Talk about immediate gratification! Don’t they know there is a recession? When will we learn the folly in tempting people to waste money on stuff they don’t need? On the other hand, I really wouldn’t mind that new espresso machine I just saw…

OK, so we are all consumers. And Amazon has once again found a way for some of us (ie. those with iPhones) to, well, consume more easily (link here, US only, sorry). Good for them. The most interesting bit of the Amazon service, however, is how they “automate” the process.

First, let’s make it clear to our Asia-based readers, this app ain’t here yet. I suspect it’s just a US thing, but, c’mon, they really need it more right now, don’t they?

The app isn’t truly “automated” at all. It relies on Amazon’s mechanical turk (a term that I never tire of hearing about) [via Gizmodo]

So how does this economy-stoking magic app work? A complex, supremely intelligent algorithm that can analyze pixels and determine just what it is you want to buy? Gremlins? Google? Actually, if you guessed gremlins, you almost on the money.

When you upload a photo, Amazon’s living, breathing Mechanical Turk workers (so-named for one of the first “robots”) try to match the photo up to products for sale on Amazon.com.

You’ll get results back in 5 minutes to 24 hours. The giant kink, obviously, is the potential for human error—how will they tell one giant black HDTV from another, for instance, especially with the iPhone’s crappy camera?

Well, at least iPhone owners can rest assured that by snapping thousands of crappy pics of products they’ll never buy, that they are employing a small army to run around and find them the merchandise.

For many years, the company I work for has run the InBuilding Wireless Solutions conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For many years, that forum has very rightfully taken a solid place as the leading platform for business discussions about cutting edge solutions for cellular use inside of large buildings, malls, airports, hospitals and hotels.

I’ve been creating the May 2009 agenda, which will be discussed over four days at The Venetian in Las Vegas. For some reason, I feel very lucky to be working on this program. Something has happened in the past three or four years. Wireless has started to mean something to people.

I am looking over notes I have taken during market research and I’ve noticed several trends:

1. Wireless solutions, or the thought of putting in wireless solutions in buildings, promotes anxiety in building owners. The reason: cost.

2. There is a multitude of wireless solutions and software programs that work on wireless DAS and other devices that hotels, multi-tenant office buildings, malls, airports, and even tunnels have to consider to make living, shopping, vacationing, doing business and even sending text messages easier for the average Joe.

3. There are an extraordinary number of business owners who want to know the future of wireless phone – voice and data — tech, so they know how they can run their business efficiently and in a streamlined way.

We really sit on the leading edge of how business works. There are other things I have not mentioned, which will make the business of wireless profound for all sorts of industries, including:

Telemetry and finding people in buildings
Public safety regulations that require large buildings to have a wireless safety system in place to make rescue, fire fighting and responding to terrorist attacks easier to manage
Managing heat and air conditioning so that we don’t die from global warming and high heating and air bills
Data, data, data
Marketing to tenants

There seems a whole world of ideas that are flying around this market. When I finally put the agenda together for IBWS, it will be something that allows property developers, carriers from around the world, and the leading minds in technological innovation to create the ideal wireless solution-led economy.

Douglas Crets is Director of InBuilding Wireless Solutions, in Las Vegas, Nevada, May 12-15, 2009. He lives in New York.

Were you watching Bloomberg on your iPhone last night? Did you watch the markets while you laid in bed or drank a whiskey sour at some bar in the deepest part of Asia? If you did, if you could not sleep, if you worried about portfolio and had the criminal heebie-jeebies about the world’s financial markets, you no doubt noticed that the Dow Jones Index had the worst drop at close in the history of the markets.

Which means, you will now be using your mobile phone to watch yoga videos. No, really. If you are in India, you will no doubt want to pay Rs99 and receive an hour of Shilpa Shetty yoga lessons to somehow disengage yourself from the attachment you have to your dwindling financial reserves.

The videos have been cut and edited such that each video captures one complete Asana. The Asanas are categorized according to the benefits they provide like Back Asanas, Stomach Asanas, Neck & Shoulder Asanas and Pranayam [Breathing] among others. Also on offer are detailed write-ups explaining the benefits and description of each Asana. Apart from these videos, consumers can also have Shetty in her Yoga poses as their mobile wall-papers and screen-savers.

Vodafone is offering a pack of Rs 99 where the user can download unlimited Shilpa’s Yoga videos in one hour. The pack also contains a step by step process of each Asana. Likewise Airtel, Tata, Reliance, BPL and Idea are also offering Shilpa’s Yoga content for download.

I am serious. Wall Street is cratering. It’s bad. Relax. Tap into that eternal god in you. The ego-tripping CDO market didn’t work.

Soon, you will have to sell your phone. But don’t worry, you can always take yoga with you. Buy the lessons now, learn them, indoctrinate them, nurture them. Align your body, breathe. You are your yoga. Namaste.

Is it a return to the more pragmatic mobile in the United States? The coming global depression that some fear is on its way may mean that luxury mobiles are going to be a thing of the past.

New York’s financial industry has seen the layoffs of almost 50,000 people this year. I doubt someone’s budgeting of his or her severance package includes an $81,000 smart phone.

With lots of talk this weekend about the “yuppie scourge” being rinsed from the great metropolis of New York once and for all, the schadenfreuden among us gathered around Yuengling beers and horrible gin, and made the dire prediction that its going to be a whole lot of texting on plastic phones in 2009 and that you won’t be seeing the bling-blangarati flashing their gemmed out mobiles at parties anymore.

This Luxury Vertu phone goes for $81,000

It’s not just me saying this. A Telegraph reporter got a scent of this at a party launching a US$13,000 luxury phone, the Vertu, and tried to remind us that we need the rich people in our lives, even as people whispered they wouldn’t be buying the damn things.

New York stared into the future this week and saw a city without investment bankers. Many shuddered. There were chilling rumours of orders cancelled for a new $13,000 luxury mobile phone, of maître d’s erasers hovering ominously over the $1,000 lobster and caviar frittata at Norma’s restaurant.

Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author and big-idea guy, recently spoke in Korea at the LIFT conference about mobile money — and the value of new, virtual money systems for the poor.

Rachel Hinman, a mobile design strategist for Adaptive Path, and a producer of three great months of mobile insight at her soon-to-end blogging project 90Mobiles90Days, summed up Sterling’s talk nicely:

There is no mobile phone divide. It doesn’t exist. The poor are eager to have mobile phones and they have them. Mobile phones are the application of ubiquitous computing.

Bruce talked about how virtual money systems are the financial services for the new urban poor. They are a disruption, an invention of anti-bank or anti-money systems.  David talked about how in Kenya, people use a SIM card as their “money”. They don’t have access to banks and carrying cash is difficult and dangerous. Bruce also talked about the success of systems like HelloMoney and India and M-Pesa in Kenya as the development of parallel money systems.

Bruce asked, “Why should an auditorium filled with mostly Koreans, members of a financial secure and advanced society, care about virtual money for the poor?”

Because of North Korea.

North Korea will collapse. A regime that cannot feed itself and is no longer advancing will eventually meet it’s demise. Nuclear weapons will not save them from economic collapse. And when North Korea collapses, it will become South Korea’s problem. South Korea will have to absorb an entire society that is financially broken – a society full of poverty.

The challenge, Bruce predicts, will be to invent new financial instruments that will help solve this problem. An economic system based on mobile phones.

Yes, this app is as shallow as it sounds. It’s nothing more than a bright shinning ruby on your screen that says, “I can blow a thousand bucks on nothing.”

But here’s what has happened to one not so clever fellow:

His cry for help seemed a bit in vain — Apple does screen every single app before they let them into the app store. In fact, the backlog caused by this process has become a source of much frustration among developers.

However, as I was in the process of writing this post, the app has suddenly been pulled from the app store. So much for having an effective vetting system.

Officially, only 19% (and rising) were sick of it. While 40% (and shrinking) were still excited about it.

Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. This week, we round up some of the iPhone stories that have amused and bemused since Apple’s new toy hit the streets a week ago:

1 Million Sold Opening Weekend

Have mobile phone debuts become like opening weekend at the movies? Probably not yet, but this device was clearly a blockbuster. “iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world.” [link to press release]

Everybody Loves To Make Fun of Queues

From Tokyo [see CNN video] to Manhattan, they came and stood in line to be one of the early adopters. And how were they rewarded for their efforts — with ridicule. However, when a certain Californian TV reporter tried to make fun of them, iPhone patrons fight back.

Ten things I hate about you:

Not everyone is sold on the new iPhone. Here’s the condensed list of things that still suck [via Computer World]:

1. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS): no sending picture messages saying, “Look how cute the kids are”.

2. Stereo Bluetooth / A2DP support: if you want to listen to music in stereo, with a wireless bluetooth headset — you should have bought a Window Mobile device. iPhones need those trendy white cords to connect with your ears.

3. Selecting, copying, and pasting: Fans have been begging for this, and Apple has been ignoring them. If you need to copy and paste long strings from URLs, or fix links that get truncated in e-mail messages — again, you should have bought a Windows Mobile device.

4. Horizontal keyboard for e-mail and notes: Typing is a bit tricky at first. However, many hardcore iPhone users claim to be able to type just as fast on their iPhones as on their Macs. A slide out keyboard is a must have for those who plan to spend lots of time using the Notes, e-mail, or Maps applications — and none of them provide a keyboard in landscape mode. Enjoy pecking out your next novel.

5. Improved predictive text (or the ability to turn it off): The time it saves in correcting miscues sometimes pales in comparison to the frustration it causes in forcing you to repeatedly deselect words. And there’s no way to turn it off or create a keyboard-based shortcut to deselect the predicted word.6. Integrated IM application:There’s still no IM client preloaded onto the iPhone. That said, with e-mail, text messaging, voice calling, and a host of third-party mobile Web-based messaging offerings (Twitter comes to mind), do we really need another form of communication built into the 3G iPhone? Well, maybe a fax machine.

7. Flash support: Sadly, no one really knows when being able to view Flash animations or films will be a reality on the iPhone. Even though YouTube clips are in Flash format on the Web, they’ve been converted to QuickTime format specifically for the iPhone-centric version of YouTube.

8. A better camera and a video recorder:Sorry, citizen journalists and YouTube filmmakers. The 3G iPhone’s still camera maxes out at 2 megapixels, and the only way to shoot video with the camera is to do some hacking. Also, there’s only one camera on the iPhone, so forget about ever making video calls.

9. Unified e-mail inbox: Microsoft Exchange is now supported, but there’s no way to get all your messages from Yahoo, Mac.com, Gmail, AOL, and your business account all on one page, so to speak.

10. Voice dialing and voice memos: Third-party apps to the rescue! The new iPhone has no native support for voice dialing or recording audio memos, but a few third-party apps now available via the App Store build them into the 3G handset, including Jott for iPhone, which is available for free.

3G iPhone in a Blender

The slicer-dicers at Blendtec waste no time getting their hands on a 3G iPhone. Of course, the poor device has a short life in their hands. Watch the video to see whether or not a 3G iPhone will blend.

Check-out all the apps!

Finally, Hong Kong gets an iTunes store. However, neither music nor movies are available–but just look at all the apps!

This should keep you busy:

The app store.

Forget iTunes, get the Last.fm app

If you’ve ponied up for unlimited bandwidth, then you might as well start using it. Nothing like streaming music from a proper music social networking site.

However, it’s not without its drawbacks [via Just Another iPhone blog]

There are definitely a few places where things could be a bit better as well – a couple places where it would seem you should be able to tap to play and you cannot (e.g. Charts / Top Albums).  Also, the app is hampered by Apple’s no running in the background rules – when you close it down, it stops playing – and does not remember where you were when you go back into it – at least that second part (remembering / reviving your session) should be improved in future updates.

What about you?

Have you seen any crazy iPhone behavior? Do you think these people are nuts? Are you one of them, flaunting your new phone every chance you get? Jealous?

Ray-ban has almost proven that mobile marketing can be so much more than stupid little banner ads pushed to your phone. Last week in New York, the sunglass company staged a fake flash-mob to stare at their newly commissioned billboard artwork and attracted a lot of attention: [via UTalkMarketing]

Ray-Ban has done just that to promote its latest outdoor creation – a huge building wrap created by Ron English.

Famous for being a “billboard usurping culture jammer” (ie. he creates illegal outdoor ads attacking big brand corporate culture), this time English has jumped ship for dollar to work with the eyewear brand.

The six-storey ‘adverart’ work has been unveiled in the heart of Manhattan as part of the brand’s ‘Project Colorize’ marketing concept.  But how to generate interest?

Ray-Ban’s answer was to stage a series of fake-flash mobs. Street teams converged onto 6th avenue, staring at the ad, decked out in Ray-Ban shades (obviously), and froze like statues.

The result? Lots of passing commuters stopping in their tracks to see what the mobbers were looking at.

Isn’t this what mobile marketing is all about? (Accepting, of course, had the flash-mob been real.)

Jan Chipchase travels the world researching how people use the mobiles. He focuses on the developing world and emergent uses — on how to reach the billions of people who don’t yet own a phone. But regardless of how far he travels, people are basically the same, says Chipchase: [via SmartMobs]

The common denominator between cultures, regardless of age, gender or context is: keys, money and, if you own one, a mobile phone. Why those three objects? Without wanting to sound hyperbolic, essentially it boils down to survival. Keys provide access to warmth and shelter, money is a very versatile tool that can buy food, transport and so on. A mobile phone, people soon realise, is a great tool for recovering from emergency situations, especially if the first two fail.

Chipchase’s most recent interview in New Scientist, refers to Chipchase as a “Cellphone Anthropologist”. But Chipchases own blog quickly dismisses the moniker:

It’s interesting to see how other people label that thing that you do. I’m neither a trained anthropologist nor do I aspire to be called one – but whatever it takes to get on with the job. Ditto – only a small % of the work is related to mobile phones – life is way more interesting than little lumps of plastic and metal.

However, like it or not, Chipchase has become a bit of a legend within the mobile community. From his early reports on the benefits of shared mobile phone use in developing nations…

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…to his recent work on how different cultures use their phones as mean of projecting identity–ranging from gaudy customizations of the phones themselves to the ways that phones are marking our physical world:

We’ve started to see the mobile phone being used as the primary form of projecting your identity. For instance, if you live in a community with no street signs, because your street is off the map or not officially recognised, you find people are writing their phone numbers above their door

So how does all his travels translate into a better designed phone? Well, that’s the tough part of the job. The data he collects then informs (and, hopefully, inspires) the designers at Nokia. But it’s getting harder to stay ahead of the street innovation:

If a way of changing, fixing or improving a popular model of mobile phone is discovered in any of the hacking communities around the world on Monday, by Friday it’ll be on the streets of somewhere like Ghana.

For more of Chipchase’s insights, check out this video from last year’s TED

And one more video from the Economist about digital nomads.

McDonald’s plans to target the coupons and campaigns directly to customer’s phones, based on their purchase history. (How they know this history is unclear.)

Once the coupon is downloaded onto the phone, Big Mac lovers can then use the FeliCa system — built-in contactless IC card and reader technology developed by Sony– to buy a burger.

McDonald’s say they will be testing the Kasazu in 175 stores before rolling out to all 3,800 outlets nationwide. Japan makes an ideal testbed for the technology as it is one of the few places where the FeliCa technology is prevalent.

The card is difficult to forge/reconstruct, and allows to send/receive data at high speed and with high security. [via Fareastgizmos]

How about you? You don’t have to admit to ever eating at McDonald’s, but would you use a mobile coupon for food? Do you wish your phone could do all the things that phones do in Japan?