The MoPR Blog

Is an $800 DVR worth it? It’s a pretty risky move during a rocky economy, but after 10 years of work Digeo is now offering its newest HD DVR to compete with Tivo – but it will cost you. Priced at a cool $800, the dual-tuner Moxi HD DVR can store 75 hours of HD programming and boasts no monthly fee or advertisements.

But with the TiVo HD DVR only priced at $299, will the Moxi be as big of a hit as Digeo expects? Would you pay $800 for an HD DVR?

In the air and on demand. In air on-demand entertainment isn’t just for the traveling elite anymore.  Continental Airlines just announced that it has almost completed installing audio and video-on-demand entertainment systems in coach class for the airline’s Boeing 757-200 aircraft.

The new entertainment system will allow customers to choose from up to 25 movies, 25 short-subject programs and 50 compact discs.

We’re glad to see more features being added to airplanes in a time when scaling services back or changing an extra fee for them seems to be the norm. Remember when JetBlue announced that it would be charging for blankets and pillows?  It’s safe to say that didn’t go over so well.

With with announcement and others, like in-air Wi-Fi access coming to major airlines like Delta, we are wondering what will they come up with next?  In this case, the sky really is the limit.

Good ol’ fashioned TV watching increased in 2008. Nielsen recently reported that U.S. usage of TV, Internet and mobile, also known as the “three screens”, has increased across the board- with the average American reportedly watching 142 hours of TV, viewing three hours of mobile video, and going online for 27 hours.

The A2/M2 Three Screen Report states that “the average time a U.S. home used a TV set during the 2007-08 TV season was 8 hours and 18 minutes per day, a record high since Nielsen started measuring television in the 1950s.”

You CAN take it with you. A morbid yet interesting report from MSNBC earlier in the week says many people under 40 are requesting that their mobile phones be buried with them when they pass away. Some even want their cell phone to ring as their casket is being lowered, like a modern-day Taps. We can’t dig it. Really. Unless you plan on making a few phone calls from the other side, what’s the point?

Well, for one, according to the article,

“People want to surround themselves (or their loved ones) with the things they hold dear, whether that’s their cell phone and headset or some family photos, a fishing rod, a piece of treasured jewelry.

We can only think of one reason to be buried with our mobile phone – and that’s if we happen to wake up, in a casket, several feet below the surface. Hopefully the battery – and signal – would still work.

Video for your iPhone? Well, sort of. 12seconds has released an iPhone application that lets iPhone users shoot video. How? Users take three pictures, record some audio and submit it. 12seconds then turns the photos and audio into a video and post it for you. We couldn’t find any examples of an iPhone video on the company’s web site but we will download the application, give it a try and report back. Until Apple relents and starts offering video on iPhones, this might be our only hope.

We’re famous! In case you didn’t hear from us via Facebook, Twitter or email, here’s our appearance on Good Day Oregon last month that featured our Museum of Mobility History, all seventeen minutes of it. Watch it below or click here.

Watch MuMoH on Good Day Oregon in Game Videos |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Cool mobile marketing campaign of the week. The Grid, a South African location-based network, is getting word out about their service via a documentary film, Mobikasi. Of course it’s a mobile documentary. But what gives it the extra coolness factor is that the 25-minute documentary is geo-tagged and split into 25 pieces that are one minute each making it a interactive tour guide focused on Soweto.

The ad agency says each one-minute clip covers a different topic that is relevant to the youth in Soweto and is geo-tagged to the location where it was shot. The location-based documentary looks at people, music, fashion, social issues and places of interest.

The Grid is a social network that enables users’ mobile phone to connect them with people, places and events. On their phones, users can see which friends are nearby, chat to people across South Africa and share photos and videos.

The video is a clever way to illustrate the power of The Grid and how users can use it. You can watch the video in its entirety here.

Spamming still apparently works. According to a new study, spammers still continue to spam [we know] because it seems to work, despite getting one response to every 12,500,000 spam emails sent out.

TechRadar reports that researchers managed to control 75,869 hijacked machines to conduct their own fake spam campaigns, offering a fake pharmacy site and, secondly, offering an herbal Viagra-style remedy to boost libido [we’ve seen those].

Says TechRadar, …”yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 a day or $3.5m over a year.”

The web gets even more social. A new report by Razorfish offers some compelling facts about the web, how it’s turning into a more social playground and how quickly it’s evolving. Here are some compelling figures:

• 28 percent use Twitter, a relatively new communication tool, with some frequency
• 41 percent use tag clouds with some regularity
• 52 percent use RSS feeds with some regularity
• 52 percent have shared bookmarks with others through services like Delicious
• 55 percent use widgets on the computer desktop with some frequency
• 62 percent use widgets on Web sites such as Facebook or iGoogle
• 81 percent read “Most Popular” or “Most Emailed” links with some frequency (84% receive videos from their peers)

This can be taken two ways: more people are engaging the web and using it more than just for surfing and getting information. On the other hand, marketers have numerous newer ways to reach out to this audience.

TV and the web: All at once. If you were at our house election night, you would believe that many Americans surf the web and watch television simultaneously. According to the Nielsen Company, the heaviest users of the Internet are also among the heaviest viewers of television: the top fifth of Internet users spend more than 250 minutes per day watching television, compared to 220 minutes of television viewing by people who do not use the Internet at all. Nielsen found that the reverse is true as well – the lowest consumers of television have the lowest usage levels for the Internet.

Nielsen also found that nearly 31 percent of in-home Internet activity takes place while the user is watching television, demonstrating that there is a significant amount of simultaneous Internet and television usage.  Conversely, about 4 percent of television viewing occurs when the consumer is also using the Internet.

We’re eagerly awaiting the day when we can both surf for stats and product information on the same device we are watching live TV on.

America Airlines introduces mobile boarding passes. American Airlines customers departing from select airports can now choose to receive their boarding passes electronically on their mobile phones or PDAs, saving the time it takes to print out and present a paper boarding pass at the airport.
Mobile boarding passes, which use a two-dimensional (2-D) barcode, are being introduced today for passengers departing on select domestic flights.

When customers check in for their flight using American’s Web site, AA.com – either the desktop or mobile versions – they have the option to receive their boarding passes on their cell phones or PDAs. If this option is selected, they will get an e-mail with an Internet link to their boarding pass. The mobile boarding pass contains a 2-D barcode that can be scanned at TSA security checkpoints and at American Airlines gates. At the airport, customers simply scan their cell phone or PDA screen when going through Security (proper identification must be presented) and when boarding, just as they would a traditional paper boarding pass.