Crackunit is One!

Hooray. This current version of Crackunit has made it to the age of one. That’s more than any of the other versions did…

I was thinking about the history of Crackunit and my blogging and I couldn’t remember how long I’d had the domain for so I did a search on Archive.org and found that I could re-trace my steps pretty well.

Here’s the first version from 2001:

crackunit v1.

It’s from when I was DJing and I put a streaming radio thing up there without anything else.

By May 2002 I’d managed to make it into a kind of blog, here’s a bit of the navigation (missing some style sheets):

crackunit v2

But I can’t seem to view the rest of the page…
My ISP didn’t like it because they thought I was doing bad copyright stuff in terms of hosting bits of music, and I kind of was. So they deleted everything I’d ever done, and being a fool I had no backups, so I gave up on the whole lark for a bit.

Then I decided to start blogging again through 2003/2004 on Technicola.com (here’s a page from 2003 via archive.org) but it was just a kind of anything and everything about nothing kind of blog. Then, one year ago today, Crackunit was re-born.

Mobile Marketing

Yesterday I spoke at the Mobile Marketing 2005 conference. I actually quite enjoyed it which surprised me.

It was a tricky old thing. From speaking to lots of people later it’s obvious that there’s a lot of different levels of knowledge and experience within the sector. And there’s still a lot to play for. Which is inspiring.

What’s less inspiring is quite how ‘old media’ a lot of the thinking in the industry seems to be. Especially from the network operator side. It’s almost as if the web and open source hasn’t even registered. The networks (and a load of ‘feeder’ companies around them) seem to want to control and own everything. Their value chain seems to rely on them owning and delivering content. Much like a properly old-school ISP.

Is it really economically impossible for a network to detach itself from all their ‘value added services’? I hate using that term (especially when the services in question add no discernible value in my world). If I was offered a network that just charged a data rate but let me go where I wanted, using whatever device I wanted, I’d be in like a shot. And hoovering up mobile bandwidth. They may not get me paying 50p to watch a movie trailer from them (I would absolutly never do such a thing by the way). But they would get the data charges.

Or am I just being naive?

Until they sort themselves out I’m hoping for a massive wi-fi cloud and using VOIP on mobile wi-fi devices. Fuck the mobile networks. (Note to mobile networks (especially any of our clients): I didn’t really mean that completely).