In the Category geo
this week in mobile : week 21
Posted May 20th, 2010 at 5:07 pm. There are 0 comments.Engadget Coverage NY Times Bits Blog Coverage
At Google I/O, Googles developer conference, Android got lots of announcements and will be going to many new places – like your tv. In the presentations by executives they spent a good amount of time throwing digs at Apple, and prosthetising their openness.
Some of the interesting bits, first Android 2.2 FroYo and then Google TV (what!?)
Built in tethering, assuming your carrier supports it & wi-fi hotspot capability.
It runs apps 5X faster
Flash 10.1 runs on it – hot and at the expense of your battery say Engadget
Application updates are cleaned up – Update all now supported and can be set to automatically download
Purchase on the Web Marketplace and send to device over the air – very cool
Music store in the Marketplace – not much mentioned aside from downloading being demoed – potential very big deal here.
Stream music from your desktop – iTunes library etc – This is Simplify Media tech, a recent Google acquisition
Google Mobile AdSense – which of course make sense. Multiple ad formats from any support Ad Network, openness.
Google TV – Getting TV and the Web married, another vector for Google Ads, on your TV. Set top box UI is, um, Googley. Is that a mouse pointer I see? Yes.
Put Android Apps on your TV – If the app doesn’t require phone specific stuff it should run today.
And now your regularly scheduled mobile updates ie. non Google I/O stuff
View past graffiti after it has been cleaned up
Graffyard uses QR codes to show the visual history after graffiti has been painted over. Its a nice example of encoding the visual of the city onto itself. One can imagine a future where city walls have a secondary digital presence and all advertising, graffiti and signage takes place via a persistent visual augmented reality system. The city becomes a contiguous blank canvas, a physical platform encoded with embed tags for the reality we want to see. Maybe.
African Churches Embrace Mobile
Reminders to come to services, tithings and sharing of bible passages for study all via SMS
Marko Ahtisaari who heads up design and user experience answers some questions about how Nokia is moving to react to the mobile world that is seemingly running away from them. He focuses on a very narrow definition of mobility, which may be right, or not.
“I still think the whole industry is missing a trick,” said Mr Ahtisaari during a meet-the-press session in London yesterday. “All the touchscreen interfaces are very immersive. You have to put your head down. What Nokia is very good at is designing for mobile use: one-handed, in the pocket. Giving people the ability to have their head up again is critical to how we evolve user interfaces.”
Heads up vs. heads down is a very interesting distinction and one that raises many interesting points about mobile device usage in the public sphere. I think if Nokia can move forward with a singular, focused direction they will be positioning themselves strongly for a good segment of the market. Im not sure if that segment will be a big enough percentage to keep them afloat, and it would represent a distinct turn from the all things to all people position they have put themselves in. What about this though – more than 50% of Nokia smartphones use touch interface ?
Speaking of heads down staring into the glowing screen – A series of photos exploring peoples relationship to their mobiles. More focused than the Flickr Lost in Text pool, which is also quite good.
The dconstruct conference website
Stretch the window down to less than 800px wide and you got the mobile version. Very elegant.
More than a third of Android users rolling on 2.1
Data compiled from a 2 week period of users accessing the Android Marketplace. Please take with a grain of salt.
Airports now on the small glowing screen
More evidence of the trend of mobile screens replacing public displays. Not sure I want to try to download an app while I’m racing through a terminal to make a connection just to see what gate my flight got moved too but, hey.
A nice roundup of technologies and ideas that are shaping the products of tomorrow. Links to examples for each in the article. Do note that four of the five listed here have a strong locative component.
1. AR browsers for mobile: Layers of data embedded in the real world around you that you can toggle between. Applications for real estate, food & entertainment, retail. This use of augmented reality will become how we live; not just an app. But will we be holding up our phones for long?
2. Augmented Mobile Profile: A social user interface implementation of your public profile. Real time information about the people around you and their entire “clouded” identity–from business card to playlists, Facebook profile to thought capitol on Slideshare. One of the ultimate social/mobile integrations I’ve seen.
3. The Active Idle Screen: Replaces your current homescreen with personal and valuable information (weather, trivia, sports scores, horoscope, etc.) in addition to advertisements for deals/coupons. Will reach the lowest common denominator audience.
4. QR codes without the QR: Recognizing that camera phones are crappy, we can analyze the photos. Take a picture of something and you receive contextual results around it. Mixed with geotargeting, this becomes very powerful. (Reviews, Where to buy, etc.)
5. Data Conformity: Location-based content and services are the promise of mobile marketing. But it has to work across all devices, content providers, and mobile carriers–one of today’s greatest challenges. When the great aggregator arrives, it will help to bring data conformity and data consistency.
Worldwide Mobile Browser Share
Displayed very nicely as a world map
The film unfolds as the viewer visits different parts of the city. The more they travel, the more of the film they see. Whats great is the creators have released the technology behind it as open source, in addition to the first GPS film Nine Lives. This has to be better than the lame 3D that seems to be in fashion at the multiplex.
$12.7 Billion by 2014 in Location Based Services
A number thats as good as any and comes from Juniper Research. Whatever the numbers are predicted to be, location based services, hyper local advertising, geo targeted marketing and anything that has to do with exactly where you are at a given point in time – especially when you are not at your desk at work or in front of the television at home – is going to be a big deal. Period.
Helpful Guide for appropriate technology usage
Covers your basic situations of office, home, in car and the great outdoors. For instance usage of MacBookPro in the Great Outdoors should be avoided – the start up sound is bear for “bring it”.
The Box
Posted May 12th, 2010 at 10:38 am. There are 0 comments.
Photo by Alastair Blackwood
The Box is back in the UK. For a period of over a year the BBC monitored their very own 40 foot shipping container as it travelled around the world carrying goods across oceans via intermodal transport. It was all to try and tell the story of globalization through the one defining symbol of the interconnected system of global trade – the intermodal shipping container.
It started it’s journey loaded with Scotch Whiskey headed for Shanghai China, and visited ports in Singapore, Bangkok, New York and Los Angeles and long stay at idle in Yokohama. Along the way it provided the context for discussions about piracy, the decline of the global economy and it’s effect on global trade and highlighted to the kinds of goods being made for cheap overseas and shipped to the west.
google mail envelopes
Posted April 12th, 2010 at 1:27 pm. There are 0 comments.
Love the idea of making maps into envelopes, even with the limitations of having to send all snail mail south-easterly to get the return address and the recipient’s address properly positioned.
Like when Reason magazine did custom magazine covers with aerial photographs for each of their subscribers homes – in June 2004
US Interstate system as a tube map
Posted November 12th, 2009 at 12:25 pm. There are 0 comments.
Senex Prime on flickr
the sea level rises and Switzerland becomes a series of islands
Posted October 22nd, 2009 at 12:42 pm. There are 0 comments.
I don’t remember seeing this in particular at the Swiss EXPO.02 but a number of artists working together under the name Waterproof “imagined a(n) (im)possible scenario wherein the water level in Switzerland rises to 1400 meters (4600 feet), turning the landlocked, Alpine country into an island nation, its rocky peaks rising above a vast ocean.”
The series of images over at Pruned show an imaginative take on how the Swiss might deal with their new situation.
via Pruned
setting an alarm for a where rather than a when
Posted October 14th, 2009 at 7:28 pm. There are 0 comments.
Proximity is a simple iPhone app that works as an alarm clock except the alarm is not set for a time but rather a location. It is aimed at commuters and others that end up sleeping while they are moving in some sort of transport. It is a great mobilization of two things that are usually understood as fixed: You sleeping in bed and your alarm clock on the bedside table are in a fixed location. A standard proximity sensor that is fixed in location sensing when moving things get closer than a pre-selected distance threshold.
I really like the transposition of a specific location where one would usually have a specific time, attaching an alarm to a where rather then a when. It is a bit of genius.
discovery in the city via mariolife and street art
Posted July 24th, 2009 at 8:52 am. There are 0 comments.
Walking home the other day I decided to play Mariolife, a real life GPS game on my iPhone. Playing in this case, is walking around in the real world gathering up virtual coins and mushrooms and rescuing princesses. In my quest to gather up coins I found myself walking on streets I had never walked, at least with any kind of noticing, and running into bits of street art I had not yet seen as well. My real life adventure was being guided by the placement of coins that existed only on the screen of my iPhone. So in spending a couple of hours wandering around collecting virtual coins and real street art (in photos) I realized that there was something really special about the collision of very different real world expereinces that was happening here.
Mariolife on iTunes
dead pixel for google earth
Posted April 30th, 2009 at 11:50 am. There are 0 comments.
82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.
A real life dead pixel by Helmut Smits. Digital display technologies affecting the real physical world with it’s intentions of affecting the digital representation of the physical world. See also.
tokyo jogging
Posted April 15th, 2009 at 12:18 pm. There are 0 comments.
Try to run on the google street view like a jogging game of wii fit from katsuma on Vimeo.
tokyo jogging is a mashup of wiimote and google streetview. Lets you “run” in Tokyo, in your web browser.
The possibilities of this are pretty interesting. Combined with the tv screen on the treadmill or exercise bike at the gym you could run world famous marathon routes and in places where running isn’t usually feasible, say, run the length of the New York Thruway.
via @oliver76
Born at 30,000 feet
Posted January 20th, 2009 at 7:08 pm. There are 0 comments.BLDGBLOG points to the interesting status bestowed upon a newly born baby girl. While flying from Amsterdam to Boston, a Ugandan women went into labor and gave birth to a child, which was subsequently deemed to be Canadian by US Customs officials. It was determined that the birth occurred over eastern Canada.
Extrapolating from this situation, BLDGBLOG speculates further:
Of course, one wonders what citizenship this baby would have been given if they had been flying over the middle of the ocean, for instance, or across the tangled borders of an enclave or exclave. A complicated mathematics of trajectory, speed, and height is unleashed by terrestrial scholars below in order to find the exact location of the plane at the moment of childbirth.
Like something out of Borges, imperial trigonometricians are called in for consultation. Their calculations take days and arguments break out.
Perhaps the child goes on to be famous – a political leader, a poet, a revolutionary, the next pope – and his or her exact aerial origin becomes increasingly important to find out. Weather data and wind speed, the weight of fellow passengers, tiny aerodynamic imperfections in the wings, and even gravitational anomalies in the earth’s crust are brought to bear: how fast was the airplane traveling?
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