(Papers are linked to their pdf downloads, if available.)

A diary study of mobile information needs [abstract]
Authors: Timothy Sohn, Kevin A. Li, William G. Griswold, and James D. Hollan (UC San Diego)
Abstract: Being mobile influences not only the types of information people seek but also the ways they attempt to access it. Mobile contexts present challenges of changing location and social context, restricted time for information access, and the need to share attentional resources among concurrent activities. Understanding mobile information needs and associated interaction challenges is fundamental to improving designs for mobile phones and related devices. We conducted a two-week diary study to better understand mobile information needs and how they are addressed. Our study revealed that depending on the time and resources available, as well as the situational context, people use diverse and, at times, ingenious ways to obtain needed information. We summarize key findings and discuss design implications for mobile technology.

Accountabilities of presence: reframing location-based systems [abstract]
Authors: Emily Troshynski, Charlotte Lee and Paul Dourish (UC Irvine)
Abstract: How do mobility and presence feature as aspects of social life? Using a case study of paroled offenders tracked via Global Positioning System (GPS), we explore the ways that location-based technologies frame people’s everyday experiences of space. In particular, we focus on how access and presence are negotiated outside of traditional conceptions of “privacy.” We introduce the notion of accountabilities of presence and suggest that it is a more useful concept than “privacy” for understanding the relationship between presence and sociality.

“Data, transported and shaped by the internet, is increasingly becoming a primary way that people expect to engage with public transport in particular. Engage, as in access and navigate through transport service information, but also explore and understand the transport service itself.” […]

“So, here are transport systems where usage data has become available - or could become available - and is then built upon, as a way of exploring whether various ‘live dashboards’ of transport across a city will engender new levels of engagement with transport. And whether this will increase awareness of personal behaviour and impact on emissions accordingly.”

His long survey is divided in a number of sections depending on the type of transport: holistic, cars, scooter, cycling, bus, rail, taxi, aircraft, maritime and walking.

Read full story

He thinks the “world is going to see a transformation through the convergence of four factors: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us, human-centered science, and emerging methods”.

Read full story

The video is part of The Economist special report on mobility and “digital nomads”.

Watch video

Sources are some of the top people in the field (many of whom are frequently written about on this blog).

Our nomadic future [leader article]
“Prepare to see less of your office, more of your family—and still perhaps be unhappy” or “nomadism promises the heaven of new freedom, but it also threatens the hell of constant surveillance by the tribe”.

Nomads at last
Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth.

Labour movement
The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere.

The new oases
Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic.

Family ties
Kith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers.

Location, location, location
It matters.

A world of witnesses
When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor.

Homo mobilis
As language goes, so does thought.

Talking cars
A collaboration between Toyota and Stanford University is experimenting a talking car interface that does much more than navigation, providing safety advice to drivers. Ing-Marie Jonsson is one of the authors of the paper that describes the experiment.

Accessibility
Vicki Hanson (IBM) received this week at CHI 2008 the Social Impact Award, for her 30-years work concerning people with disabilities (for example, deaf children, dyslexic kids, and more recently older adults).

GPS and the perception of the world
Is the widespread use of GPS changing how we perceive the world? A research group at Cornell University has studied GPS users to answer this question (and more). Chittaro discusses this with one of the authors (Gilly Leshed).

Technology among the homeless
We tend to believe that technology is improving everybody’s life, at the workplace as well as at home. But what about those who have neither a job nor a home? Christopher A. Le Dantec, together with his colleague W. Keith Edwards, carried out a study on the use of technology among the homeless and will present the results tomorrow at CHI 2008. The paper that describes the study was one of those that received the conference Best Papers awards.

Attractiveness on-line
What does it make an on-line user profile attractive to members of the opposite sex? Andrew T. Fiore and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley have selected 50 user profiles on the Yahoo! Personals web site and studied the perception of these profiles on a sample of users in the 19-25 age range

On-line friendship
Imagine you have to move to a distant city. What would happen to the relationships you have with your friends? Which telecommunication tools would you use to try to maintain friendship? A research collaboration among three universities in the US (California Irvine, Carnegie Mellon e Duke) has followed 900 persons who moved to other cities. The interview is with Irina Shklovski (Univ. California Irvine).

Friends and enemies in social networks
Who’s in the list of your friends on social networking sites? True friends? People who you don’t know much? Total strangers? Should those sites offer a richer way of describing your relationship with each of them? A research group at HP Labs has studied the effects of a richer classification on users. Chittaro interviewed Michael Brzozowski (HP Labs).

What do people do with Facebook?
Facebook is definitely a popular site, but what do we know about how people use it? Adam N. Joinson (University of Bath) is studying Facebook users to learn more about it.

Interaction with future cars
Industry is working at cars that will talk more and more to their drivers and some researchers are even working at car interfaces that automatically adapt to the specific user who is driving. David Krum, project manager at Bosch Research, is one of the organizers of the special interest group “Interaction in the Automobile” which met at CHI 2008.

Driver distraction
What human factors issues should future car interfaces take into account? The need to monitor the driver and to mitigate driver distraction and inattention came out often in talking with Brian Lathrop (Volkswagen Electronic Research Lab), Brian is one of the organizers of the special interest group “Interaction in the Automobile” which met at CHI 2008.

Phishing the common user
How do common users react to a phishing attack? To know better, a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (including Serge Egelman) has carried out phishing attacks on a sample of users and studied their behaviors. They have presented their results at CHI 2008, and the picture that came out is not reassuring from the security point of view. For example, 97% of the users believed the phising e-mail and went to visit the phishing site. At that point, 87% of the users which received passive warnings (and 21% of those who received active warnings) believed also the phishing web site and entered their data.

Graffiti-covered desktop
Do users keep their software updated to prevent security attacks? What could the interface do to make users’ more aware of the need to install security updates? A research group from the Georgia Institute of Technology has proposed a new interface to this purpose at CHI 2008. When a security update is available, graffiti appear on your desktop. The more security updates you have not installed, the more the desktop becomes graphically degraded (and graffiti also mask open windows, to make work more annoying). One of the authors (Kandha Sankarapandian) explains the research.

The first thing he highlighted is the fact no-one at Nokia calls the devices phones anymore; they are multimedia computers.

He was shown three projects being developed at Nokia’s labs around the world, two of them in Palo Alto.

Read full story

Here are some of the recent publications by this very prolific researcher:

Brewer, J., Bassoli, A., Martin, K., Dourish, P., and Mainwaring, S. 2007. Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 6(3), July-September, 39-45

An ethnographic study and a design proposal for a situated music-exchange application suggest how explicitly foregrounding the experiential qualities of urban life can help rethink urban computing design.

Dourish, P. 2007. Seeing Like an Interface. Proc. Australasian Computer-Human Interaction Conference OzCHI 2007 (Adelaide, Australia)

Mobile and ubiquitous computing systems are increasingly of interest to HCI researchers. Often, this has meant considering the ways in which we might migrate desktop applications and everyday usage scenarios to mobile devices and mobile contexts. However, we do not just experience technologies in situ – we also experience everyday settings through the technologies we have at our disposal. Drawing on anthropological research, I outline an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between technology and “seeing” everyday life and everyday space.

Brewer, J., Mainwaring, S., and Dourish, P. 2008. Aesthetic Journeys. Proc. ACM Conf. Designing Interactive Systems DIS 2008 (Cape Town, South Africa)

Researchers and designers are increasingly creating technologies intended to support urban mobility. However, the question of what mobility is remains largely under-examined. In this paper we will use the notion of aesthetic journeys to reconsider the relationship between urban spaces, people and technologies. Fieldwork on the Orange County bus system and in the London Underground leads to a discussion of how we might begin to design for multiple mobilities.

Williams, A., Dourish, P., and Anderson, K. 2008. Anchored Mobilities: Mobile Technology and Transnational Migration. Proc. ACM Conf. Designing Interactive Systems DIS 2008 (Cape Town, South Africa)

Mobile technologies are deployed into diverse social, cultural, political and geographic settings, and incorporated into diverse forms of personal and collective mobility. We present an ethnography of transnational Thai retirees and their uses of mobile technology, highlighting forms of mobility that are spatially, temporally, and infrastructurally anchored, and concepts of the house as a kinship network that may be globally distributed. We conclude in pointing out several ways in which our observations and analysis can influence design.

Troshynski, E., Lee, C., and Dourish, P. 2008. Accountabilities of Presence: Reframing Location-Based Systems. Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2008 (Florence, Italy)

How do mobility and presence feature as aspects of social life? Using a case study of paroled offenders tracked via Global Positioning System (GPS), we explore the ways that location-based technologies frame people’s everyday experiences of space. In particular, we focus on how access and presence are negotiated outside of traditional conceptions of “privacy.” We introduce the notion of accountabilities of presence and suggest that it is a more useful concept than “privacy” for understanding the relationship between presence and sociality.

(via Pasta&Vinegar)

The content looks very exciting indeed and the editors-in-chief have done a great job at getting some of the best people in the field to contribute.

Columns

• Filling Much Needed Holes, a column by Don Norman on unmet needs which you can find fully online here;
• Persona Non Grata by Steve Portigal of Portigal Consulting;
• What’s in a name? Idioms, metaphors and design by Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! Research.

Features

• Towards a model of innovation by contributing editor Hugh Dubberly;
• Designing for Disagreement by Paul Burke;
• Designing for the Last Billion by Gabe White of Frog Design;
• Primal Interactions by Alex Wright, information architect at the New York Times;
• Mobile Spatial Interaction by Peter Froehlich, Lynne Baillie and Rainer Simon of the Motorola Telecommunications Research Center;
• The Business of Customer Experience: Lessons Learned at Wells Fargo by Secil Watson of Wells Fargo;
• The Linguistic Command Line by Aza Raskin of Humanized;
• Understanding Convergence by Stefana Broadbent and Valerie Bauwens of Swisscom.

In addition, there are several “Forum” pieces and a few book reviews.

Unfortunately, the publishers (ACM) have taken a weird approach to the online version: while the site has all the trappings of an online publication (with a nice design, a good table of contents, commenting, and article blogposts), it contains hardly any content! They only have excerpts available online - you have to be an ACM member to read the full text - in the printed issue that is (at $50 for 6 issues). Also there is no information about the authors online. Not surprisingly, the site has very few comments and I doubt it has much traffic.

I hope the hard copy will arrive quickly here in Europe, but even more that Richard and Jon will be able to convince ACM that this is not a very good online policy.

Nokia principal researcher Jan Chipchase’s investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. Along the way, he’s made some unexpected discoveries: about the novel ways illiterate people interface with their cellphones, or the role the cellphone can sometimes play in commerce, or the deep emotional bonds we all seem to share with our phones.

Jan Chipchase can guess what’s inside your bag and knows all about the secret contents of your refrigerator. It isn’t a second sight or a carnival trick; he knows about the ways we think and act because he’s spent years studying our behavioral patterns. He’s traveled from country to country to learn everything he can about what makes us tick, from our relationship to our phones (hint: it’s deep, and it’s real) to where we stow our keys each night.

Jan’s discoveries and insights help inspire the development of the next generations of phones and services at Nokia. As he puts it, if he does his job right, you should be seeing the results of his research hitting the streets and airwaves within the next 3 to 15 years.

Watch video

Intel Research’s over-arching vision for the future is evolving from one of proactive computing to one of Essential Computing. Over the years, we’ve been part of a steady evolution moving computing from the machine room out into people’s workplaces and into their daily lives. As this transformation continues, we will see computing evolve from being a number of separate devices we each use occasionally to dozens of devices that are an essential part of daily life.

Intel’s vision of Essential Computing encompasses five research areas, or as we call them, research themes. These five research themes - Personal Awareness, Physicality, Emergence Engineering, Concealing Complexity, Richly Communicative - focus on making technology more viable, more useful, more personal, more essential in our daily lives. Through these research directions, we seek to simplify and enrich all aspects of our daily lives through applications and systems technologies that collectively empower each of us as individuals, connect us to each other and into the fabric of networked society.

The five research themes for Essential Computing

Essential computing is a big goal. To spearhead this effort, we’ve broken it down into five research themes.

Concealing Complexity
As more devices become essential to our daily lives, it will become increasingly important to conceal their complexity.

New Possibilities for the Cell Phone Platform
Imagine carrying all of your applications, documents, photos, and MP3 and video files with you, in a device no larger than a deck of playing cards. That’s the concept behind the Personal Media Server.

Personal Awareness
In the future we may have a “wardrobe” of personal devices to help us pursue short- and long-term goals and personal enhancement.

Physicality
What kinds of new interfaces, sensors and actuation systems will allow people to seamlessly interact with the computing and physical parts of their lives?

Richly Communicative
Computing devices are increasingly being used as communicating devices. What’s needed are ways to convey more meaning and intent.

Videos

• What is ‘essential’ to you?
• Essential Computing Research Overview (short version)
• Essential Computing Research Overview (long version)

Researchers

The Essential Computing site also links to a page which presents some key Intel researchers and the projects they are working on, including many of the People and Practices Research Group (P&P):

• Ken Anderson (anthropologist, P&P) - Transnationals and cosmopolitans-people who are living outside of their home countries
• Richard Beckwith (research psychologist, P&P) - community adoption of technology
• Maria Bezaitis (director, P&P) - a vision on ethnography
• Sunny Consolvo - user-centered design for ubiquitous computing
• Scott Mainwaring (reseacher, P&P) - People’s relationships with technology
• Wendy March (interaction designer, P&P) - Teen girls and communications technology
• Eric Paulos - Emerging digital and wireless urban landscapes
• Allison Woodruff - how people interact with the growing number of portable electronic devices in their homes

The debate on movement started from the assumption that the movement of people and goods around the world consume vast amounts of matter, energy, space, and time - most of it non-renewable. Question that arise are: Should sustainable development therefore be concentrated in cities, where economic progress can most feasibly be de-coupled from transport intensity? Or are there ways to ensure that rural communities have access to services by using transport resources more smartly? And could new forms of sustainable tourism be enabled by access to territorial and cultural assets that already exist?

The session began with a keynote from Anthony Townsend, research director at the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto, California, who has now posted his entire presentation online.

“What I want to talk about is not the future of mobility but rather, the future of presence. By ‘presence’ what I mean, is that if movement or travel is a means - then presence is the end. And so I want to broaden the discussion of mobility to include technologies and practices of telecommunication - ways of being “present” at remote locations.”

Townsend believes in the future of virtual worlds, telerobotics, and high-definition videoconferencing. But does presence really always require such high-end technologies?

Townsend’s talk was followed by a review of Dott 07’s Move Me project, which explored the potential to transform transportation resource efficiency in one village, Scremerston, in Northumberland, and by a review of three Dott 07 projects - Sustainable Tourism, Welcomes and Mapping the Necklace.

“People are the new media“, said Pierre Bellanger in a recent article in Netéconomie (”The social network is the telco’s future“). If this means extending the collaborative approach also to the mobile phone, it is not really much of a surprise. For sure, “the new culture is participative” and extending this approach to the world of mobility seems rather straightforward, even if one can only guess the shapes this culture might take once it is detached from the PC and the big stationary screens. But Bellanger, who is the founder and CEO of Skyrock radio, goes quite a bit further in this reasoning. What he has in mind is nothing less than a revolution taking place, with him sitting in the front row. Or said differently: the mobile person is the media (and the individual gets mixed up with his mobile). Therefore the mobile (individual and machine) becomes the fulcrum of his communication and his outreach. The mobile is receiver, sender and relay station.

This central role of the mobile in our media world becomes amplified, adds Pierre Bellanger, because “Who knows better what I am doing, what I am watching, what I am listening to, with whom I am talking or where I am, than the machine that carries all these activities?” The media inserts itself in the mobility of the user while at the same time giving him “full control of his exchanges. The modest size of the screen and the keyboard is no limitation: it can connect to whatever other machine, appear there as a virtual support and therefore use the connected machine, including its peripherals, as an extra resource“. The mobile takes control of its surroundings: “A bit like the iPod takes control of a stereo system to which it is connected“. Bellanger concludes: “It is the small terminal taking charge of the big one“.

The “small terminal” is the new screen that comes in the wake of others that mark the history of communication. The first screen in the history of technology was a public one: it was the big cinema screen. The second one was a collective one, but it wasn’t public: it was the television set. The third one, the computer screen, was personal but could be shared. The fourth one, the mobile, is on itself, intimate, not to be shared, and accompanying me wherever I go.

And the evolution isn’t finished yet. A fifth screen is already on the horizon. A screen perhaps without a screen, without contact even, or on the contrary connected through a multitude of extensions. A screen that will highlight the evolution towards more autonomy and more mobility (i.e. the capacity to mobilise our resources, which the English call “empowerment”).

This fifth screen covers a collection of things:

1. public technological devices (displays, kiosks etc.),
2. public infrastructure without screens, that enter into a dialogue with our personal terminals that have screens (mobiles, smartphones, iPod and other mp3 readers, audio-video, game consoles…),
3. or, by extension, with other terminals which are not “enabled” (contactless cards, RFID tags…),
4. the mobiles themselves, because “the capacity of exploitation contained in the device itself becomes the capacity of a server“, as Bellanger explained.

Now set up as a human cyborg through the mediation of the mobile, the individual enters into a dialogue with tags, that become increasingly pervasive in the city. The urban nomad navigates along the structure of his own information system; in a dialogue with real time and real places; in continuous interaction as well with other nomads.

This media complex integrates the individuals in a moving tissue. The fifth screen marks the arrival of ambient technology, of the Everyware that Adam Greenfield calls it in his book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (see here and here). This Everyware is the field of development of the fifth screen and the new online service and media perspective of thecity. It is also one of the open topics to be addressed in the Villes 2.0 [Cities 2.0] programme, and a challenge to understand the city of tomorrow. Everyware is a real revolution due the way extends the power of us all (but also of the various operators and of authorities) in the public realm. This is why in the city of tomorrow, the urban is the media.

The “familiarity” one can feel towards a city or a neighbourhood, even while discovering it, is the real stake of the fifth screen. We will rather speak of a “permanent process of familiarisation” in a city where everything changes and moves all the time. Or in the words of Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, it is crucial to provide people the tools for their autonomy, their wayfinding and their choices - the author speaks of freedom that is granted to individuals (”empowering individuals with information and choice”). How? The answer to him requires a neologism: findability (which describes “a world in rapid emergence where one can find whoever or whatever, from wherever or whenever”). What does that mean concretely? One goes from the web to the city, and from the link to the place. One googles the city like one googles the Web. “Findability” applies to the existence of signs, reference marks, beacons and other types of information in the city, links as it were to real times and places, that allow us to navigation and to be secure in the city.

The goal of the fifth screen development, as some experiments are already showing, is to make the city familiar, to provide useful information and transactions, to enable a dialogue between citizens, and to allow the population access to participatory information, without forgetting of course some space for the imaginary. The fifth screen is the city. It is the urban as a media. They are waves, labels, signs, screens, traces, … A city augmented with information, information augmented with geolocalisation. One can feel the pulse of the city in real time and one can even participate in its beat, as demonstrated by the projects Real Time Rome and WikiCity.

The fifth screen is the next lever for urban governance. It allows the urbanite to express himself. The urbanite becomes the media in the city, just like the desktop user is in the world of Web 2.0. The fifth screen opens up a space to a wide range of actors that will use these opportunities of dialogue to share information, entertainment, services, and all kinds of offerings.

But if the field is wide open, so is Pandora’s box! The fifth screen can also become a tool for repression, for surveillance and for all types of intrusion. It could be the opposite of the collaborative media of sousveillance (with the system allowing us to see our voyeurs and therefore establishing a balance of reciprocal transparency, as outlined by David Brin in The Transparent Society). The history of the fifth screen will need to be written together by citizens, companies, and regional entities.

Bruno Marzloff

Turning bright ideas into brilliant products
Many bright innovative ideas fail to be developed into exciting, new products simply because they see the light of day in the wrong place or at the wrong time. For example, a company may decide not to pursue an idea because it doesn’t fit in with their strategy, or an idea may never get off the ground because the inventor doesn’t know where to find appropriate partners. It’s precisely to prevent such a waste of good ideas that a number of partners have now come together to found the Creative Conversion Factory (CCF).

What does the CCF aim to do?
The CCF aims to facilitate and accelerate product innovation in the field of high-tech systems by encouraging collaboration in design and ICT between participating companies and knowledge centers. It provides a place where inventors, manufacturers and investors can come together in a spirit of open innovation to turn promising ideas into viable products.

What does the CCF offer?
The CCF welcomes the submission of any patentable creative and technological innovation as a potential project. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of a number of criteria, including the extent to which they enable participating organizations to achieve synergies and improve their capabilities. Once a project has been adopted, the CCF investigates whether there is a market for a product based on the idea and whether such a product is technically feasible. The CCF coordinates contacts among the various parties. In principle, the outcome of the project is a product prototype.

What capabilities are covered?
The CCF has so far defined three main areas of capability that it can apply in adopted projects:

1. Sensor technology, including sensors and actuators, software and hardware platforms, wireless communications and high-level end-user programming solutions;
2. Lighting, focusing on creative solutions based on new technologies that enable highly controllable lighting to be integrated into the surroundings; and
3. Psychology, especially techniques for positively affecting people’s behavior and attitudes.

What are the current focus areas?
Projects undertaken by the CCF focus on Ambient Experience, i.e., the embedding of intelligent technologies into the surroundings to make people’s lives more enjoyable, easy and productive. During the initial phase, the emphasis will be on two themes within this topic: Mobility & Navigation and Care & Wellbeing. Participating partners will collaborate to develop new concepts in interactive gaming environments that facilitate navigation in complex environments and stimulate social contact and physical exercise.

Who are the participating partners?
Partners participating in the CCF include the Technical University of Eindhoven (Faculty of Industrial Design), Stichting Brainport, Design Academy Eindhoven, Philips Research, Philips Design, Dutch Polymer Institute, Holst Centre, NH Hotels (Koningshof) and Living Tomorrow.

Creative Conversion Factory is an initiative of Emile Aarts, Scientific Program Manager of Philips Research. The concept and the business plan have been developed by Brainport Foundantion in conjunction with the Faculty of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology, Design Academy Eindhoven, Dutch Polymer Institute, Holst Centre, Philips Design, Philips Research, NH Koningshof, and Living Tomorrow B.V.

Much of the most innovative thinking now focuses on improving the passenger experience, instead of the more difficult challenge of moving buses faster along crowded streets. But city planners, armed with affordable global-positioning and computer technology, hope that meeting these seemingly modest goals can make bus trips a far more pleasurable, even productive, experience.

With fuel costs high and public concern for the environment rising, some public transportation officials sense an opportunity to challenge the car’s preeminence.

[…]

“The more communication that happens between citizens, the stronger the urban garden,” said Federico Casalegno, an MIT sociologist who led the team that developed the futuristic bus stop prototype.

At the heart of much of the new thinking is a concept that some urban planners call “smart mobility” — integrating the flow of people with the flow of information. Whereas transit companies have traditionally seen their passengers as ciphers who want nothing more than to be physically moved from one place to another, the future of transit reform lies in seeing these passengers as active participants in a constantly evolving information cluster. The transportation system should share as much information with passengers as possible — how buses are flowing, when the next one is expected. It should give passengers access to information about the outside world — from international news, to e-mail, to data about the passing neighborhoods. And passengers, in turn, should be empowered to share information with the system and, if they want, with fellow riders.

“The general concept is to increase connections between people, places, and transportation systems,” said Casalegno, who is the director of the Mobile Experience Laboratory at MIT. “It shouldn’t just be about getting from Point A to Point B.”

- Read full story
- Slide presentation (SlideShare)
- MIT project web site | MIT class project website (with video)

If you want to keep abreast on developments in this field, here is a crop of news stories from just this last week:

A recent special report in Business Week on how basic cell phones are sparking economic hope and growth in emerging — and even non-emerging — nations. The report takes a particular look at the micro- and macro-economic impacts of this development, and what it means for local entrepreneurs and major mobile operators. It also features an online extra on the use of mobile phones by artisans and tradespeople in rural India, a summary graphic and a slideshow;

A Reuters story on the beeping boom in Africa, what the social practices are, and how that is pushing mobile operators to innovate their services;

A post on the Vodafone R&D Betavine blog on the Mukuru Kash service that like Paypal will store funds that you pay to them online and then set up a voucher which can be redeemed at the petrol station for fuel;

“Next: bridging the digital divide“, a recent post by Niti Bhan, where she puts developments in the bigger picture of bridging the digital divide between the digital haves and have nots, and wonders what will happen if all these people in the developing world can also start accessing the internet from their mobile devices;

In a recent post on mobile banking, Barbara Ballard of Little Springs Design guides us to three blogs on the topic: Mobile Banking (news and analysis from Brandon McGee, a VP in charge of mobile banking), Mobile Money & Banking, and Mobile Banking, the blog of Hannes van Rensburg, CEO of a South African mobile banking provider Fundamo.

Note by the way that all the user research work by Jan Chipchase and others seems to have paid off: Nokia dominates the mobile handset landscape in India with an astonishing 74% market share.

Abstract:
This talk adheres to the vision that in order to bring key benefits to human daily experiences with products and specific environments, new collaborative, ubiquitous and pervasive systems need to be developed, thus moving away from a stand-alone and computer-centred vision technology. The idea of the user as an unconscious sensor of the environment will be presented together with the possibilities offered by the application of adaptive systems to a particular user experience such as driving high performance vehicles. The example of the Ferrari’s Innovation Team will be brought as a case study of a multidisciplinary group which, by accounting for corporate needs and research trends, is active in shaping research directions and facilitating the market exploitation of both new paradigms and technological achievements. This will be presented by means of a series of initiatives in the area of ubiquitous and pervasive adaptation.

Mr. Antonio Calvosa, currently leading the Ferrari’s Innovation Team Project, is in charge of bringing knowledge into the Company with respect to future and emerging technologies that can play a relevant role in enriching the Ferrari’s driving experience. He developed a series of international collaborations with leading institutions, mostly within the Seventh Research Framework Programme of the European Commission. In particular, attention has been paid to the identification and exploitation of new concepts for future human-machine interfaces.

He is a co-author of a series patents at Ferrari on human-machine interface and of a patent on electron microscopy held at Philips Research. Antonio Calvosa graduated cum laude in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and also received his ‘Diplome d’Ingenieur’ from Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité (Paris, France) within the Top Industrial Manager for Europe Programme. He also holds a Master in Physics of nanostructures from Paris XI (Orsay, France).

According to Rachel Hinman of Adaptive Path, who attended the keynote,

Calvosa encouraged the audience to “…get your mind out of the lab – put your mind into figuring out how to communicate your technology to everyday people like your mom, or to your friend.”

He also talked about how in the end, you should always be thinking about the end user and putting people at the center of what you do. He gave an example of the Moen Revolution shower head created by Design Continuum Inc.

“Moen Revolution was an example of engineering the product based on the design. We worked in reverse to design the inner working that would improve the shower experience.”

He stressed that user need drove the design and development of this product - not technology and engineering.

The program, announced Wednesday, is called Search & Send.

It was jointly developed with the two Silicon Valley Internet giants and DaimlerChrysler’s Research, Engineering and Design North America office in Palo Alto.

Drivers can plot destinations, addresses or points of interest using Google Maps or Yahoo Local Maps. Then, they can click a “Send to Car” icon. The information is then sent to the vehicle’s GPS navigation system and can be retrieved by pushing a dashboard button on the car’s Tele Aid telematics system.”

- Read full story [San Jose Mercury News]
- Search & Send website with videos
- Read press release

Promising idea-makers are provided with undisturbed working conditions and paid scholarships.

One of Magyar Telekom’s objectives with this project is to promote new initiatives and creative ideas that later might be competitive on the market.

Research fields

What happens to the net once it meets the urban space? How does private space relate to the saturating wireless networks? Where does user created content gain authority? How does our use of cities alter as we get more and more real time feedback of its dynamics? What makes a home smart? Street-smart?

We would like to rethink and remix the possibilities of new media in our everyday lives and to augment connections between new technologies and our society.

Lab

KIBU offers a research lab space downtown Budapest, a basic grant for a dozen researchers, some equipment, and a dynamic workflow where sharing and helping is essential , and the freedom to capitalize any good idea.

Being sponsored by Magyar Telekom(MT), the leading Hungarian Telco, there is a direct path where ideas and prototypes get reach larger audiences, in case MT and the project group finds ways to do so. Our aim is build a platform where ideas are materializing and some end up in cultural context, some in the market.

Art and technology

Kitchen Budapest regularly organizes exhibitions to present our prototypes, as well as works or projects from related institutions and professionals.

(via IFTF’s Future Now)
 

UPDATE: 6 OCTOBER 2007:

Short report of visit by IFTF’s Alex Soojung-Kim Pang