Archive for Conferences
by Imran Ali
March 29, 2008 at 1:57 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Ethnography, Events, Conferences, Visualisation
Earlier this month I dropped into the Emerging Arts Fest at O’Reilly’s seminal ETech 2008 conference; the arts fest brought together a number of projects at the ‘intersection between art, design and technology. One of the most striking pieces on show was MIT’s New York Talk Exchange, part of the school’s Sensable City lab.
The NYTE project is mining real-time communications data from AT&T and visualising IP traffic and telephony flows between New York and the rest of the world, handily expressing the relationships between New Yorkers and the globe, even down to various ethnically biased neighbourhoods mapping directly onto countries of origin and the temporal dynamics of calls across multiple time zones.
NYTE is nothing short of a breathtaking technical and aesthetic achievement, though it’d be interested to utilise these visualisations to explore a finer level of granularity, notably where mobility and messaging intersect with more general IP and telephony traffic.
Complex data visualisations are almost always pretty, but their real profundity is as ‘revelatory media’; what can we learn, what questions can be answered that previously could not; what is serendipitously revealed?
What would NYTE look like around 9/11? We’d expect to see blackspots around Lower Manhattan, but would we see a sudden switch from voice to SMS are networks were overwhelmed? Would we see a sudden uptick of calls between Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Boston prior to the attacks?
Though not the first MIT project to explore these themes, NYTE is certainly the most polished - what can such visualisation tell us about the motivation and ethnography of communication and messaging?
by Debi Jones
February 12, 2008 at 11:50 am · Filed under Conferences, Mobile World Congress
Mobile Monday, MoMo as the organization is affectionately called by it’s members, is a global networking organization which began life in Finland and gradually spread worldwide starting 3 years ago with chapters, now, in most major cities. The Global Peer Awards began in 2006 and are in their second year of collocation with the conference in Barcelona.
Finalists presented from two categories: 1. Early Startups, and 2. Emerging Startups. Each finalist was invited to present to jury panels matched to the two categories. Awards were given at 3 levels within the categories. Jury, Audience and Community winners were selected. And the winners are:
EARLY STARTUPS
Jury, Audience and Community Award: Buzzd
mobile, local search with share - or the fun way, moloso
Chapter nominating - New York
EMERGING STARTUPS
Jury Award: Funamobl
Open Source, Mobile 2.0 Messaging - momeos
Chapter nominating - Silicon Valley
Audience Award: Kimia
Mobile web proxy service - mowpros, moproser, mowser, …hmmmm
Chapter nominating - Madrid
Community Award: Taptu
Mobile search with share - moseso
Chapter nominating - London
Yep. Mobile search and messaging are still targets of innovation and…well, hot. Congrats to the winners.
P.S. Anyone else think Harley Davidson when looking at the logo?
by Imran Ali
February 4, 2008 at 5:35 pm · Filed under Events, Conferences, Development
This year’s Orange Partner Camp has been set for 14-16th April in the Portugese coastal town of Faro.
Each year’s camp rings together application providers, platform vendors, content producers, and software houses to learn from France Telecom and Orange, how to access the business and technology platforms of their now 167m global customers.
Personally, I prefer the free-wheeling unconference style of mobileDevCamp and iPhoneDevCamp as being more productive and open environments to create and innovate. However, by all accounts, Orange partners do extract a lot of value from Orange’s camps.
Perhaps Orange and the unconference community would be well served in co-hosting and connecting their events; building bridges and conversations between the most significant elements of the industry can only enhance each other’s standing and help to solve real user problems.
