Gail is back

A familiar face returns: Gail Johnsson Tabtim will be interning with us again, this time within the 'Drawing the City' project. 


Gail will be helping us out on our Motorola Mobility - Mobile Life study on people's perceptions of their cities. Gail will be following up on our study in Chicago, and will be collecting hand-drawn maps from Stockholmers. 

New visiting researcher: Matthias Korn

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

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

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

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

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'.