iTunes Companion for Konfabulator

iTunes Companion searches for album cover art for your current iTunes track at amazon.com and downloads it to your hard drive. The image is only downloaded once. The next time you play that track it finds the image on your hard drive. It searches for artwork in your iTunes Library before going to amazon.com.

You can scan the album cover yourself and drag and drop the image file over the Widget if it can't be found at amazon.com.

Via Tipmonkies

Could we file that (see links) under "Kawaii Technopunk Lifestyle" respectively a lifestyle with a technopunk cuteness factor - the laptop with stickers look definitively like cutie punk;)

Compare Mobile Phone as Personal Shrine with What alpha geeks and 11-year-old schoolgirls have in common (via Ross).

Just saw this, haven't read it yet:
Defining Mobile Social Software

See:
Blog Search on Context Management

I made a table for you to explain what I mean. I call it “Shawn Conahan’s Media Eras Infographic.” Our company is about sharing media so feel free to use it in your powerpoint, change it if you think its incomplete, etc., but really take a critical look at it.

I like this one too:

Now we are seeing convergence create a two-way web that integrates our media such that you have a channel on which you create, consume and share your media. “Find me on Xanga” or “Did you see my post about that?” are illustrations of how our very own “channels” are increasingly the hub of our media and social lives. The Personal Media Device elegantly converges those functions and puts them in your pocket. Put very simply, this is "Channel You." The mobile applications that enable people to do that more are the winners in this new media era.

It’s a phone, not a console! (PDF) is an interesting paper about mobile games by Marko Turpeinen, Risto Sarvas, Fernando Herrera from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

Hmm, for a certain kind of gaming the PSP has still a lot of advantages - bigger screen, game-oriented buttons... And games are explicitely made for these consoles.

On the other hand I also think that there are a lot of possibilities with mobile phones not yet even touched nor discovered. But it's a different breed of games.

There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides and maybe we should just not look at it as either or but rather as two possible devices for games. Time will tell what kind of games have the greatest appeal on the different devices.

Via Nicolas

Excerpts from It is a phone not a console!:

Current trends in commercial mobile game development seem to follow the path of games made for portable game decks rather than taking advantage of the special characteristics of a mobile phone. Presumably, porting well-understood game concepts onto the mobile phone presents a smaller financial risk in the form of familiarity in marketing, development, and user adoption. As we have presented above, there are gamelike phenomena that leverage sociality, connectivity, media creation, and mobility. Furthermore, the phones are very personal devices; they know a lot about the user and lend themselves as vehicles for selfexpression.
Also, the phone can be a part of richer cross-media concepts, phones enable an alternative way of billing for gaming content, they are a communication medium for TV entertainment, and a source of extra information when playing in the real world. These characteristics can and should be used to differentiate mobile phone games from game deck games.

[...] However, the learning curve for consumers to understand what mobile gaming can really be about should not be underestimated. It is already hard enough to communicate to people about basic mobile games. Perhaps this is the reason why simple mobile games like bowling are very popular. One approach could be to gradually add features that leverage sociality, mobility, connectivity, self-expression, phone billing etc. into mobile game concepts that people are already familiar with. Then move towards more innovative concepts as the mainstream market becomes used to the special characteristics of mobile gaming. Another approach would be to introduce the mobile phone as a gaming device into game-like activities where these features already exist and the concepts are familiar. For example, Geocaching combines connectivity, mobility, and sociality, and online betting, which is a well-known and popular game format, combines mobility, sociality, money transfer, and cross-media.

Colorzip Japan

Interactive television programming is walking out the door and onto mobile handsets, pressuring Japanese TV broadcasters to adapt content and programming. Networks TBS and FujiTV are linking up with ColorZip Japan, a new server-based full-color bar-code technology that synchs TV broadcasts to related digital content for sponsored websites, music samples, contests and prize drawings.

We spoke with ColorZip Japan CEO Christopher Craney about how ColorCode is developing the Japanese market. Already in talks with telecom providers over having the code embedded onto new handsets, Chris discusses both corporate and individual marketing campaigns for this next-generation bar-code technology. We also interviewed the CTO, Evan Owens, who demonstrated several applications of their product.

Related:
Mobile Monday Japan

China sets up forum organization on future mobile communication beyond 3G

The organization, or namely Future Mobile Communication Forum, has 26 co-founders including nine multinationals, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, Philips, Shanghai Bell-Alcatel, Motorola, Samsung, France Telecom and NTT Docomo from Japan.

[...] Beyond 3G could provide high-quality image transmission at a price as low as fixed-line Internet, said Zhou Hong, vice president of Huawei. He said Huawei spent 15 percent of its annual sales on research and development of future technologies including Beyond 3G and the company is making great investment in the new technology.

For more QR code meishi (QR名刺) see here.

Via the excellent Jan.

See also:
Future Perfect by Jan Chipchase
More on QR Codes on this blog

Interconnected World, Innovative ubiquitous services
For Nicolas: Many user scenarios to check out.

Via Touch

Related:
Rakuten Keitai Shopping

Touch, Exploring user centred applications for NFC and RFID.

The project covers three distinct areas

1. Social and communication.
   This is a promising area for significant, emergent, potentially unexpected uses, particularly in areas of personal information management, location-based services and social networking.
2. Public services.
   This area looks at the ways that new touch-based interactions could access public data or services in safe, democratic, appropriate and efficient ways.
3. Retail, services and marketing.
   Exploring changes to the way we interact with retail services, looking at (but not limited to) payment for both products and services, automated check-out, product information, extended services and relationships, recycling, and tracking products through their cradle to cradle life-cycle.

Via Anne Galloway

See also:
Elasticspace