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.

The Benefits of Location Tracking for WLAN Management

Cisco Systems makes its entrance into the wireless mesh networking arena with a line of outdoor mesh products aimed at reducing the deployment costs involved in setting up indoor and outdoor networks.

The scenarios of usage seem to uniquely target wireless network managers in helping them in the planning and deployment of their WLAN networks, optimize ongoing network performance, enhance wireless security, and improve both the visibility and control of the air space. More in Location is Everything—The Benefits of Location Tracking in WLAN Environments.

LIFT06

February 2-3 2006, I’ll attend LIFT06 in Geneva. LIFT is a conference about new technologies and people organized by Laurent Haug and Nicolas Nova. These two guys, both from the country where the Minitel was born, have done an amazing work gathering a nice set of brains to hear from and meet.

Keynote will be done by BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow. I also expect to be well lectured by Avenir Suisse’s Xavier Comtesse (Internet and the ordinary people’s revolution), Marc Besson (Identity Revolution), Stefana Broadbent (The specialization of communication channels), Marc Laperrouza (Can China really control the Internet?), Pierre Carde (Managing clusters of creative companies), Thomas Madsen-Mygdal (10 things i’ve learned about creation), Euan Semple (Working In A Wired World), and hopefully some other last-minutes surprises.

.

No doubt, there will also be appropriate moments to get into in-depth discussions about the “fourth places“.

Do Not Press the Button, Please

Physical accessibility to my Bank in Spain. Fortunately the web accessibility to my account is less tricky.

k

BT's Boring LBS Services

Mobhappy has a critic of the British Telecom’s announce of new Location Based Services: BT Launches a Whole Range of Terribly Boring LBS Services. The 3 main scenarios seem to be:

• People tracking (employee, child and elderly)
• Traffic and directions
• Find my nearest things

I think traffic and direction as well as dispatched employee tracking already exist, work and are usefull. However they target a limited audience with very reliable positioning technologies and strong systems. However, I am really interested to know about plausible scenarios for BT to invest money on child and elderly tracking. Moreover, I am not aware of any “Find my nearest things” service that really work on my mobile phone and that is engaging enough for me to have my mobile phone in my hand and to watch a tiny screen.
Related to this are Intel’s Useless LBS Scenarios and NTT DoCoMo’s Interconnected World.

Sociallight, a Spatial Annotation Service

Socialight is a mobile phone and web based platform that allows users to create and share location-based messages. The current prototype is rather limited because it uses Bluetooth beacons to determine the location of the device. In the future, they plan to use GPS and operators data. When a Socialight-enabled device enters an area with a beacon, the user’s device scans the area, retrieves geographic positioning data from the beacon and then transmits its position to the server via GPRS.

The scenario presenting the service is also rather limited like many LBS scenarios currently. It is like finding a slice of pizza in a city is the ultimate holy grail in urban areas.