Archive for Research
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!
by Imran Ali
June 10, 2008 at 11:40 am · Filed under Studies + Research, Ethnography, Research
We last visited the emerging discipline of Reality Mining towards the end of 2007, in an examination of the work of MIT’s Nathan Eagle’s analysis of the usage patterns and movements of mobile users.
In the last few days there have been a pair of interesting developments in the field. Firstly, a report from the BBC on a large scale study by Albert-László Barabási at Boston’s Northeastern University and secondly, the launch of Sense Network’s Citysense.
Barabási’s work is notable as the author of the seminal book Linked, exploring the science of human networks. Over the course of six months Barabási’s study followed 100′000 individuals randomly selected and anonymised European mobile users. Their calling and messaging habits were logged along with their location, revealing that most people tend to move within 5-10km ranges throughout the course of their day-to-day lives, generally between the same sets of several locations.
Understanding that clusters of people behave similarly has useful implications for analysing traffic and disease control as well as enabling a new generation of commuter information services and criminal intelligence.
Separately, the launch of Citysense is interesting in that it’s perhaps the highest profile, commercial reality mining service currently available. Currently, available only in San Francisco, the service assists users in discovering social hotspots around the city, answering the question - “Where is everybody?”.
Taking in realtime reality-mined data, Citysense utilises public data from Google and Yelp to surface vanues and events and render them on ‘heat-map’ of the city.
As more mobile usage data becomes available to developers and privacy models evolve to help users control their presence, the emerging field of reality mining is set to unlock the real value of mobility and ubiquitous connectivity.
by Darla Mack
June 4, 2008 at 2:19 am · Filed under Studies + Research, Usage + Usability, mobile data statistics, Facebook, Research, Mobile Research, Social Networking, M:Metrics
In a release published by M:Metrics last month, a study shows that the American population spends over 4.5 hours browsing on their smartphones.
Looking at the trend it seems the most popular site visited by US users was Craigslist. To me, that’s surprising… then again I’m not a big Craigslist user. UK consumers favored Facebook, which was also another site visited by US consumers.
What is interesting is the time spent browsing. According to the data collected in March, US users spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes out of the month browsing Craigslist, while UK users spent an average of 1 hour and 45 minutes of their time browsing Facebook.
Not to take away from web browsing, but I hope developers are paying some attention to these trends. This would be the opportunity to create dedicated applications instead of having to rely on the browsers themselves. I know I’ve become a happy person since the Ebay application came out.
“People are becoming increasingly engaged in the mobile medium,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89 percent year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent. Consumption is quickly evolving from brief transactions, such as checking the weather or flight status, to time-intensive interaction with mobile Web sites—even without an iPhone.”
by Imran Ali
May 26, 2008 at 4:33 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter, Research, Social Networking
Following this week’s publication of a Gartner research report, there’s been some commentary onthe relative growth of SMS messaging and mobile instant messaging clients and services.
The report - profile here by Betanews - speaks of a 19.6% increasein the global volume of SMS traffic (that’s 2.3 trillion messages?)…interestingly, the report highlights South East Asia as the most prolific messagers, averaging around fifteen messages each day. Gartner go on to suggest that the growth of mobile social networks will gradually cannibalise SMS usages as users begin to communicate without the need for SMS as a carrier.
CrunchGrear’s counterpoint to Gartner’s analysis - and one I’m inclined to agree with - is that while social networks and IM networks effectively lack interoperability, SMS’ ‘baked-in’ cross-device and cross-network compatibility will likely slow the cannibalisation of SMS by mobile IM. With the major IM networks polarised around Google+AIM on the one hand and Yahoo+MSNon the other, handset manufacturers and cellcos tend to pick a camp which favours commercial terms, not user needs.
To add to this, unfettered use of mobile IM or mobile social networks is generally enabled through the adoption of generous or all-you-can-eat data plans - which are likely to exceed the budgets of most casual pay-as-you-go users.
As services such as Twitter have shown, there’s still a a lot of mileage and innovation in SMS…with what has essentially become the command line interface of the mobile internet.
by Debi Jones
February 5, 2008 at 7:58 am · Filed under Research, Research Roundup
Research Roundup is a weekly feature from the writers and editors of MM2. Every week MM2 editors and writers will recommend interesting findings from a variety of research sources covering the mobile industry.
From Russ Shaw
Mobile Social Computing Adds Trust To Marketing
A new report from Forrester Research notes that members of “Generation Y” spend as much time on their cell phones as on the Web.
Because of these usage patterns, Forrester analysts Vidya Lakshmipathy and Jaap Favier see promising opportunities for text messaging within existing as well as new, social computing sites. “Most of this time is spent sending and receiving text and picture messages, but with more than half also using social networking sites, the likes of Facebook and MySpace have now launched mobile social computing sites, and new mobile networks like Zingku are popping up,” the analysts write.
From Debi Jones
Birth of a Cell Phone Nation
According to Mediamark Research, US consumers have reached a landmark. There are more cell phone-only households in the US than landline-only households.
From Paul Ruppert
”New” Does Not Mean ”Better” in All Countries
A new global survey of innovation acceptance undertaken by The Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity Innovation–The Innovation Confidence Index–reveals that consumers’ confidence in the ability of more advanced products and services to improve their lives varies greatly around the world and that up to half of consumers in some European continental countries are skeptical of the value of innovation.
From Darla Mack
US Mobile Searchers
Mobile search is gaining strength in the US market, where the Nielsen Company estimates 46.1 million wireless subscribers are using 411 and SMS-based mobile search on their phones in the third quarter of 2007.
From Imran Ali
Metaphors for the Mobile Internet
This paper examines a set of metaphors for describing, understanding and characterising the Mobile Internet. The metaphors are a result of extensive user studies in the US, Hong Kong and Europe in the late 2006 and early 2007. In these studies, we explored the user experience related to the Mobile Internet through in-depth contextual interviews with over 40 users, including a group in the US, which was deprived of their standard Internet PC access for several days. Our analysis of the collected data resulted in six metaphors that can be used as powerful creative tools in designing Mobile Internet applications.
From Ewan Spence
Quarter of Marketeers Use Mobile
The results of Wave Eight survey of marketers, showing that 26 percent said they were currently using mobile, 20 percent said they planned to use it in the next six months and 54 percent said they are not currently using mobile.
by Darla Mack
January 9, 2008 at 10:18 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, mobile data statistics, Messaging, Research
According to an article on vnunet, research revealed that during New Year’s Eve sms traffic increased by 30 percent as compared to last year.
It’s not surprising that the holidays are the time of the year that people get their fingers moving to the tune of sending their greetings to friends and loved ones. Whats surprising is that the increase mostly came from the emerging markets.
While the Philippines holds its title for text messaging capital of the world, other areas such as India increased their traffic level.
Steven van Zanen, head of messaging futures at Acision, said: “SMS represents a significant slice of mobile operator revenues, and events like New Year’s Eve demonstrate how critical it is to ensure a reliable and speedy service.
“One operator’s infrastructure operated under peaks of 19,000 messages per second without congestion or delay.
“The New Year figures are eagerly anticipated each year and this year’s record traffic levels again do not disappoint.”
by Imran Ali
December 26, 2007 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, Studies + Research, Usage + Usability, Events + Conferences, iPhone, Twitter, Video Conferencing, Openmoko, Communication, Voice, Research
With the sad cancellation of O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conferences, it seemed that the unique melting pot of traditional telcos, cellcos and bleeding-edge disruptive innovators, hackers and entrepreneurs would dissipate.
Thanks to the efforts of one of the former ETel advisory board members, Lee Dryburgh, the unique conversation between these communities will move beyond telephony into ‘communication’ in all its forms - social media, telephony, ethnographics and - of course - mobility.
Lee is hosting the inaugural Emerging Communications 2008, conference next Spring in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. The conference wil also be accompanied by an unconference day, providing a mix of traditional conferences with the energy of a parallel BarCamp-style event.
Though the lineup isn’t finalised yet, there are some interesting speakers lined up already, including sessions on Building Twitter from Blaine Cook, Emerging & Usage Patterns from Intel’s Dawn Nafus, OpenMoko’s Michael Shiloh and thought leaders such as Norman Lewis and Sheldon Renan.
One of the underlying implicit themes from the current programme of speakers seems to be the potential in the intersection of telephony and social networks - issues which speak to the future of mobile messaging, a topic covered by MM2.0 contributors just recently.
Though not focussed exclusively on the mobile industry, eComm 2008 promises to surface some interesting directions for messaging and communication. As such it’s a community that we need to watch closely, listening for the weak signals that’ll give clues as to what happens next in the industry…
{ Disclosure: I’m a member of the voluntary eComm 2008 advisory board. }
by Imran Ali
December 23, 2007 at 9:04 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Ethnography, Research
A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to Nathan Eagle’s research on Reality Mining at MIT by eComm’s Lee Dryburgh (Nathan will be speaking at eComm 2008 in March).
Though Eagle’s work is a couple years old, it represents one of the more comprehensive studies of mobile communication and ethnography.
Supported by Nokia, the Reality Mining project has collated and mined data from the mobile handsets of 100 users and modeled various social behaviours, including conversation context, activity, proximity, location, time and relationship networks - both for individuals and aggregate groups of people.
The project’s themes have included…
- Modelling complex social systems - with applications as diverse as disease control and the social lives of freshman MIT students!
- Behaviour modelling and prediction - including generation of an automatic ‘lifelog’ of events cross referenced with the various ‘encounters’ between participants in the research. Intriguingly,researchers have attempted to model the probability of where and when people will be against their actual behaviour to determine the accuracy of predictions.
- Relationship inference - trying to automate and understand the relationship between participants based on their pattern of communication, movements and encounters.
- Social Serendipity - in the light of Dopplr’s success, the research’s investigation of serendipity seems prescient, with suggested application areas including dating, conferences and (surprisingly)Â the enterprise arena.
With the study’s raw data and client applications freely available to the world, I would expect to see handsets and services which begin to exploit the learning from this work. By embedding intelligence about my relationships and inferring behavior, could mobile communication and messaging evolve to a mixed model of explicit and overt messages with underlying exchanges of social signals, locations, moods, behavior and preference?
(Coincidentally, RW/W and MIT’s own Technology Review covered this story last week…I wonder if that’s where Lee first came across it?)
