Recently in Mobile Computing Category
I'll be going to a few interesting events in the next two months:
April 26 GoRuCo (Gotham Ruby Conference)
from the site: "A technical conference aimed at highly motivated programmers interested in all things Ruby."
April 30 Visualization Day at CUNY
This looks really interesting, with presentations by Ben Schneiderman and other HCI & Visualization notables. The conference is free, which is always a plus.
May 12 - 14 Where2.0 in Burlingame, CA
I've been wanting to go to this conference for a couple years. Always a great line-up of speakers and lots of interesting people and projects. This year's Where2.0 should be excellent - with all the LBS apps and platforms that are launching.
May 17 Smart/Models (AIGA/NY Biz Conf)
AIGA/NY has put together a great looking conf featuring a diverse group of designers and producers discussing... the biz. I'm especially looking forward to Jason Fried's talk on 37signals' approach. There has been a lot of talk about new business models in the creative space, and this looks to be a great round-up of some super intelligent people with highly innovative ideas and methods.
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Of course, this will all change next month when the SDK is released.
Despite some misgivings, I was still almost excited about the Chumby project. But when one arrived this morning at Organic, and we gleefully ripped open the packaging [cue montage of kids in a candy store on Christmas]... that excitement pretty much faded to complete disappointment.
The device is chunky - like a little, ugly, bloated change-purse. The material seems cheap. The LCD is lack-luster. The touch-screen is trash. In a weak attempt at customization, a few 'chumby charms' are included in the package - which can be attached to a metal stud on the side of the device.
As a ubiquitous device, the chumby fails miserably - tied to a power-outlet. The sheer size of the thing is a limit on its mobility. And it feels so goddamn out of place in pretty much every setting... with the exception of a child's playroom.
I felt the future of ubicomp crashing down into a pit of sharks...
...and then I pulled out my iPhone to check my email.
Jane Oh, Chris Kairalla, and I are developing a location-based system documenting and displaying emotional response and stimulus. The project is multi-faceted, involving a cell-phone application, wearable input and display, screen-based display, and server-side locating software. Currently, we are focusing on one emotion—gratitude, as determined by facial flush response, or temperature changes in the face. Location will be determined by cell-tower ID and signal strength, as gleaned by the mobile app and server-side logic. We are developing the client app in Series60 Python, implementing the Location api. The tower info will be correlated to both user-inputed geo-data and the FCC supplied database (link). Data will be transfered to the cell-phone via bluetooth, and uploaded to the server. Subjects will also be encouraged to take relevant pictures, and hopefully video for the screen-based informatics display.
Pertinent online resources are archived here.
The only mobile app (aside from radar) that I tend to use with any frequency is OperaMini. I've got a Nokia 6682, and the standard web browser is pretty aweful. Mobile Opera provides a light-weight yet option-heavy browsing experience. The proxying really makes web browsing much faster and I haven't run into any huge issues. Really, the only sites I use it for are google, gmail, and the random miscelaneous site checking. I can choose which images I actually want to download, and since I don't have unlimited packet data on my plan, this is a necesary feature.
Good read (albeit a little disjointed) over at Open Gardens re: alternative mobile networks. Fish gives a broad overview of the 2 key types of mobile networks, Wi-Fi and WiMax. The article contains much postulation on what customers really want and/or expect — what type of network will succeed; though in this the point seems to be lost.
The final statement struck me as naive and, well, silly.
In my view, the winner will be the customer and the customer will define and decide what exactly they mean by a mobile network and whether it will succeed.
In my mind, the customer does'nt really decide, the customer is given, sold. That's what customers are by definition — sold. The product with the most coverage and accessibility is going to prevail. Even if that products coverage is garbage, and is not all that accessibile, because getting into this business is so expensive. The telcos already in place will decide.
Or maybe I'm just being cynical. I hope so.
A new technique for luring people to maliscious sites has been going around—via SMS. Cnet reports that the scam is reasonably sophisticated: robots send out an SMS (using the email/SMS gateway) to the effect of "you will be charged $2/message through your phone bill unless you go to this website and cancel the service."
Well, it was only a matter of time before things like this started popping up. I fear for the Email/SMS gateway, on which many innovative developers are forced to rely. Yes, this method of reaching users is a hack, but one developers are forced to use, as there are no reasonable alternatives—short codes are extremely difficult to obtain, and incredibly expensive, especially for start-ups without exhorbitant financial backing.
Hopefully this won't piss off the carriers enough to lock down the gateways. Hopefully the repurcussions won't inadvertantly filter out all the interesting SMS- and MMS-based applications out there—Gumspots, Radar... But really, I've developed a pretty strong cynicism with all things related to the mobile telcos.
SmartMobs had it first.
Read about GSM Location on 7.5th Floor, one of my 'dailies'. The project looks interesting, as a new viral location-aware tech. One of these days I'll build that Python app...
