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QUALCOMM and crunkies, a new form of blogging

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 04

qualcomm.jpg
You walk into a Chinese restaurant and your phone buzzes. It’s a blog post from a friend with a simple message: Avoid the duck. This is one vision of future blogging from Qualcomm CEO-elect Paul Jacobs, who just stopped by our office. (He’s the one on the left in the photo).

This new type of posting is linked to a certain location. It’s called a Crunkie. The idea is that you can leave location-based posts in certain places for your friends. And they pop up when your friends appear.

So… Soon there will be no more need to carve messages on restaurant tables or scrawl them on bathroom doors.

The crunkie is the brainchild of Wavemarket, an applications company that Qualcomm has invested in. I'm guessing that if these applications take off, we'll hear about them in Korea before American crunkies buzz in our pockets.

For me, it's an ever-so-small vindication: All the crazy mobile stuff I wrote about in 1999 and 2000 is starting to come true--or at least appear in the doorway. Granted, my timing was was off, to put it as gently as possible.

I took the picture of Jacobs and Steven Altman, the company president-elect, with my aging camera phone.

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Reader Comments

jbr

May 4, 2005 05:12 PM

why is this better than a normal blog notification message? subscribers to a blog site can already be notified via pager, phone, IM, etc that new content or comments have arrived to a blog site. why would i not want to know this until I arrive in a restaurant?

now, for this to be sporty, my favorite restaurant would have a blog site that is tailored to me and when I walk into the restaurant, i get greeted with a personal message telling me about "my" personally tailored special for that evening.

that would be a cool use for this technology.

Rob

May 5, 2005 07:59 AM

I think it has some value. Too often we forget things that we mean to do. This reminds you (or informs you) just at the right time. I keep thinking that my wife could blog a perpetual grocery list and if I had time and stopped by on the way home, I could instantly see everything she needed.

Parag Agarwal

May 5, 2005 08:46 AM

On the theme of new types of blogging, what about a blovel? A blovel is a novel written in a blog format which continuosly evolves over time and as the author travels around the world. It isn't exactly a journal or diary, but actual stories and sequence of events in a structure similar to a novel. Please see my incomplete blovel http://www.tequilaterror.blogspot.com
Remember, you heard it first here. Comments welcome and also advances for the film rights.

jay

May 8, 2005 01:35 PM

Crunkies is really a proximity application which already exists: check out www.proximitymail.com

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In Blogspotting Senior Writer Stephen Baker and Associate Editor Heather Green take a look at how cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society. Whether its blogs or wikis, data crunching or data targeting, technology’s advances are reshaping the world that we live in.

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