Who is Eccky?

I'm speaking at a conference tomorrow and the organizers sent out a press release on how Eccky is the future of social networking and entertainment. Eccky is what I'll be talking about for the first time in public. This press release was picked up by some weblogs and in no time they had collected everything publicly (= via Google) available on Eccky. My team dinners, important meetings, a few qoutes here and there, etc... Within hours I had several interviews as well with traditional press publications that wanted to know more about Eccky after they read something about it in the 'blogosphere' (their words). Reminds me of something I posted on last week. By the way, why don't bloggers ask questions like most journalists do?


So who is Eccky? More on that after tomorrow, but here's a highlight as it was found by others as well: "..., but basically Eccky is the name of a game where two parents can make, name and raise a virtual child using the MSN Messenger and their mobile phone. See mine to the right..;-)"

Jabberwocky Plus

I love the term 'familiar strangers' as it was used for Intel's Jabberwocky project. Now MIT has something similar, and it logs a bit more than just the Bluetooth phones that happen to come close to me. Can't wait for some data...


"Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed the system, which logs the ID code of every Bluetooth chip the phone passes, the location of every phone mast it contacts, every person phoned or texted and when applications are used. Data is then stored on a server which uses software to recognise any patterns in behaviour and predict what may happen next."

Blogs and marketing

Can blogs work as a marketing tool for any company, product or service? It would not surprise me, and I think most people do not yet understand the value blogs can bring in building a real relationship with your customers. Microsoft is a leading the way...


"His blog communicates that Microsoft isn't some faceless giant who doesn't give a fuck about its customers. It's a company full of people who are passionate about trying to make better products and cool services for customers they respect. They pay Scoble less than $100,000 a year (he's blogged about that) and he does a day job too. If you had a $100,000 total marketing budget, you couldn't even get an advertising agency to buy you lunch, let alone work with you."

Living in virtual worlds

The fact that gaming is a huge business (opportunity) is sometimes a surprise to people that have no first hand experience with it. And meanwhile millions and millions of people are spending a good part of their 'free' time playing these games, increasingly together in so called Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). This post on Terra Nova, and the extensive discussion following it, gives some nice insight into this emerging entertainment segment.

Trusted sharing

Things like threedegrees, Waste and Grokster Radio allow closed user groups to share everything digital. I feel these services will be even more destructive to the dominant entertainment business models than something like KaZaa...


"A Grokster-like file sharing functionality figures into my vision of a low key, IM-like, desktop ‘peeps presence panel’ that allows me to click on a friend, family, or business cohort’s name to access their photos, prose, ponderings, priorities, presentations, patterns, projects, etc. all in a pull-down menu with permissions, privacy, and protection."

User led innovation

Since devices are becoming more open and programmable everyday, more innovation will happen. But operators and handset manufacturers do have a choice of speeding things up or slowing them down. Glad to see Nokia is trying to understand the successes of the past in order to facilitate the ones of the future.


"The industry would do well to reflect on these trends. If Ahtisaari is right -- and I think he is -- then the best way for the mobile industry to lift itself to the next level would be to encourage and foster a hacking culture around mobile technology and, moreover, to welcome it when it arises inadvertently."

Software-defined radio

Software-defined radio (or SDR) is making progress and that's a good thing for sure.


"The real trick will be if the software-defined radio in a device can not only handle multiple radio flavors, but support them all at the same time -- if, for instance, it can maintain a cellular call and transmit that to a Bluetooth headset while a user looks up the Web over a Wi-Fi connection."