Mobile and Wireless Technologies

Copenhagen.
The next speaker in this COST298 session is Simona Isabella. She notes how the mobile phone as a technology that crosses public and private spheres can be seen as an embodiment of contemporary society. Overall, the meaning technological artefacts assume depends on internal technical as well as external social factors; technologies are socially shaped, within the constraints imposed by technological possibilities, and may ultimately even be domesticated - but in different ways by different groups.

Mobile telephony history shows these developments: in Japan, for example, the humble pager evolved into a medium for interactive text communication, while the landline picture phone in the US failed because of concerns over privacy. Today, the emerging broadband society can be described as a society of perpetual contact; the mobile phone embodies and enacts this. By adding Internet access features, it transforms telephony from one-to-one to one-to-many; additionally, the use of social networking sites through mobile devices heightens the always-in-touch nature of contemporary society.

Copenhagen.
Eva Törnqvist is the next speaker at COST298, who highlights a specific form of user-led, bottom-up innovation in the use of mobile phones: by birdwatchers in Sweden. Traditionally, this community has used other tools to disseminate information about where to see rare birds: for example sticking paper signs on the back of a road sign, later on using answering machine and pager messages (to the point where they clogged the phone lines in small Swedish towns to breaking point).

Today, a community called Club 300 (as in, at least 300 recorded sightings of rare birds) uses mobile phones to share their knowledge. The switch to mobile phones also allows for the transmission of substantially more information (bird pictures and sounds), and connection with other services (such as road directions). Similarly, the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management now also share their wildlife and hunting pictures and videos on the Web, as well as through mobile phone services.

Copenhagen.
The post-lunch session at COST298 starts with Hanne Westh Nicolajsen, who focusses on users as co-innovators. This is in the context of CAMMP (Converged Advanced Mobile Media Platforms), which sounds not unlike aspects of our Smart Services CRC. Such research is driven by convergence between the Net, digital TV and radio, and 3G mobile technologies. How can users be best involved in the design of rich mobile media services for the future?

Approaches to this are based on a living lab model (providing a real context to technology use, focussing on the medium to long term, engaging in participatory design, and involving multiple stakeholders), which also means aiming for creativity (through employing creative methods, engendering trust in the process to encourage wild ideas, and basing creative processes on existing knowledge of what is possible through technology).

Copenhagen.
And this pre-lunch session here at COST298 ends with Chantal de Gournay and Frank Thomas, who approach digital cities from a different perspective. Amongst the key issues for them are how to combine real, virtual, and social spaces, how to address local and global identities,communities, and neighbourhoods, and how to understand different modes of participation in the digital city.

Chantal highlights the possibility for a fifth screen (after TV, PC, videogames, and mobile phones) as urban spaces become augmented realities through the introduction of digital screens that allow both more traditional forms of broadcasting and new forms of 'egocasting', perhaps in response to people in the vicinity. This ubiquitous paradigm creates the 'seamless city', in which real and virtual life merge and different times and spaces blend into one. Potentially, in such spaces, everywhere is nowhere, and there is no sense of the here and now.

Copenhagen.
Following the next09 conference last week, I've now made my way to Copenhagen, to attend the COST298 conference with the somewhat unwieldy title "The Good, the Bad, and the Challenging" - don't hold that against it, though: the actual theme of the conference (and of the COST298 EU research programme) is participation in the broadband society, so it should be interesting. (The two-volume proceedings alone are going to seriously push my luggage weight over the edge on the flight back.) Also, erm, interesting is the choice of location, at Aalborg University's campus in Ballerup on the outskirts of Copenhagen, almost an hour's metro ride out of town - I must say I much preferred the IT University campus, just cross from the city centre, where we held the AoIR conference last year.

Hamburg.
The next presentation here at next09 is by Rafi Haladjian from Violet, a company founded in 2003 in Paris. He says that the new frontier for future developments is no longer cyberspace, but meatspace - the physical world. There is a life after the PC...

But how do we get there? Violet's first step was to create the world's first Internet-connected, wi-fi, toy rabbit (think robotic, not fluffy). This also demonstrated that everything is now possible, no matter how absurd - if you can network rabbits, you can connect anything. In effect, the rabbit blinks, moves, speaks, reads, sings, hears and 'smells' (using RFID); it is an ambient information device which acts as a spontaneous information provider for short 'goot to know', real-time, information and snack media, and as a multi-expression messenger which can be controlled over the Internet.

Hamburg.
From Andrew Keen's rant we move on to a next09 panel on mobile telephony. What will the mobile environment look like in 2020? We begin with a brief video from the open think tank MoCom2020.com, showing where we've come from, and where we may be going (a 'sensorconomy' based on digital device sensors, new mobile services and mobile broadband offerings, major takeup in India, Africa, and other developing regions, miniaturisation and embedding of mobile devices, a shift of newspapers from print to mobile delivery, instant translation tools, location tracking, and substantial privacy and security concerns).

Athens.
For the first round of paper sessions here at WebSci '09, I've chosen a session on trust and distrust. Having just watched people juggle USB drives for the best part of 15 minutes, we finally start with a presentation by Dave Karpf. His interest is in the Web's impact on collective action for Internet-mediated organisations - and he suggests that the emergent mobile Web wll be of particular importance in this context.

Mobile Web-enabled devices enable new forms of collective action; rating and reputation systems attach track record data to individual participants - when the two meet, this has potentially radical implications for what uses become possible. Reputation in this context refers to complex, context-dependent community assessments; it plays a crucial role in solving collective action problems, and introduces what Axelrod has called a 'Shadow of the Future': they lead people to do well for others as they make visible the contributions of each participant (and introduce possible future repercussions for those who fail to put in). This is visible for example in communities like eBay or Slashdot, which both promote positive and sanction negative contributions through their reputation systems. Even Google's PageRank can be understood as a reputation system: PageRank measures, indirectly, reputation.

Sydney.
Rachel de Sain is the next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; she is Strategy and Commercial Manager for Mobile at Sensis. Her focus is on mobile advertising and marketing. Sensis operates brands such as Yellow Pages, WhereIs, TradingPost and Citysearch, and has recently come around to placing this content in Google and Google Maps as well - in this, mobile has become one of the most fundamental parts of the business.

Sensis gets around 2.5 million searches from mobile devices per month, and this doubles around every four months. Mobiles now have a 101% penetration rate in Australia, but over 49% of Australians have owned a phone for over 7 years, so it's not a new technology any more, even though technological features keep changing. Benefits for consumers are that mobiles are always on, that they choose whom to communicate with, that communication is personalised, and that it is relevant on the fly - if therefore provides confidence for consumers. For advertisers, the always-on nature is also attractive, and customers using mobile phones to connect are genuine customers, not windowshoppers. Also, the return on investment is measurable. Overall, though, the mobile is about building bridges, it takes users from one platform to another, and this is crucial.

Copenhagen.
It's the final session here at AoIR 2008. I've come in a little late for Lisa McLaughlin's presentation; she's been working in Malaysia to examine the Multimedia Super Corridor project which incorporates the Cyberjaya (technology) and Putrajaya (administration) districts.

The project was initiated in 1996 with much fanfare, but met with limited success as companies approached to develop representations there were initially reluctant to do so as the availability of a highly skilled technology workforce was doubtful. There was also strong skepticism about the project from the local community, not least because the building of the MSC required the displacement of existing communities of Tamil plantation workers. If knowledge societies require 'fast subjects', then these existing communities were now pushed into a position of 'slow subjects' providing menial services to those working and living in the MSC.