MobileCampNYC3 will take place on Sat. November 15th (9:15am-6:00pm) at Microsoft’s NYC office in midtown Manhattan.
The idea is to have a dedicated track for all things related to QR Codes, Barcodes, RFID, and Physical Hyperlinking in general. For this track we will have 10 sessions dedicated to one room (although it is still possible to use free spots on the main grid.) I’m helping curate this track so please send an email introducing yourself if you would like to hold a session to dharper [AT] wirelessink [DOT] com. Also be sure to register below.
QR Code T-shirt platform to feature physical hyperlink to Besher’s new novel published direct to mobile “Manga Man,” original music soundtrack, book trailer, short film, .mp4 anthology of Japanese avant-garde Butoh dance performances, plus audio book and graphic novel excerpts.
New York, NY, October 18, 2008 — Winksite, a leading mobile content management and social networking software company whose solutions connect publishers to their audiences and audience members to each other, announced plans to team up with novelist Alexander Besher, Philip K. Dick Award nominated author, to launch direct to mobile “The Manga Man,” the San Francisco-based journalist, author, and futurist’s first novel since his celebrated “Rim Trilogy” (“Rim,” “Mir,” and “Chi;” HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster). Debut date is October 31st at http://www.mangaman.mobi.
Besher’s tome is a 600-page alternative fantasy noir epic that’s set in the mid-21st century when the speed of media has overtaken the speed of light. The story features a half-digital, half-human “post-Zen” Butoh dancer-assassin whose mission is “to stop the warlords who plan to clone the universe.”
Dave Harper, Founder & CEO of Winksite, says “Working with Besher and his creative team is a natural fit for us. In the past, we’ve collaborated with a wide group of writers and progressive thinkers including Stanford law professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig who inspired us to launch the Creative Commons Library, sci-fi author Cory Doctorow, horror meister David Wellington, and Internet ‘Smart Mobs’ guru Howard Rheingold. Besher’s futuristic vision strikes us as being not only timely but timeless.”
Besher’s multimedia ‘Manga Man’ is the first work of literature in history to appear on a QR/2D-coded T-shirt designed by the prize-winning Italian graphic novel artist Daniele Serra.
For his part, Besher is equally thrilled to be working with Winksite. “I’m convinced that the media platform of the future lies in mobile phone technology. It’s a market that’s growing by leaps and bounds. Just witness the advances represented by Apple’s iPhone and companies like Nokia which is bringing out its multimedia monster, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone. Not to mention the first handheld projectors that are due out this year, and the advent of A4-size screens. I can only say that we’ve truly entered the post-Gutenberg, post-McLuhan age. Our credo is ‘You are the Media.’”
“Dave Harper is that rare breed of visionary and entrepreneur,” Besher declares. “We chose to go with Winksite over other proprietary QR-code gatekeepers and mobile platform sites because Dave is open source and his hands-on passion for pushing the envelope on mobile content knocked me out. He’s been an invaluable partner in helping us bring our vision to life.”
“I also deeply relate to Winksite’s motto: ‘One World. No Borders. 3 Billion Connected People,’” Besher says. “That’s what all my novels have been about—erasing the interface between the human body and the outside world. I hope that everyone will wear my book. We can all meet on the dust jacket on the other side of the Milky Way.”
Advance praise for “The Manga Man”:
“A hidden SF master.”
Rudy Rucker, Philip K. Dick Award winning author of Postsingular, Spaceland, and The Ware Tetralogy (great-grandson of Hegel)
“Pure Superfuture cooked down in sf’s last mad scientist’s lab. Enough ideas for thirty other books blistered down into a sharp little drug that’ll reengineer the front of your head. You want a hit of this. Trust me.”
Warren Ellis, author of the Transmetropolitan and Global Frequency series of graphic novels
“Fascinating! Great!”
China Miéville, author of Iron Council and Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award
“This book would make Philip K. Dick delirious with joy. Nobody else in science fiction has ever pushed the envelope this hard—or with better success.”
Spider Robinson, best selling novelist and Robert A. Heinlein Estate-appointed completer of sequels to Heinlein’s novels.
THE MANGA MAN PREMIERE (INVITE TO AN EVENT)
Butoh Without Borders Multimedia party and launch for Alexander Besher’s QR Code sentient T-shirt novel THE MANGA MAN this Halloween. All proceeds to benefit Doctors Without Borders.
Date: October 31, 2008
Time: 6 – 9pm
Location: UPDATED: Arte Movimiento SUB Mission, 2183 Mission at 18th Street, San Francisco
About Alexander Besher
Born in China, raised and educated in Japan, Alexander Besher is a San Francisco-based author, journalist and novelist. He is the author of “The Pacific Rim Almanac” (HarperCollins, ’91), and the “Rim” trilogy of futuristic thrillers including the Philip K. Dick Award-nominated “Rim” (HarperCollins ’94; HarperPrism, ’95); “Mir,” and “Chi” (Simon & Schuster, ’98 and ’99). He served as editor of the Chicago Review literary quarterly at the University of Chicago , was contributing editor to InfoWorld magazine, and wrote “Pacific Rim” (Chronicle Features), an internationally syndicated weekly column covering business, technological and social trends in the Asia-Pacific region. His forthcoming novel “The Manga Man” is the first title in his new “Dance of Darkness” trilogy of alternative noir fantasy novels. His novels have been translated into over a dozen languages and film-optioned. Recently, he has been writing screenplays and television scripts.
About Winksite
Winksite is a leading mobile content management and social networking software company whose solutions connect publishers to their audiences and audience members to each other. For more information visit winksite.com
The video sets out to amplify the message of the song. The piece was conceived and created by The Rumpus Room as a multi platform project, having versions of the film for small hand held devices as well as large resolution screens. It is both a traditional piece of film and an interactive portal to online information and campaigns.
The video has over 100 QR Codes that are subliminal when watched in real time, but accessible to interact with if you navigate through the film using time controllers. The QR Code links in the video are a catalogue of online content about issues of civil liberties, as well as links that will give you the opportunity to get involved in campaigning against the erosion of our personal freedom.
HP asks, “So how important is mobile for social marketing?”
HP then answer’s their own question, “In short, very.”
I have to agree.
HP’s The Digital Mindset Blog::
John Hadl, whom Brandweek called “the father of mobile marketing” and a top 10 Next Generation Marketer, predicts that in a couple of years mobile phones will be the “premier consumer connection and medium for insights available for marketers.”
Julie Ask of Jupiter Research makes the case that mobile has already become a natural and increasingly important complement to social marketing campaigns. She provides a list of seven best practices for marketers to keep in mind when creating mobile social marketing campaigns.
In his keynote at Mplanet 2006, AT&T’s COO Randall Stephenson, said that of the three vehicles AT&T has to reach customers in their new Three Screen Initiative (internet/PC, TV, wireless/mobile phone), wireless is the most important.
Wireless Week’s Brad Smith suggests mobile advertising may be poised to explode next year.
Tomi Ahonen calculated that in 2006 mobile social networking was already worth $3.45 billion. In Ahonen’s view, “if you are not on mobile, you won’t be relevant soon.”
Mmetric recently reported that 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile device in June. And this was prior to the launch of the iPhone.
Note: Winksite is mentioned in the post as an example of a mobile web 2.0 mashup, where web content is automatically repurposed for mobile consumption making it “almost trivial to mobilize one’s blog.”
MobileBarCodeCamp is bringing together mobile enthusiasts, explorers, authors, designers, architects, producers and professionals in North America to share the current state and their visions for the future direction of mobile bar codes and other cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks. MobileBarCodeCamp hopes to support the many voices helping to unlock the potential of a “hyperlinked first life”. Topics may include – but are not limited to – mobile code formats, mobile code readers, mobile gaming, bar code art, entrepreneurship, social mobility and presence, near field communication, physical hyperlinking, the importance of open standards, protocols, and platforms, and mobile bar code usage on other continents.
We are extremely interested in having the various Bar Code Platform & Reader companies represented at this event.
MobileBarCodeCamp grows by word of mouth (and word of blog). Tell your friends and people that you think will enjoy sharing a day with likeminded.
One thing that has become obvious as of late is that along with educating people about the mobile Internet, it’s necessary to also offer tools that provide easy access to it. This is especially true when it comes to helping people discover and connect with off-portal mobile content and services. Part of this requires finding solutions that are successful at making connections between the physical world and mobile Internet.
One of the tools which aim to converge “realspace” and “mobilespace” are bar codes (think of them as a form of physical hyperlink.) It works like this. Let’s say you’re walking along a sidewalk and someone hands you a flyer. Glancing down you notice a bar code placed neatly within the design. Immediately you take a photograph of the bar code with your mobile phone. Software on your phone converts the snapshot of the code into a mobile address. You are automatically offered the option to launch this address in the phone browser. Doing so launches your mobile browser and you are taken directly to the linked content — jumping you from printed content to online content.
You might be asking yourself about now, “Gee. I don’t know if people will actually do that?” Well the short answer is – people already do, lots of them in fact. In Japan, for example, QR codes have become part of everyday life, available on everything from business cards, id cards, magazines, newspapers, flyers, posters, stickers, food products,puzzles, web sites, billboards, more billboards, CDs, confectionary delights, calling a cab, vending machines, coffee cups, advertisements, and tickets –- even including the occasional booth-babe (my apologies to Darla Mack). All these little codes eagerly await — ready to link people to content that matters to them — mobile sites, profiles, videos, podcasts, products and other little pieces of content (think ringtones and wallpapers). Individuals also have joined in on the opportunity as publishers themselves — printing codes on stickers, placing them on their web sites or blogs, even walking around with cute little stampers to easily affix codes practically anywhere for any reason. As such, QR Codes have become the door to the mobile Internet for the average mobile user.
Much like other mobile technology, such as SMS, it typically takes a while for the US market to embrace new mobile technology, but once it does we quickly match the usage seen in other parts of the world. I believe that will happen with bar codes as well. Already I see the signs…
For example, Semapedia.org brought to you by the brilliant minds of Stan Wiechers and Alexis Rondeau, are connecting the virtual and physical world by bringing the best information from the Internet to the relevant place in physical space. They do this by combining the physical annotation technology of Datamatrix codes (another flavor of bar code) with high quality information from Wikipedia. (see Semapedia explained with pictures)
Others like the creative team of Kevin Slavin and Frank Lantz from area/code turn city streets into huge public game boards using bar codes and cell phones as part of the game play.
Still not convinced people find this useful, fun or both? To highlight potential, I’ve provided results from a survey originally taken by InfoPlaint in Japan that was carried out at the end of August 2005. The respondents selected the survey themselves via a link in the DoCoMo iMode menu system. 7,660 people completed the survey; 5,023 of them were women.
Q: Do you know about QR codes (2D barcodes)?
I’ve used them 73.3%
I know about them, and have a reader feature in my phone, but I haven’t used them 7.6%
I know about them, but don’t have a reader feature in my phone, so I haven’t used them 15.6%
I don’t know about them 3.5%
Looking at the age breakdown, for both males and females almost 90% of the under 20’s use them, but the rate steadily drops down to end up at just about half of all the over 50s.
Q: For those who answered that they used them, in what printed materials have you used QR Codes? (Sample size=5,513)
Business card 5.7%
Newspaper 31.9%
Magazine 84.2%
Advertising flyer 51.1%
Poster 14.2%
Direct mail 25.0%
Mail-order catalog 24.8%
PC web site 20.7%
Other 13.1%
There was no significant differences between the sexes, except for almost two and a half times more women used mail-order catalog QR Codes.
Q: Which of the following QR Code-based services do you want to use? (Sample size=7,660)
Easy phone book registration from a business card, etc 36.8%
Read a URL and access a site 74.3%
Replacement for company identification badge 29.0%
Cashless shopping at vending machines, etc 28.3%
Buying goods written about in magazines 27.7%
Replacement for tickets (concerts, travel passes, etc) 32.5%
Others 5.5%
Don’t want to use 7.4%
Okay, so I’ve tried to do a bit of convincing but to what end? I see it this way, Winksite is the quickest way to build a mobile audience. Our RSS-driven publishing tools let you simply and easily add your information to the mobile Internet in ways that thrill mobile users. Thousands operate mobile spaces at Winksite with the added benefit of community features such chat, forums, and polls. We also want to help our publishers and their fans promote their space to mobile users. One way we do this is by aggregating our communities into a blog sidebar where mobile and desktop users find each other by interest and location.
Pulling It All Together
Another way is to help people promote their spaces in everyday situations and circumstances. Current camera phones now have good enough optics, resolution and processing power to be able to read these special bar codes on the printed materials we come across each day. As such, Winksite now provides a set of unique bar codes for each of our publishers that link directly to their mobile sites and communities. With the ability to create a universally accessible mobile site that’s connected to physically distributed bar codes, we see our publishers creating a wide range of useful applications.
These applications include:
linking print articles to RSS feeds and blogs
delivering product or tourist information
linking “lost pet” flyers to contact forms
dating – use your imagination on that one
“find me” maps
promoting an event or concert on flyers/postcards
connecting geocachers to mobile logbooks
creating museum exhibits and street tours
building scavenger hunts or “collect-them-all” games
downloading ringtones, music, wallpapers or video (think indie artists)
ticket sales for clubs
directing people to your mobile site and/or storefront
enabling mobile sales from catalogs or flyers
distributing coupons
conference badges connected to profiles
business cards connected to company sites
signing up to text alert services
running competitions
connecting mix tapes to podcasts or vidcasts
connecting posters to podcasts or vidcasts
enabling community interaction at public locations
As the World Wide Web showed, things really take off when users build out their own real estate. The success of the Web was partly a result of the distributed development of local content and economies driven by individual passion. It’s happening all over again on the mobile web. Be a part of it.
Please Note: “Booth-Babe” photo provided by news.3yen.com.
All these little codes eagerly await — ready to link people to content that matters to them — mobile sites, profiles, videos, podcasts, 
harper.wirelessink.com 
