L'émergence des Créatifs Redessine la Suisse

Dans L’émergence des créatifs redessine la Suisse, Xavier Comtess reprend les idées de Rise of the Creative Class de Richard Florida pour les contextualiser à la Suisse. C’est peut-être un peu trop porter sur la creative economy en laissant un peu de côté les composants non-économomiques de la creative class comme le style de vie et les motivations de cette nouvelle classe. Actuellement la fracture en Suisse qui n’est pas au niveau des langues ou des cultures, mais dans les différences grandissantes du High-Tech Land et du Heidi Land.

Il mentionne les villes européens capables d’attiré les créatifs sans oublier Barcelone:

En devenant des acteurs mondiaux des technologies des télécommunications (Helsinki), de l’innovation (Dublin), de la nanotechnologie (Grenoble), de l’aéronautique (Toulouse), de la culture et des échanges (Barcelone), de la nautique et du tourisme (Valence), ces métropoles ont su attirer la matière la plus rare aujourd’hui: les créatifs.

Counterfeit Maps

Via The Map Room

To save money, some Chinese GPS manufacturers use counterfeit maps instead of official ones; as a result, Shanghai drivers who buy the cheaper units are getting lost.

Some fairly disturbed individuals actually discover cities deliberately using other city’s maps.

The usage of inaccurate maps would actually be an interesting study.

Informal Tringular Collaboration on CatchBob!

Philip Jeffrey from the Human Communication Technologies Laboratory of the University of British Columbia, came to visit Nicolas and I at the CRAFT. He came to planify an informal triangular collaboration around CatchBob!

A first successful step was to share the code of CacthBob! and make it run in Vancouver. People at UBC, plan to extend it to a “Chase Bob” (with one or many moving Bobs). Nicolas and I have plans for a richer task “Clue2Clue”. We will collaborate on setting these environments, sharing datas, publishing and hopefully organizing a workshop.

Main partners would be:

• Philip Jeffrey, University of British Columbia, Human Communication Technologies Laboratory
• Mike Blackstock, University of British Columbia, Human Communication Technologies Laboratory
• Nicolas Nova, Swiss Federal Institue of Technology Lausanne, Center for Research and Support of Training and its Technologies
• Fabien Girardin, University of Pompeu Frabra, Interactive Technology Group

We all share a common set of research interests. During the discussion, I wrote down the main topics covered by CatchBob and that Nicolas and/or want to continue investigating with the system:
- location awareness (impact on collaboration, automatic/manual positioning)
- uncertainty management (impact on the collaboration and gap between the designer and user conceptual models. Communication latency, positioning accuracy, unpredictability of connectivity, sense of trust)
- collaborative map annotation (annotations and the relations of their meaning to the map. ).

Nicolas mentions more…

ArtFutura 2005

ArtFutura 2005, the digital arts and new media festival of reference in Spain, will be an event not to miss on October 27th-30th. In Barcelona, special guest will be Bruce Sterling who will probably talk about Blobjects. Other participants will include Hiroshi Ishii, founder of the “Tangible Media” concept, the interactive systems that regulate themselves via the manipulation of everyday objects.

Place Lab and Google Maps Mashup

Similar to a previous hack of mine “MapMe“, James Howard developed a Google Maps WiFi Locator, that uses WiFi positioning within a web browser. It loads a signed applet to make native calls (Place Lab code) to the WiFi adapter and Google Maps to display the position.

My position in Geneva while writing this… perfect!

IperG Open House Day

I did not intend the IperG Open House Day, but Tobias reported on it in which he says “it was interesting, but not ground breaking”. Apparently Hitcher left very good impressions. Seems like a rather casual, non-intrusive pervasive game. I could not find any map-based pervasive game in IperG.

Drawings and Handwritting in CatchBob!

Examples of drawings and handwrittings in a mobile, synchronous, group, pen-driven map annotation application (CatchBob!):

Drawing and Handwriting on Mobile Phones

Drawing and Handwriting on Mobile Phones, Marc Relieu, Conference Seeing, Understanding, Learning in the Mobile Age Budapest, April 28–30, 2005

Even though this paper has a too strong ethnomethodological perspective, it gives me ideas on how I should analyze the annotations made by the players of CatchBob! How about analyze usage of a mobile, multi-users, synchronous pen-driven map annotation tool? In CatchBob! every pen stroke, hand-made drawings, handwritten texts are shared between the TabletPC users.

This study is based on Orange Scribble, a an instant messaging services permit to merge drawings with handwritten texts and to send them in real time on touch sensitive mobile phone displays. The creation of endless new combinations between handwritten text and drawings, either to solicit attention, to open an exchange, to produce an evaluation or to initiate a new topic turns ogame-like practice. The author examine how the local senses of drawings is occasioned and established as a concerted practical accomplishment.

It is interesting to see that the users still wrote in a serially manner. They position each new contribution just in the next line after the last. While doing this, they preserve, through a spatial positioning of their writing and drawing, not only the seriality, but also the sequentiality of their exchange.

Learning and Recognizing the Places We Go

Learning and Recognizing the Places We Go, Jeffrey Hightower, Sunny Consolvo, Anthony LaMarca, Ian Smith and Jeff Hughes.

The authors present their work on the problem of moving from location to place (i.e. geocoding, translate a coordinate into a corresponding name). The problem is that geocoded information, like a raw coordinate, does not correspond to someone’s mental model of their personal routine nor to the terminology they use when discussing the places they go.

The application “Beacon-Print” uses WiFi and GSM radio fingerprints collected by someone’s personal mobile device to automatically learn the places they go and then detect when they return to those places. BeaconPrint does not automatically assign names or semantics to places. Rather, it provides the technological foundation to support this task.

Place learning algorithms take as input a sensor log gathered from a mobile device and produce as output a list of the places the device went. The sensor information collected about each of these places is called a waypoint.

Their place learning algorithm is based on fingerprints. Fingerprint waypoints are a “signature” of each place which allows the device to detect when it returns to the place, but provides no direct information about where that place is geographically located.

JXME 2.1 (Tantà) Released

JXME 2.1 (Tantà) has been released.

The purpose of JXTA-J2ME is to provide a JXTA compatible functionalities on constrained devices using the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and the Mobile Information Device Profile 2.0 (MIDP). The range of devices include the smart phones to PDAs. Using JXTA for J2ME, any MIDP device will be able to participate in P2P activities with other devices within the JXTA network.