“How mobile phones have ruined dating and why everyone should want the ability to be completely blown off.”

A little caveat first. I am the co-founder of a technology start-up. Now I know technology has the ability to make our lives better, more efficient, and if entrepreneurs like me do our jobs correctly, eventually more fulfilled. Which is why any of us who are still dating should throw away our mobile phones right now. Mobile phones have ruined dating for good. I know this may be a controversial argument, but hear me out.

For those of us over the age of twenty (my sister is in college so I’m using her as my watermark), we may remember a time not too long ago when everyone had a home phone. Tethered to a long curly cord, you would talk into the receiver with words both gentle and harsh for long hours into the night. If you were talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend you would sometimes just sit on the phone not saying anything while you independently went about your own tasks. This was the golden age of dating – the golden age of being stood up.

Just like the 1950s and handwriting, there once was a time when it was possible to arrange a date with someone to meet at a place and time and for that person to just never show up, never to be heard from again. A blow-off. A waiter asking if he should remove the extra table setting. A bottle of wine for two already poured now a bottle for one. A sad song playing in the background as the camera pans out in the crowded restaurant on the one lonely soul sitting by himself. But was it so sad?

Just think of the information you have because of this stand up! You know categorically that this person is out. You know instantly and without a doubt that you can move on to greener pastures. No time wasted, no second guessing. You may be mad that they decided that sharing an experience with you was less important than whatever they were doing at the same moment, but hey, you had a nice bottle of wine, you ate food (which you would have done regardless), so net net, with all this extra information you now have about this person I’d say you’re up on the night. Now fast forward to today.

I’m assuming you have made it past the first step of actually getting someone’s phone number. What happens next? In today’s world you have to then navigate through an intense and carefully structured set of Byzantine digital dating rules. I’m going to list a few of them:

1. You absolutely cannot call the person. It’s almost the equivalent of stalking or heavy breathing on a late night phone call.
2. No Gchat before maybe the third or fourth date, if not longer. Gchats are the death knell of a blossoming romance.
3. You have to send a clever, funny, and bold text message. Maximum 160 characters. Anything longer smacks of desperation. Too bold is too Wall Street.
4. Do not reply to a response quickly. In the age of instant digital gratification, making them wait for responses is good.
5. I’m not even sure what to do about Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or BBM. My gut says don’t touch them – they’re like Gchat.

Those are just a few of the rules and to be honest, I’m constantly seeking the advice of wiser digital dating gurus (aka my sister).

So now you’ve sent your witty 160-character text message. What ensues is a masterful game of cat and mouse, of push and pull. Clever digital notes passed back and forth across the mobile airwaves with the intention of laying groundwork so you can entice them into seeing you in the physical world. At least I think that’s what most people want. This entire stage in the dating process is only made possible by the mobile phone. And because people use their mobile phones for everything nowadays, there are an infinite number of legitimate excuses for why messages were not received or responses delayed. You think maybe their battery did die which means that they still want to see me…

In the event that you do make plans to meet non-virtually, there are always only two options for what happens next. A) They will actually meet you as planned or B) they will not meet you as planned but will inform you and cancel/change the plans prior to the date taking place. What I mean to say is that there will ALWAYS be information about the situation in real time exchanged through mobile devices. Actually showing up to a pre-arranged date and the other person pulling a no-show and not communicating anything just doesn’t happen anymore.

You no longer have the gift of categorically verified information about a person’s uselessness in one night.  Today if someone changes plans you now have the possibility of having a “text” relationship with someone for weeks and months without ever seeing them. I propose that this is not too dissimilar from prison pen-pals. One day you will be granted parole.

Solution? If ladies just answered their phones when a guy they liked called, then that seems to solve the whole problem. But that’s what, too easy? Maybe we need an iPhone app that prioritizes your contacts based on potential chemistry so low priority matches go straight to voicemail, middle priorities get sent an automatic pre-written text and higher priorities get coveted access to your real live text message. I’m sure I’ve just made a developer a million dollars with this idea.

Or you could just answer your phone.

(Author’s note: as I write this a girl that is to be unnamed (Jenna) has blamed her blackberry service for not sending me the email that was supposed to tell me our plans had changed. A digital stand up. But it wasn’t her fault; it was her corporate email account… Maybe she’ll read this, feel guilty and actually call me.)

Jesse Solomon is the Co-founder of RightsCube – the online source for all of the world’s film and television rights information.  RightsCube enables media buyers more purchasing power and enable content owners access to a larger pool of potential buyers than their traditional sales channels would allow. He can be contacted at jesse [at] rightscube.com

Blockbuster is bringing its OnDemand service to Android and Windows Mobile phones starting next week alongside the launch of the T-Mobile HTC HD2 smartphone.

On that device, Blockbuster customers will be able to download and watch new releases directly on their mobile phones while also gaining access to queue management and movie locator tools similar to those found in Blockbuster’s iPhone application.

This development comes with the company’s current financial troubles and possibility of going bankrupt. While Blockbuster is attempting to compete with Netflix, the company still cannot support streaming on mobile devices or desktop computers.

Downloading movies directly to your mobile phone is an attractive feature, but Apple devices do not support movie downloads. Blockbuster is exploring ways to get around this technical barrier.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

BumpRADAR is a recently released iPhone app that helps users visualize location based activity around them. It is created by mopimp productions and uses a mashup of data from Bump, Foursquare, and SimpleGeo.

Discover which events, parties, & venues are bumpin’ by leveraging RADAR – Realtime Activity Discovery via Augmented Reality. By visualizing nearby Bump activity you will gain relevant social context about what’s going on around you!

Only interactions within the past hour are displayed and it is entirely anonymous. Viewing a map of Austin during SXSW, it is not surprising to see pins clustering around the convention center. It is a fairly accurate representation of early adopter activity during the conference.

While BumpRADAR is unique in execution, it is not the first of its kind. Citysense presents mobile users with a heatmap of a city’s hotspots in real-time. Vicarious.ly is a mashup built specifically to track the “location wars” during SXSW. It maps mobile interactions via BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter. Twitter also recently activated location support and to promote it employees can be tracked via map at sxsw.twitter.com. For Pepsi’s Podcast Lounge, Zeitgeist displays were set up that present real-time Foursquare check-in data. Venues can be considered hot according to number of check-ins and tweets in a specific location.

All of these apps raise awareness of our immediate surroundings, presenting what is popular and where people are interacting. It takes previously invisible social behavior and makes it visible through digital technology. While this is still only applicable to those actively participating through services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Bump, it provides those that do a very new ability.

Ambient awareness was a term brought to us with public microblogging services like Twitter. With location updates we now have ambient awareness around the physical proximity of our social network. Those using location based services can now observe as people migrate from panel to panel to dinner to party while decisions on where to go next can be based on both an event’s popularity and friends’ presence. This could have its benefits, but like any other socio-technological development it could have its cons. As location awareness is still relatively new, its effects on our behavior are still being defined.

During SXSW, we will be helping sponsor Mobile Monday Austin on March 15th. It will take place at the International Center of Austin, where we look forward to meeting fellow enthusiasts in the mobile space.

The event will take place from 5pm to 6:30pm. Barbara Ballard of Little Springs Design will discuss mobile design and and user experience, followed by a panel moderated by Carlo Longino of MobHappy.

The panel consists of:

Jason Grigsby – CloudFour

Harry Heyman – Foursquare

Matt Galligan –  SimpleGeo

Joel Hull – Frog Design

Chris Moisan –   Taptu

Peter Vesterbacka –  Finnish Mobile Association

If you’re in Austin, feel free to stop by and say hello. For more information on the event and to RSVP click here.

In order to further our understanding of the behaviors developing around mobile technology, we have been reaching out to experts across the globe for their unique insights. By doing this, we are able to escape ourselves and become exposed to new perspectives.

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and tech consultant based out of Portland, Oregon. Previously, she was involved with PR and digital strategy at Wieden + Kennedy and has blogged for the Discovery Channel. She founded CyborgCamp, a conference on the future of humans and computers.

With all the hype surrounding augmented reality, we asked Amber to clear things up and help us put the technology into perspective.

Amber: In a way, augmented reality has been hyped for years. It’s been used for military and corporate purposes, and it’s been quite expensive. But augmented reality really started as virtual reality. It was a little too early for its time. For one thing, the idea of the interface was not stable yet. The idea of wearing a heavy helmet on one’s head is not socially, economically, or physically feasible.

Now that mobile devices and webcams are available to enough people to make augmented reality a more common occurrence, AR speculation has blossomed once again. iPhones and other mobile platforms now contain locative technologies, accelerometers and ongoing connectivity. They’ve become a common and affordable interface, allowing augmented reality to finally have more than a few common platforms to stand on.

Virtual Reality is often defined as an opaque experience that is separate from the real world. But mobile devices are melting into our reality instead of taking us away from it. We are using information to connect us to people and to plan the experiences of our future self and those around us. We are using personal mobile devices as video game controllers for the world around us. Virtual Reality has dissolved into actual reality.

We are gaming animals. All throughout history, games were substitutes and simulations of war. Now our wars are fun. They’re soft wars. The race to get the most followers and most views on a website. The race to share. They’re still very evolutionary, we’re just playing the game on a different platform that doesn’t involve us physically as much as mentally and strategically. We’ve become emperors of our own empires, sending out robotic troops to scrape websites, gather RSS feeds and plot trajectories on digital maps. We have robots that grab and tell us our stats. We count our troops. We have Facebook walls that, when printed out, would span the length of Egyptian temples. They’d also contain as just as much history.

The first augmented reality was spice, and that was a heavy market for the Europeans, who had a quite a lot of bland food. Augmented reality is hyped a little like that. Marketers find it tasty, and business writers like to sprinkle it onto a lot of the passages they write. It makes the tech go down faster, so to speak. For more on that, I’d watch Bruce Sterling’s keynote at Layar.

Stay tuned for more of Amber’s thoughts on the topics of location based services, the internet of things, slow data, and more.