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For people like me swamped everyday in convergence (if you might wonder, it’s still happening), I suggest to read Convergence Culture (where old and new media collide) by Henry Jenkins. You might start twinkling hearing the word ‘convergence’ over and over again but this book describes, in a very clear way, the complexity of the process of convergence in media, technology and culture surrounding us. If you might doubt, here’s what Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution writes on this book:

“Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan I’ve been waiting for. With all the fuzzy generalities, moral panics, and gloomy pronouncements from industry spokesmen and social critics, Jenkins’ clearly communicated and nuanced analysis is sorely needed. The world McLuhan foretold back in the age of ‘electric media’ has become immensely more complicated in today’s many-to-many, converged, remixed and mashed-up, digital, mobile, always-on media environment. If you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, an entrepreneur, or a media industry executive, you need to understand convergence culture. And you will only after reading Henry Jenkins.”

Probably the best book I read on media, culture and technology changes since Smart Mobs.

For anyone kicking of 2007 working in content, digital distribution and digital rights management, do take an hour to watch this conference of Lawrence Lessig on “The Differences between Culture and Code” from the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin last week. Absolutely recommendable if you want to understand what current technology evolution does with content and culture and how to find solutions to manage these changes in a fair way.

Via Enrique Dans, via Joi Ito.

The Nokia Music Mixer has been launched last week, it’s available as part of the XpressMusic campaign that accompanies the launch of the Nokia 5300 phone. I’m particularly interested in the music mixer. Nokia once again sets the tone for youngsters enjoying the remix culture.

Anyone can remix tracks to their taste by adding new sound clips and effects in the Nokia Music Mixer. You can start by choosing the loop set of your choice, move clips with drag and drop function to create your own unique mixes and add effects to it. There are R’n'B, Dancehall, HipHop, Reggae, Elektro, Chill, Trance, House, Techno, Disco, Funk, Beatbox and more loop sets to choose from with basic rhythm/bass/guitar/keyboard melody lines and effects to play with. The quality of the loop sets is great, I’m sure anyone can create a cool tune or mix according their taste.

Now the fun starts People who own a Nokia phone model supporting AAC can download their mixed ring tones to their phone. The mixes are sent directly to your mobile phone via WAP link (works international). Three mixes a day, free-of-charge can be downloaded per user.

Nokia Club members can take part in the Mix competition and win a new Nokia 5300 XpressMusic phone. More info at the Music Mixer website.

Barcelona has always been pretty pioneering with new technologies… The Barcelona City Council has been experimenting for a while now with mobile services and recently launched a “Barcelona Mobile” campaign to sensibly citizens and tourists on public services to be accessed from your mobile phone. (check out the video here, it’s great fun!)

Barcelona City Council offers you a new service which allows you to have all the information about the city on your mobile:

• MERCÈ 06 City Festival program (ended last week)
• What’s On: the Grec festival, your team’s match, children’s activities, the theatre, exhibitions and concerts.
• Directory: a guide to restaurants, hotels, etc.
• Barcelona city map -> exists already online and is excellent!
• How to get there: a tool how to get somehwere in Barcelona by underground, bus or just walking.
• Usefull numbers: firse service and emergency numbers

Now I’m happy all these services are becoming available on the mobile phone, in the end that’s what we all want, however I tried some of the services and the information is very poor. For example only 7 hotels were mentioned and the places I was searching for didn’t appear… well probably more time is needed to index everything. The map thing is pretty cool and advanced, connecting this to a LBS system with services is going to be peanuts later on.
The SMS service costs only 0,30 Euro/sms which is reasonable but knowing about my mobile web browsing bills from last months, I’m not attracted to use the Barcelona mobile web service a lot.

However, walking through the city and checking for (public) available WiFi acces points in Barcelona learns me there are currently a lot of these public acces points available a bit everywhere, so… Martin, isn’t this something to connect to with FON? Also, wouldn’t all these services be quicker and easier to build and be found through tools like Plazes.com once their mobile beta goes public? With a bit of promotion and marketing the best ‘plazes‘ in Barcelona can be tagged easily and become accessible through the mobile as another valuable option.

What about other cosmopolitan citizens? How are the mobile services in your city? It would be great to map some of the coolest urban mobile services…