Digital Media

After inking a deal with Samsung last month to deliver movies directly to your home, Blockbuster announced on Tuesday that its OnDemand service is also coming to your mobile phone.

Blockbuster OnDemand, to be available on "select" Motorola mobile phones, will provide users with access to "thousands" of films, the company said in a statement. Users of the upcoming application, whose release date is yet to be announced, will also be able to choose films for home delivery or reserve titles for in-store pickup.

According to Blockbuster, the Motorola deal is yet another element in its strategy of providing consumers with options to get its movies anywhere, at any time.

For its part, Motorola believes that offering Blockbuster movies on its handsets will help it regain some of its appeal. The company once sat atop the mobile-phone industry. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. And it's trying desperately to regain some market share.

That might be coming through Android-based devices. Motorola has already signed on to deliver Android phones. Blockbuster's app might become a component in that strategy. But by competing with the iPhone and its many multimedia capabilities, Motorola and Blockbuster will be facing an uphill battle.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

If you want to quickly buy a phone, or just check out what AT&T and Verizon Wireless have to offer, it just got a little more convenient.

Amazon announced Thursday its beta launch of AmazonWireless, a new Web site that offers cell phones and service plans from, for now, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. The online store features Amazon-style shopping, without the rebate hassles that cell phone carriers are notorious for, and free two-day shipping on a large selection of phones.

During this beta-testing phase, Amazon plans to expand the selection of phones and services as well as add carriers. It will also be testing features and gathering input from customers.

According to Paul Ryder, Amazon's vice president of consumer electronics, AmazonWireless is designed for both existing cell phone customers who want to upgrade and those who want start a cell phone service.

AmazonWireless currently offers more than 120 phones, including a large selection of high-end smartphones, as well as the latest budget models. Customers can use their existing Amazon accounts to upgrade their phones or shop by carrier, phone feature, price, color, and brand. You'll also find other familiar Amazon features, such as bestseller lists, product descriptions, and customer reviews.

It's important to note that not every phone offered by the carriers is listed. For example, I checked for the iPhone 3GS just now and it wasn't even mentioned.

Just recently, Softbank Mobile, Japan's biggest cell phone carrier, signed a deal with Aoyama Gakuin University to provide iPhone 3Gs to 1,000 students to keep tabs of their attendance via the phone's Global Positioning System. The company now has a plan to equip the same amount of elementary-school students with GPS phones.

The iPhone 3G is one of the most popular GPS-enabled cell phones.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

However, the purpose this time is much more serious than nabbing truants. As reported by the Associated Press, this is to test how GPS-enabled cell phones can help track the spreading of an infectious disease and stop it from becoming a pandemic. This is part of the Japanese government's effort to promote Japan's Internet and cellular infrastructure to new users.

This government-backed experiment uses a virtual sickness that is highly contagious. A few months from now, a few students will be chosen to be "infected" with this sickness. Their movements will then be tracked via their cell phones and compared with other students. Stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease.

The families of exposed students will be notified via cell phone messages with instructions on how to get them checked out by doctors. In a real-world outbreak, this could help better control the rate of new infections.

The significance of this level of control is demonstrated via Softbank's calculation: If an infected person spreads the illness to another three people per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. However, if each sick person only infected two people a day, after 10 days, then only about 1,500 people would get sick.

Massachusetts police used cell phone tracing via GPS and Google Maps to track down a 9-year-old girl who was allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported on Wednesday.

Police arrested the 52-year-old grandmother at a motel in Natural Bridge, Va., on Tuesday after she allegedly failed to return her granddaughter to the home of her legal guardians in Athol, Mass., the report said. The grandmother had picked up the child for a weekend visit on Saturday and allegedly threatened to not return her, according to the report.

With help from the cell phone provider, authorities were able to trace the location of the child's cell phone and followed the journey of the grandmother and granddaughter by using GPS coordinates that updated every time the phone was used.

They were able to track the phone to an intersection on Virginia Route 11 in Natural Bridge and then used Google Street View to view the intersection, where they saw a building with a red roof that looked like a motel. Then they searched on Google maps for motels in the town and located the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge and confirmed the location using Google's satellite view on the map, the report said.

The case is "an interesting first (at least as far as we're aware)," Pablo Chavez, Google senior policy counsel, wrote in a blog post.

The Google Street View of the Virginia motel where a missing Massachusetts girl was found with her grandmother.

(Credit: Google)

When consulting online traffic maps to form your plan of attack for hitting the streets, how often do you suspect that the red, yellow, and green colors indicating the various speeds of traffic flow are inaccurate, show outdated data, or that they'll change by the time you get there?

The concept of online traffic maps makes a lot of sense, but until they're foolproof, users will always be skeptical. A new collaborative project between UC Berkeley and Nokia is trying to provide mapped traffic data with more accuracy than ever before. How? By tapping into the ubiquity of GPS-enabled cell phones and the willingness of drivers like you to share your location information.

Here's how the pilot project, called Mobile Millennium, will work. Volunteers with phones running on T-Mobile or AT&T's services can register their phones and download the appropriate software through the pilot's Web site. Nokia does not need to be the manufacturer of the hardware, but the phone obviously needs GPS and has to be able to run Java applications, like Blackberries and iPhones. And yes, right now, you do need to live in the Bay Area.

Registration is free and takes less than five minutes. At this point, your work is essentially done. As you drive with your phone in the car, you'll cross the virtual trip lines placed every quarter mile on the NAVTEQ maps on the program. When you do, your phone knows to send its coordinates and traveling speed back to the engineers at UC Berkeley, who have created the algorithms to process the data.

This kind of program will only work where there's a large enough sample size to analyze, and that may not happen for a several months or even years. The advantage of this program, however, is that people with cell phones drive on roads that traffic cameras and actual trip lines simply cannot access to provide travel information. Imagine having access to traffic stats for city streets, rural roads, and vacation routes--and not just commuter thoroughfares.

You don't have to be older than 60 to have a "senior moment" in today's information-overloaded culture. So technologists are working on software that could one day help jog the memory despite your age.

For the past two years, IBM researchers have been developing technology to help people recall events, names of new acquaintances, and details of a conversation in their context with the use of cell phone and computer. On Tuesday, IBM Research Labs plans to publicize an early version of its personal-assistant software, called "Pensieve," after the fictional memory bank described in Harry Potter books. IBM posted a video on YouTube.

Not available publicly yet, the software could feasibly be used with any mobile smart phone. The technology relies on people keeping track of what's important to them by using the phone to snap photos, create text documents, or record audio. When the phone is synced to a computer via a Pensieve-enabled dock, the software takes over. It collates files by their tagged GPS location and time, among other rules, and creates associations between them.

"As it processes the information, it's building an associative network of people and places and events," said Laura Haas, director of computer science at the IBM Research Center in San Jose, Calif.

For example, if a person takes a photo of an event poster, the software's optical character recognition technology would take down the details of the event and make a calendar entry. Or if a person takes a photo of someone new at a business workshop, followed by a picture of his or her business card, Pensieve might create an address book entry that's linked to the photo and notes taken at the workshop. Later, when the person tries to remember the name of new acquaintance, he or she could use Pensieve's search engine to recall data from the workshop.

"If I'm trying to remember the name of this interesting person, maybe all I remember is that I met them at Google, I would search for 'person at Google' and it would show my contacts from there and start jogging my memory," Haas said.

The project began as part of an annual competition within IBM's Research Labs, which calls on engineers to submit creative ideas for tech projects. The project received so-called "blue money," or development funding.

For now, the technology relies heavily on photos or text that are captured on a cell phone, thanks to IBM's work in optical character recognition and information retrieval. But IBM researchers eventually plan to add sound capture on the same device, when more mobile gadgets provide audio recording tools.

IBM is also now starting to look for technology partners, such as cell phone manufacturers or mobile software companies, to develop it into a working product, Haas said.

"It's an evolution of smarter and smarter PDAs," she said. "What makes this special, and why I think it will be successful, is that it's purposeful. If you're capturing everything, then you're like our poor brains, and you can't process everything."

New IBM Research technology (a mockup shown here) is designed to be a virtual memory aide, organizing the who, what, when and where of all the information captured by your mobile device so you can search for it later.

(Credit: IBM Research Labs)