So, you’re one of the 1.7 million people who went out and got that brand new iPhone right off the line, but you still don’t have any friends to try out Apple’s much lauded video chat with? Never mind the company’s Facetime introduction service , which lets you call up and Apple representative, try the app out and find out about all of its features – the video sex chat services are already on the way. While Apple may be able to control the App Store and maintain its “moral responsibility” , it looks like porn has found another avenue onto the iPhone and may, yet again, lead the way for other services. Sponsor According to the article in the Silicon Valley Insider , there’s already an ad on Craigslist for “iPhone 4 FaceTime Video Sex Line Chat” that offers a salary and a free iPhone 4 to potential employees. Starting an online interactive pornography firm where woman will use the iphone 4 to video chat with potential customers on a pay as you go basis. Hours are flexible, pay will increase as the business builds. Woman will receive a free iphone 4 to use as personal time when not working. Woman will talk to potential clients and chat with them and perform various acts as desired by clients. All information will be confidential. Payment will be based on percentage of sales volume and performance. Potential launch date of the company is 9/1/2010 or based on feedback received. Woman will receive, as before mentioned, a free cell phone and a very competitive salary. Please send information and pictures – we would like to launch sooner than 9/1/2010. It’s often the case that porn leads the way in technology and we can only wonder what other innovative services using mobile video chat will follow. The utilitarian opportunities are endless, from remote diagnosis of automotive issues to assistance with assembling that pesky Ikea desk. Perhaps video chat will offer a more personalized customer service for special cases by taking advantage of the extra “bandwidth” of being able to see someone when we speak to them. Having done DSL tech support for a while, I could tell you that being able to see what someone on the other end of the line was trying to describe could have turned an hour long ordeal into a five minute chat. And when it comes to sending someone out into the field, why waste the gas when you can look from afar? Whatever other innovative uses we see next of , it sure the iPhone’s two-way, face-to-face video chat, it doesn’t seem like this particular use of FaceTime will see a lot of, well, “face” time. Discuss

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Apple announced this morning that it has sold over 1.7 million units of the new iPhone 4 smartphone through Saturday, only three days after its launch on June 24th. These numbers, touts the Cupertino-based company, make the iPhone 4 launch the “most successful in Apple’s history.” Oddly enough, it’s also the launch that seems to have had the most technical issues as well, given the antenna reception problems Apple confirmed both officially and unofficially last week. Holding the phone in a particular way leads to a weakened signal and sometimes even dropped calls, according to numerous reports from new users, testers, gadget blogs and mainstream media news outlets. Sponsor Despite these issues, consumers lined up for the new device in record numbers, proving once again, those who buy Apple are some of the most loyal customers a company could ever have. Sorry, Says Apple CEO “We apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs is quoted as saying in this morning’s release containing the sales numbers. The CEO, however, was not as apologetic a few days prior, when responding via email – his new unofficial channel to speak and react to public inquiry – to a consumer’s complaint about antenna performance. “Just avoid holding [the iPhone] in that way,” he suggested to the email’s writer . Meanwhile, officially, the company downplayed the antenna issues. “Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance,” a company spokesperson told media outlets last week. Another solution offered by the spokesperson was to buy one of the company’s $30 rubber bumpers instead. The bumpers, incidentally, represent Apple’s first foray into the accessory case business, arriving just in time for the iPhone 4. (Evil? Or evil genius?, one has to wonder.) Issues Aside, iPhone 4 Sells Today, unconfirmed rumors circulating through tech blog sites hint that Apple may be close to releasing a software update that will fix the antenna weakening issue, a problem previously thought to be related to the device’s hardware design itself. The new iPhone 4 places the antenna outside the phone, in stainless steel bands circulating the device. According to various sources, though, the hardware may not be at fault after all. Instead, forum postings on the Apple.com website (now removed, of course), supposedly confirmed that a software fix for the reception issues would ship early this week. Yet, despite these problems and other, less prevalent reports of screens with yellow streaks or the occasional misplaced volume button , the iPhone 4 has outsold not only its rivals, but other iPhones (and iPads!) too. To put the numbers in historical perspective, in 2008, Apple sold 1 million iPhone 3G devices within the same time frame (3 days) as the iPhone 4. Last year, the company again sold 1 million of the 3GS model iPhones during its opening weekend. iPads, on the other hand, took a little longer to reach the million mark: 28 days, to be precise. After 29 days, Apple had sold 2 million iPads and then 3 million after 80 days. Discuss

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Services like Foursquare , Gowalla and others make it easy to post your physical location to the web – but what makes people want to do that at all? Fifteen-month old Foursquare is adding 100,000 new users every week and Facebook has made it clear that location is a feature it is preparing to offer soon . What’s the motivation for users to register online where in the off-line world they are? We asked some users of these services and found that they had varied and interesting answers. Sponsor Service May Vary Of course location services vary widely in nature. Nick Bicanic’s startup EchoEcho , for example, is a very discrete service for letting one friend know where you are at a time, emphasizing extreme ease of use. OK Magazine’s new celebrity stalking location app might represent the other end of the spectrum. Most people who shared their experiences with us were using one of the big social location apps: Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude or BrightKite. Real world businesses are starting to make interesting use of these services (here’s one list of twenty one different examples ). The types of places users check in to are somewhat diverse, too. Though the stereotype of Foursquare users as youthful bar-hoppers is largely confirmed by the numbers. According to a data visualization by the independent group BitsyBot Labs , bar check-ins on the service beat out check-ins at places of education and parks almost all last week. Bars were about equal with the arts and entertainment category. Food and shopping reign supreme, but on most days travel tops drinking, too. Those numbers tell you something about aggregate activities, but why do individuals participate in this in the first place? It’s emotional – and it’s different for different people. Will location apps become far more popular once mobile coupons become ubiquitous and people can save money by using such services? Maybe, but there are clearly other types of incentives already available. Serendipity and Connection San Francisco entrepreneur Pat Diven uses location based social networks for probably the best-known reason, and in the types of circumstances you might expect. He’s checked in on Foursquare more than four hundred times, including at the bloggers’ event WordCamp, more than three times at an Apple store and at more than twenty different pizza places. His Plancast account, where he records not where he is – but where he will be – indicates that he’s the kind of guy who likes both big tech conferences and things like camping in Big Sur or beer and music parties in the countryside. “I use location for chance meetups with people I know in the city,” he said last Friday afternoon, via a Twitter client on his phone. “It’s worked a few times.” Diven also raised a common concern, articulated as a sophisticated social network user might: “Hoping for more granular control soon!” He’s a good example of an active person, who both exposes a lot of their activity publicly and has entirely private accounts on other services. Diven exposes enough, though, that I was able to see a lot of information about what he likes to do just by looking around online – I didn’t speak to him for this article beyond trading a single Tweet. He’s been doing this for long enough (his Twitter account is more than three years old) that he’s sure to have decided that a certain amount of public exposure was worth it to him. Cambridge-based experimental tech CEO Shava Nerad is on the other side of the country and has a different take on the use of location apps to connect with other people. She says for her it’s simple. “I have friends who work in coffee shops and we like to spontaneously clump to co-work,” she said by iPhone early Saturday evening. “The rest doesn’t matter to me.” Nerad’s public Foursquare history is much tamer than many peoples’ – though she did once win a badge for checking in after 3am on a week night, so apparently it’s not all about working. Portland, Oregon consultant Mike M. says he uses location services to track people more than to meet them. His son works in Emergency Medical Services and he keeps an eye on him using Google’s service Latitude , “hoping he stays safe.” (I called him Mr. M. just because I don’t want to see his kid get in trouble.) Location apps for tracking people around medical matters? That kind of thing makes many people take pause. Some of the same types of tracking technology is being incorporated into medicine and is in many cases causing a substantial reconsideration of patient privacy. In the consumer world, it’s different. I showed my dental hygienist last week who else was checked in to the dentist’s office on Foursquare at the same time I was and her first reaction was concern about HIPPA. She decided that no one could stop the patients themselves from exposing their own location, she just couldn’t confirm to me whether or not she actually knew who those people were. Much more straight-forward, in the people connection department, was my wife’s comment left on Facebook last week when she got home and I was gone. I had checked in to a coffee shop, pushed the update from Foursquare to Facebook and she commented “there you are! I was wondering where you went.” Be it for chance or as an exercise in caution, the uses of location services for tracking other people are just beginning to become clear. For the Win Many of the popular location based social networks present themselves as games. They give points to users for going to new or multiple places, then tally the points up against the user’s friends. Does that really motivate people to check in? Does it motivate people to go more or different places? Apparently, it does. New York City author, social media consultant and mom Tamar Weinberg says “people disagree with the concept of badges, but I think it’s fun to chase after new opportunity & status.” Hutch Carpenter, almost Weinberg’s exact opposite as an enterprise engineering platform executive in San Francisco, and a dad, says he sees it that way too. “I second that,” he said of Weinberg’s explanation. That ethos of location-based public achievement may go trans-generational, too. Carpenter checked in on Foursquare at Toy Story 3 this Saturday, said it was his six year old son’s first trip to a movie theatre, and pushed the update to Twitter . This game play isn’t necessarily about narcissism. Virginia-based developer Alex Stone , who says he’s made several friends because of Foursquare, says of competing service Gowalla that “[its] quest for items and trip pins has led me to discover some really cool spots in my own small town.” As a Personal History The thing that surprised me most when I asked people why they use location based social networks is how many of them say they use it primarily for their own tracking of their personal history. It’s a lazy diary, people say. I thought, naively, that I was the only one who felt that way. Some people say they use it to help with their expense tracking on business travels. Buffalo, NY web developer Adrian Roselli told me Friday that he started using BrightKite “so I could post photos in real-time while traveling and associating each with locations on maps.” He says he publishes the RSS feed of his check-in history to a map he can view later, to trace his route. That’s really geeky, but according to his check-ins Roselli spent Friday night having desert with a woman and Saturday morning on a charity bike ride. So apparently – you can push a check-in feed to a map and still maintain some connection to the kinds of things that normal people do. Several people told me they are doing technical things like that with their check-in histories, for self-awareness. When I went to New York with my wife earlier this month, she grew very tired of me pulling out my phone to check-in everywhere we went. But once we got home she admitted it was nice to be able to scroll back through the updates to Facebook I published and remember all the places we had been. Or, as Palo Alto’s Spencer Schoeben told me this week-end, “I love looking back at my check-in history and remembering the awesome things I’ve done.” Schoeben is a 16-year old founder of one startup company and CEO of another, so he’s recording a busy young man’s history with those check ins. Schoeben has reason to be proud of his accomplishments – and maybe we all do. The one rational for checking in that no one I talked to claimed for themselves – but that one very perceptive person quietly told me was probably more common than not – was showing off. “To non-explicitly brag about your coolness and/or importance, based on where you eat, drink, work, and travel.” That makes sense to me. Heck, I’ll own it myself, to some degree. Did I feel a little cool when I checked in at Manhattan’s underground ping pong venue and bar called SpinNY and wrote “Crazy place, ping pong balls flying everywhere, hitting me while I drink beer and blog.” Yeah, I did. Was I aware of what I was doing the next weekend when I checked in to two Mid Century Modern furniture stores in a row? Yes, throw me to the type of piranhas that eat people like me! I was aware of what I was doing. There are clearly many different reasons people use location based social networks. Many of us use them for several different reasons ourselves, at different times. There are of course other sides of the story, ranging from the very serious to the somewhat serious – Dan Tynan wrote this weekend at IT World about why you should consider not participating in these kinds of services. Tynan writes a blog called Thank You For Not Sharing , which says it includes “a fair amount of whining.” (It’s really quite funny.) Presuming you’re fully informed (though that’s another matter) then whether these services are for you comes down largely to your circumstances and your attitude. They aren’t for everyone. But they are a good experience for some people, as the stories above illustrate. If you’ve ever wondered why on earth someone would use a service like this – that’s why. Discuss

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The U.S. financial overhaul bill signed last Friday by House and Senate negotiators, has a provision that would highlight the use of ” conflict minerals ” by makers of computers, cell phones and other electronics. The Dodd-Frank bill will require companies to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission the nature and origin of some of the materials they use in creating their products. These minerals are used much in the same way “blood diamonds” were, by strong men and rebels to finance brutal wars and massacres. Sponsor Minerals affected by the bill include the following. + Tantalum: stores electricity in cell phones + Tungsten: creations vibrations in phones + Tin: circuit boards + Gold: used to coat wiring Of the countries involved in the sale of conflict materials, none has been so woefully affected as Congo , according to the anti-genocide group Enough . 5.4 million deaths, countless rapes and mutilations have been fueled by the country’s mineral resources over the past decade and a half. The groups fighting each other, primarily in the eastern part of the country, make $180 million off the four minerals listed above. Instead of fighting against this legislation, any of the major computer or cell phone manufacturers could come out against it. This would have few negatives in exchange for some titanic PR. Oh, and maybe fewer people would die too. We have a request for comments in to Steve Jobs. We will let you know if he responds. Photos from the Grassroots Reconciliation Group , devoted to helping ex-child soldiers. Discuss

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Last Thursday we wrote about Firefox’s launch of its newest version, 3.6.4. This version separated the browser itself from the plug-ins that ride it. So if a plug-in were lagging, or otherwise going haywire, it wouldn’t crash the whole screen. These improvements are restricted to Linux and Windows until Version 4.0, which will include Mac. Today, Mozilla has announced a further upgrade , to version 3.6.6. Sponsor With 3.6.6, the time-out has been increased, according to Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner. ‘Following the release of Firefox 3.6.4 we heard from some users, mainly those using older computers, that they sometimes expect longer periods of non-responsiveness from plug-ins, especially with games. For these users the default timeout of 10 seconds was too short. To address this, we increased the amount of time Firefox waits for a plug-in to respond before terminating it from 10 to 45 seconds.” This update is automatic and does not require a second upload. Discuss

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