Tech for tech's sake
      does not a market make.

The world can have as many waves of new technologies as serendipty, venture capital, or the right combination of both can muster. But the technologies that are accepted by, and make a difference in, society are those that satisfy needs. Not the technies' needs, but the needs of the average (fair to middling) educated persons'.

Moreover, indigenous culture can play a major role in which new technologies actually get used. Several articles that read today reminded us of all this:

The ROAR consortium (The Guardian and Observer, Emap Advertising, Channel 4, and OMD UK) last month released some research on over a thousand 15-29 year-old Britons. Although this research primarily was about whether or not young Britons will purchase 3rd Generatoin mobile phones (the research's answer: not initially), there were a few other interesting conclusions:

"Today's generation is demanding of technology and hard to impress. In their formative years, radical steps forward – such as making mobile phone calls, surfing the web and sending email, have been the norm. Today's youth wants personalised media and expects products and services to be totally tailored around them. Older generations may remember having to adapt themselves to imperfect and faltering technology but highly consumerised youth have grown up with ease and standardisation of Windows/Nokia. They simply disregard hard to work, irritating technology."

"This presents technology companies with a new challenge. In order to engage young people, technology companies need to develop solutions based on a richer understanding of needs and not just base innovations on a tacit assumption that 'young people love technology.' Instead of simply being first to market with new functionality, companies should concentrate on adding to, rather that compromising basic functionality."

Meanwhile, Anil de Mello, who has been writing some perceptive articles about mobile telephony, examined why i-Mode — so successful in Japan — hasn't done well in Europe.

Taking de Mello's article as a cue, Daniel Scuka of Mobiliser.org and the co-founder of the Wireless Watch Japan media project, examines why Europe is different than Japan when it comes to mobile technology. Some of his conclusions:

• "Pricing of SMS vs. mobile email is one major differentiator between Europe and Japan.
  
• In Japan, mobile email is key for mobile marketing and the unofficial webs
  
• And on Japan i-mode, lots of people love to get those opt-in mail marketing messages."

From their articles, blog from Japan, offers a different perspective on this same articles:

• "Some of Japanese are not familiar to PC. Cell phone is major way for mail and web.
  
• "Almost of cell phones in stores has camera, it's commonsence for consumers. Lots of People take a shot and mail it on a daily basis, they use it like a chat. This situation has produced new bussinesses and services. "
  
• Some of cell phones has Video Messaging funciton, but consumers are not as keen as carriers expect. There are difference in speed within consumers as compared to carries or technologies".

We believe that the next wave of online journalism will wireless. An era of pervasive, untethered, 'always-on' and 'always at' access to information. (We don't mean people tethered to the invisible 100-meter leash of 802.11b or 802.11g WiFi. We instead mean constant, live access wherever your roam, which occassionally might include WiFi but certainly includes GPRS, EDGE, 3G, etc.) We've been studying behavior in Japan and Europe, so that we might predict what will happen when that wireless waves crashes onto North America.

New technology that doesn't satisfy a need of the average educated North America and that doesn't fit into the established infrastructure isn't going to work, no matter how much the technies who invented it might like or dream.

Once the North American telcos switch to WCDMA2000, the successor to GSM that most telcos outside of North America already plan to switch, will North Americans use mobile telephony (and particularly SMS) as much as people outside of North America already do. Or are North Americans somehow culturally unique from other human beings? We don't think so.

Thanks to Emily Turrettini of Textually.org for leading us to those articles.