Author Archive
by Imran Ali
August 7, 2008 at 6:11 am · Filed under Events + Conferences, Events, Conferences, London
London continues to be a hotbed of mobile innovation with the announcement of Ryan Carson’s Future of Mobile conference, due to take place from 17-18th November later this year
The Carsonified crowd have quickly established themselves as running great, low cost, high value conferences in digital mobility, web, design and advertising.
The sessions are themed around openness, operating systems, launching apps, ‘ideas & tactics’ for breaking through industry barriers. It actually looks looks pretty pragmatic, rather than theorerical with a slight bias (and rightly so) towards entrepreneurs and hackers.
Early bird pricing still seems to be in effect, sodelegates can registered for as little as £145/$282. You can find out more about sessions, speakers and workshops at http://future-of-mobile.com/2008/london/
by Imran Ali
August 7, 2008 at 5:05 am · Filed under MMS, Twitter, Video, 12seconds
Following on from last week’s coverage of 12seconds, the service’s creators have been running a ’12second Challenge’, posing questions and setting challenges each day that users must respond to or answer in twelve second bursts. A great way of building enthusiasm and publicity for a service…and creating a generation of evangelists.
12seconds have also been talking about a bunch of upcoming enhancements and improvements that’re soon coming to the service. These include…
- Video replies and an improved recorder.
- Enhanced commenting, tagging, grouping & navigation.
- URL shortnening for posting to Twitter.
- Privacy controls.
- Support for third party services - perhaps Facebook and MySpace?
- Mobile integration - this already works well with MMS…perhaps they’re looking at installed apps? Video messaging finally comes to iPhone?
12seconds look like they’re being driven by the needs of their alpha testers, a great approach that’ll ensure they deliver the user experience and product that’s really in demand…now what could the business model be…?
by Imran Ali
July 30, 2008 at 7:50 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Nokia, Location, Locative
Prominent Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase, recently wrote about the implications of shared location data and it’s increasing awareness to others.
Chipchase explores the emerging trend of people seeking disconnection from one another in urban environments, despite the increasing economic dependence we all have on interconnectedness in all its forms.
As mobile and locative technologies are providing a new precision and pervasiveness in locating individuals, coupled with a rise in overlapping social networks, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain geo-privacy meaning that opting out of technology could likely mean opting out of culture and society - less a technology issue and more one of cultural gravity.
Though mobile elements of web services such as Dopplr and Yahoo’s FireEagle are looking at mechanising how we share, articulate and perform our locative data - no one is really exploring the social implications and social cost of non-participation in locative media.
Chipchase rightly doesn’t seek to offer answer, but encourages readers to articulate meaningful questions to explore the implications of our collective invention…an approach entirely appropriate to any emerging technology.
You can read Chipchase’s article here…
by Imran Ali
July 29, 2008 at 4:23 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, MMS, UK
Back in November, we reported that Brits were sending 1.2bn text messages each week. Today, just eight months later, the UK’s Mobile Data Association released figures (as reported by BBC News) covering the first half of 2008 that show in increase to 1.4bn messages per week, surprisingly including 10m photo messages.
Assuming an SMS averages 5p and MMS 10p, that’s likely to be around £60-70m of revenue each week for a product will a relatively miniscule cost base…an astonishing figure which underlines the massive consumer appeal of SMS and MMS and its value to cellcos. All the more impressive when comparing the 28bn UK messages with 80bn messages sent across the US in the same period, a country five times the size of Britain.
Conversely, the UK’s Chartered Society of Physiotherapists today published a study illustrating the physical and physiological impact of texting on teenagers and other groups. As well as a geographic and demographic breakdown of the texting habits of 177 people, the CSP goes on to suggest a five step programme for safe texting…
- Hold the phone up with the screen facing towards you so you are not having to flex your neck too much as you look down to view the screen.
- Keep your hands close to your body. The weight of a phone may not feel much, but the load on your arm is significantly increased if the arm is held out stretched and this action will put strain on your neck and shoulder muscles.
- Try to use both hands together when texting to “spread the load”. Keep messages short and use abbreviations and the predictive text messaging feature on your phone. This will help reduce the repetitive motion of pressing various keys.
- Don’t text continuously. Try to take breaks by putting the phone down between text messages.
- Carry out the following two exercises to prevent text message injury:
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- Regularly open your fingers and stretch them out.
- Stretch your arm out, rotate your wrist so it is facing upwards and with your other hand pull your palm down towards the floor to feel a stretch over the front of your forearm muscles. Hold for 15 seconds and repeat 2-3 times.
Taken together, the MDA and CSP studies provide an invaluable insight into the textual habits of Brits.You can read the CSP’s study online, here…
by Imran Ali
July 29, 2008 at 9:27 am · Filed under MMS, Twitter, Video, 12seconds
A few days ago I received a Twitter from my friend Katie, linking to a twelve-second video of her applying some lipstick. This was my first experience of 12seconds,the recently launched Santa Cruz based startup being heralded as the video of Twitter.
Though other services such as Seesmic have sought to emulate the intimacy and immediacy of Twitter in video form, Seesmic always seemed a little too rich and required too much of a user’s attention, in comparison with the simplicity, sparsity and elegance of Twitter.
As its name suggests, 12seconds limits user’s video messages to a couple dozen seconds, encouraging the same charm, inventiveness and brevity that we see in 140-character Twitters. Where Twitter’s limitation was semi-imposed by the limitations of its medium of choice - the SMS - 12seconds’ limit is an arbitrary boundary cheekily described by the service’s creators as ‘an upper boundary for boredom‘…
The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.
However, 12seconds’ limit may actually position the service ideally for mobility. Squeezing twelve seconds of video from a mobile handset’s forward-facing camera into an MMS is probably quite feasible technically, compatible with most handsets - and as a user experience - recieving a few dozen twelve second video messages is no more distracting than hundreds of Twitters!
It’ll be interesting to see if 12seconds recognises it’s mobile opportunity and whether users take to it as they took to Twitter and its rivals.
For me, receiving Katie’s message invoked a similar emotional response as when I first started to use Twitter - voyeuristic and intimate, potentially distracting, but open to many possibilities and user-created innovations.
12second’s is currently in a closed beta public alpha period…here’s hoping for an invite 
UPDATE: I just received an invitation to the public alpha and it seems that mobile users can submit videso by emailing an attached clip or emailing an MMS clip…here’s my first pixellated attempt!
by Imran Ali
July 22, 2008 at 8:26 am · Filed under Events, Conferences
In mid-September, my friends over at Giga Omni Media will be hosting their first conference on mobile technology and culture - Mobilize.
Taking place on 18th September at the Mission Bay Conference Center, the one-day conference will be focussing on the mobile web, rather than the broader mobile industry.
Speakers include Android’s Rich Miner, formerly of Orange. Amazon’s VP of their Kindle division, Ian Freed, investors represented by iFund and the BlackBerry Partners Fund, as well as executives from Sprint, SkyDeck and Pinch Media.
The early-bird rate of $395 holds until mid-August.
UPDATE: Rich Miner’s set for a keynote as is Cisco CTO Padmassree Warrior.
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by Imran Ali
July 13, 2008 at 5:50 pm · Filed under Funny, India, Video
Courtesy of Geekologie
by Imran Ali
July 6, 2008 at 7:40 am · Filed under Open Source, Openmoko
Last Friday, pointedly coinciding with Independence Day celebrations in the US, Openmoko launched the latest edition of its open source Neo handsets, the FreeRunner. Unlocked from carriers and running an open OS, the FreeRunner really is a product of independence day and stands in stark contrast to the impending iPhone launch next Friday.
Features such as a tri-band radio, wifi, touch screen, Bluetooth, A-GPS and graphics acceleration are kinda mundane now ,and actually so is open source software. What’s quite unique about the FreeRunner is the remixability of the handset’s physical form factor.
Openmoko has made available downloadable Pro-Engineer format CAD files under a Creative Commons license for the developer community. Sadly, the CAD files aren’t available for lower rent 3D software, which might encourage further experimentation. Nevertheless, it’ll be interesting to see how the developer community adapts the insides of FreeRunner to various form factors and application areas.
You can find the CAD files here…
by Imran Ali
July 4, 2008 at 12:46 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter, India, Emerging Markets
“Gup Shup” is a Punjabi term that almost literally translates as ‘gossip’ or ‘chit chat’ - generally with an informal, unrestricted context - and also the central concept of India’s SMS GupShup service, a kind of Desi Twitter for the subcontinent.
The big brains over at Telco 2.0 have just published an analysis of SMS GupShup’s relationship with carriers, that explores…
- pricing multi-party conversations and chats.
- diversified revnue models, including allocation of 60 characters for text-ads in a GupShup SMS.
- using customer data to create value for users themselves, not just carriers.
The piece is actually quite a penetrating analysis of how third parties and service ecospheres can add value to a carrier (to mutual benefit) without neccesarily cannibalising or commoditising existing businesses, and perhaps more interestingly where companies such as Twitter can find sustainable revenues…
Read more at Telco 2.0…
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by Imran Ali
June 23, 2008 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Devices, User Interface, Research, Crowdsensing
Earlier this year we covered the emerging field of crowdsensing - the ability to aggregate sensor readings from networks of mobile devices.
Last week, CNET highlighted research underway at Georgetown University that’s exploring the use of mobile devices to track the glocose levels of diabetes patients…a more personal form of mobile sensors that may have some ‘crowd’ applications but are very much about individual users…
- RFID-enabled skin patches sense glucose levels.
- The patch sends glucose data to a nearby mobile handset.
- The handset can do any number of things - submit data to a healthcare tracking service, emergency services and first responders or use the data to direct a dispensation device to administer insulin.
The process and the technology are still in teh early stages of development, but have exciting implications for healthcare, further underlying the emerging role of cellphones as mobile sensing platforms.
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In a bizarre inverse of the Georgetown project, a recently published design concept for a digital tattoo display also uses blood - this time to power a fuel cell that runs a display surface implanted under the skin of the user! The display, could potentially be used in concert with mobile technologies and as the author points out, it would be ‘waterproof and powered by pizza’!
A food shortage coupled with a profilerating mobile market, potentially powered by said food? Oops!
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