Mobile 2.0 at Mobile Life

New visiting researcher: Matthias Korn

2011-12-02T22:28:00.001+01:00

Matthias Korn, a PhD-student of Aarhus University's Computer Mediated Activity Group in Denmark is our new visitor. Matthias is working with us within Mobile 2.0's location-based services theme.

Matthias' work focuses on the cross roads of citizen participation and mobile ubiquitous technology, and studies how location and 'being there' may support citizens in deliberation activities such as participatory planning. His research explores how mobile location-based services interweave physical and digital spaces and, specifically, how people make and experience the link between the two. Matthias' research ties into our work on location-sharing quite nicely, and it's great having him around.

Foursquare studies & apps

2011-12-02T21:58:00.001+01:00

As part of our location-sharing research, we've been looking at how people use location-sharing and the interaction design elements that affect their attitudes and behaviour by both studying existing services, and building on top of them.

We’ve been taking a ‘performative’ view on check-ins on foursquare, and explore how these specific design elements facilitate emergent, and sometimes conflicting, social norms (not) to check-in. Read more in our MobileHCI’11 paper here.

Interested mostly in gamification elements? Shorter paper ‘Gamification and location-sharing: some emerging social conflicts’ presented at the Gamification workshop at CHI’11 here.

In the mean time, our foursquare check-in apps PhiSquare (check-in via QR codes) and Pic-In (check in by taking a picture - 3rd prize in this year's Ericsson app awards!), are still downloadable as Android apps.

Lars Erik to Yahoo! Labs

2011-10-01T19:11:00.000+02:00

Finally a public note on some very big news! From January 1, Lars Erik Holmquist is moving to sunny California to set up a group at Yahoo! Labs in Santa Clara. Lots of luck - we're expecting lots of surfin' and sunscreen in your future!

In the mean time, Henriette Cramer has taken over as project leader for the Mobile 2.0 project at Mobile Life, so direct any questions about the project and collaborations her way.

2nd workshop on Research in the Large at UbiComp'11

2011-05-16T16:14:00.004+02:00

We're organizing a 2nd edition of our 'Research in the Large' workshop at UbiComp 2011 on September 18th in Beijing. The workshops will deal with the shared challenges and practical strategies to deal with the challenges inherent to wide deployment and dealing with large-scale data sets. More information at the workshop page.

Organizers: Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost (Mobile Life/SICS), Frank Bentley (Motorola Research) and David Ayman Shamma (Yahoo!).

We are in the semi-final of the Ericsson Application Awards

2011-04-29T11:45:00.008+02:00

Two applications, developed by Mobile 2.0, were selected for the semi-final of the Ericsson Application Awards (EAA). Both of our submissions are based on recent work on mobile image recognition.

Update: Pic-in won 3rd prize!

In the EAA student category we entered our application "MobileArt" in the competition. With MobileArt users can receive information about art pieces in the Stockholm subway by just potining the mobile phone camera at them.

The application "Pic-In" entered in the EAA company competition is a tool for users of location-sharing service foursquare. The application can recognize places based on photos. Users can now share a location by - you guessed it - taking a photo of it.

The winners of the semi-final will be announced at May 28th, so stay tuned for further announcements.

If you want to see, how our applications work, just have a look at the videos below.

SXSW

2011-03-26T05:35:00.004+01:00

Mobile 2.0 went to the South By South West Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, to talk to start-ups and hear about the latest in mobile and location-based services. Among the companies we interviewed were Bump, TangoTab, MapDing, Yobongo, View.io, HeyTell, Locaii, Ditto and Skylines. And some of us also made a splash at the SXSW fashion scene; Mattias 'hey man, nice hat' Rost was buzzin'.

‘Ethics, logs & videotape' workshop at CHI 2011

2010-12-06T16:14:00.008+01:00

App stores have made distribution of research apps to thousands of users incredibly easy. There is more user-generated content around than we can manage to analyze; Millions of tweets, public status updates and shared locations are waiting for us. These are huge opportunities, but researchers now also run into some interesting ethical questions.

Procedures, regulations and ethics - especially in an international and intercultural setting - are unclear and the notion of informed consent is changing. Can we just use all data that is out there? Is someone's tweet intended to be quoted in a research paper? How do we deal with permissions if we use data from users of freely available applications? Do we need to tell people about all our research plans? Is anyone downloading our app a participant?

Asking a million users for a signed consent form is not a feasible option. Notices and messages in apps telling people about our research plans will probably be skipped. If they are read, there is no guarantee they are actually understood. Sometimes researchers cannot even know who the people providing content for their studies are.

Not studies would be missing a huge opportunity, but a discussion is in order. Do we have added responsibilities if we log people’s actions? Can we always be sure there will be no adverse effects for our unwitting ‘participants’?

Join us for a discussion at the CHI2011 workshop we're co-organizing in Vancouver, Saturday May 7th: ETHICS, LOGS, and VIDEOTAPE: Ethics in Large Scale User Trials and User Generated Content.

Position papers due January 14, 2011.
Co-organised by Donald McMillan, Alistair Morrison, Matthew Chalmers (Univ. Glasgow), Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost (Mobile Life), Wendy Mackay (Univ. Paris Sud) and Adam Greenfield.

Using Foursquare or Gowalla?

2010-09-15T02:34:00.002+02:00

Location is big! Research studies on location-sharing are numerous, but it's only now that services are actually reaching the market in a big way. Check-in services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are getting a lot of attention, but how are they actually used?

As a part of our studies on location-sharing, we're running a survey on when people check-in on Foursquare and Gowalla. We'd like to know more about the places you share, the people you share with, how you feel about checking in and the experiences (both good and bad) that you've had.

Using Gowalla or Foursquare? Feel like helping us out?
The survey will take you about 15-20 minutes and will help us better understand how and why people check-in - and there might be an Amazon voucher in it for you.

Most Wanted at Ung08

2010-08-04T15:11:00.000+02:00

The Portrait Catalog is a mobile phone app that lets you share a picture of yourself with your friends. The twist is that you can only get a picture directly from another person via Bluetooth, so to collect pictures you have to meet people in real life! We will be giving away the Portrait Catalog at the Ung 08 festival, a 5-day event for youths between 13 and 19 organized by the City of Stockholm as part of the Most Wanted activity. Users will also have a chance to get their personal photo taken, and share this through Facebook and become the festival's Most Wanted. To encourage the use of the app we are giving away Sony Ericsson Xperia phones as the prize for the coolest photo and for the best networker - the person who has shared the most photos during the festival! You can find us at Kungsträdgården in Stockholm during August 8 to 14.

Looking for people who like to try out our new foursquare apps

2010-07-13T13:36:00.001+02:00

For a current research project in the area of location based services we are looking for a group of foursquare users (e.g. friends or colleagues), who are regularly checking-in at one venue in the Stockholm area.
We would like to do a user study with two new check-in applications for foursquare. We will let you try out this application for 7-10 days each and talk with you in short interviews (face-to-face or via telephone or Skype) about your experiences using foursquare in general and our apps.

If you want to try out our new applications and give feedback to us, just send an email to Sebastian@mobilelifecentre. or tweet via @seb_bue and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

If you know other people who are interested in participating, feel free to forward this information.

The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up

2010-06-03T19:36:00.000+02:00

Lars Erik Holmquist has a guest post at CrunchGear (also featured on TechCrunch) about the past, present and future of mobile and ubiquitous computing. It relates ubicomp research - including many FAL projects - to the possibilities that have opened up with new infrastructures, and argues that the rate of innovation in mobile services is about to take a quantum leap. Follow the link to read the whole article:

The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up by Lars Erik Holmquist

Foursquare + Spotify = Spotisquare!

2010-05-28T11:25:00.000+02:00

Mobile 2.0 just released Spotisquare - a mobile web app that connects music to places!

Some places just remind us of a specific song, sometimes we feel places could use a little music. The idea is to have people share what music fits a place and the people that go there. Beats to navigate the city centre, some nice ambient to go with that scenic view? Or maybe you want to share that awesome band you saw at that one club? Life needs a beat. By making collaborative playlists anyone can express their experience of a place using music.

Spotisquare connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. It is a mobile web app that adds music to places. Point your mobile browser to m.spotisquare.com. You can just use Spotisquare to check-in on Foursquare, but it also connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. When you find a venue that has a Spotify playlist, you can listen to it in Spotify, and also add your own songs to it. You can add a playlist to a venue with our connector.

φ² scanner for 4sq released!

2010-05-24T12:49:00.005+02:00

Mobile 2.0's excellent intern Sebastian Büttner just released φ² Scanner, an Android app to check-in using barcode stickers to foursquare.

Mobile 2.0's φ² project explores different ways of physical check-ins for location-based services and the connection between ‘the visible and virtual’. This is all part of Mobile 2.0's bigger location-based services project, which involves both user studies on people's usage of existing services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Brightkite, etc), and development of new concepts for location-based services (such as making hidden services visible at physical locations).

Download the first φ² app & generate your own barcodes at phi2.mobilelifecentre.org.

Research in the large!

2010-05-18T18:14:00.000+02:00

We’re organising a workshop on Research in the Large: using app stores, markets and other wide distribution channels in research at UbiComp2010, Sept 26th in Copenhagen, large.mobilelifecentre.org (with an associated special issue for IJMHCI).

Distribution of mobile applications has been greatly simplified by mobile app stores and markets. Both lone developers and large research and development teams can now relatively easily reach wide audiences. This provides a huge opportunity for both iterative development and gathering research data. However, an overview of successful strategies and ways to overcome the challenges inherent to wide deployment in a research context is not yet available. How do we need to adapt evaluation and research methods? How do we address validity & ethical concerns when doing research on such a large scale? As researchers from both industry and academia we need to share our experiences so we can make the most of this opportunity.

Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost and Nicolas Belloni (FAL/Mobile 2.0), together with Frank Bentley (Motorola) and Didier Chincholle (Ericsson) are organising a workshop at UbiComp2010 to do exactly that. Go check out the workshop call, send us your position paper and/or contribute to the associated special issue of the International Journal of Mobile HCI. More info at large.mobilelifecentre.org

New Intern: Sebastian Büttner

2010-04-27T16:44:00.001+02:00

Since two weeks Sebastian Büttner is working with us in the Mobile 2.0 group. Sebastian is a student of the German Darmstadt University of Technology. He will work on his 'diploma thesis' at FAL & Mobile Life Centre until the end of September. He will be focusing on new concepts for location-based services, in particular by integrating objects, tagged with barcodes or RFIDs into location based services to improve those and make them easier to use.
We're all quite excited to see what he'll come up with - physical check-ins, revolutionary integration of the 'real and virtual'? We'll keep you posted.

Portrait Catalog on video

2010-03-03T11:58:00.001+01:00

In the following video Mattias Rost is presenting and demoing a mobile application called Portrait Catalog. Portrait Catalog is an application for sharing and collecting portrait photos of friends. The portraits are sent over Bluetooth from one person to the other, but portraits cannot be forwarded once received. The application is inspired by the act of sharing portrait photos in elementary school, where youngsters eagerly exchange their portrait picture with their friends when the photos arrive. The application was developed during an internship at Sony Ericsson in the early summer of 2008.

We will be at CHI 2010 in Atlanta

2010-02-09T11:44:00.003+01:00

Henriette, Mattias, Lars Erik and I will be in Atlanta in April for the CHI conference. We got a workshop submission at the "Designing and Evaluating Affective Aspects of Sociable Media to Support Social Connectedness" workshop. The abstract is here.

Location-based services study – We need you!

2010-02-03T14:38:00.002+01:00

For a research project at the Mobile Life Centre we’re looking for users of mobile applications that focus on your location such as foursquare, gowalla, brightkite, Google latitude, loopt or glympse for short interviews.

Are you using an application like that? We want to talk to you about your experiences! We are interested in all types of use and both people who just occasionally use mobile services and people who use them all the time, so don’t worry about being ‘exactly the type of user we’re looking for’.

An interview would take about 15 – 30 minutes. We would either meet up face-to-face in Stockholm or Amsterdam, or talk via video chat (e.g. Skype). We would like to conduct the interviews between 21 Jan and 10 Feb, but you of course get to set the time and place.

I (Henriette) will be conducting the interviews. We’ve included a short description of Mobile Life below, please check out mobilelifecentre.org if you want to know more about our work.

Comment on this post, or send me an email at henriette (at) mobilelifecentre.org or tweet via @hsmcramer and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. If you know other people who would be interested in participating, feel free to forward this message.

Thanks from me, Henriette Cramer and Mattias Rost

Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend

2009-05-27T14:19:00.004+02:00

This weekend we will be in Copenhagen at the developer camp organized by Mozilla and the Maemo community. I don't think I need to present Mozilla. On the other hand, Maemo is the operating system of the Nokia Internet Tablets based on Linux and an active community of developers has been developing mainly open-source applications and improving the platform. Maemo is the first platform where Fennec, Mozilla mobile browser, has been released. So Mozilla will have some talks, hands-on sessions on Fennec, how to develop add-ons, etc. We are looking forward to meet the open-source community and put our hands on those great projects.

The future of Mobile is Social and Contextual

2009-05-04T00:03:00.006+02:00

There are a few people sharing our vision of the future of mobile. One of them is Rudy De Waele who is, among a thousand things, author of the mTrends blog, the european blog that you should read if you're interested by mobile technologies and future. Rudy is also behind the Mobile 2.0 Conference Europe in Barcelona where we might go in June. But I'm not writing this post to advertise his work (I don't think he needs it) but to share through him a great presentation that summarize very well out daily work at Future Application Lab, from the Mobile 2.0 project to the LIREC project.

Mobile Social Contextual Applications & Services

View more presentations from rudydw.

Thoughts on Mobile Internet

2009-04-29T17:15:00.003+02:00

On the flight back from Boston, I was reading Smart Mobs, the next social revolution by Howard Rheingold (on Amazon.com) and found this very interesting quote:

The telegraph, like the Internet... transformed social and business practices, but it could be used only by skilled operators. Its benefits became available to the public at large only when the telegraph evolved into the telephone - initially known as the "speaking telegraph". The Internet is still in a telegraphic stage of development , in the sense that the complexity and expense of PCs prevent many people from using it. The mobile phone thus promises to do for the Internet what the telephone did for the telegraph . to make it a truly mainstream technology.
Because it used the same wires, the telephone was originally seen as merely a speaking telegraph, but it turned out to be something entirely new. The same mistake is already being repeated with the Internet. Many people expect the mobile Internet to be the same as the wired version, only mobile, but they are wrong... Instead, although it is based on the same technology as the fixed-line Internet, will be something different and will be used in new and unexpected ways.

Tom Standage The Internet Untethered

In our little bubble, western-developed bubble, we tend to think that PC Internet is universal. And in our countries it kind of is. But thinking that Internet is a mainstream media is approximately neglecting 2/3rd of the world. We know as a fact that people in African countries and India are getting access to the Internet on their phones before owning a computer. Think one second about their conception of what the Internet is and how they can or should interact with it...
Most of Internet actors are mistaken by trying to move the desktop on mobile phones. Look at the first mobile version of facebook (can you actually do something on it except checking it out?). Look at Opera with its way of interpreter of pages to make them look like on the desktop. Look at Microsoft (why would you need a start menu on Windows Mobile?). What we are aiming for with the Mobile 2.0 project is to explore the limits or the future uses of the mobile. We know that we can't predict it but, by developing new applications and new approaches, bit by bit, we can maybe influence it and see it coming. Some initiatives are encouraging, we at the Future Applications Lab are really excited about the coming Palm Pre with WebOS as a huge crossover between the Internet and the mobile.

Mobile 2.0 team at CHI2009

2009-03-27T13:43:00.004+01:00

See You on the Subway: Exploring Mobile Social Software, the paper submitted as a work-in-progress on the Subway Friend Finder application, will be presented as a poster at the CHI conference in Boston next week. We will all attend the whole conference together with most of the Mobile Life researchers, so feel free to come talk to us if you're there.

Rui Xue Xia joins the Mobile 2.0 Project

2009-03-19T13:10:00.001+01:00

Rui Xue Xia is a new master student at the Future Applications Lab. She's finishing the Information and Communication Technology for Development master program at Stockholm University, a master that mixes IT, business and management. She'll be doing her Master Thesis on the Mobile 2.0 Project for 6 months. She will focus on business models in the mobile ecosystem, studying the different business possibilities for mobile applications including GeoChat, Portrait Catalog, Colombus and the Subway Friend Finder. Her knowledge in Mobile Business will bring a different angle to the project and we are really looking forward to work with her.

Two videos of geo chat and subway friend finder

2009-03-06T13:34:00.001+01:00

We made two videos demonstrating the geo chat application and the subway friend finder.

Geo Chat from mobile life on Vimeo.

Subway Friend Finder from mobile life on Vimeo.

Mobile Life Open House

2009-03-06T13:30:00.001+01:00

On wednesday we had an open house here at the mobile life centre!
We demoed four applications from the mobile 2.0 project: GeoChat, Portrait Catalogue, Subway Friend Finder, and Columbus.
There were a lot of interesting discussions around the applications and mobile 2.0 in general with interested people from industry as well as people from the general public.
For those who couldn't make it you can find video-demonstrations of both subway friend finder and the geo chat application at the mobile life website under our project page.

Demoing at JFokus

2009-01-28T17:39:00.000+01:00

Mattias and Nicolas attended JFokus on January 27-28, and demonstrated both GeoChat and Portrait Catalogue.

The conference had a quite wide focus and was not as focused around Java technologies as one might think. From a mobile 2.0 perspective it was interesting that the keynote talked about JavaFX which has one of the aims to challenge Flash Lite for mobile devices, but also wants to create a framework for enabling cross device user interfaces.

There was also an interesting presentation on HTML 5, which showed some really promising features of the upcoming standard. Although the discouraging fact that w3c has stated that the standard will be complete in 2022, it was nice to hear that most browsers actually already have started to implement parts of the standard as those parts become ready. Furthermore, the two guys who presented came from a company called Kaazing who are offering open source solutions for creating web applications that utilizes parts of HTML 5 already today, without the need for any browser plugins.

Among other things being presented at the workshop there was a short presentation of Microsofts Silverlight, a look at the new stuff being presented in Java SE 7, and also an in depth presentation of what you can do with JavaFX.

What is the Mobile 2.0 project about?

2009-01-22T13:46:00.000+01:00

This is the first post of the Mobile 2.0 project blog at the Mobile Life Centre. The project aims to explore the next generation of mobile services and applications. What follows is a short presentation of the project.

The market for mobile devices is fragmented and there are many barriers to development and deployment. At present, it is difficult to create efficient and attractive mobile services that make use of advanced capabilities of modern terminals and servers, such as absolute location, sensors, near-field communication, proximity of other users or services, etc. We call these Mobile 2.0 services, since they represent as much as a quantum leap from current mobile services as Web2.0 represents from the original World Wide Web.

In this project, we envision a new type of environment where advanced mobile services run on a common platform, similar to a web browser on traditional computers, but with added capabilities for the mobile domain. We want to make it easy for creative actors to create new services quickly, making mobile service development more like web design than application development. We also want to make it possible to distribute services to a large number of different services, and thus achieve critical mass.

We are approaching this problem from two angles: first, by prototyping a set of examples of Mobile 2.0 services based on a variety of different platforms and technologies; and second, by creating a standardized environment for rapid development of such services. We have prototyped a number of example services, including native applications, Java applications and completely web-based mobile services. The applications use a range of technologies, such as location awareness and local sharing. They cover various media and domains, such as photography, chatting and social awareness. We are now going to user test these services and deploy them to a wide range of users. This work will help us understand and hopefully address some of the problems that are currently facing developers when trying to reach mass-market.

Furthermore, we are developing an environment that will make it easy to develop advanced mobile services as it already is to create advanced web services, and builds on the expertise of web developers and interaction designers. This requires a standard that is closer to HTML and existing Web development tools such as Javascript, Flash and Ruby, than the advanced development environments of iPhone and Android, or web add-ons like Google Gears.To this end, we are now in the process of specifying a Mobile Markup Language (MML).