mobile_city - Yule Heibel on Diigo

17 Apr 09

Where 2.0 Preview - Building the SENSEable City - O'Reilly Radar

James Turner interviews Andrea Vaccari of MIT's SENSEable City Lab about using internet and mobile technology data (generated by citizens in their day-to-day lives) to figure out how "digital technologies are evolutionizing the way we live in cities." (Not sure about turning EVOLUTION into a verb...)

radar.oreilly.com/...-20-preview---building-th.html - Preview

senseable_city mobile_city urbanplanning mit o'reilly andrea_vaccari

JT: In a future world where this is more pervasive and available rather than being a one-shot, how would you see urban planners and governments using this data?

AV: Well, for the urban planners, there is a big, big revolution going on. What happens today is that policies and plans are thought by assumptions. And their effects and imports can be evaluated only after a long time that they are implemented because, again as it was seen before, gathering this information is expensive. It's costly. It's cumbersome. So it's really impossible to get this information in real-time. What is going to happen is that instead of planning the city, the urban planners would actually have to program the city, to configure [it] in real-time because information will flow in real-time. So if you change the direction of the one-way road, you will see almost immediately what the effect on traffic is. If you close an area to cars, you can see immediately what will happen into the mobility in general. And if you create public spaces in a place rather than another, you will see immediately how people will react to that.
I recently saw some comments about our work that were asking what's the function of these visualizations. And I have to say they are very useful. And they are extremely important in two different ways. On one side, yes, they are helpful to inform the citizens to educate, in a sense, the public to understand this kind of information; to make them understand that their actions build up on an overarching dynamic system which is the city that really is built of individual choices. But these individual choices emerge as one unique entity which is the city again. So as we somehow try to explain how financial markets work by showing some graphs or charts at the end of the news on TV or on newspapers, I think that we will have to do the same to inform the public about these issues and to let them understand what it means. On the other side, these visualizations are extremely helpful and I have to say successful in helping those who are stakeholders in this revolution, as I was saying before, which includes telecomm operators or municipalities in getting interested into this analysis, in understanding the potential. And really by seeing this data visualized, the decision-maker can grasp it. And these visualizations helped us collecting some of the data that we then used for our quantitative analysis.
1 more annotations...
- Well, basically, our major datasets are on one side cell phone activity and on the other side, Flickr pictures. They are not the only ones of course. But they are the two best examples of what we call digital shadows and digital footprints. Digital shadows are all of those data that are gathered by the interaction and conscious interactions of the user with pervasive systems. Digital footprints, on the other side, are explicitly released information about the behavior of citizens in the city. Flickr pictures are publically available online.
  
  And a good deal of those is available and geotagged. So you can download them and see where they were taken. Since you know also the user that took them and you know, for example, his or her nationality, you can really see how people flow within a specific area from the level of the nation to the level of a city, back down to the level of a specific area within the city. And you can see where most of the pictures are taken: what are the hotspots, what kind of temporal signature is in specific place so whether tourists go more in the morning or in the afternoon.
  
  And more interestingly, you can see flows. You can see where people go to take a picture first and where they go next. And all of these places are interconnected with each other.

18 Nov 08

Why mobile phones are the new travel guides -Times Online

Description of Wikitude, developed by Philipp Breuss of Austria, which stands to replace guidebooks -- and guides. Downloadable to mobiles, you hold your phone up as if to take a picture of a building; then, when you see the building on the screen, tap an icon, and off you go into information-land. Seems to work best for London at this point.

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article5106415.ece - Preview

wikitude travel mobile_technology mobile_city

02 Jun 08

"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (p.2) (MIT Technology Review)

P.2 of Kate Green's "the Future of Mobile Social Networking" - fascinating stuff.

www.technologyreview.com/...page2 - Preview

mit_techreview local_news location_based_reminders locative_media mobile_city mobile_muse

Whrrl is most useful when members of the user's social network actively contribute reviews. This requires that the user's friends have smart phones--and the motivation to critique the places they go.
the biggest obstacle faced by services like Whrrl is privacy concerns.
3 more annotations...
- Choudhury says that these first-generation services will likely be used by small groups of early adopters who are more aware than most of potential privacy risks and will push companies to confront them.
- In the future, she suspects, location-based services will include more predictive features. For instance, instead of explicitly requiring you to write a review, the software might recognize how often you visit a restaurant and infer that it is a favorite.
- "Eventually, I think that a whole lot of exciting technology will emerge that figures out how to reduce the burden on the user," Choudhury says. "There will always be the case where user input will be important, but when we find the sweet spot, that's when I think it will take off."

"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (MIT Technology Review)

"IPhone users will soon be able to enjoy Whrrl, software that combines activity recommendations with real-time location data."

This sounds very intriguing...

www.technologyreview.com/...20844 - Preview

location_based_reminders locative_media mobile_technology mobile_city mit_techreview local_news

The software enables something Pelago's chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone's map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user's friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.

"If you think about your day-to-day life and how you discover things around you and places to go, to a great extent the source of that information is your friends," Vengroff says. With Whrrl, a user can "look through the eyes of friends and see the places they find compelling." The software begins with the user's position on the iPhone's map and indicates a smattering of nearby establishments. If the user's friends have visited and rated these places, the software indicates that as well. The map also shows the positions of nearby friends who have enabled a feature that lets them be seen by others.
Whrrl may turn out to be the leading edge of a wave of new location-based applications. "I think we're going to see a lot of new players showing up in this space," says Kurt Partridge, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center who works on a similar project called Magitti. "Part of the reason," he says, "is the universal availability of GPS or access to location, which hasn't been available to application writers before." The iPhone and Nokia's N95 phone are two examples of phones that provide location data to computer programmers. Google's forthcoming Android mobile operating system may also help push location-based applications onto the market.
1 more annotations...
- Whrrl, which can also be downloaded onto BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, and Nokia N95 smart phones, is commonly compared to both types of service. But it differs from either in that it combines aspects of both. In addition, Vengroff explains, Whrrl has collected details on establishments in 17 cities, which allows the service to provide fine-tuned local search, letting the user narrow down the hunt for, say, a café to one that has outdoor seating and vegetarian options and is recommended by at least one friend.

26 May 08

"The Web and Beyond: Mobility (1) - Adam Greenfield" - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

Michiel de Lange reports on the CHI conference "The Web and Beyond: Mobility" in Amsterdam on 5/22/08, featuring Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia). In this post, he focuses on Greenfield's presentation. A key aspect that struck me was this observation by Greenfield: that ubicom / ubiquitous computing creates a new level of "ambient informatics," and "information processing dissolves into behavior." Greenfield's example is the seemingly choreographed swish of a public transit user who swings her purse in front of the transit card reader, never skipping a beat, but shaped indelibly by the technology into certain movements.

www.themobilecity.nl/...ond-mobility-1-adam-greenfield - Preview

adam_greenfield mobile_city ubiquitous ubicom technology

Networked processors are already showing up in new places, on the level of bodies and on the level of the streets. These become social objects. They help create an “ambient informatics”: delivering information locally upon which you can act. This really becomes ambient when information processing dissolves into behavior. Greenfield gives an example of a woman he saw using her transit card in public transport by swinging her handbag in full speed in front of the reader, almost becoming a choreography.
Architecture and building is becoming increasingly shaped by computation. It changes the city-scape. It changes mobility too. Objects become accessible, scriptable, queryable, and connected. All this changes the way we use cities from browsing to searching. We can now directly look for something and this search can be customized by recombining elements.
- - seems to me that G. leaves out one significant factor: when I look around, I don't see architecture & building "increasingly shaped by computation," I see people who use tools (including mobile phones) who are the ones shaping the city. If anything, the buildings & architecture themselves lag behind user preferences, although it is for sure a two-way street. - on 2008-05-26
Add Sticky Note
1 more annotations...
- Greenfield ends with some “proposals for the real time city” that urban/media designers should leep in mind:
  
  1. Create beautiful seams: read/write access to city
  
  2. Underspecify: do not too much closure to space.
  
  3. Understand changing city life: from flaneur to consumer to user.

15 May 08

Nomads at last | Economist.com

Published on the same date as "The new oases" (http://tinyurl.com/6nhzvy), I missed this story the first time around. Saw it now via Wendy Waters's blog, "All About Cities." Like "The new oases," it's all about mobile computing, and its effects on our social worlds/ lived lives.

It's odd this topic should pop up for me today, as the other article (bookmarked last month, "The new oases") seemed very appropriate to a discussion around video commenting, which was taking place on Fred Wilson's blog. Disqus & Seesmic have joined forces, enabling users to leave video recorded comments (vs. text scribblings) on blogs. Somehow, when I read about this on Dave Winer's blog and Wilson's (and I left a comment on Wilson's blog, too, albeit straight text, no video), I immediately thought of "The new oases" and its points regarding isolation. You have to wonder whether the technology can ever *produce* or *recreate* "nest warmth," that sense of communal belonging, or whether each instance of technologicall mediation isn't just another way of giving us yet another perspective view on our own selves.

It's not the case that "communal belonging" or what the Germans call "Nestwaerme" (nest warmth) is a good thing, or whether getting a perspective is a good thing. They're both good things in their appropriate times and places. It's more a question of not confusing one for the other. On Wilson's blog there's much discussion of whether or not the Disqus-Seesmic joint venture (video blog comments) will produce better comments/ comments streams/ understanding. I don't think it will. It will just refract whatever understanding exists or is able to be seen into yet more facets. That's all.

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

the_economist nomadism mobile_technology mobile_city technology

AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café's wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn't usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.
The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies.
9 more annotations...
- Around the turn of the century, as some astronauts, typically executive road warriors, got smarter about packing light, says Mr Saffo, they graduated to an intermediate stage, becoming hermit crabs. These are crustaceans that survive by dragging around a cast-off mollusc shell for protection and shelter. In the metaphorical sense, the shell might be a “carry-on” bag on wheels, stuffed full of cables, discs, dongles, batteries, plugs and paper documents (just in case of disc failure). These hermit crabs strike fear into the hearts of seated airline passengers whenever they board, because their shells invariably bang into innocent shins all the way to their seat. They carry less than astronauts—and are thus more mobile—but are still quite heavily laden with gear, mostly as a safeguard against disasters.
- Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don't even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.
- Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel.
- how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
- Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large.
- Architects, property developers and urban planners are changing their thinking about buildings and cities to accommodate the new habits of the nomads that dwell in them.
  - Yep. - on 2008-05-15
  Add Sticky Note
- Regulators have grasped that the airwaves are now among society's most important assets. America, for instance, has just auctioned off a chunk of spectrum with new rules that require the owner to allow any kind of device and software to run on the resulting network.
- Now the mobile phone is on course to replace the PC as the primary device for getting online.
  - Pay attention, Canada! - on 2008-05-15
  Add Sticky Note
- The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it. As Ms Canlas sips her Americano and dives into her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she gives no thought to the specifications and standards that make her connection possible. It is the human connections that now take over.

20 Apr 08

The new oases | Economist.com

"Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic" - Economist, April 10/08: interesting article about unmooring and how that's reflected in architectural trends, too. Sent this article in its entirety to my email archive, since I can't seem to use Diigo for highlighting. Key excerpt:
QUOTE:
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.
UNQUOTE

Other key idea: how this turns the "third places" critique on its head, too.

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

the_economist urban_design workspaces mobile_city nomadism mobility third_places

FRANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect, likes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the trick. Opened in 2004 and housing MIT's computer-science and philosophy departments behind its façade of bizarre angles and windows, it has become a new Cambridge landmark. But the building's most radical innovation is on the inside. The entire structure was conceived with the nomadic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre's design, was conceived as a new kind of “hybrid space”.
1 more annotations...
- The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.

06 Apr 08

Videos (and slides) of keynotes available - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

Michiel de Lange posted keynotes and slides online from the recent Mobile City conference.

www.themobilecity.nl/...d-slides-of-keynotes-available - Preview

mobile_city reference locative_media video cities architecture

07 Jan 08

Jane Jacobs, bloggy neighbourhoods and cell phone sidewalks (The Mobile City » Blog Archive » )

- sounds similar to what I've said in a few articles (see the FOCUS Magazine article on Centennial Square, published March 2007 ("Private affairs in public spaces"), and on my wiki, too (re. importance of anonymity). I'm intrigued by the ref. to "seams" as per Jacobs. Must get the ripper and investigate... <div class="jk">!</div>

www.themobilecity.nl/...hoods-and-cell-phone-sidewalks - Preview

cell_phones cities jjacobs mobile_city urban_energy

Yule Heibel's Library tagged mobile_city → View Popular

Where 2.0 Preview - Building the SENSEable City - O'Reilly Radar

Why mobile phones are the new travel guides -Times Online

"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (p.2) (MIT Technology Review)

"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (MIT Technology Review)

"The Web and Beyond: Mobility (1) - Adam Greenfield" - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

Nomads at last | Economist.com

The new oases | Economist.com

Videos (and slides) of keynotes available - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

Jane Jacobs, bloggy neighbourhoods and cell phone sidewalks (The Mobile City » Blog Archive » )

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Sponsored Links

Top Contributors