3GSM Gatherings

Informal Mobile Sunday Barcelona (setup by Stuart Mudie) and the 3GSM Gathering of the Mobilitst (organized by Rudy de Waele and Gotomedia) was the opportunity to meet practitioners and observers of the mobile industry including:

Markus Angermeier, accessibility expert, creative director design for Aperto‘s, consultant for Plazes (mobile phone demo and brainstorming on proximity-based scenarios), and the german Bundeswehr, initiator of the web 2.0 mindmap, and self-proclaimed Beetles world’s biggest fan.

Russell Buckley from MobHappy, discussion on going beyond preaching the converted on LBS issues and why the message and clues fail to be understood in a techno-push world.

Alex Kummerman, Clickmobile, LBS and social software enthusiast. Interesting concept on providing an location-based social network management platform. I would find this an interesting supporting tool for informal, elastic communities, thriving on spontaneity that deal with mobility beyond an area or city level. A scenario involved the members of a sport team fan club. Alex mentioned the research of Michel Simatic on multiplayer mobile games and the technical constraints.

Oliver Starr from MobileCrunch who ranted on ubiquitous computing and how it does not work even if the technology is available. His luggage was loaded on a flight to Milano instead of BCN and he had to jump on that plane for security reasons (a luggage cannot flight without his passenger). Unfortunately in the transfer in Milano, his language did not follow him and stayed in Italy. Great object as first class citizen and malfunction of tracking technologies story.

Josep Ganyet, well-traveled teacher at the UPF, focus on usability testing. Talk about Don Norman’s emotional design, the spanish male multi-tasking and BCN in general. He flickered the cocktail.

Jaakko Villa, CEO of idean research. A few words about their user experience research methodologies…

David Mery, Symbian “evangelist” (a company that obviously needs one…), discussion on Symbian’s recent efforts to support its developers community and Symbian’s plan to open to the lower-end smartphone market. No words about David’s past as suspected terrorist.

Relation to my thesis: Exchanging with people from the industry, on their playground is a healthy exercise. Oliver Starr’s story supports my claim on the utopia about ubicomp spread by the perfect “I want to track and keep control of my luggage” scenarios while the real-world in which dealing with exceptions is the rule and where heterogeneity emerges from complex physical, economical, and human constrains. 3GSM carries this seamless picture of a mobile and connected world. I still find ironic that people talking about the wireless world get stuck in the real world constraints: Russell Beattie’s Dial up… Wow, it still works and Stuart Mudie’s For the past five days, I’ve been living in the future – the mobile future.