Monty's Gaming and Wireless Outlook - Issue 167

The US musician Gil Scott-Heron is best known for his classic song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. What is less generally well known is that in 1951 his dad was the first black person to play professional football for Celtic… which must have been some experience considering the not particulary enlightened religious and racial attitudes of 1950s Glasgow.

While Scott-Heron’s song is a piece of genius created before he succumbed to the crack pipe, it appears the revolution is most certainly being televised. The rule seems to be the flatter the TV, the more there are. It’s now almost impossible to go into a pub, shop or train station without a winking high definition screen begging for attention.

What’s more, it’s us who are being televised and monitored constantly as modern cities become more Blade Runner than Blade Runner. The UK has the most video surveillance in the world with more than 4.2 million CCTV cameras on this particular island. And you think email is personal? Ha.

Try sending two emails one minute apart to the same address with ‘Bomb’ in the subject line of the first mail and ‘Hello’ in the subject line of the second one. Yep, the one with ‘Bomb’ will always arrive later than the ‘Hello’ one. You ARE being watched and it’s going to get worse, man.

This week’s news from the US that Google has finally moved into the mobile space with a Java-based application based on its mapping technology may make many US subscribers happy, but what are the real implications?

The Google service is free and is very good indeed, but this may be the straw that breaks the desert ruminant's back when it comes to mobile phone advertising. According to researcher Kelsey Group, mobile local applications such as Google's services will bring in $386 million of advertising by 2009 and that means we're f**ked.

Forget the film Minority Report and ads following you as you walk pass a shop window... it will be ads on mobiles that will MAKE you walk past certain shop windows. And don't imagine for one second that these personalised ads will escape the notice of the authorities. Consumerism will have finally got its man, captured and cornered, unbothered and unbewildered.

Or, as Gil Scott-Heron says in another classic song, B-Movie,... "And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune, the consumer has got to dance." Mark my words, we're going be dancing like bears in a Russian circus. Happy days.