FilmLoop

Apologies for not having blogged lately, but work is taking its toll (as usual), and rather than writing meaningless crap, I prefered to stay silent (how noble I am..). But this one here got my attention: I receive Guy Kawasaki's email newsletter (subscribe here), and this morning an update arrived in my inbox, pointing out FilmLoop. FilmLoop is basically a photo broadcasting system (Guy calls it "photocasting") which distributes a person's pictures to other people who have subscribed to a loop. Loops are strings of images that move across your desktop. The difference to "legacy" photo-sharing sites is that FilmLoop is pushing the pictures, so whenever a loop is changed, it is automatically updated on the desktops of all subscribers. As you might expect, FilmLoop is an investment of Garage Technology Ventures. And no, FilmLoop is not available yet for the Mac...

I've googled FilmLoop, and found a post on TechCrunch where you can find a nice and more detailed description, plus a number of interesting comments. And looking at it, yes it does seem a very cool application, and I am looking forward to trying it out.

How does this impact telcos you might ask. With the risk of sounding like a broken record, my answer would be that FilmLoop is one more example how telcos get reduced to a pipe, as you do not need any intelligence within the network, but just install the application at the edge. For example, I recently talked with customers about the potential of machine-to-machine communications, especially in mobile enviroments. Some mobile operators are offering centralized m2m platforms to connect to (you might have seen first releases this year at the 3GSM congress in Cannes), e.g. for hooking up vending machines or also for surveillance purposes: a customer connects to the platform and receives regular updates of surveillance cameras. The operator sells the platform as a value-add on top of the pure connectivity, in order to make a higher margin on the service. With FilmLoop, you could just install the software client in your cameras on-site (would require storage and processing capabilities, but I guess that's not really a hurdle), and you don't need any form of centralized intelligence anymore, so beyond connectivity, any visual application is not dependent on the network operator anymore. But I am sure that the people at FilmLoop have already figured out more clever applications.