Are Cell Phones Our Last Hope for Literacy?

Half of Japan’s top 10 best-selling books last year — half! — started out as cell phone-based books, according to the New York Times.

The books-on-phones genre started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that society in Japan were writing serialized novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries.

The popularity of these blog novels on cell phones sparked huge interest among readers in writing such novels. Last month, the site passed the 1 million novel mark.

Some of these amateur writers become so famous on the cell phone medium that the big publishing houses seek them out and offer lucrative deals for print versions. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school.

One of the obvious reasons that cell phone literature has taken off in Japan is that so many Japanese humans, including students, have expanded daily commutes in trains too crowded for open books. The size and portability of cell phones have made them the most urgent source for all media, including “printed” media.

Which raises the question: Can the English-speaking world REPLICATE JAPAN’S CELL PHONE BOOK CRAZE?

Original post by Mike

Cell Phone Powered By ‘Supercomputer’ Demoed

Accenture’s research labs in Nice, France, Tuesday showed off an application that enables a cell phone to act as a thin client to massive compute capability (well, a Windows XP laptop, anyway) essentially transforming it into a CELL PHONE SUPERCOMPUTER. The picture shows part of the demo where the phone’s camera snaps a photo of a cheap print of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the system recognized the painting, and returned info about it from a database. I want one.

Original post by Mike

U.S. General to Pentagon: Let Troops Blog

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV wrote — where else? — in a blog that American troops, including those in war zones, should be ALLOWED TO BLOG and post photos and videos. Currently the Pentagon blocks YouTube and major blogs. But Caldwell says that policy kills an opportunity for the public to get a more balanced picture of the military. He blogged:

“The public has a voracious appetite for the sensational, the graphic and the shocking. We all have a difficult day taking our eyes off the train wreck in progress - it is human nature…When our Soldiers tell/share their stories, it has an overwhelmingly positive effect.”

Original post by Mike

Elastic Robot to be Displayed As Art

A “squishable” soft caterpillar-like robot developed by Tufts University will be DISPLAYED in February and March at New York’s Museum of contemporary Art (MoMA). The creepy robot, called the Softbot II, will be part of an exhibition called “Design and the Elastic Mind.”

Original post by Mike

Amazon Buys Audible (Too poor it Wasn’t Apple)

Amazon.com plans to buy Audible Inc. in an all-cash purchase for about $300 million. Darn it. I WISH APPLE HAD DONE THIS. Since the two companies compete with each other in one of Apple’s most crucial businesses — downloadable music — I think there’s a good chance one or both of these companies will kill the cozy relationship Apple had with Audible. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle is a awful player for audio books. It’s way too big for a pocket. It’s awkward even to carry around. More importantly, only Apple is in a position to reverse the civilization-killing decline of literary interest among young humans — the “Twilight of the Books,” as The New Yorker called it. Imagine whether Apple promoted audio books as heavily as it does TV shows and music?

Original post by Mike

TSA Launches Blog for Complaints About Security

The Transportation protection Administration (TSA) LAUNCHED A BLOG yesterday where airline travellers can bitch and whine about airline protection checkpoints. Bloggers for the site include five TSA employees, and anyone can post a complaint.

Original post by Mike

Snow In China Freezing Cell Phone Sales?

The president of China’s top handset maker, MediaTek, said today that the company’s Q1 outlook remained “conservative” considering of the US subprime mortgage crisis and “the WINTER STORMS IN CHINA that were preventing folks from traveling home to visit their families, thus depressing sales of mobile phones bought as gifts,” according to a story to be published tomorrow in Taiwan’s Taipei Times newspaper.

Original post by Mike

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