3G is coming! Arigato UN!

This is hot news, just came out this morning! A follow up to my last post Live TV on your phone posted this week in which I spoke about United Nations discussing the possibility of expanding reserved television bandwidth for mobile service providers for them to provide third-generation services to their subscribers so that they could watch mobile TV on their cell phones and/or hand-held devices among other new options.

Yesterday in a meeting in Geneva, United Nations telecommunications decided to give mobile service providers access to additional bandwidth. In my opinion, this will impact traditional media exponentially, especially television broadcast.

How does this affect my final thesis project? Well, UN just made my project one of the hottest shows on the planet. This seems very surreal, everything is falling in the right place at the right time. In a nutshell, this is a perfect prototype development! I love technology, I love research and I love blogging in my Research Method’s class break! Wi-Fi rules! Once we have WiMAX, I’ll be blogging, vlogging and especially moblogging while in transit!

Here’s the article published this morning by International Herald Tribune in the UK:

BANDWIDTH EXPANDED FOR MOBILE PROVIDERS

International Herald Tribune

The Associated Press
Published November 16, 2007

GENEVA: A United Nations telecommunications meeting decided Thursday to give mobile service providers access to bandwidth now reserved for television broadcasts, a hard-fought compromise that will offer the promise of high-speed Internet access on the move anywhere in the world, but not until 2015 in some places.

The decision, which came at the end of the monthlong meeting of the World Radiocommunications Conference in Geneva, will give makers of wireless equipment more confidence to develop better and less expensive Internet devices.

Delegates met for almost 20 hours straight in a plenary session that began Wednesday evening before reaching the consensus compromise.

The conference meets every three or four years under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union, an arm of the United Nations.

U.S. officials had lobbied hard for a single global agreement on spectrum use, arguing that a common approach was better than each country or region deciding to use separate frequencies for next-generation mobile services.

In the end, European and African countries decided to limit the amount of bandwidth available for mobile services to half of what will be offered in other regions, a move seen as a concession to their national broadcasting companies.

Some regions also opted to wait until 2015 before making the least expensive part of the radio spectrum available to advanced mobile services.

Although U.S. consumers are likely to gain access to these services starting in early 2009, it will take six years more for those in Europe, Africa, China, Russia and much of the Middle East.

European broadcasters had warned that digital terrestrial television reception could be interrupted by nearby cellphones, computers and other devices that shared the frequency.

Live TV on your phone!

Did you know that a United Nations group coordinates the world’s broadcast frequencies? They have to make a decision by Thursday whether to transfer a part of the UHF television bandwidth to wireless phone service providers so that they can provide third-generation wireless services for lower costs. This would bring live television on your cell phones! This is an exiting news for me as my project deals with wireless interactivity. Here’s an article from the International Herald Tribune:

MOBILE-PHONE OPERATORS VIE FOR UHF SPECTRUM
By Kevin J. O’Brien

Published: November 12, 2007

BERLIN:The United Nations group responsible for coordinating the world’s broadcast frequencies is expected to decide by Thursday whether to transfer part of the UHF television bandwidth to phone operators, which they say would allow them to offer third-generation wireless services to more people at a lower cost.

Broadcasters fear the reallocation, made possible by the global migration of television from analogue transmission to a more compressed digital one, as ultimately increasing their competition for the video audience.

“We are turning the tide of opinion in our favor quite quickly,” said Tom Phillips, director of governmental and regulatory affairs at the GSM Association, a group based in London that represents the mobile operators. “I think this is a race against time for us. Do we have enough time or not? I don’t know.”

The World Radiocommunication Conference, a four-week meeting of 2,000 delegates to the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva, ends Thursday. The recommendations of the ITU are not binding, but they are usually followed by most member countries, especially those in Europe and Asia.

Richard Russell, the head of the 153-member U.S. delegation, said progress on a compromise had been made since negotiations began in October but the final days of the conference would be critical. The United States plans in January to auction a part of its UHF spectrum for high-speed 3G service.

“There are a lot of countries with a lot of different issues on this,” Russell said recently. “That makes the task of finding an appropriate compromise more complicated, but not impossible.”

The UHF bandwidth has been used almost exclusively for TV signals for 60 years. The world is in varying stages of going digital, with U.S. broadcasters switching by 2009, Asian broadcasters by 2015 and most European countries sometime in between. The issue of what to do with this “digital dividend” has fallen to the ITU, a group created in 1865 to coordinate cross-border telegraph operations and now a UN agency.

“This is a huge issue because UHF spectrum is the sweet spot, where it costs the least to transmit and where the signal can easily penetrate buildings and other barriers,” said Phil Harris, a director at InterConnect Communications, a consultant based in Chepstow, England, that advises mobile operators and regulators. “This is the so-called digital dividend. The question is, who will get it – mobile operators or broadcasters?”

Going into the closed-door ITU negotiations, most European nations opposed reserving part of the UHF spectrum for 3G mobile services. Some countries, like Russia, use UHF for aviation and defense communication. Germany and Spain are pursing national plans to use the extra UHF spectrum for more broadcast services, not for mobile operators.

The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations, an official observer at the ITU negotiations representing 48 national regulators, opposes reallocating UHF spectrum.

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission, which represents North and South America, supports reserving part of the UHF spectrum for wireless purposes. Brazil, which initially opposed the plan, signed on to the U.S.-led proposal after it was changed to emphasize that countries agreeing to the plan could set their own timetables for digital broadcast conversion.

But most broadcasters see the ITU proposal as an attempt by mobile operators to obtain a coveted spectrum that would enable cheaper mobile broadband and video service, which would raise competition for broadcasters. The European Broadcasting Union, which represents 75 broadcasters, has been warning ITU delegates that UHF spectrum-sharing with mobile operators would interfere with TV signals.

Mobile operators cite their own studies that say no such interference is possible.

Oliver Herrgesell, a spokesman for RTL Group, the largest European broadcaster, said broadcasters were already complying with government regulations on TV content and advertising and should not be forced at the same time to compete with mobile operators to purchase additional bandwidth.

“Broadcasting is highly regulated,” he said. “Television faces many obligations regarding programs and local production. There is now a proposal to allocate spectrum on market conditions. These double standards could endanger the fragile broadcasting system.”

Mobile operators are trying to convince ITU delegates that setting aside the UHF spectrum for 3G would lead to regional, if not global, broadband service at more affordable prices and would help extend coverage to the 20 percent of the world’s population without broadband access in rural areas.

Going into the conference, some delegates favored postponing a decision until the ITU’s next conference in 2011.

If a decision is put off, individual countries will parcel out extra bandwidth before the next conference for a range of different purposes at different frequencies, making it impossible to establish a global standard or service, said Massimiliano Simoni, a radio communications engineer at Telecom Italia who is attending the ITU event.

“If this doesn’t happen at the ITU, then the opportunity will be lost,” Simoni said. “Frequency decisions are by their nature long-term decisions.”

The Break Up!

I came across this video that shows the relationship between an advertiser and a consumer. They’ve agreed to meet in a restaurant. The man’s feeling perfectly happy, until the woman makes a painful announcement: she wants a divorce. In the course of their conversation she makes it clear to him why she is leaving him. And he makes it very clear that he doesn’t have an empathic bone in his body. At the end of the movie the woman walks away disappointed but determined. The advertiser stays behind alone.

For those of you who come from a marketing background would understand why there has been a shift in marketing. The four Ps (product, price, place and promotion) became the four Cs (customer satisfaction, cost, convenience and communication).

What I have learned through my research and the business unit of one of my courses is that marketers have a new approach. It’s not about needs but the ability to convince the customer that you are fulfilling a need that they already had. Listening to your favourite music in the living room is not enough, we want to continue listening to it once we leave the living room and iPod fulfills that extension of need. Enjoy the video:

API for Cab Tracker

I have great news to share. Since I wrote about Cabspotting and its amazing feature Cab Tracker, in particular, I’ve been researching ways to create a similar interface. I contacted Stamen Design who has access to the application programming interface (API) of Cab Tracker to see if they would share the API with me so that I could play around with it, “test drive” it with my own GPS devices placed randomly in the city and create the patterns. They said YES!

I am very grateful and excited to have access to such a “cool” and mind-blowing interface. Everything is falling in the right places at the right time. Stay tuned for more exciting news…

Alternate Reality Game

ARG or alternate reality game is an interactive narrative that takes place in the real world and is affected by the interactive players. I would discuss and incorporate ARGs in my upcoming posts as it relates to my final thesis project. Here’s an introduction to ARG:

Six panelists at ARGFest 2007 discuss the definition of an ‘ARG’, followed by a short clip from the live recording of the ARGFest netcast, followed by the ensuing nuttiness of late night geekdom. Enjoy the video, I am also including a transcript of the video for those of you who would like to go back and refer to something in the video:

(transcript: How would you describe an ARG?)

* Brian Clark, GMD Studios: If I had to describe it to people, I’d describe it as platformless gaming. Sort of accepting the idea that gaming and play can happen anywhere, in any context, with any device. Once you sort of embrace that idea, it adjusts the way you see playfulness as your social role. So gaming doesn’t have any ‘this is the acceptable place to have gaming and this is the unacceptable place’.

* Brooke Thompson, Giant Mice: I actually tend to focus on the story, and talk about how it’s a story that’s broken up into pieces that you can find anywhere, and that it’s your story. Even if you’re not the person that put it out there, it’s the story that you are discovering and that you are a part of and that you are building, so that’s the focus that I tend to take with it.

* Sean C. Stacey, Unfiction Inc.: That’s actually the focus that I take too. It’s a collaborative story-telling process. The players in the gaming community are putting the story together for the puppetmasters – putting it back together. The puppetmasters know what was there in the first place, but what comes together from the players is coloured by their experiences and their knowledge, and it becomes a different thing at that point, than what was visualized at the start when developers started putting pieces out there. And I’d describe it as platformless, or anything could be your platform, anything and nothing; then I’d start talking about examples at that point, because it doesn’t make any sense to anybody.

* Jane McGonigal, Institute for the Future: You always say it plays out in the real world, it uses every day technologies rather than gaming specific technologies. I focus on massively scaled collaboration- the puzzles and missions you design that you can’t possibly solve alone, as a staple of the genre. I also emphasize a lot, the role of the real time game designer. I talk about how this is the first genre of digital gaming that has real time design; and the responsiveness, and what Sean Stewart calls the jazz of doing an alternate reality game, is really important. And Brian, you were talking about sustainability, and Adrian, you were talking in terms of replayability – I think one of the great challenges and opportunities in alternate reality gaming is to figure out how to keep the jazz in, replayable and stable. Obviously that’s a challenge people know about, but I actually think given the number of amazing grassroots moderators and the community’s ability to reform itself around problems, that it is a solvable problem, and to lose that sense of ‘a game is different every time it’s played’, depending on the community, would be to abuse the real heart of the genre. Otherwise it just becomes interactive media.

* Adrian Hon, Mind Candy: Over the 2 or 3 years I’ve been at Mind Candy, I used to have this decision tree about how to explain ARGs. Start at the top: Is this person over 40 years old? Well, if he is, talk about Masquerade [a game from the UK]. If he’s under 40, talk about The Game [UK]. Has the person watched The Game? Yes or no. Yes? Well it’s a bit like The Game but without cheating. No? Well… I don’t know. And it had to do with all these different things. But now the main way I do it is actually talking about the fact that ARGs don’t really have controls, and it sort of touches basically on what Jane said about real life. In the sense of using these interfaces that we already now use, and when I talk to [video game designers about it, why some game is a lot of fun and why a lot of people play it] is because you already know how to sing, you already know how you’re supposed to play guitar – you don’t have to be taught how to do that. Whereas if you look at a Playstation 2 controller, they have 15 buttons and 2 joysticks, and even I have problems working out how to play [the game] or something like that. Whereas with ARGs, everyone knows how to use Google pretty much, everyone knows how to send an email. That’s the interesting thing that I normally concentrate on.

* Evan Jones, Stitch Media: That’s a great point – IGDA, their accessibility group is quite interested in alternate reality games just for the fact that they are so accessible. The game play devices already have things like TTY for telephones and all these different aspects. But, to your question – the way that I define things: I’ve been presenting on this a while just recently, and the way I’ve tried to sum it up lately is I talk about how the characters believe that they’re real[...] It’s not through the user’s experience, but through the creative experience – that the characters in the story do not let go of the notion that they exist; from there all the other things sort of emerge.