This morning Techmeme surfaced a news release put out yesterday on Businesswire that came with the following headline: The Number of Customers Actually Purchasing Mobile Video Service Could Climb from Only Five Million at the End of 2006 to Almost 80 Million by the End of 2012. I had to reread the headline twice, just to make sure it wasn't a Dave Berry humor piece.
Irish analyst firm Research and Markets put the piece out to promote their new report titled New Video Dynamics: Outlook for Mobile Video. Now, aside from the fact that I remain personally skeptical that people will actually pay for downloaded video clips, one has to wonder what they were thinking when they crafted a headline that conveys that those rare customers who purchase video today might possibly climb from paltry to a reasonably respectable number by 2012. Aren't analysts supposed to make authoritative statements?
Here's a test for you… see if you can read the headline using the same voice that John Cleese uses in Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch… and not laugh.
While I've been rebuilding PC's this week, a lot has been going on. Some of what caught my eye includes:
The Skype Journal has been at the Skype Ebay Devcon. Among the more notable items:
- Jim Courtney's discovery of IM+ for Skype. If you need access to your Skype buddy list, and to be able to make Skype calls from Blackberry, this is the solution for you. He and I exchanged IM notes, and then the next day I got a call from Dan York made via IM+ for Skype. Interestingly enough, it appeared to be a conference between Dan York, his mobile, and my PC. Haven't figured out yet how that works.
- With the launch of the Skype 3.5 beta, you can now transfer calls to the PSTN. This is a crucial feature which will unlock a range of new applications. We've been waiting for this for a long time at iotum, but it comes rather late as our development efforts have shifted to presence and mobility.
Meanwhile, Ken Camp has written a couple of lengthy posts (#1 and #2) on the new Jaiku client for series 60. Suffice it to say, they're worth a read if you're interested in attention economics.
And lastly, at iotum we slipped our first new Talk-Now release out in several weeks. More on that in a post later today.
