Stephen Wellman speaks about Google's mobile behaviour groups in Google Lays Out Its Mobile User Experience Strategy. Compare this with The problem with mobile social networks.

Understanding users, anywhere, anytime

Rechis said that Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups:

A. "Repetitive now"
B. "Bored now"
C. "Urgent now"

The "repetitive now" user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The "bored now" are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don't offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The "urgent now" is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

Via Daren Twiss

PS: I just made a post with three QR Codes pointing to swiss services for the "Urgent Now".

Mimi Ito: Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places

From the abstract:

The mobile phone has become the central node of the ensemble of portable objects that urbanites carry with them as they negotiate their way through information-rich global cities. This paper reports on a study conducted in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London where we tracked young professionals’ use of the portable objects. By examining devices such as music players, credit cards, transit cards, keys, and ID cards in addition to mobile phones, this study seeks to understand how portable devices construct and support an individual’s institutions.

Our focus in this paper is not on the relational communication that has been the focus of most mobile communication studies, but rather on how portable devices mediate relationships to urban space and infrastructures. We identify three genres of presence in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. These place-making processes provide hints to how portable devices have reshaped the experience of space and time in global cities.

Via Nicolas' new blog at liftlab

Findbook in Taiwan creates a QR Code for the best price of a book. What's interesting here, is that they put text into the QR Code and not a weblink which could be updated.

Jump! Mobile, where I discovered this, asks what is the reason of this text QR Code.

I guess as long as there isn't a possibility to buy right from your phone, the text QR Code makes more sense than a weblink. Why? Most things we discover, we do not buy right away, but we a) either need some time to think if we really want to buy the item or b) we are not in a situation to buy (work place, cybercafé etc).
And with text in the QR Code, we don't need to access the internet, which is a big advantage for a simple reminder.

Where Jump! Mobile is right, is that this is a fairly simple use of QR Codes and it could be combined with something much more interesting. Say a best price alert service: every time the current price gets cheaper one receives an SMS. The QR Code would then look something like this:

Tokyomango writes:

This looks like an ordinary fax/scanner/printer, but it's actually much smarter than your Average Joe office equipment. By embedding all the necessary information for a particular sender or setting into a QR code, the CP4500it from Ricoh lets you avoid the hassle of messing around with all those often dysfunctional buttons on the conventional machine. Just scan the QR code as the first page of your document, and it will read your settings (file type, contrast/brightness, size, fax #, etc) and automatically do what the QR code tells it to do.

Just think a step further and one can send you all needed information for your printing job via QR Code right on your cell phone. You put it on your Ricoh copy machine and get the job done precisely as it was intended. And I think we are only at the very beginning of this.

That's also why I firmly believe that a standard like QR Code has so many advantages over a proprietory mobile code solution. Suddenly, if everything starts talking QR Code, the possibilities are endless.

See also:
Ricoh's press release about imagio MP C4500it/ imagio MP C3500it

Kyle aka Pukupi did a new design for his site. He also offers an interestig article: Pukupi's top 10 hints for building interoperable mobile web sites.

Kyle writes to avoid emoji's as their is no standard set yet. However silly they might be, I believe that emoji's will become quite important in the future.
Just think about the use of emoji's in Jaiku, the better Twitter. And more seriously, see Junichi Azuma's "From Emoticon to Universal Symbolic Signs: Can Written Language Survive in Cyberspace?"


Also of interest:
The Mobile Lab

White Paper 2D-Barcodes und Mobile Tagging vom 17.07.2007 (pdf, 354,37 KB)

Welche Codes und Code-Reader sich allgemein oder in bestimmten Einsatzgebieten durchsetzen werden, ist für den europäischen Markt noch nicht klar absehbar. Zu neu ist die Thematik, zu schnell sind die Entwicklungen, zu umfangreich ist die Zahl der Player, die dieses Thema besetzen wollen. QR-Code und DataMatrix haben sicher derzeit die Nase vorn, aufgrund der Verbreitung in Codes und Readern und nicht zuletzt der ISO-Normierung.

Translation: Which codes and code readers will break through on the european market is not yet foreseeable. The topic is too new, the development is too quick, the amount of players who want to dominate is too vast. At present QR Code and Datamatrix lead certainly, because of the biggest distribution of codes and readers and last but not least because of the ISO standardisation.

Via Werben und Verkaufen


Related:
QR Code on Toilet Paper (Densen Uta Promotion)
European Central Bank explains QR Codes

QR marketing finally here

"QR technology has been incredibly successful for marketers in Japan and we expect similar success in Canada," Michael Gramlow, CD interactive at Dentsu Canada, tells MiC. "It's a great way to connect with a youth target that's notoriously difficult to reach - not just because it offers something new and different for them to interact with, but also because it generates a lot of street buzz."

He adds that the wild postings now hitting Toronto streets are "a pioneering effort in North America, and Dentsu and Vespa are very proud to be the first to bring it to the Canadian market."

Deutsche Telekom has also joined the MC2.