July 29, 2005
Motivations for Adopting New Technology
Jan Chipchase reflects on what motivates the adoption of new technology and recounts how walking in front of a print shop in Old Delhi with a friend and colleague, they were beckoned to sit down to see a movie that was playing on one of the mobile phones.
Excerpts:
"Younghee and my Hindi is non-existent and these gentlemen spoke next to no English so communication was body and sign language and a smattering of words. They had no way of knowing we worked for a handset manufacturer, as far as they were concerned we were just to foreigners walking by.
The movie itself was made famous by the fact that it was shot on a mobile phone and eventually distributed as an auction item though Bazzee.com. Baazee is owned by EBay and recently renamed eBay.in. This distribution culminated in the arrest of Avnish Bajaj CEO of Bazzee.com on the grounds of peddling adult content. (The video Shan is referring too is of a 17-year-old schoolboy who used his mobile phone camera to record his girlfriend giving him oral sex which created a a huge scandal in India).
The movie was in the public domain and had gone viral - presumably passing from phone to phone - each new recipient sufficiently motivated by the desire to have a copy of the file to overcome the hurdle of pairing Bluetooth devices and going through the still-not-yet-that-easy data transfer process.
Whilst it may be possible to arrest the CEO of a high profile auction site, it is not practical intercept this content passing from phone to phone. The real power to make decisions on whether content is suitable for consumption is shifting to the individual. P2P networks are I presume to a large extent trackable. Interactions directly between devices are much less so."
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