Coca-Cola sets up mobile social network

Coca-Cola Co. is creating a virtual teenager hangout like MySpace and Facebook, only on cell phones, to lure more youngsters to its sodas and flavored drinks, starting in the United States and China. Eyeing the success of mostly desktop computer-bound teen social sites run by media companies, like News Corp's MySpace, the world biggest soft drink maker said on Wednesday it was creating a cell-phone network under its Sprite brand where members can set up profiles, post pictures and meet new friends.

Coke, part of a growing group of advertisers putting ad campaigns on cell phones, will make the U.S. site available to Web-ready phones on June 22. It launched in China last week and is eyeing other markets in regions like Latin America.

"The Coca-Cola Company needs to continue to recruit future generations of consumers," said Mark Greatrex, senior vice president of marketing for Coca-Cola. "Mobile marketing is absolutely where it's at for us going forward." [more]


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I can see my house from here ...

I realize that this is extremely delayed due to my recent lapse in posts and the fleeting state of news in the blogosphere, but I feel that it is worth posting nonetheless. Google has launched its Street View option on Google Maps (US). I spent some time browsing the few available streets in my hometown and concluded that if I am ever in need of a street-level view of a particular building or square foot of pavement, it might come in useful. Over all, however, the novelty seemed to wear off quickly as I found the display increasingly choppy and I struggled to find something worth looking at. As a service, it would probably be better if it were integrated into Google Earth as a desktop application, rather than Google Maps as an online tool.

Of course, there are more critics of this new service than there were of governmental wire-tapping. A host of unethical and dangerous activities are quoted as possible threats to personal privacy and safety. I am undecided as to whether or not this is a good idea, because all good ideas can often be perverted into bad ideas. However, what does interest me is how this relates to the ever-increasing confusion over what constitutes "public" and "private" space. In many (if not all) countries around the world, new technologies - from mobile phones to satellite imagery - are changing the ways in which people interact with, and understand, spatial demarcations in everyday life.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"There's a distinction between what Google has a legal right to do and what is the responsible thing to do," said Bankston, who believes the company should have blurred the images of unwitting pedestrians before it posted the street-level pictures. "It's a problem we as a society have to grapple with, and I think we are just now seeing the fault lines emerge." While he thinks some of the issues raised by Google's new service are prime fodder for a healthy debate, Weinstein worries that it might inspire overly repressive laws.

"It's a tough area, but it just seems there is no way around the fact that public spaces are public spaces," Weinstein said. "You don't want to create an environment where it becomes illegal to take photos in public. It can be riskier not to be able to see something than it is to be able to see something."


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Let's try this one again?

Apparently, I am not the only one who thinks that the more the Internet and mobile technologies are said to "progress", the less effectively any one task seems to work. Still, for some reason I am skeptical that better performance for average users is the reasoning behind this proposal.

Time to scrap the Internet?
Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over. The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on September 2, 1969. The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."

Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was "generally healthy" because the current technology "does not satisfy all needs." One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known .....

A new network could run parallel with the current Internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture. ... And it could take billions of dollars to replace all the software and hardware deep in the legacy systems. Clean-slate advocates say the cozy world of researchers in the 1970s and 1980s doesn't necessarily mesh with the realities and needs of the commercial Internet ....

The Internet's early architects built the system on the principle of trust. Researchers largely knew one another, so they kept the shared network open and flexible - qualities that proved key to its rapid growth. But spammers and hackers arrived as the network expanded and could roam freely because the Internet doesn't have built-in mechanisms for knowing with certainty who sent what. The network's designers also assumed that computers are in fixed locations and always connected. That is no longer the case with the proliferation of laptops, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices, all hopping from one wireless access point to another, losing their signals here and there. [source]

There is something nostalgic about the early development of the Internet and the WWW - probably that it wasn't sponsored by McDonald's and Coca-Cola. (That came later.) I find similarities between early Internet development and the Open Source movement.

I am not disagreeing, of course, that malicious and illegal activities take place via the Internet which would ideally be avoided with a better system of policing. However, what I envision happening here is a further commercialization and corporate exploitation of the Internet, not just in its content, but in the actual technological infrastructure. Couple this with enhanced Patriot-Act-esque policing tactics, and what's the result? A hyper-secure network closer to the ideals of sharing and trust that the original 'Internet' sought to construct? A perfectly executed system capable of connecting and exchanging information quickly, easily and safely? Will we finally achieve the utopian expectations that the Internet has long since promised to fulfil?

Or will billions upon billions of dollars be spent setting up a new playground for pre-teen hackers and nameless, faceless criminals?

I am genuinely interested in seeing if this plan works. Of course, if its future depends on (US?) governmental funds as this article suggests, I'll never get the chance.

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