Telecom

Here’s an interesting study of cellphone carrying behaviors around the world from Jan Chipchase and Fumiko Ichikawa’s presentation to Nike Tokyo Design Studio. We don’t often stop to think about the way we carry our phones, the devices having become second skin to most of us. But here Chipchase, who travels the world conducting research for Nokia Design, sheds light on the variation in these practically unconscious decisions of where we put our phones, how we carry them, and why. Through studying the carrying patterns of thousands of mobile phone owners in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Africa, Chipchase and Ichikawa reveal some noticeable differences, including:

- 80% of Women in Milan carry their phones in their bags, while only 30% of Women in Los Angeles do (studies also reveal that 50% of people who put their phones in their bags report frequently or always missing calls or SMSes, versus 30% of people who carry them in their pockets)

- In several developing countries, including India, China, and Brazil, many users carry more than one mobile device to optimize their communication costs by buying multiple SIM cards from different operators

- The clamshell phone design is used by domestic Chinese brands to target women, with a large offering of accompanying cases and mini-carriers available to buy at street markets and in stores

One of our favorite slides in the whole presentation, and that serves as a nice summary of what mobile phone designers can learn from these small habits points out, quite simply: “The easiest way to never forget - is to have nothing to remember.”

To learn more, watch the slideshow below, or download it here.

| View | Upload your own

[via FuturePerfect]

pyWuzzler is a tabletop football game developed by a couple of students from FH Hagenberg in Austria. The game runs on Nokia N95 devices using the handsets acceleration sensor. The aim of the game is of course to score as many goals as possible within two minutes, while it concentrates on the head-to-head match between the attacking player and the goalkeeper. The interesting thing here is that they took the motion of your wrist from playing a real-life tabletop football match into the game interaction.

pyWuzzler

The UK’s Glastonbury Music Festival will feature a charging station powered solely by the wind and sun. The French mobile-providing giant, Orange, is the proud parent of the latest edition – last year they tested out a similar station with then-partner Gotwind (and is talks with them for larger-scaled wind-power generators). The tent itself is capable of charging 100 phones per hour and will be a free service offered to concert goers – the “free” part being something that trendwatching.com has been researching religiously for quite some time.

REcharge Pod
[via springwise]

Over 80% of Brazil’s population between the ages of 19 and 32 own a mobile phone, many of whom are underprivileged with limited access to information regarding employment or educational opportunities, not to mention leisure activities.

Sensing this gap, Rede Jovem, a social program that promotes digital inclusion in poor communities, developed 0800 Rede Jovem, an initiative that helps spread information about leisure and growth opportunities in the surrounding areas of their communities. Among such opportunities advertised are places to practice sports free of charge (courts, schools, free lessons), employment opportunities, free cultural and artistic events (concerts, exhibits, movies and plays), and free services related to citizenship (issuing documents, medical checkups). The objective was to create a virtual network where young people are able to find and discover interesting initiatives that are happening in their neighborhood, primarily those that are free of cost.

Currently, over 500 young Brazilians living in favelas (slums), have enrolled in the program, receiving at least one message per day. The information sent to them is tailored to their location, guaranteeing that the opportunities shared with them are relevant.

Research conducted among those enrolled have shown promising results:

• 62% have used the information sent to them by the project
• 64% say they have passed on the information they have received to somebody else
• 93% find the information they receive to be useful.

In a country such as Brazil, where there is a large gap between ease of access to information between the rich and the poor, 0800 Rede Jovem has found a way to use technology to provide useful information and, consequently, to promote social inclusion.

0800 Rede Jovem

Contributed by Mandalah - PSFK’s partner in São Paulo

An image of an uncontrollable, violent hooded youth (or hoodie) that has been created by the British media has caused fear and concern be people in the UK. This young fella plays up his role as he walks the streets playing moody hip-hop through the external speakers on the phone somewhere upon his person. Approaching him, you feel like you’re in a film (his) as a pulse-beating soundtrack suddenly rises.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made the bold claim that print will be extinct within the next 10 years. He says magazines, newspapers and all media will no longer exist in physical form as we know it, and will only be delivered via IP networks. His essential theory is that both producers and consumers crave the interaction that only networked communications can supply. Ballmer also sees a further blending of commerce and content which will make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between advertising, communication and entertainment.

[Washington Post via Buzzmachine]

A new study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University has revealed some interesting properties of human movement through tracking their mobile phone use. The study used data collected from 100,000 randomly selected individuals in an undisclosed European country; every time an anonymously tracked user received or made a call or SMS, the mobile base station used was recorded to determine his/her approximate (within 3 km sq.) location. The results, gathered after six months of data collection, indicated that the majority of people travel a relatively short distance, somewhere between 5km-10km a day on a regular basis, and tend to re-visit the same spots over and over again. The research team also made the somewhat surprising discovery that people’s movement followed a power law distribution, a mathematical relationship that is seen in other natural and social phenomena, like earthquake sizes and income distribution.BBC points out the potential applications of the report’s findings, and that several companies and researchers have begun using mobile tracking as a way to gather information on other types of movement, like traffic flow.

“It would be wonderful if every [mobile] carrier could give universities access to their data because it’s so rich,” said Dr Marta Gonzalez of Northeastern University, Boston, US, and one of the authors of the paper.

…Professor John Cleland of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Disease (LSHTM) said the study could be of use to people monitoring the spread of contagious diseases. “Avian flu is the obvious one,” he told BBC News. “When an outbreak of mammalian infectious airborne disease hits us, the movement of people is of critical concern.”

Although the scale of the latest study is unprecedented, it is not the first time that mobile phone technology has been used to track people’s movements. Scientists at MIT have used mobile phones to help construct a real-time model of traffic in Rome, whilst Microsoft researchers working on Project Lachesis are examining the possibility of mining mobile data to help commuters pick the optimum route to work, for example.

BBC News: Mobile Phone Expose Human Habits

The tiny mobile Zink printer that we talked about at the beginning of 2007 is about to be released - but under the Polaroid brand. Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer will print up to fifteen 2 x 3-inch photos on its rechargeable battery from any PictBridge capable camera or over Bluetooth. PC Magazine says that the photos aren’t that good - but might be fine for scrap books and fridges:

Output quality is far from ideal, or even what you’d expect from your local drug store. Colors in more than half of my test photos were noticeably off, shifting some light colors to yellow, some shades of red to purple, and making some photos seem faded or washed out.

That said, however, quality that would be unacceptable in a 4 by 6 isn’t necessarily unacceptable in a 2- by 3-inch photo that’s meant for a wallet or for literally sticking on a refrigerator door, desktop monitor, scrap book, or school locker. I’d call the quality good enough for the intended purpose. It helps too that the photos are both water and scratch resistant. Cost per photo is currently as low as 33.3 cents if you buy them in packs of 30 sheets.

Polaroid Pogo
[Via Engadget]

At their IO conference, Vic Gundotra, engineering vice president of Google gave a glimpse of the functionality of their new mobile phone system Android. Google hopes that Android will become the open source software platform for smart phones. Here are some of the video clips shot by Android Community.

On movement aware functionality using an ‘inbuilt-compass’ for Google Street view:

Read the rest of this entry »