So today i found out (via furilo) that there now a company at rabble.com which is doing intercasting. It's a platform based on Qualcomm's BREW platform for mobile java deployment. Given that the rabble.com folks are based in San Diego, i bet they are ex-qualcomm folks or funded by qualcomm. When i played with brew it didn't seem very interesting to me, but that was part of the larger frustration that mobile device makers are putting out different standards which don't work together. Beyond that, Qualcomm is a big part of why the US is stuck with it's brain dead cell phone system, while the rest of the world basks in the glory of GSM.
Rabble.com is a location based participatory media publishing and viewing system. It lets you publish audio, video, text, and photos from your cell phone to others with proper location based tagging to allow others to read and consume that media. There are two problems with it. One it's a close style system. Like UPOC and Audio Feast it's doing something which would be cool, if they didn't control it.
Just like ourmedia, rabble.com is taking a lot of the ideas we developed in indymedia projects about open access to media publishing tools, and putting a depoliticized face on them. This is ok, in part. Just like it's ok that there is both open source and free software, we have participatory media like rabble.com, blogger, and odeo, and then we have participatory media for more radical social change. It's funny, but part of the difference is that anarchists are creating participatory media for collective action through indymedia and other groups, while the more mainstream groups are doing it about creating space for individuals.
Of course, the other frustration i have is that rabble.com is going after my name. I didn't get bothered to much with a group of liberal social democrats started rabble.ca in canada as a web zine covering issues of globalization. But a San Diego (the most red state city in california) based company getting on the bandwagon, thats too much. Just now they passed me up in the google results when you search for rabble rabble.
Note / Disclaimer: While i work for odeo, my opinions are my own and do not in any reflect the opinion or thoughts of my employer.
Posted by rabble at March 18, 2005 02:50 PMNot ex Qualcomm, ex MP3.com and Moviso. Self funded. J2ME is on the way. In some ways you could say that we are a closed system in that you need our application to view mobile orginated content on another handset, but we have integration with all the open APIs of the main blogging sites for bi-directional publishing. Frankly, we are nothing like UPOC.
As for name, the trademark for Rover was unavailable, but Rabble was pretty much wide open. Didn't know you. As for politics, we are probably looking at the world through similar lenses. We have really cool propagangda art all over our offices.
-Derrick
Posted by: Derrick Oien at March 19, 2005 04:19 PMthanks for the link! I can't find an email address at your site to write to you... feel free to delete this comment.
When are you letting people try Odeo? I can't wait!! If you need some beta testing from spain... :)
cheers
álvaro
I forgot, as the creator of The $250 Million Radio Show, I can't wait to try out your tool.
Posted by: Derrick Oien at March 20, 2005 10:49 PM"Just now they passed me up in the google results when you search for rabble rabble."
Not any longer!
;-)