mobile

A cultural sociologist interested in understanding how people use digital tools in their day to day lives, Tricia Wang is involved in various projects related to ethnography and information technologies.

In her talk at Lift 12, she focuses on a story you may have heard of, concerning a student who ended up making international headlines for throwing shoes at the architect of China's internet censorship infrastructure and then become the hero for information freedom worldwide. Tricia tells us what happened to the student and how the outcomes were dependent on a variety of factors that tells us a lot about how we socialize and build trust online.

Today on February 20, two days before the opening of the Lift12 conference – and an excellent example of Lift’s examination of new technology trends – is the launch of “Genève, Ville Vivante”. This is a fascinating visual representation of the movement of people in the city, made possible by geolocalization of anonymized mobile phone data. Impressive animations and large panels will explain what new perspectives of the city these digital traces offer.

An initiative by the City of Geneva, Pierre Maudet. In collaboration with Lift and Interactive Things. A big thank you to Yves Cretegny, former Lift CEO and Fabien Girardin, who initiated this project together with Eric Favre, CIO of the city of Geneva, back in 2010.

See this impressive installation by yourself!
Mainstation of Geneva,
exit passage du Mont Blanc
Feb 20 - March 4 2012
Official opening ceremony Feb 20 14:00, in presence of Mr. Pierre Maudet, mayor of Geneva.

Ville Vivante Trailer from Interactive Things on Vimeo.

In this February 2008 presentation, David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong, talks about the new business models created by mobile channels. Zong lets people use their mobile phones to buy virtual goods. The system is easy to use: enter your number, go through the verification process, and pay on your monthly cell phone bill. Zong, which works with 250 mobile network operators in 45 countries, was acquired in July by ebay, and David is now VP Mobile for Paypal.

Remember the words of China Mobile’s CEO at the 2008 Davos World Economic Forum?

We know where you are is now taking an additional dimension with we know where you go…. The Beijing Municipal government - which must have been following developments in the Arab world with a keen interest - has launched the Information Platform of Real-time Citizen Movement, a project that aims to watch over the capital’s entire population around the clock (by monitoring mobile phones) so as to reduce traffic congestion.

Anybody having had to sit in a Beijing traffic jam must be welcoming the use of ICT to ease the flow of humans in cars. Whether the gathering in front of Wangfujin’s McDonald falls within the definition of a traffic jam is another question.

Sitting on a Swiss train the other day, I became fascinated by this air pilot playing with his laptop PC and his tablet.

But it became even more fascinating when the guy fired up his iPhone:

This is a truly compulsive usage of technologies by an extreme user. But it was interesting to see how he combined certain sorts of interactions/app usage to certain parameters (screen size, presence of a keyboard, etc.). It was also curious to see how the mobile context (a train with a limited personal space) was not so problematic to accomodate the use of three displays at the same time.

The adoption of mobile goes across generations, usages are evolving in the same direction:

Millennials are very much mobile-oriented and believe in using their preferred devices for both work and personal purposes, but in that regard, they're no different than the generation before them. Mobile heterogeneity and the mixing of business and personal use is not a generational phenomemon -- it's a universal change taking place across the enterprise.

But a gap persists, and it's not the one one could instinctively think of:

Some mobile generation gaps do exist. For example, Millennials are slightly more likely to have a smartphone than a Baby Boomer (90 percent versus 80 percent), but already 84.6 percent of all mobile workers have a smartphone. [...] Here, a surprising generation gap emerges: More than 70 percent Baby Boomers use a smartphone for work, versus 59 percent for Millennials.

Personal and business uses are mixed, not surprisingly:

Personal and business use are already highly mixed. The iPass survey found that employees who had to buy their own smartphones were less likely to use them for work purposes -- but two-thirds of them still did. In other words, mixed personal/business use is already the norm.

Link

^{"Romans" with iPhones, seen in Rome in 2009.}

Matt Jones, designer at Nokia, speaks about the opportunities to design mobile games based on physical activities, motions and mobility.

Because of a technical issue, the sound starts around 13 minutes. Sorry Matt, and sorry to you all for that. That speech - voted one of the top 5 talk at Lift06 - is worth watching even if it is only for the final 10 minutes that have sound!

Our friends at CERN are presenting a very interesting lecture on Oct. 26th in Geneva:

The Citizen Cyberscience Lectures

Mobile phones and Africa: a success story
Dr. Mo Ibrahim, Mo Ibrahim Foundation

Time: 14:00-15:30, 26 October 2009
Place: Main Auditorium, CERN

The Citizen Cyberscience Lectures are hosted by the partners of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, CERN, The UN Institute of Training and Research and the University of Geneva. The goal of the Lectures is to provide an inspirational forum for participants from the various international organizations and academic institutions in Geneva to explore how information technology is enabling greater citizen participation in tackling global development challenges as well as global scientific research.

The first Citizen Cyberscience Lectures will welcome two speakers who have both made major innovative contributions in this area.

Dr. Mo Ibrahim, founder of Celtel International, one of Africa’s most successful mobile network operators, will talk about how the introduction of mobile phones in Africa has created jobs and enriched the social lives of citizens, as well as supporting civil society and advancing the cause of democracy.

Dr. Alpheus Bingham, founder of InnoCentive, a Web-based community that solves industrial R&D challenges, will describe examples of citizens outside a targeted field of expertise providing unique solutions to challenging scientific problems.

The Citizen Cyberscience Lectures are open and free of charge. Participants from outside CERN must register to be able to access CERN.

To register contact Yasemin Hauser (Yasemin.Hauser [at] cern.ch).

For more information visit the lecture's website.

Takeshi Natsuno "Upcoming trends in mobile services" (Lift Asia 08 EN)

Takeshi Natsuno, the father of the first, functioning, successful, large-scale wireless internet system, Japan's i-Mode described his perspective and trends on mobile services for the near future.

Juliana Rotich, an author, blogger and digital activist with Global Voices Online in Kenya, talks about citizen journalism in African countries. Starting from web examples, she then describes the value of mobile applications in this domain. Her presentation gives a broad overview of the issues at stake in mobile activism/journalism.