2000 – 2.97%
6. View Trend Windows 98 – 0.76%
7. View Trend Windows NT – 0.63%
8. View Trend Linux – 0.57%
9. View Trend Windows ME – 0.43%
10. View Trend iPhone – 0.09%
11. View Trend Windows CE – 0.06%
3 Mirror Mirror
There are a whole bunch of ‘customisable’ Social Virtual World engines/services springing up that are trying to knock good ole Second Life of it’s pretty prim perch. Most fall into the ‘create anything and do what you want camp’ such as Metaplace, Vastpark, OpenLife, HiPiHi or Multiverse etc: Quite a few fall into the ‘fixed and/or branded’ space such as There.com, Habbo, Nictropolis or Webkinz. Incidentally Raph Koster’s Metaplace went public a few days ago.
So it is going to be interesting how the beta Mirror World will fare given it is very focused on being a precise duplicate of key icons, cities, tourist and business hubs from our physical real world. I can see the attraction of this environment running on top of say Google maps and Google are pushing into this area too, but I wonder if this may be yet another proprietary virtual dead end. To make it really attractive to tourist and business, like any social network, it’s going to need the social part – lots ofpeople and as we know the likes of Habbo and SL (which has itself lots of real world locations within it) have a heck of a start over these, well, start-ups. Of course I will be beta testing this and many others! Some press release blurb…
“From key tourism destinations, places of interest , historical sites to realistic full scale 3-Dimensional replicas of entire cities. This mirror world of our existing planet – âÄúMirror WorldâÄù allows end users to journey through âÄúvirtual wordsâÄù in the comfort of their homes âÄ“ creating a brand new exciting marketing tool for tourism industry players like tourism destination operators, Hoteliers, Shopping Malls, Retail Outlets and more to showcase and sell their destinations and facilities to key markets around the world.”
