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Boo on the Beeb!

AudioBoo was just featured on BBC News as part of a feature user generated content coverage of the G20 Summit in London!

AudioBoo was my first 4iP commission and you can read more on how it's doing here at 4iP or on the Guardian's site.

AudioBoo Lives

Today is a good day! Mark Rock and the team at Best Before have dodged and weaved their way around the Apple App Store Police to launch the first version of AudioBoo. Not only is it a great tool but one of my first 4iP commissions Head to the app store now to download it for free!

As you may already know AudioBoo is an application for recording and sharing your audio with the world. The built in microphone allows you to create audio up to 3 minuets in length and post it to the web. You can easily wrap the audio in a rich layer of metadata by adding titles, text, geo-location and a photo.

From a 4iP perspective I hope it empowers users to better create audio journalism or first person narratives as well as makes it easier to find this type of content on the web.

Needless to say it's V1. A huge step but there's a tonne of work to do on the application itself, the API and other tricks Best Before have up their digital sleeves. Keep your eyes out for updates.

Once again a huge congratulations to the Best Before team. They've done an amazing job.

Update: Here are a few links to blogs and chat about AudioBoo:

http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/03/18/easy-audio-blogging-with-audioboo/

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/03/16/audioboo-out-of-beta-now-available-at-app-store/

http://www.4ip.org.uk/blog/audioboo_lives/

Mobile: future trends

"It's the recreation of the Internet, it's the recreation of the PC (personal computer) story and it is before us -- and it is very likely it will happen in the next year"

Eric Schmit Jan 2008 [Reuters]

More from my trends presentation last week. Mobile is going to be huge the 'mother of all markets' of Steve Jobs is to believed. According to Jupiter Research, made-for-mobile content will drive mobile entertainment revenues to $47.5 billion by 2010.

While grossly oversimplified this graph from Jason Grigsby's presentation illustrates just how large the opportunity is. The size of mobile (3.3B handsets, one for every two people on the planet) is staggering, and well known (see Communities Dominate Blogs for description of other media's relative penetration).

Other number of note:

• iPhone sold 1 million units in its initial 74 days [Apple]. According to Cloud4 95% of iPhone customers regularly surf the internet.
• Apple claim to be on course of 10 million by the end of the year [Fortune]. This is particularly significant because Google sees 50 times the number of searches using the iPhone than any other devise.
• Mobile gaming is expected to generate $9.6 billion in global revenues by 2011 [Gartner]
• Data services revenue increased from $2.7 billion in 2005 to $6.9 billion in 2007 [Cellular News]
• Location based services are driving this growth. Last year, Google’s Marissa Meyer told us that the Google Maps usage from iPhone was off the charts. The new iPhone with Google Maps married to GPS will give location based services a further boost. [GigaOM]
• China adding 6 million subscribers / month [Cellular News]
• More than 100,000 iPhone developers downloaded the beta iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) in the first four days since its launch on March 6.

These number reveal the following trends:

• Mobile broadband will become pervasive in established and emerging markets
• Media to mobile will become the dominant delivery and compute platform
• There will be a broad array of user friendly devices
• User experience will be highly personalised and targeted from the device design to the content consumed
• Location based applications will receive more funding that ever before