This could be an interesting way to create new mobile user interfaces:
MOTION-SENSING COMES TO MOBILE PHONES.
Apparently the wii-technology that allows to translate real physical motion into a game will be available for mobile phones. The article states that all tier 1 device manufacturers are working on integrating this technology (not sure what the cost factor is, but as these features go it is likely to expect them only in the high-end flagship devices).
Moving a device up, down, left, right could all be translated into browsing behaviour - which of course might make scrolling a lot easier.
The iPhone will apparently be the first-to-market, with the following implementation:
"The iPhone, set to debut in June on AT&T's wireless network, detects when the device is rotated, so it can tell whether to display what's on the screen in portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) format. That allows the user to determine which format is best for viewing whatever is on the screen, be it a Web page, video or photo. The phone also can detect when it's being lifted to the ear, and responds by immediately turning off the display light to save power and preventing changes to the display image due to inadvertent contact with the touch-sensitive screen. The system restores screen power when the iPhone is moved away from the ear."
Friday 23 March 2007
Wednesday 21 March 2007
Mobile Search 2.0
Yahoo! released the US version of oneSearch, a new mobile search solution.
Check out the official press release for more info, or try it directly by typing m.yahoo.com into your phone's browser, this should open up the mobile version of the US Yahoo portal with the search box at the top.
Check out the official press release for more info, or try it directly by typing m.yahoo.com into your phone's browser, this should open up the mobile version of the US Yahoo portal with the search box at the top.
Monday 19 March 2007
Let's say you are travelling on business and you are looking for a pizza place nearby, so you type in "Pizza" and ...
There was this interesting thread on the Yahoo-groups MoMo London mailing list the other day, about how come that location aware/based services have not really taken off on mobile so far. For years and years, they have been hyped as the prototypical use-case, the inevitable cash-cow of mobile services. At least outside Japan and South Korea, in 2007 LBS has still not fulfilled that promise. Invariably, historically and even still today when one reads about LBS the standard use case seems to be someone in an unfamiliar surrounding looking for a great restaurant nearby.
In thinking about LBS, this seems to be a very striking myth and perhaps one of the reasons why LBS is still in its infancy: most of us are actually in quite familiar surroundings most of the time. And if we are not, we tend to be with someone who is. Or have done our research prior to getting there, online; desktop-online that is. Hence, such a service offering will not drive regular, widespread adoption. That is not to say it is useless, it simply will not deliver the level of uptake required for LBS to be considered successful.
So it seems that for LBS to take off there need to be more reasonable customer propositions, and it seems there indeed are many good ones floating around out there, some of which are the following:
1) Updates and events based on my particular loacation and preferences; e.g. who is playing at a local favorite venue, what is on in a cinema near where I live, traffic information on the journey home, special offers in shops / restaurants I frequently go to. Add mobile coupons to this mix, and users might accept this into their daily lives. Of course it needs to be mostly pull, or an opt-in push, and a perception of being spammed needs to be avoided, but that seems like stating the obvious.
2) Location tagging: with exponential growth of people documenting their life online via blogs, myspace etc. users might see it as a nice feature to be able to keep track of where they went. A drive for exhibitionism (with sufficiently voyerism to match it) would surely overcome any privacy issues for plenty of users. Such a service would then e.g. display dots / lines on a map where the user has spent time, potentially with links to the appropriate blog entries. Example: WeHangHere
3) Location tagging part 2: people leaving comments about their favourite places or linking to blog entries; someone who passes by those places can see what others thought about it / experienced here. Digital graffitti.
4) Kids safety / emergency: parents tracking their kids / emergency services locating a person in need - as far as I know already widely used in Japan.
Of course, apart from the services the main pieces in the puzzle that are missing would be:
1) LBS lookup costs to decrease, in order for any meaningful margins / business cases to surface. Another ask to the carriers - surely one of them will lead the pack, 3 ("Tear down this wall, Mr. Fox") seems to be a likely candidate.
2) Devices supporting GPS: Nokia is leading with the N95. Again, Japan seems far ahead - legend has it, that all 3G phones shipped after April 2007 are required to have GPS support. By the way: whatever happened to Galileo, the EU version of GPS ? And are there any devices already in planning to support Galileo and / instead of GPS ?
3) As with all mobile internet services: cost transparency and data flat fees.
4) The local content needs to be complete: if 9 out of 10 stores / bars / cinemas / gas stations I pass are not listed, little enthusiasm is to be expected.
In thinking about LBS, this seems to be a very striking myth and perhaps one of the reasons why LBS is still in its infancy: most of us are actually in quite familiar surroundings most of the time. And if we are not, we tend to be with someone who is. Or have done our research prior to getting there, online; desktop-online that is. Hence, such a service offering will not drive regular, widespread adoption. That is not to say it is useless, it simply will not deliver the level of uptake required for LBS to be considered successful.
So it seems that for LBS to take off there need to be more reasonable customer propositions, and it seems there indeed are many good ones floating around out there, some of which are the following:
1) Updates and events based on my particular loacation and preferences; e.g. who is playing at a local favorite venue, what is on in a cinema near where I live, traffic information on the journey home, special offers in shops / restaurants I frequently go to. Add mobile coupons to this mix, and users might accept this into their daily lives. Of course it needs to be mostly pull, or an opt-in push, and a perception of being spammed needs to be avoided, but that seems like stating the obvious.
2) Location tagging: with exponential growth of people documenting their life online via blogs, myspace etc. users might see it as a nice feature to be able to keep track of where they went. A drive for exhibitionism (with sufficiently voyerism to match it) would surely overcome any privacy issues for plenty of users. Such a service would then e.g. display dots / lines on a map where the user has spent time, potentially with links to the appropriate blog entries. Example: WeHangHere
3) Location tagging part 2: people leaving comments about their favourite places or linking to blog entries; someone who passes by those places can see what others thought about it / experienced here. Digital graffitti.
4) Kids safety / emergency: parents tracking their kids / emergency services locating a person in need - as far as I know already widely used in Japan.
Of course, apart from the services the main pieces in the puzzle that are missing would be:
1) LBS lookup costs to decrease, in order for any meaningful margins / business cases to surface. Another ask to the carriers - surely one of them will lead the pack, 3 ("Tear down this wall, Mr. Fox") seems to be a likely candidate.
2) Devices supporting GPS: Nokia is leading with the N95. Again, Japan seems far ahead - legend has it, that all 3G phones shipped after April 2007 are required to have GPS support. By the way: whatever happened to Galileo, the EU version of GPS ? And are there any devices already in planning to support Galileo and / instead of GPS ?
3) As with all mobile internet services: cost transparency and data flat fees.
4) The local content needs to be complete: if 9 out of 10 stores / bars / cinemas / gas stations I pass are not listed, little enthusiasm is to be expected.
Sunday 18 March 2007
Meme Tracker
Another handy tool in organizing the latest and greatest - a "Meme" tracker integrates latest headlines on a given topic from a variety of sources. "Memes" is a term coined by Richard Dawkins in the 70ties to describe a unit of cultural information. In the context of technews, internet buzz etc. it describes the latest events, hypes etc. in the industry. Check out http://techmeme.com/ as an example. WAP review has reviewed the mobile version. If I understand correctly the difference to a RSS-feed reader is that the selection of the relevant sources is not done by the user, but the owner of the memetracker. I am curious to see whether I find relevant news that I cannot find by following a number of relevant sites and blogs from the area I am interested in, that have updates on a daily basis.
I wonder, if a memetracker will indeed surface topics that between the sources I have used so far I might miss. Or, alternatively, if a memetracker can serve as the first information stop, and other sources will become less important. Finally, intuitely I am asking myself: so how can I customize this service and add sources I like? But that does not seem to be the point, if I get the concept - if I want to define the sources, I use an RSS-reader. Memetracker I guess would be more like traditional media, ie. trusted gatekeepers that channel signal from noise for the recipient, only that the actual aggregation happens in an automated way.
But the all decisive question for me really is: how to find enough attention span and cognitive processing capacities to absorb all of this readily available constant information chatter ... sigh.
I wonder, if a memetracker will indeed surface topics that between the sources I have used so far I might miss. Or, alternatively, if a memetracker can serve as the first information stop, and other sources will become less important. Finally, intuitely I am asking myself: so how can I customize this service and add sources I like? But that does not seem to be the point, if I get the concept - if I want to define the sources, I use an RSS-reader. Memetracker I guess would be more like traditional media, ie. trusted gatekeepers that channel signal from noise for the recipient, only that the actual aggregation happens in an automated way.
But the all decisive question for me really is: how to find enough attention span and cognitive processing capacities to absorb all of this readily available constant information chatter ... sigh.
Saturday 17 March 2007
Flipper Karten
Remembering my Hamburg years:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqcITby-l4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZNkrDiawg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S3JW26pL_4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV1M1YYyYoI&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Gpb6JESNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ji1vvxhlsA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk5pQxJFv0A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqcITby-l4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZNkrDiawg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S3JW26pL_4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV1M1YYyYoI&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Gpb6JESNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ji1vvxhlsA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk5pQxJFv0A
Let there be blog
So here goes. My first blog. I have been tempted before to set up and more importantly keep a regular blog, but never got past one or two initial posts before other things kept eating up my time - and the need to keeping a blog seemed infinitely less important than say spending quality time with my tele.
Yet another attempt goes here - and why? Why not just keep a good old diary or notebook, which has served plenty of people well in the centuries past to record and structure their thoughts, emotions, insights etc. Exhibitionism ? Some desperate need to gain attention? Somehow, plenty of negative associations used to define my position on setting up my own blog.
And it is not just that it seems to be one of those things that up-to-speed, self-respecting over-achievers seem to be doing these days. After all, that would still have nothing to do with me.
I think it has more to do with the fact that over the past 12 months or so I became a regular and quite enthusiastic reader of a variety of blogs, mainly in the mobile sphere, to catch up on the latest buzz and thinking and developments in the industry. And it made me realize that apart from helping to record and structure my thoughts and insights etc. the additional benefit of blogs of course is their networking and public properties - the opportunity to potentially interact with countless others and receive feedback, further ideas, hints from unexpected corners of the web and world. I fully intend to still keep the part of my life that I consider private out of this blog - but what cognitive and perceptive in- and output I find worth sharing and putting out there for peer review can henceforth be found here.
Prost.
Yet another attempt goes here - and why? Why not just keep a good old diary or notebook, which has served plenty of people well in the centuries past to record and structure their thoughts, emotions, insights etc. Exhibitionism ? Some desperate need to gain attention? Somehow, plenty of negative associations used to define my position on setting up my own blog.
And it is not just that it seems to be one of those things that up-to-speed, self-respecting over-achievers seem to be doing these days. After all, that would still have nothing to do with me.
I think it has more to do with the fact that over the past 12 months or so I became a regular and quite enthusiastic reader of a variety of blogs, mainly in the mobile sphere, to catch up on the latest buzz and thinking and developments in the industry. And it made me realize that apart from helping to record and structure my thoughts and insights etc. the additional benefit of blogs of course is their networking and public properties - the opportunity to potentially interact with countless others and receive feedback, further ideas, hints from unexpected corners of the web and world. I fully intend to still keep the part of my life that I consider private out of this blog - but what cognitive and perceptive in- and output I find worth sharing and putting out there for peer review can henceforth be found here.
Prost.
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