A mobile world: SL on the move?

Today I came across this youTube video and article on TechDigest:

No, your eyes aren't kidding you. That really is the processor-shredding Second Life virtual world running on an iPhone. But how? And why is it so slow? Well, the answer is that it's a concept demo produced by mobile technology firm
Comverse.

In a layman's nutshell, all the processing is being done NOT on the iPhone, on a central server. All that's being streamed to the iPhone is the visuals - essentially, a video feed of the Second Life environment. Then, when you tap the
on-screen buttons to move, or type in a message, that's sent back up to the server for processing.

So, it's not a Second Life client on the iPhone - it's just streaming Safari-friendly video of your SL session, with you able to send your commands back in the other direction. That's why it's this sluggish at the moment, because you're one step removed.

Second Life is too resource-consuming to go mobile right now. Especially its streaming technology requires quite a lot of bandwidth to render the simulation you're in. For the time being this is a nice gimmick to show your friends, but not of any real use.

But the virtual worlds will get on the move sooner or later. For the virtual workspace to have an impact on our busy lives they will have to go mobile. It will require lighter interfaces and more bandwidth on mobile phones, but we'll get there. Why?

Well, I'm on my way to a meeting, and I'm stuck in a traffic jam. I'll be missing this important meeting. Time to pull over and log into our virtual world and do this meeting there...

Buzz Word "Local"

It seems "local" is one of the big buzz words going around.

Was the title of an interesting question I spotted on Linked-In

"local" search marketing
"local(location based)" mobile marketing
These are two of the things I have heard associated with local marketing. I believe some have referenced the long tail saying that small local establishments advertising could add up to more than the big Brand advertisers.

what is your take on this? Do you think it is truly a scalable solution? Which do you think "local" targeting provides the greatest area of growth mobile or online?

Do you think if the same "targeting" ability was available in radio maybe to target someone in a specific zip code would the demand be there?

The winner is
With the huge amount of spamming and direct mail and unpersonalised printed marketing material you would indeed think it would be a winner if you could get into the local-targeting mode.

It's not a winner though, it's a slight improvement. With todays technology of online banking, online ordering etcetera the winner is: income and spendinghistory specific marketing.

In other words, we're talking about intelligent documents (I need to set up a file for this item ;)