Younghee Jung leads a multidisciplinary research team at Nokia called “Insight and Innovation.” She talks about what to expect next from your mobile phone, the newest ideas in the pipeline, and the questions that Nokia is asking women.
According to Younghee Jung, there will be a shift in the near future from getting connected to whom we are getting connected to and how and when we are getting connected.
Handbag designers should listen to the cellphone-handbag discussion from the workshop.
Mobile Communication in Everyday Life takes a closer look at the mobile phone as an object of inquiry in the tradition of the so-called media ethnography. Consequently, the benefits and limitations of such research designs are the focus of the book. Some contributions focus on the tension between private and public communication, others on cultural dimensions.
In recent years, as camera phones and digital cameras have become more common, sending visual messages has become increasingly easy. Visual communication is used most importantly between members of the immediate circle: MMS creates closeness between friends and family members and adds emotion to the communication; messages are often humorous and they function to maintain and enforce relationships and social bonds. Mobile visual communication has become one means of communication to complement the more traditional ways of keeping contact. For instance the news about the arrival of a baby or a new pet is delivered immediately through MMS, whereas before sending photographs in a letter was perhaps the most commonly used method.
[...] Photos are mailed only to intimates such as a lover, a spouse or a very close friend. Decisions about sending an image or what kind of a photo to send are made based on social relationships (Okabe, 2004:10). Van House identified four traditional uses of photos:
constructing a personal
and group memory;
creating and maintaining relationships; and
self-presentation. On the basis of camera phone studies, a fifth category was also identified:
functional images.
From their data, the researchers concluded that camera phone use encourages experimentation with a more expressive use of images (Van House, 2004:3). Kindberg et al. (2005:46) observed in their study that the most common reason for capturing a mobile image was to enrich mutual experience by sharing an image with those who were co-present at the time.
The Mobile Identity Workshop is just over and I couldn't attend. So I went first to check the blog of John Palfrey (whom I know back from 2003 when we co-hosted one of the first blogging conferences before they where named that way;)
As this the mobile ID topic is a central one to us, I would have liked to participate in it, but SF was just too far away. So far the most interesting post concerning the workshop was the one from Urs Gasser.
We have argued that mobile phones are as symbolic of contemporary modern societies, as pocket watches were when Simmel wrote about Berlin. This transition corresponds with a shift from punctuality to more fluid ‘networked time’ where ‘punctuality’ is negotiated on the move, so that time, venue and group can change with the next email or text. Whereas trains and pocket watches were early modern twins, mobile phones and cars are the late modern ones, raging against past rhythms and timekeeping of early modernity when transport and mediated communication were unconnected. The striking popularity of cars, email and mobile communications are thus significantly tied up with how they afford a flexible and mobile social life, with high network capital, with dispersed and personalised social networks and where coordinated arrangements and travel are necessary for the mundane business of meeting up, for doing social life.
I wonder how many people are already living the mobile life and how this is reflected according to age, gender and other sociodemographic factors. Does anyone have some statistical data on this?
Greenpeace Japan has recently launched an anti-GMO (genetically-modified organisms) campaign (japanese true food site), aimed at informing and empowering consumers to support GMO-free products and put pressure on the food industry to provide more choice and better labelling of GMO content in foods. [...] Food items are rated with a green face (good), yellow face, (not so good), and a red face (bad) based on the presence of GMOs.
[...] Not only can shoppers see whether an individual product merits a green, yellow or red face, they can also read background information about the source company that produces that item and in particular, their customer feedback telephone number (I’m sure you can see where this is going). Many Japanese mobile browsers are configured to automatically identify and hot-link phone numbers on webpages – so it’s just a one-button click to ring the company and leave them a phone message about just why their product is not being purchased today.
That's interesting: Although all new japanese phones come now with a barcode reader preinstalled, Greenpeace wants to come out with there own:
In the works: a GMO-free QR code reader that would mean consumers would be able to scan the unique mobile-friendly bar code that are printed some products and get an immediate green, red or yellow face.
As the normal QR code reader would direct one to the official webpage, it seems that the Greenpeace Reader would redirect the customer to the Greenpeace product page. Interesting development! The only other solution would be to create Greenpeace QR Code Stickers. Or am I missing something.
"As our identity becomes a commodity so does our privacy. And that's where we are entering a dangerous area, making privacy only available at a cost," she said.
This week's Economist writes: Phones are the new cars in it's Leaders section, meaning that we should look what happened to cars to make a few predictions about the phones of the future.
Phones, like cars, are fashion items: people generally replace them long before they actually wear out.
I would add, phones like cars, are status symbols. In populations and areas where people can't afford cars, they will replace them with phones.
Phones are unquestionably the most personal, the most social and the most rapidly evolving technological devices on earth, and are likely to change as dramatically in the next decade, as they have in the previous one.
That's why Mobile 2.0 makes so much sense.
Swiss Army Knife or optimised device for a particular task
In short, Bruce Sterling believes that the phone will be “the remote-control for life”.
as opposed to:
Already, the clear trend in phone design is towards ever greater diversity. The debate over whether the phone would emerge as the digital “Swiss Army Knife” and cram in as many features and functions as possible is over, says Bruno Giussani, the author of “Roam”, a book about the mobile industry. Instead, handset-makers now make different devices optimised for particular tasks such as music, photography or e-mail, and combinations thereof.
Personally I see the phone clearly as a Swiss Army Knife or as a remote-control for life than as a optimised device for a particular task. That's why the iPod, albeit one of the most interesting mobile devices today due to it's convergence model (bringing together a mobile device with the broadband pc) simplicity and design, will come under a lot of pressure, if it remains what it is.
That the Swiss Army Knife approach was too early in 2001 has a lot to do with the business smartphone angle here in Europe. Japan's mobile success showed that design, simplicity and usability are key elements in an early market. Once people understand the paradigm, you can start to add more sophistication.
Also instead of targeting sophisticated business users, you should add immediate value for everyone.
So I think we are right now at the antithesis point of the story being examplified by iPods, RAZR's and Chocolate's. But I am confident that the synthesis will come, as I don't see people carry around multiple devices on a daily basis. (Already now I see less iPod's in the streets than six months ago, but I still see mobile phones all over the place.)
Phones will remain different on the surface, something they already are as much as cars. But as with cars, the most widely used phones start resembling each other more and more - on a technical as well as on design level.
As the mobile now also enters an era where more and more people will start producing content and for the mobile web and for the classic web, the pressure to use standards and to be more standard-compliant will accrue.
It is significant in this regard that three major handset manufacturers - Nokia, Motorola, MS with Windows Mobile opted all for QR Codes instead of inventing their own proprietory format.
"There are so many autonomous devices such as cell phones and laptops that have emerged in the last few years," said Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers behind the work.
"We started thinking, 'it would be really convenient if you didn't have to recharge these things'.
"And because we're physicists we asked, 'what kind of physical phenomenon can we use to do this wireless energy transfer?'."
The answer the team came up with was "resonance", a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied.
MySpace's biggest challenges in expanding abroad involve cultural differences. People outside the United States have different and very established habits when it comes to socializing online. And many do so by using mobile phones rather than computers.
"In the U.S., teen and twentysomething culture is more about IM," or instant messaging, according to Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California who studies popular culture and technology. In other countries, "the primary way of talking to your friends is SMS," the text messages on mobile phones.
Would you agree with it? IM is pretty strong in Switzerland too. But elsewhere? Does anyone have figures concerning this?
