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.

Mobile 2.0 team at CHI2009

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

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

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

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.