DeepDarkSee

Bayennale 2005:
Bayennale 2005 is a large-scale, international arts festival running July 22nd through August 7th and takes place at over 40 venues throughout the Bay Area. The opening night party is this Friday, July 22nd, from 6pm-9pm at The Lab in San Francisco.
The Bayennale is an international open invitation for visual and performance artists from around the world to make their way to the Bay Area to join with local artists–and for all to create and perform new work in venues ranging from the gallery to the street to shipping containers magically transformed into art-spaces for the event. The Bayennale is sponsored by the Port of Oakland, and is the brainchild of conceptual artist Lowell Darling.

Gotta love this, complete with building guide. Link via boingboing.

But he’s a liar! Give this music video clip a couple minutes for the big shift.

Of all the things we do for our customers, I believe that prompt, quality responses to questions, and speaking with people while they are having problems, will teach us more, and build more loyalty and referrals than almost any other way we spend money. Does full service phone support work for all business models? No. Can any online business afford not to have knowledgeable and responsive email support, and well placed telephone call backs? No.

Thanks for the reminder, Seth: …your call center is probably the single cheapest investment you can make in building your consumer or business to business brand among customers and motivated prospects.

Wikipedia has a great page on mobile phone carriers, worldwide and by region, ranked by size. It kinda puts China in perspective, even before you think about level of penetration and expected future growth rates.

• China Mobile (GSM) - 204.3 million
• Vodafone (GSM, UMTS) - 154.838 million
• China Unicom (IS-2000, GSM) - 100.1 million
• T-Mobile (GSM, UMTS) - 78.9 million
• movistar (GSM, UMTS, IS-2000) - 51.3 million
• Cingular (IS-136, GSM, UMTS3) - 50 million
• Orange (GSM, UMTS) - 49 million
• NTT DoCoMo (PDC, FOMA) - 45.9 million
• Verizon Wireless (IS-2000) - 45.5 million
• Mobile TeleSystems - MTS (GSM) - 34.22 million
• Vivo (IS-2000, IS-136) - 27 million
• Turkcell (GSM) - 23.4 million
• Sprint PCS (IS-2000) - 22.2 million
• O2 (GSM) - 21.3 million
• TIM (GSM, UMTS)

Via Engadget: Sazo GPS tracker for nervous parents:
There’s apparently no end to the steady stream of devices that use some combination of GPS, RFID and cellphones to help nervous parents track their children. The latest, now on sale in the U.K., is the Sazo, a £100 GPS unit that sends location updates to its distributor’s server via GPRS.

Parents can retrieve data via a browser or get updates by SMS. There’s also a panic button that automatically sends a text message to parents, and a deluxe version includes a full-fledged cellphone. Sounds great. Until the kid loses it. Or spends too much time indoors, and falls off the satellite’s signal. Or the server gets hacked, letting anyone get in and retrieve the location data. While parents might like the idea of a GPS tracker, in the end, they may find that just giving the kid a cellphone (even a simplified one like the Firefly) is a heckuva lot simpler.