Always connected: Broadcasting your life to the world

14.09.2009
Over the last week I've been on a fact-finding mission to Scandinavia. No sign of the (yet), but I've run into a few companies that may help determine what our always-connected lives may look like in a few years.

If , then southern Sweden is teeming with amazing mobile software. In fact, many of the coolest new phones get their grooviness in part thanks to software made by companies like , which makes tools that allow phone makers to stitch custom user interfaces to deeper phone functions (like Samsung's Omnia phones, which put a TouchWiz interface atop a Windows Mobile OS). Or , which makes superefficient image processing technology used in more than 400 million digital cams and camera phones. Those are just two of the dozens of hot mobile companies in the Skane region of Sweden, in and around Malmo.

[ Cringely takes a look at the darker side of Internet ubiquity in "" | Stay up to date on Robert X. Cringely's musings and observations with InfoWorld's . ]

An interesting Malmo startup called is onto something I think could change our lives irrevocably -- for good and ill. Bambuser's premise is brain-dead simple. It turns your phone into a live video camera on the Internet, which essentially turns everyone who has one into a broadcaster. If you have a handset with a hefty enough processor and relatively fast data connection, you can upload "live" video (with up to a three-second lag) to the Bambuser site or to a widget embedded in your blog. Viewers can access the video on the Web or on their own mobiles, and you can store the video for later viewing. The service is completely free; all you need to do is sign up online and log on from your phone.

Launched about 18 months ago, Bambuser has some 60,000 users worldwide, including many in the United States, says founder Pouria Ruhi. He calls it "the best democratization tool ever created, like Twitter for mobile video." And it's not the only one. (pronounced "kick") offers a lookalike service, which is used by some professional news sites as well.

That's the theory anyway. In these early days of not entirely high-speed mobile data, the reality is a little grainier. Video playback can be pretty chunky and the subjects, well, fairly mundane. Consider who posts frequently to Bambuser (when she's not hosting the Swedish version of "American Idol"). Log on and you can view a stuttering 27-second video of her getting her teeth drilled. Exciting? Not exactly.