The ShoZu Campaign begins on MIR!

ShoZu is a service that helps you easily get your content off your handset. So, for example, install the application on your handset and every time you take a photo, you can be prompted by ShoZu to send it to your online Flickr gallery, or to your blog or the like. Press ‘OK’ and the image sends in the background via your handset’s data connection. Genius.

Once your content is freed from the chains of your average handset, all bets are off and the excitement arrives. You can actually DO stuff with all that content you’re creating.

There is little value in keeping your content on a 240×320 screen (or worse resolutions). Most of the time we want to share. It’s a basic human requirement — interaction supported by content. As a 10 year old I can remember being bored to bits by the neighbour popping over to show my mum her ‘holiday snaps’ (or ‘photos’, if English isn’t your first language).

A picture paints a thousand words. And, as I well know, can keep two 35-year old mums talking for hours. But the need to share and use supporting content to underpin information exchange is ingrained into the human psyche. More so now that your average normob is a huge Facebook user and wants ‘to know how to do those mobile upload things’.

Getting the sodding content off your phone though, that’s a real headache. By now, most handset manufacturers have got some kind of phone suite that lets you connect to your phone and retrieve pictures and video from it.

But what a total pain it is.

And it’s hardly real-time. Or quick.

If you’re out and about, you take a photo and… you leave it on your handset for five weeks until you can be bothered to get the cable and your computer to talk? That’s the reality. Indeed most of the normobs I meet simply can’t be bothered to figure it out. They just show their photos on their handset — because they don’t know how else to do it.

And here we are: My Campaign! I want to raise awareness of ShoZu amongst the Mobile Industry Review audience and beyond. My hope is that you, dear reader, will take it upon yourself to educate at least five normobs about ShoZu. Further, I hope you will help them get the app installed on their handset and setup to send to Facebook or Flickr or the like.

It’s my firm belief that ShoZu is a ‘gateway application’ — like a gateway drug — that converts a normob to a mobile data user (a ‘promob’).

ONCE you’ve tasted and started using ShoZu, you ‘get’ mobile data. You can start to look at other applications and uses. You might like to check out Jaiku. Or try and get your head around Twitter.

But the key is photos. Photos OFF your handset, on to the internet. That’s the magic that converts the normob.

Too often, nobody cares. We’re all busy. Normobs just get on with their lives. Take 10 seconds out to explain the concept though — and you spread a little joy with your technical experience.

I’ve talked to ShoZu and I’m pleased that they’ve agreed to support the various costs we’re going to incur to do this. Thank you ShoZu.

I hacked out a few ideas that I wanted to do here on Mobile Industry Review to comprise a campaign over the months of December and January. I’d like to find the best normob handset for the likes of ShoZu and give some away. I’d like to do a series of How-To videos, I’d like to interview as many folk as possible about how they use the likes of ShoZu. So standby for more news on that.

Not for nothing are the mobile operators and handset retailers gearing up for what they hope is a going to be a bumper December — this is typically one of the busiest periods of the year for handset retailers and across this month and January, hundreds of thousands of normobs are set to take delivery of a new handset… And if we can influence just a smidgen of those to adopt the likes of ShoZu and the concept of ‘mobile applications and services’ then the future for the mobile industry will be that little bit better.

So help us out here at MIR. Hug a normob — and show them how to use ShoZu.

Or, if you’re already an advanced ShoZu user, nominate yourself as a ShoZu Grand Master.