BCN Trends Spotting

Current trends in BCN are torturing elevators, the designing 4th places bible, sleeping awareness signs, and the return of manual street cleaning.

Notebook Ban

I got kicked out of the restaurant car in a Swiss train because I was reading my NetNewsWire with my 12″ PowerBook. I was shown a the written “restaurant” policy booklet containing rule 11: “notebooks are NOT allowed”. Reading newspapers, books, and yelling on a mobile phone are allowed. Even smoking cigars is a more than accepted activity. I did not go into explaining that I was actually reading the news with my small electronic device and having an IM conversation with GPRS. It is interesting to notice that a notebook is still perceived as a working tool and not a communication device. Until december 2005 (when smoking will fortunately be banned from all trains) smokers are more welcomed than geeks in swiss train’s restaurants.

Ogo for IM and Mail

Swisscom is the first european operator to launch a mobile device (named Ogo) that offers instant messanging (via MSN) and email capabilities. Ogo costs 49CHF for the device, then 19CHF/month for the services. Swisscom targets teens and “enfults/adulescents” (teens in theirs 20s and ealry 30s). Carsten Schloter, the ever-opptimisitc Swisscom CEO, envisions Ogo as an SMS killer. I might go down into history for that statement.

You mean I have one device to phone, sms, take pictures, listen to mp3s and FM radio and another one to handle my IM contact and mails? Plus chatting and writing mails need advanced keyboard capabilities that people will need to adapt (ever written a mail on a Blackberry and done IM on a PocketPC?). Adults like integration or at least smooth interoperability (geeks are ok with interoperability). Let’s see how teens accept multiple devices for multiple purposes… It might just work since it is not rare to see (pre-)teenagers moving around with their phone, digital camera, iPod and the occasional Nintendog.

Vessels Live Trackers

Yesterday, Julian Bleecker mentioned FlighAware that provides real-time tracking of not just of flights or traffic to airports, but actual unique, tail-number identifiable equipment. Sailwx provides the same live tracking capabilities, but for ships.

Map of Road Traffic Noise in Paris

The “Mairie de Paris” offers an applications that maps the road traffic noise in the whole city. Maps are both in 2D and 3D with daytime and nighttime data.

Found in the Radical Cartography spectacular links.

Sofware Engineers and the Networked Economy

Google has an open-source program mainly to support young geeks and tie into open source. In that program, Googles is functioning as a university as it creates a new kind of distributed lab. Chris DiBona, open-source program manager, has a great quote on the importance for software engineers to properly apply the tools of the networked economy (message boards, phone, VoIP, email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and blogging):

“Developers should get used to the idea of globally distributed work groups all over the place, all over the time zones. It’s the future of software development.”

Via Google and the networked economy on ballpark.

WiMax, a State of the Art

Miguel Angel Cordobes Aranda of the Auna (now Ono) Innovation Center gave a presentation at UPF on the results of the first WiMax trial in Spain. He knew half of the acronyms and only understood a few of the technical numbers and telco charts. However Miguel provided an overview of the current and future of WiMax from an operator’s point of view. In a few punchy lines:

• WiMax cannot compete with xDSL, HFC in terms of capacity
• WiMax will net be able to compte with mobile networks (GSM) in terms of reach
• WiMax brings more problems than solutions for fixed services (e.g. user has to be close to the window)
• The added value of WiMax is to offer mobility… and the current standard does not support it (no handover).
• WiMax is good for nomadic mobility but not complete mobility. Current technology insures connectivity up to 50-60 km/h. So no usage in trains!.
• WiMax is focused on the midium-size metropolitan area! The countryside, rural ares and big agglomerations are not of a big interest (financially).
• Apparently, particulars won’t be able to proclaim themselves providers by installing their own broadband base stations.

It is very interesting that operators view WiMax as a technology for mobility even though it clearly lack of coverage (it probably won’t ever reach GSM’s overall coverage) and lack of connectivity at average speed. All these technological and financial constraints strengths my current interest in the moving sands that mobile and ubiquitous applications and users must deal with. All wireless offers come from their technical limitations and financial constraints. Currently, no wireless technology eats the other, but rather collocate to and stack on each other with extremely poor interoperability. Each context (controlled indoor environment to uncontrolled outdoor environments) calls for its sets of technologies. Ubiquity, to its strict sense, is still far from reach.

Location and Space in Mobile Computing

Two slightly related presentations done this weeks by Nicolas and Mauro at EPFL that do a snapshot on the use of location and space in mobile computing:

Pervasive computing and the socio-cognitive affordances of space

Using location awareness in mobile interfaces to propel collaboration

Jabberwocky

Jabberwocky is a mobile phone application for visualizing our urban Familiar Strangers. It is an outcome of the Familiar Strangers project at Intel Research Lab Berkeley’s Urban Atmosphere. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram mentioned
“familiar strangers” as people (not friends) you have very little in common with them, but share something very important: proximity.

In the idea of Jabberwoky I especially like the fact that “Strangers are strangers exactly because they are not our friends, and any such system should respect that boundary” that goes against the current web2.0 frenzy of attempting by all means to convert our strangers into our friends.

Here the goal of exploring the Familiar Stranger is to promote discussion around Jabberwocky to improve community solidarity and sense of belonging in urban spaces. It is very relevant to the ICING project that finances my research at UPF. It deals with intelligent cities and ambient intelligence. I am always very skeptical when we start to use the term “intelligence” for abstract metaphors.

Technically Jabberwocky is very easy. It contacts a Bluetooth device, it compares the radio’s identifying MAC address to a log of addresses stored in its memory.

Jabberwocky can also become location aware as it allows users to create their own locations (like “work” or “my commute”) and link groups of phones to them. That way, Jabberwocky can give us some clues to our previous encounters with familiar strangers (that is, “office,” “corner café”). It is a very clear example of defining location not as a static set of coordinates or fixed location but as a personally defined shifting region.

Elizabeth Goodman talks about the project in Jabberwocky: Your Personal Compass

Article in GEO:connexion

This month’s issue of GEO:connexion features an article by Nicolas (with my humble help). It is a try to transfer to the industry our experience and the first outcomes of our experiments on location awareness with CatchBob!.

When Location Means More than Location (Registration required)
New developments in mobile location tablets in Switzerland provides clues about trends in interactive graphics in real-time.