I was a finalist in the Nokia mobile filmmaking competition for Pangea Day, and they flew the five of us to LA from all over the world. The guy who won was from South Africa - Eduardo Cachuco. This was his winning video, of kids playing an old arcade machine in a township outside Johannesburg: http://share.ovi.com/media/PangeaDay.film/ecachucho.10002
He told me that online video - even YouTube - is hard to watch in South Africa because of the connection speeds. You have to wait ages for everything to load and buffer. Even in the capital, Jo'burg, where he lives and works. The telecom company has a monopoly on internet connections and there's no connection or government regulation to increase speeds. Crazy - must be hurting their economy at some level. Anyway, I wonder whether this has increased the amount of mobile video being watched and made because it's not noticeably slower than their 'broadband'. The same in South Asia & South East Asia. There's lots of mobile filming action there - a significant number of entries for the competition were from India and Indonesia, for example. Nokia have pushed mobile filmmaking in the Southern Hemisphere for much longer than they have here - this was the first year for the mobile filmmaking competition in the Northern Hemisphere, but it's been running successfully in Asia & Australasia for three years. They're certainly upping the ante in pushing storytelling using their devices. But the N Series have been 3G devices - so haven't been available in the US until recently. USA can be amazingly backward in adoption of new tech, weirdly - not sure what the reasons for not adopting 3G early are, but presumably it got caught up in commercial/ regulatory nonsense. Apple's refusal to add video is just stupid - they're saving it as a treat to convince people to buy a new iPhone in 2009. Frustrating. Nokia's video is good (tho colors aren't great and low light is terrible) - and they even have a built-in editor. But I can't help feeling that Apple's implementation & interface would be easier & higher quality. Rupert http://twittervlog.tv On 27-Nov-08, at 7:24 AM, Jay dedman wrote: We call them cell phones in the US, but Mobile video is becoming pretty interesting...especially outside the US. South Africa particularly has some stuff going on. a conference called, Mobile Active, just occurred last month: http://www.mobileactive08.org/ Then there's this project that is getting kids to connect to each the through video on their mobile phones; http://www.thegrid.co.za/ Here's a documentary they are making: http://www.vincentmaher.com/?p=779 what I dont get is why it seems to difficult to do cell video in the US. is the N95 the only game in town? my iPhone is cool...but only seems to do video if I jail break it. weird. Jay -- http://jaydedman.com 917 371 6790 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
