Day: November 11, 2006

Email is Dead for Teens

Danah Boyd writes:

Do young people have email accounts? Yes. Do they login to them semi-regularly? Yes. Do they use it as their primary form of asynchronous communication for talking with their friends? No.
…
[The youth] have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there’s not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you’ve ruined their life. And you have. Because you’ve taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It’s like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

Transforming Education

My colleague, Atanu Dey, has a post on how he would like to transform education in India. “Want to transform education? Want to re-engineer the whole system of education so that it is effective, efficient, and relevant to the world of today? I have the business plan and the funding. I need committed smart people who want to accomplish an important task, have fun while doing it, and make a lot of money (exactly in that order.)” Atanu’s big idea:

Provide an end-to-end managed service to educational institutions which will make education more effective, efficient, and relevant.

The service will be to provide all educational content (rich, multi-media, massively hyperlinked across domains) and tools (learning, teaching, testing, evaluation, teacher training, administration, reporting), and the technology platform to host the content locally and to access it.

TI’s eCosto Chips

WSJ writes about new cellphone chips from Texas Instruments:

[TI] said the design combines multiple functions that usually are run by separate integrated circuits onto a single chip, which reduces the cost of phones that use it. The eCosto is the first “single-chip solution” that incorporates multimedia functions, including a three-megapixel camera, video playback and three-dimensional games, said Alain Mutricy, a Texas Instruments vice president.
…
Mr. Mutricy said the eCosto chips are designed to bring down the prices wireless carriers pay for the least expensive multimedia-enabled mobile phones to about $50 to $70, from closer to $90 to $100 now. Retail prices will differ depending on the decisions of the manufacturers and of carriers, which distribute the phones and which often subsidize their cost to consumers.