GLOBAL – One thing we like to do is point out mobiles doing interesting things for good causes. I have one today from the UK, but threw in two unrelated ones that fit the spirit of this post.
Before I get into these causes, are there any causes or fund- or awareness-raising campaigns that you know about in which mobile devices were instrumental? If so, leave a comment below and share it with us.
Now read on for the causes I bookmarked in the past week or so.
What is the question?
We’ve mentioned Alfi Dennen of Moblog.net before. What we like about him is that he always seems to be mixing photos, Web, maps, and mobile phones in some interesting way.
His latest is a campaign to raise awareness of extremely drug resistant TB. The way he did it was to plant clues and items all over London that a ton of people ran around looking to find. But, to add a twist (two actually), the items all contained letters that turned into a really long anagram the hunters then had to decipher. The second twist (probably the first time it was done this way) is a large scale drawing of the campaign logo made of the position markers of all the items hidden around town, which was only revealed as people found the items.
Isn’t that cool?
Of course, the question embedded in the anagram was related to the campaign and turned out to be “Does anybody here care about tuberculosis?“, which is the whole point of the campaign.
Go over to XDRTB.org to learn more.
Circling the wagons?
One other cause I wanted to make you aware of was Australians fighting their government who wants to institute a filter (à la Great Firewall of China) that would basically censor internet traffic into Australia. This cause is really not involved with mobile phones, but still affects the mobile industry.
Australian Twitter users have changed their profile pictures to have taped mouths. Also, the Australian Web Industry Association has built a website for folks to make their voices heard and to find out more info.
While I really do not know if Nokia has an official stance on all this, I do know that we usually prefer open network rather than filtered and censored networks. And, because we do business in so many countries, we respect each nations’ laws and work on a local level on areas like these that might affect our business.
Tongue firmly in cheek, maybe
Lastly, not to belittle the two causes above, someone (not Apple) put up a Please Fix the iPhone page where folks can make and vote for things they wish would get fixed on the iPhone.
Actually, this is really cool, showing Apple how much its fans care for it and serves as a source for what might need to be included in the next iPhone.
Nokia really doesn’t have something like this (as far as I know). Such feature and fix requests are in different places, such as S60.com, the Support Discussion forums, Nokia Beta Labs, and in Nokia Pilots. Despite being spread out, I do think we get a lot of feedback as to what folks want, and what would be nice for us to add to future products.
Or what do you think?
Image of macro artwork from XDRTB.org