The Flow

The small pieces of updates sent to you from other people via services such as Twitter and Facebook "status updates" might be seen as nonsense and non-important information. Well, they may be that. They are the messages that are not worth to be sent via e-mail or instant messaging. But still, the messages are not meaningless. They can even be sort of addictive to read. Suddenly a friend or a person you met at a bus stop three years ago is telling the world what he/she is doing right now or what music he/she likes or whatever. And in a weird way it's interesting because you get that person in your mind's eye, which would not be the case otherwise. Flemming Funch writes about this phenomena in this blog post:

"But it keeps people on your radar screen. You don't have to respond, but you can, if something somehow rings a bell. It doesn't have to be your close friends either. It is surprisingly meaningful, even if it is people you've never met, but you have some kind of interest in what they're up to."

He continues:
"I watch a screen where a few dozen people say something once in a while, and I can say something too. Interestingly, they aren't all watching the same screen, as they have different groups of friends than I do, although they overlap. They aren't all there at the same time either, and they aren't all paying attention. But once in a while somebody feels like saying something. That will be something that relates to what's going on for them at the moment, and it will also be something they feel like saying into that fuzzy kind of space, usually without saying it to anybody in particular. They typically don't expect a response either. Other people do the same. Whether you directly comment on anything else or not, what you say will necessarily be colored a bit by what you see already on the screen."

I wish I could summarize this in some kind of a definition. I guess that will take a while. For now I call this phenomena "The Flow".

Micro-blogging

Our brains seem to become more and more connected. This is of course a good thing. What would the world be like if there was no international net open for all? Pretty boring. Blogs have given us the opportunity to read about other people's ideas, knowledge and lives. Using instant messaging and social networks, we get increasingly bombarded with information sent by other people. Facebook introduced a new type of communication a couple of years ago - the "status update". Probably it was just a fun thing created by the Facebook developers. Short, sometimes meaningless sentences like "Jim is watching TV" pop up in the never ending history of Facebook events. The idea was adopted later by Twitter, and really took off. By answering the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less, you can send your friends updates ("Tweets"). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS and RSS. Anyone with a cell phone can send and receive updates any time, anywhere. Users can send messages as text, video or audio. Other sites such as "Jaiku" and "Yammer" have taken the idea even further. They all go in the category "Micro-blogging" and are now used by millions of people.

Double sided mobile device - Yin and Yang

In a series of posts I have argued that it is a waste of space to use just one side of a mobile device. By thinking out load I have tried to find possible usages of such a device. You know that Apple's IPhone has a touch screen to interact with the device. Why not put a touch screen on the other side as well? Why would you do that you might think? Why would you not? I bet there are lots of situations where a double sided device would be more practical, more intuitive and easier to use. As a hypothesis, would it make sense to split up the most common usages and put them on each side? Like the Yin and Yang of a mobile device. I can think of several possible Yins and Yangs of a mobile device. Here are some of them:

• Yin - Content and applications. Yang - Communication.
• Yin - Geography. Location services, GPS, Navigation. Yang - The rest.
• Yin - Media and gaming. Yang - The rest.
• Yin - Health meters (such as pulse, blood pressure) Yang - The rest.
• Yin - Authentication. Fingerprint sensors. Security. Yang - The rest.
• Yin - Practical functions such as a flashlight or a mirror. Yang - The rest.

The question is: Is the single sided mobile device sufficient for all of the examples above? Is it more logical, more intuitive to use only one side? Are two sides only confusing for the user? I don't know since I haven't used a double sided one. An interesting aspect is if the two sides could be able to communicate with each other. How would that work? To be Xhausted...

Authentication - OpenID

For those who haven't heard of OpenID, it is an open, decentralized user identification standard, allowing users to log onto many services with the same digital identity. OpenID authentication is used and provided by several large websites. Organizations like Google, IBM, Microsoft, Myspace, Orange, Verisign and Yahoo act as providers. Authentication can be made through normal passwords, but also with smartcards or fingerprint biometrics. It seems very promising. I tried to find out if there are any mobile phone vendors out there that support fingerprint authentication using the OpenID standard. I couldn't find any. I think it would be awesome to just press your finger on the sensor of a mobile device, and *swoosh* - you're online, ready for e-mailing, chatting, using banking services, online purchasing , blogging or whatever you do on the net that requires a login procedure. No need for user names, passwords or certificates. Just a fingerprint recognition and all service providers know that you is you and nobody else. I'm sure that this idea is in the makings somewhere. It cannot be that far away that this could be available to everyone. I mean, the Asians use fingerprint biometrics for online banking already. Hope that they also hop on the Open ID train.

On the other side - A flashlight

Imagine you're sitting on your sofa watching a good movie a late Friday night. Then suddenly, a "click". Everything turns dark. Your TV, your room, and all the street lights outside. It's a major power outage. You can't see anything really. Luckily you have your mobile device in your pocket as usual. You slide up the backside face of the mobile device and turn on the built-in flashlight. Your room lits up, and you can navigate in your apartment.
In an earlier post, I argued that it was a pity that the IPhone only uses half the space available. One side is full of goodies, while the other side is just an empty space of plastic - useless. So, since the backside of the IPhone gives no value at all to the user, then anything that adds value would be infinitely better (mathematically speaking, that is). Your mobile device is a thing you carry with you all day long. Why not put as many usages as possible to it since it's available all the time? Maybe it would feel kind of dorky to have a built-in flashlight in your mobile device. But I think you'd appreciate it in the scenario described above. In an other post, I came up with the idea of having a built-in recordable mirror on the backside. I guess that would attract the vain mobile users of the world. But what do I know, I'm just thinking out loud.

Mobile authentication of today

I googled the topic of fingerprint authentication for mobile phones and found some blog posts on that subject. This engadget blog post describes the Pantech PG-6200 as a "new handset for the security-conscious Taiwanese citizen who also wants some pretty capable multimedia features in his/her cellphone". Here is another example from Toshiba. In fact, there are 40 mobile phones with integrated fingerprint sensors shipping today. Most are sold in Asia. Biometric cell phones are widely used in Asia for mobile commerce (M-commerce), online banking and for securing the device in the event of loss or theft.
How could we benefit from online identification in the future? Well, a whole lot if you'd ask me. To be Xhausted...

Image courtesy of Pantech Wireless,inc.

Sensors - Authentication

Future scenario:
It's the year of 2025. Ben wakes up at 6.30 in the morning and grabs his mobile device. He puts his pointer finger on the authentication sensor which reads his fingerprint. The device tells him that he's logged in as an authenticated world citizen and welcomes him back online. From now on all his online communication is signed with his world citizen id. Ben presses the built-in money button and sends the 1000 world coins he owes his brother. Ben's brother is also online and quickly expresses his gratitude that he finally got his money back. Ben switches to incognito mode and comments in a forum that he'll be late to that damn A.A meeting. Then he goes to the shuttle just outside his house which takes him to his work place. The fee is automatically paid by his device.
A good friend of mine (Odd Möller) came up with the idea of an authentication sensor.

A double sided cell phone of today

I searched the net to find out if there is any phone vendor that has created a double sided mobile device. I found Samsung UpStage SPH-M620. On one side, it’s a cellphone, digital camera and camcorder. On the other, it’s a dedicated music player with touch-sensitive media controls. That sounds great. But can you take this idea even further somehow?

image courtesy of Samsung Inc.

IPhone - A waste of space

Don't get me wrong. I love my IPhone. It has all the functionality that I need to retrieve information and to communicate with other people. Plus a whole lot more: a camera, calendar, maps, Ipod, YouTube, weather etc. My previous phone, a Sony Ericsson, is light years behind IPhone when it comes to usability. The touch screen is surprisingly easy to use. You almost don't even have to read the manual to get started using this device. The user interface is so slick and utterly well designed that every task you perform becomes joyful. To put it shortly, it's a hallmark of design by Apple.

According to the technical specification for IPhone, the height is 4.5 inches (115.5 mm) and the width is 2.4 inches (62.1 mm). It has a 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen with 480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 ppi. Nothing strange about that. But take a close look at the back side of the IPhone here beside. It looks slick with the rounded corners and the silvery Apple logo. But what else? Really, it's just an empty black plastic surface which gives the user no value at all. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. To me that seems like a great waste of space. A mobile device of the future needs as much space as possible to squeeze in functionality and content. Instead of using the total area of the both sides together (143.4 cm²), IPhone is only using half of that. I'm going to try to find out possible usages of a double sided mobile device. To be continued.

images courtesy of Apple Inc.

Scratch it!

I've been thinking a little of the idea of a context sensitive time navigator. Is there any use for such a thing? Isn't the good old scroll bar sufficient for that purpose? Maybe so. To test the idea, here's an example of how a time navigator, the turntable, could work in order to move in time. Spinning the inner circle allows the user to move in time at a faster pace than the outer circle. In an e-mail application the inner circle could represent moving by weeks, whereas the outer could a represent a more fine-grained period such as days. I don't know if a round time navigator like this would take too much space inside the frames of a mobile device. Maybe it's better to put it at the outside frame of the device? To be investigated...