New Intern: Sebastian Büttner

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.