Mobilizing Youth

Interactive Science Exhibit in Second Life

Pretty interesting use of Second Life. NOAA's Earth Research Lab created tsumani/hurricane/glacial melting "exhibits" in Second Life that teach the user about various science related topics - mostly pertaining to weather.

Any nonprofit that wanted to create this kind of 3d interactive exhibit used to spend months doing it and 10000s of dollars. SL gives a nice framework with built-in promotional opportunities. Certainly at this point in time, the buzz it's generating is probably worth the investment itself (although that may become quickly untrue).

I don't know how compelling the content is - given SL's limitations. It looks to convey a few simple points well, but doesn't offer much depth beyond those points.

Link to article and screenshots:

http://news.com.com/2300-1043_3-6179917-1.html?tag=ne.gall.pg 

Tacoda, Behavioral Targetting

This is interesting - just picked up the story on TechPresident. Hadn't heard of Tacoda before. It seems that what they do is run an ad network. Then, they gather visitor data when someone clicks an ad and aggregate that data. They've got a big enough ad network that there is enough data to make some broad generalizations about user behavior as it relates to certain brands and/or web sites. (i *think* this is how it works)

So they've been able to model behavior of visitors to Obama and Clinton's web sites. They can tell that Clinton visitors are into cars and vacations and Obama visitors are into blackberrys.

Very interesting. Definitely could help some campaigns figure out where to place ads.

Tacoda: http://www.tacoda.com

Story about clinton/obama: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625610 

short codes are fun!

i just came across this gem and had to post it. looks like some add for pork loin from the 50s. found it on a rather banal article on shortcodes: http://www.wirelessweek.com/article.aspx?id=146359

Text messaging doubles in US in 2006

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/22869.php
and http://files.ctia.org/pdf/CTIA_Survey_Year_End_2006_Graphics.pdf

quick stats:

* 158 billion text messages sent in 2006 - a 95% increase over 2005

* 2.7 billion MMS sent

* 233 million wireless users - increase of 25 million

* us population in 2006: 298.5 million. from https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print/us.html

* so that means that about 80% of the United States population owns a mobile phone.

China Mobile Subscribers Surpass Total US Population

ahh... wow. that's a lot of mobile subscribers.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/23029.php

interesting: as a percentage, chinese spend more on mobile phone than americans spend on food.

SMS / Text Messaging Character Encoding Sets and Parameters

What: SMS / Text Messaging Character Encoding Sets and Parameters

Links:

http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54717 (most of the information below is from this pithy post).
http://www.mobilecity.cz/doc/GSM_03.38_5.3.0.pdf (technical specification for SMS character encoding default language set). http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/default_alphabet.html (clear chart of the 7-bit default SMS alphabet)
http://www.mblox.com/mblox/technology/technical_features.asp - MBLOX’s supported character set information

When: 

Apr. 16, 2007

Overview:

While developing SMS campaigns for partner organizations, I was often asked if it was possible to send non-English characters such as Spanish or Chinese characters. When I checked with MBLOX, they told me that it was possible to send non-English characters by using a different encoding. However, the encoding took up a lot more space which would leave just a little bit of space for the actual message. So I had a quick answer for our partners, but wanted to get to the bottom of it – so have done a bit of research and here it is:

• The character limit of an SMS message is actually a data limit.
• The protocol allows up to 140 bytes in each message.
• The default SMS character set is a 7-bit set defined in a in a technical specification by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (GSM 03.38). It is not the same as ASCII. See links above for the default character set.
• It seems that there are Spanish characters in this character set, but I have not yet figured out how to properly encode them in my messages. If you know, please let me know. Alternatively, it may be that MBLOX does not implement the entire default set(?). I’ve tried inserting various character codes, but none seem to work.
• If you want to use characters, symbols, or glyphs that are not contained in this default character-set, you need to encode your messages in Unicode UCS2 which uses 2 bytes per character which means that each message can only hold 70 characters. The entire message must use the same encoding.

All of the above only applies to GSM based phones – as the data limits are particular to GSM’s SMS system. Longer messages are possible on Sprint’s CDMA-based messaging system, for example. But since you may be sending to a device on a GSM network, the GSM limits serve as the lowest common denominator.

Ref: 06