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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 (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.
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- 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.

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.
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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.

13 May 08

MIT students show power of open cell phone systems (MIT Technology Review)

Fascinating report on MIT class project to design software programs for Android (Google) mobile operating system. Upshot? Location, location, location. All but one of the projects involved location-based applications.

www.technologyreview.com/...20765 - Preview

mit_techreview mit android cell_phones mobile_technology locative_media

What do you want your cell phone to be able to do?

Massachusetts Industry of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.'s upcoming Android mobile operating system.
If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation.