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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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