Liz Everette

V Cast ReligionVerizon announced that it is partnering with Unity in Values to launch another V Cast channel. This is one is youth oriented, featuring music and extreme sports. Sounds like every other channel out there. Oh, right. This is “The Mobile Word.” The Christian V Cast channel.

Now I don’t have a problem with religion. I don’t really even have a problem with religions selling out, or at least co-opting all the secular things I hold sacred. But you have to wonder: what is the point of all of this?

Salvation is one of those things that I had always thought was free. But here, you’re adding a $15 monthly cost or $3 daily cost for the V Cast service, another few bucks for FaithMobile’s Bible verses via text, and not to mention a glut of Tobymac ringtones.

Faith-based everything may be huge right now but this is a for-profit business, and last I checked, religious organizations are not-for-profit. Someone is making a huge chunk of money off of the people getting saved by cell phone. You’re not a soul to be saved, you’re a demographic component to be counted and marketed to.

metallica_baby.jpg

EMI apparently has dementia. After years of the record industry putting out zillions of lawsuits against hapless grandmothers and teenage kids with the end result requiring DRM wrapping on everything, EMI has decided to buck the trend. They’re in talks to release normal, unprotected MP3s so that consumers can purchase them anywhere and download them to any device.

Let me get this straight. The RIAA and its cronies have been bitching up a storm about copyright infringement for years. Now that sales of online content have been possibly hurting because of the lack of portability, they’re just going to get rid of it. While I’m all for it, I have to wonder if this is going to result in another anti-consumer backlash in the next five to ten years.

Me? I buy my CDs, and I rarely buy them digitally. Of course, I’m also a music snob. It may take a couple of days to get them from my favorite record store, but I’m quite happy to support them. And I also want the CD case so I can prove the all important “heard them first” thing with music inferiors.

The pornography industry has always been on the cutting edge: over the past two centuries we have gone from waiting months for a naked picture to be painted to minutes for a poorly lit home video of celebrity sex to make it around the world and across headlines everywhere. Porn made home broadband access catch on like wildfire and, once again, it could very well determine what format wins the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war. As Nerd Approved recently suggested, Sony’s reported refusal to allow porn onto Blu-Ray discs might well be the deciding factor in all of this.

Technology analysts are certainly looking to the pornography industry for guidance, and initial reports suggest that based on numbers alone, HD-DVD might win out because of the fact that it is cheaper to produce and doesn’t require any significant overhauls of existing technology. Of course if Sony bows out, then that would no longer be a factor. The wild card here is going to be Sony, which needs good news for investors right now, and although I certainly doubt a rousing cry of “Porn on Blu-Ray!” will be heard over Wall Street, it would certainly give consumers one more reason to go out and purchase that PS3.

As far as I’m concerned Sony’s refusal to allow porn on Blu-Ray is illogical. As the average porn store becomes less seedy and the online order less personal, people who have money will be willing to put it into what they want to really see. It’s now acceptable for women and men to acknowledge the industry and to enjoy it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Candida Royale’s name pop up in otherwise stodgy women’s magazines.

Quality is important in pornography like in no other film genre: the ability to really see the action in intimate and immaculate detail is, ahem, invigorating – and that drives people to purchase what they could see in poor scaled down formats for cheap, or probably even free. As ZDNet suggests, the potential of a higher capacity format lends itself not only to better quality images, but to what they’re calling “creative expression– like giving viewers choice of camera angles.” The ability to select the standard side view or maybe under the guy or even the unique through the boobs view would definitely make the viewing that much more personal.

Bottom line: if Sony makes the decision for the porn industry, the HD-DVD format will win by default. This is exactly what happened with VHS vs Sony’s Betamax, and for one reason or another, Sony is unwilling to learn from it’s mistakes. However, if they allow Blu-Ray distributors to make their own business decisions the porn industry won’t make its decision arbitrarily, nor with revenge on Sony in mind: it will make its decision based on the consumer. Expect telemarketing surveys to start with: “Is an adult over age eighteen available? Sir, I’d like to ask you a few questions today about your pornography viewing habits.”

World of Warcraft has hit eight million players: congratulations to those of you who have the free time to spend so much effort on reality avoidance.

Seriously though, this is interesting, especially because of the apparent “stickiness” of WoW. The people that I know who play are die-hard– and there are a lot of them. So truly, congratulations Blizzard: this is definitely a huge feat in the frequently fickle world of gaming.

Therefore, it is important to note that the Burning Crusade expansion pack will be hitting store shelves tomorrow January 16th. If you can’t wait that long, head on down to Gamestop tonight for their midnight launch.

Absolute Gadget

iPhone

Neo, you’ve been replaced. Even worse, your replacement is not human. It’s far better.

As I had previously griped about in my post on convergence, or rather, Intel’s decision not to expand beyond UMPCs, I want an all in one, completely converged device. Today Steve Jobs delivered on that and went above and beyond what I had even hoped for at this point in time.

The specs aren’t what I’m focused on so much though– a big screen is nice, their new multi-touch feature is certainly cool (and far less hateful than texting out emails), and it runs OSX of all freakin’ things.

But here’s what I’m focused on:

1. 2MP camera– so that I can share my life as it happens, in decent detail and not waste people’s time and money by MMSing them pictures they can’t see– they’ll get them by email.

2. WiFi!!! I can save on my daytime minutes by calling people from WiFi hotspots via Skype– or at least that’s what I’m hoping that I can do with it. I’m not totally certain, but it seems worth a shot. Even if I can’t do that, I can at least play games online all day without having a really expensive data plan.

3. The content is going to rock. How do I know this? It’s already out there, waiting for me on my iPod. All I’ll have to do is move some of it over. Beyond that, it’s WiFi enabled, and the web is full of things to keep you occupied.

To sum it up: my DS is going to be a dust collector, unless the household obsession with Konami runs strong into the summer, in which case I’ll never get to hold the remote again. My RAZR is headed to the spot where my NEC 515 now sits– great phone paperweight land. And my iPod? Well, that’s probably still coming with me, since it’s a 30GB that’s almost full. It’s great for car trips and long days at work, but it won’t be with me everyday without fail.

June can’t come soon enough!

Apple

Cingular’s video sharing service won’t launch until later this year, but they will be demo-ing it at CES. I know that this has value to some people– the press release example of distant relatives seeing their new grandchild is certainly moving– but then there are the rest of us whose parents don’t much care to see yet another cute thing that their grandpuppy did. Yes, I said grandpuppy.

I think that this is ultimately a niche service, or else a service that will be used for those extraordinary events, as mentioned above. A couple of thoughts though: bullying by text message has become pervasive in the U.K., and although I haven’t seen statistics for the U.S., I can imagine it being similarly bad. I’m curious as to how children will adopt this mechanism to be even meaner. And then of course, the obvious: can the porn industry leverage this service to gain momentum on mobile?

Nielsen SoundScan released data today on the past years music purchase information. Not surprising: rap and hip hop ringtones held seven of the top ten spots on the realtones chart and six out of ten spots on the polyphonic chart. Surprising? The Super Mario Bros. theme was number one on the polyphonic chart, and by a good margin.

The digital track sales chart was something different altogether though: country superstars Rascal Flatts were the most downloaded artist based on track sales, and the alternative-punk genre dominated barely with four of the top ten slots.

The bottom line is this: realtone purchases are made by the young and devoid of taste, digital music is purchased by lots of people devoid of taste.

Business Wire

Um, yeah. I really don’t know why Forrester Research had to study this, but apparently, they did. I probably wouldn’t have spent the money and instead just hollered across the house at various family members.

Seriously though: 79% of consumers find the idea of ads on their mobile annoying and 97% percent don’t trust ads by texting. How can you blame them? I don’t have a massive data plan– I use my RAZR to check hockey scores, home email, and occasionally a white pages lookup. That’s it. I use Opera Mini for all of these functions– it won’t download images, and when consulting nhl.com, that is a very good thing. The browser built into my phone is painfully slow and I’m not a big fan of my carrier’s WAP deck layout or content. Banner ads from Verizon or Sprint (neither of which are my carrier) certainly wouldn’t induce me to continue to use my built-in browser.

If anyone saw Morgan Webb in “Morgan’s Minute” on G4 last night (sometime between 8 and 9) she made the point for me: if you’re going to sell something to me, you’d better give me something in return. We have come to expect that: an advertisement has to have a decent return on investment for the consumer or it’s not worth our precious time to pay attention.

I have a feeling that this will play out within the realm of Xero Mobile, a new MVNO will be launching this year. Their hook is that talk time will be subsidized by watching various ads on the phone. If I’m not paying for data services for the honor of this, it might be a viable consideration. Then again, it depends on how cool the phone is.

Advertising Age

So take me back to Cingular
No, you can’t go back to Cingular
Been a long time gone, Cingular
Why did Cingular get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Feds
(Apologies to They Might Be Giants)

AT&T sent out a press release last week stating that its acquisition of BellSouth has been completed. The deal will also consolidate ownership and management of Cingular Wireless and yellowpages.com.

Their plans are to start the rebranding process for both BellSouth and Cingular ASAP. If you’re interested in the management details, and such, feel free to read them here.

All that I’ve been able to ascertain from their literature is that this is a wonderful event that will allow consumers the chance to gain lots of next-gen tools and functionalities. Early 2007 is the only timeframe that I have seen thus far.

Perry Como is on top of the Billboard ringtones chart this week with two Christmas Classics: “Jingle Bells” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” For those of you who have no idea who I’m talking about: don’t worry about it. “Jingle Bells” came out in 1946 and there won’t be a test.

Boris Karloff’s “You’re A Mean One Mr. Grinch” is number three on the chart, and much to my chagrin, the Twisted Sister Christmas album ringtones don’t seem to have made it up there.

Billboard