Just when you thought it was safe to go around stealing phones, the power of Mobile 2.0 is breathing its fire once again.
I received a Flickr mail from one of our users, Awbalfour, telling me that his lovely (and expensive) Nokia N93 was stolen with ShoZu installed and pointing to his Flickr account. Immediately I got flash backs of this evil Chihuahua from our last stolen phone story. Turns out this one has a bit of a twist.
Not only was the thief inadvertently uploading random photos with ShoZu to Awbalfour's Flickr account, but also photos of himself. Normally that wouldn't be so much of an issue, unless you happen to be the cleaner at Awbalfour's office! BUSTED!
Action is being taken and I am following the Flickr comments to see how this one ends!
You can see pictures of the thief and the developing story over here. Go ShoZu go!
You definitely should, because it's one of the most powerful features of ShoZu that you might not know about.
Originally conceived for our record label partners so bands like Goo Goo Dolls and My Chemical Romance could blast a ton of fan sites at once with every upload, we decided to open the feature up for everybody.
It works just like the Carbon Copy 'CC' feature on your email and
it's dead simple to set up. You can have up to 10 different CC
destinations and for every email destination you can add unlimited
email addresses! Powerful stuff.
So now you don’t need any specific type of handset, just the ability to send email or MMS picture/video messages and you can make use of our integration to a growing number of 30 social media sites. Yes that means you!
Our new service is designed for the millions of users who regularly send images/videos to multiple destinations but do not have a ShoZu supported handset or simply do not wish to run the ShoZu client application on their phone.
To use the new MMS/email service, simply visit www.ShoZu.com on your computer and set up your preferred websites, blogs and email addresses. Take advantage of our CC feature to carbon copy all of your preferred sites in one hit, and add a few auto search tags too. While you're there, click on "Upload options" in the "Share-It" section and tell us your phone number or email address. Now any photo or video clip you send to go@m.shozu.com will be delivered directly to ShoZu’s gateway and forwarded automatically to all of your destinations in one go. One message does it all!
The MMS/email service requires no software installation on your phone and is free other than the data or messaging charges from your wireless carrier.
Enjoy!
c|net Webware
TMCnet
and our favorite title ShoZu Goes Both Ways over at Mashable
What they didn't know is that we have even more huge announcements coming in the next few weeks so stay tuned!
Cameraphones are part of our every day lives and provide us with an awesome opportunity to capture moments we have never captured before. There's a huge amount of creativity out there from our users and we love seeing the cool and creative ideas you all come up with when taking impromptu cameraphone photos. We'll be running some competitions soon with great prizes, so here's a few fantastic pics from our users to get your creative minds working:
So we did it again! We really do have some loyal fans over there :-) Thanks guys! Here's an excerpt...
"The Price Is Wrong:
Why Cellular Operators Need A Better Way to Charge for Sending Data"
SINGAPORE -- I'm often surprised that people use their cellphones so little...
...ShoZu, a British company I've mentioned before, which makes software that offers an easy way to send photos and videos from your phone to many popular Web services such as Flickr, has recently cut a deal with Singapore's StarHub, a combined Internet, telephone and cable TV provider, to let users upload and download all the video and photos they want for less than $3.50 a month. To put this in perspective, says StarHub's product manager for ShoZu access Lee Jin Hian, it would cost you about the same to upload just one 500-kilobyte photo at its pay-as-you-use rates.
What's neat about this is that ShoZu itself is an example of software that actually (a) makes sense and(b) makes iteasier to do stuff. Indeed, Mr. Lee pushed StarHub to adopt it because he was already a fan of ShoZu. Whyshould we want to store photos taken with a camera phone on that phone, when we could send them toall our friends seconds after we take them? And ShoZu is particularly good in doing all this in the background, so youdon't have to worry about progress meters, or resending something that only made it halfway before your connection cut out. Mr. Lee was as impressed with ShoZu as I am, but he realized that unless it was offered at a flat rate, and at a price that appealed to ordinary users, it would never take off. "If you worry about the bits and bytes," he says, "you're never going to use it."
That's the other part of this process. It isn't just cost that is holding people back from using their phones to do this kind of thing: It's ease of use. It isn't fun to try to attach a photo or video to a multimedia message and send it to someone else, let alone try to post it to Flickr or to some other Web site. ShoZu makes it easy.
Dean Wood, ShoZu's senior vice-president, says he is happy with the deal because he sees StarHub as a sort of unpaid distributor and marketer for his company. On top of that, ShoZu will take a cut from the Web sites that users upload their photos and videos to -- the advertising revenue that YouTube, say, would get from ads alongside the video uploaded by a ShoZu user. Furtherdown the track, he says, the company will make money by delivering targeted ads to users through the ShoZu software on users' phones. (This raises some privacy issues that I'll go into in another column.)
The important thing, Mr. Wood believes, is that the user doesn't have to pay. This is definitely not the way things are done presently, where operators try to wring what they can out of users for every little extra they tag on. "A lot of operators are in transition between those models," he says. "The dominant model is essentially the consumer pays, whether it's a subscription fee or a download charge for a piece of content or an application."
So why aren't more operators doing this? Well, it's partly about cost. Many operators don't have the tools in place to ensure that all this extra data doesn't slow down their networks for premium customers. If you don't have a lot of business customers, like 3, then this isn't a worry, and StarHub's Mr. Lee says his company's network can handle it.
For StarHub, then, it's a lure: If the company is able to persuade users that ShoZu is cool, it will attract more subscribers because of the cost, and the fun of it may encourage those new users to do other things with their cellphones. But that isn't a given: Mr. Lee knows there's much still to do. "There's a lot of awareness [raising] that needs to be done over the next year or two," he says.
So: Instead of dodging people who are yakking on their cellphones in the street, now we'll have to dodge people who are snapping and uploading photos on their cellphones. That's progress of a sort, I suppose.
Original WSJ article over here
