The rise of the cameraphone has certainly changed the face of journalism, and old-guard wire service Reuters isn't about to get passed by -- the company has entered into a long-term partnership with Nokia to develop new mobile reporting technologies, and the two companies have recently completed trials of an N95-based "Mobile Journalism Tookit" that takes moblogging to a whole new level. Reporters were given a hardware bundle that consisted of an N95, a Nokia SU-8W portable keyboard, a Sony condenser mic with special N95 adapter, a tripod, and two Power Monkey power stations, including the solar-capable Explorer, all of which linked into a custom mobile CMS that allows stories to be posted almost instantly. Reuters also partnered with Comvu for GPS-linked video streaming, and the N95 also provides a host of other metadata about each piece of content as it's filed. Although the trial is now over, both Reuters and Nokia plan on using the kits to teach journalism students and to promote the cause of citizen journalism. Let's hope that means they start teaching people how to take non-blurry cameraphone spy shots, eh?

Read -- Mobile Journalism Toolkit press release
Read -- Posts from the Reuters mobile journalism trial
Read -- Toolkit contents

You know it's a pretty slow summer Friday on the Reuters news beat when one of the biggest stories making the rounds focuses on the shocking revelation that Nigerian students are using their shiny new OLPC XOs to do what hormonal young men have being doing since the dawn of time: look at naked women. The esteemed wire service's African correspondent breathlessly reports that a journalist from the News Agency of Nigeria had seen pornography on a few children's notebooks, which led the country's publication of record to surmise that "efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials." Why, the NAN report makes it sound like these kids are spending their days at some seedy adult bookstore and not even attending school at all. Luckily for the porn-addicted youngsters, administrators of the pilot program are aware of this snowballing crisis, and will soon be installing filters that will very likely block out a slew of legitimate pages while still allowing curious students to see all the flesh they want on Myspace. Will someone please think of the children?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

See, the great thing about a robot uprising is that it doesn't have to be "hostile" in the usual sense. All it takes is enough robots doing peoples laundry, and then one day our whole civilization stops because nobody can find any clean socks -- total chaos. In that vein, it looks like Reuters has just sealed humanity's doom. They've just launched their new Reuters NewsScope service, which tags news in machine-readable ways, allowing for the automatic trading of stocks based on the actual content of news stories, not just the numbers that current automatic trading systems glom onto. An additional Reuters app can even comb through Reuters archives to see what effect similar news had on a certain stock historically, handing even in-depth analysis over to the bots. As Techdirt points out, if you combine this system with that Thomson Financial bot for the automatic generation of news stories based on financial data, you can create a rather entertaining loop of robot-driven financials. Soon these machines will recognise their subservience and rise to challenge us. If we're lucky, they'll use us to test out risky moon missions and the like before we're completely obsolete. But we'll probably all just die during the first invasion.

[Via Techdirt]

In what could turn into a preemptive strike against the further decline of DVD sales in the face of competition from digital downloads as well as Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, major retailers may soon be installing kiosks in their stores that give customers access to on-demand, feature-length films on DVD or their portable devices. According to Reuters, the major movie studios are reportedly in talks with retail heavyweights like Wal-mart to theoretically offer their complete archives for downloading to in-store terminals with high-speed connections, where they would either be burned onto DVD or transferred to unspecified devices, a la that proposed DVD Station service we saw awhile back (which seemingly never materialized). While the prospect of having immediate access to almost every movie ever made is admittedly appealing, we're not really sure that we want to drive all the way over to Best Buy just to stand around waiting uncomfortably with our fellow patrons as we all clutch our iPods, nervously tap our feet, and wish we'd all just stayed at home and settled for whatever was on Moviebeam.

[Via Slashdot]