The Digital Media Conference brings together players from the entertainment, internet and new media industries with a focus on digital media creation and distribution. It opened with Analysts talking about trends in digital media and includes sessions on online advertising, video, and social media. It’s a jam packed day with two separate sessions throughout the day punctuated by keynotes by industry power players from AOL, Yahoo, Bittorrent, Napster and the list goes on.

The most exciting this for me here today are the B-sides. They’ve devoted basically the entire second track of the conference to Mobile industry panels and that’s just my speed. I’ve hunkered down in a front row seat by the *only* power strip in the whole conference room and I refuse to move so that I can share the most interesting and insightful trends from the panel sessions.

Check out what’s on tap: Read more…

The passing of George Carlin this past weekend represented much more than the loss of one of the funniest, edgiest comedians of all time. It also underscores the dwindling number of counter culture visionaries left in American culture. In the past few years, we’ve lost pivotal figures in the evolution of our culture like Timothy Leary and Hunter Thompson to the point that it’s hard to point out any significant counter culture figures remaining in modern society.

Now all that we have left are Youtubers performing stupid human tricks and celebutants as mascots for our materialistic and money-obsessed society. Everyone is screaming to get our attention in small bursts for short-lived fame or advertising revenue. And we’re all complacent to stare at our monitors and TV screens to be entertained instead of really making a difference. We’ve even commercialized our causes now, collecting our badge for being environmental or caring about the troops in Iraq. We collect them like our Prada clothes, Coach purses, Plasma TVs and latest gadgets.

You see, the counter culture is a critical component of social change in society. The great minds of the 60’s and 70’s weren’t afraid to challenge the establishment and their ideas spread like wildfire. As the counter culture movements swept through in waves, they brought to light new truths around freedom, social responsibility and personal exploration. Without these influencers or any substantive underground movement, we have no vehicle to propagate radical new philosophies that the larger society can adopt to effect real change in society. Read more…

Dashwire 2.0 for Windows Mobile allows you to sync all of your files and contacts using your PDA data connection and has cool remote control and picture sharing features as well. You install it on your Pocket PC or Smartphone and it will sync all of your data so that you can see it on your Dashwire dashboard.

It basically provides a way to Sync your phone to the web, along with a really solid dashboard and some cool social features. Check out a thorough review of these features and how they work after the jump! Read more…

While the end of days may not be here for mobile carriers like AT&T, Verizon or Sprint-Nextel, the mobile web is driving fundamental change in the industry. Much like the internet forced better pricing and more choice for land lines (those still exist, right?), the mobile web will force carriers to evolve or die.

So what are the forces threatening the power structure of the mobile industry? Read more…

Scotland has become the first country to address harassments and pornographic text messaging in their legal code, with stiff penalties for those that send unwanted indecent messages. This is a timely move as people come to rely on text and email messages more and more to interact. We’ve seen a lot of interest lately in dirty texting and believe that it’s a good way to extend intimate interactions to times when you can’t be near your partner. However, as people rely on texting for intimate interactions, there comes a need to protect people from unwanted indecency or harassment.

The Register helps define the broadly worded legislation saying that, “The offence will be committed if someone sends an unsolicited text message to someone else which a court finds was designed to give the sender sexual gratification or to humiliate, distress or alarm the receiver.” It seems that this would include pornographic spam as well as unwanted dirty texts.

The penalties for this new law can range up to 10 years in prison for improperly soliciting text sex or harassment via sms. I think that one of the most important keys here is that the messages are unwanted, similar to how we generally classify sexual harassment. This falls right in line with our Tips for Dirty Texting in terms of starting slow to see how your partner feels about sending naughty messages and making sure they feel comfortable along the way.

Mobile web usage is surging dramatically this year, with Opera reporting that the number of pages viewed on their Opera Mini browser alone nearly tripled during the 6 months from November to May to nearly 3 billion pages per month. This doesn’t include iPhone users, who make up an even larger growth engine for mobile web usage. As mobile interfaces for mobile phones mature, along with mobile browsers and handset interfaces, we’re seeing drastic changes in how people surf the web on their cell phone.

Before the iPhone came along, people were very unlikely to perform general web searches on their phone. iPhone users are as much as 50 times as likely to use Google search as other smartphone users, likely because the larger screen means that they can make sense of the results better. Additionally, Google released plugins for Blackberry and Windows Mobile handsets that allow users to search directly from their smarphone’s home screen, thus increasing mobile searches as much as 20%.

So the question is: Now that millions more users are flocking to the mobile web on their handsets, what kind of information are they looking for?
Read more…

A new trend in the UK dubbed ‘dipping’ is getting media attention for it’s use of online tools for teenage mischief. Apparently some youths are using Google Earth to scope out local pools to crash while the homeowners are at work or sound asleep. The ‘dipping’ parties are organized on Facebook or Bebo and some have even called for dressing up.

Investigators found that the most recent event was attended by about 16 people, though over 500 were invited in total. Apparently this is a new trend that has been backed up by increased party crashing of events listed on social networking sites. Authorities are also worried that the practice of dipping could become a hot trend during the summer months while homeowners leave their pools unattended for vacations.

This is in interesting and inventive use of Google Earth for classic teenage hijinks. The only difference is the paper trail that leads investigators directly to the participants. Once location-based technologies improve, crowd sourcing events like this can simply broadcast their location in real time to limit the footprint and paper trail. I wonder how often people are using Google Earth for urban exploration and scouting for other events?

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