WiLife

A Facebook organized party that was to be held in Torbay, Devon has been cancelled after British police used unprecedented powers to force the whole town to stop selling alcohol. More than 7,000 Facebook fans looked set to turn up at this Friday causing the police to apply for a magistrates 24 hour ban under the 2003 Licensing Act. All off-licenses, pubs and bars in the town were to be closed. Today’s media attention, however, has meant that the event had to either be cancelled or a license issued for it to go ahead. As of now, the group page is still up, with an explanation warning that anyone turning up at the weekend party will be asked to leave or face arrest. Meanwhile, diehard partygoers are filling up the Facebook event wall (now 1400-plus comments long) with schemes on where to take the party instead.

We’re looking forward to having Charles Ogilvie, Director of Inflight Entertainment & Partnerships at Virgin America, share his insights on interface and interaction design along with David Armano (Critical Mass) at the PSFK Conference San Francisco. We asked him to tell us a little bit about himself, Virgin America, and where he finds his inspiration.

First, who are you and what do you do?

I’m Director of Inflight Entertainment & Partnerships at Virgin America. (For those who don’t know, we’re a new domestic airline in the US that launched 8-8-2007). We fly to 8 cities and have about 20 planes in service. Each of our planes has an entertainment and food delivery system we put together that is pretty unique - it enables our unbelievable inflight team to deliver an unprecedented onboard service.

You’ll be speaking on our “Look & Feel” panel. In one paragraph, can you sum up what innovation you are seeing in the approach to interface and interaction in your industry?

The airline industry has been notorious for inconvenience and uncomfortable situations. It’s really a good example of where technology can truly revolutionize an experience. We’ve changed the game by using individual interfaces and interaction points as gateways for passenger control.

For example:

You’re hungry: electronically order a meal and it is delivered moments later.

You want to make a playlist: select from more than 3000 MP3s.

You need or want to chat with somebody at a different seat(s): just touch a few buttons.

You want to access the internet: we have it in development right now and it is really a fun & exciting evolution! You’ll be able to get airborne access using your own devices (or our Red system’s seatback computers). We already have 2 WiFi access points per aircraft and we will offer air-to-ground data services on every plane in our fleet. So…this is joy for biz travelers and geeks everywhere – including my favorite geek, SMS buddy and tech lover Paris Hilton who just told me specifically to tell the psfk innovation crowd that “being able to text from my seat on the plane would be awesome”. There are other airlines doing more limited offerings, so we obviously are working with users to make sure we get it right and bring a robust product to our inflight experience. And yes, we will also allow wifi devices like the iPhone and Blackberry to access the air-to-ground connection and have a mini-portal that they connect through. SMS & BBIM at 35,000 feet, here we come!

Passengers with control over their situations have better experiences than those who don’t; it’s that simple. We try to give them more control wherever possible. Wish traffic to the airport was equally streamlined…

Five sites that provide you with inspiration:

who we are
where we’ve been
where we’re going
how we move forward

Thanks, Charles!

Like what Charles has to say? Want to hear more? Why not purchase one of our reasonably priced tickets for the PSFK Conference San Francisco?

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

Abbey Claassen at AdAge offers a glimpse into the “Home of the Future”, according to Microsoft. The software company created a mock home to reflect their vision of what technologies and features tomorrow’s home will feature at their campus in Redmond, Washington. The home has existed for more than 15 years, but its recent renovation showcases Microsoft’s prediction of how household electronics and amenities will look in 5-plus years. Highlights from Claassen’s overview:

What it includes: Everything in the home of the future runs on a central network, with devices such as cellphones and even the home’s doorbell residing as nodes on that network. When family members arrive home, the home recognizes them because of their mobile devices. The mailbox may even be smart enough to notify them what mail is waiting to be collected. (That means, yes, there will still be paper letters in five years.)
The RFID Factor: Virtually everything in the home of the future was embedded with radio-frequency-identification technology — smart tagging, it is called — and was able to react without much effort on the part of the user. Want the kids to put their toys away? How about programming certain toys to go in certain bins? The system will automatically check whether everything gets back where it belongs. Or in the kitchen, if family members pull out particular appliances and ingredients, the “smart kitchen” will know what they are looking to make, and the countertop will display the recipe.

Interestingly, as Claassen reports, Microsoft’s future home does not include walls and surfaces covered with PC monitors and screens. Ever more human-friendly, “smart” interfaces are expected to take the place of older forms of interaction:

‘It assumes there will be more intuitive ways to interact with information,’ said Stephen Kim, global marketing director at Microsoft. He said consumer adoption of some of these tactics, such as voice recognition, has actually been faster than many assumed and cited Sync, the in-vehicle technology partnership between Microsoft and Ford.

And according to other accounts, decor will be a lot fancier than today’s: “Interactive wallpaper will combine images of friends, favorite bands and places to create something akin to an online MySpace page in the real world. While the images on these walls come from projectors, companies such as Philips are working on thin organic light-emitting diodes that could be applied like wallpaper.” Sounds nifty, but we’re curious if Microsoft, like Disneyland, has mindfully ignored the issue that should be at the forefront of future design: sustainability.

AdAge: Microsoft’s ‘Home of the Future’

Mauro Cherubini brought our attention to a useful form of location-based service: location-based reminders (LBR). As Cherubini points out, the reminders we’re most familiar with (email appointment alerts, alarm clocks) are set to go off at specified times. With LBRs, we could be reminded to perform a certain task (buy toilet paper, check our bank statement) upon reaching certain destinations (- this could be cross-tagged with a specific time as well, like only during opening hours or on the weekend). Geominder is a basic tool that notifies Symbian series 60 phone users of their to-dos based on where they are (no GPS required), but we haven’t noticed much else like it for other mobile devices. We hope to see this spatio-temporal organizational framework explored more; not only would it be useful for alerting us to those less time-sensitive errands that keep slipping our minds, but it could also serve as an emotional tool, reminding us of those special moments we shared (but may have forgotten) at places all around us (… sorry, getting wistful).

[via Mauro Cherubini's Moleskin]

Augmented Learning by Eric Klopfer is the latest full-scale argument in support of “m-learning”, or learning via mobile devices and applications rather than PC/desktop. In his study, Klopfer offers a history of education and pedagogical practices, “edutainment”, and mobile games, and also offers recent examples of different ways educational programs have been integrated with mobile technology, and to what effect. The book’s publisher, MIT Press, offers a brief synopsis of Klopfer’s findings regarding educational games:

 These [mobile educational] games–either participatory (which require interaction with other players) or augmented reality (which augment the real world with virtual information)–can be produced at lower cost than PC or full-size console games. They use social dynamics and real-world contexts to enhance game play, can be integrated into the natural flow of instruction more easily than their big-screen counterparts, and can create compelling educational and engaging environments for learners. They are especially well-suited for helping learners at every level develop twenty-first century skills–including the ability to tackle complex problems and acquire information in “just-in-time” fashion. All of this, Klopfer argues, puts mobile learning games in a unique and powerful position within educational technology.

[via SmartMobs]

We’ve mentioned the Eye-Fi before, a memory card that lets you upload media directly and immediately onto the web via a local wireless connection; now the card has taken on two new forms and specific uses. The trio of Eye-Fis (all still 2GB) consists of the Eye-Fi Explore ($129), which includes geotagging capabilities via Skyhook (the WiFi-based location system that the iPod touch and iPhone rely on); the Eye-Fi Home ($79), which uploads photos through desktop software using your home network; and the Eye-Fi Share ($99), which offers the same functions as the original Eye-Fi card. They’re expected to go on sale June 6th, just in time for summer vacation.

[via Engadget]

To kick off their new ‘Data Availability’ initiative, MySpace is joining forces with a few web giants - namely Yahoo!, Twitter, eBay, and Photobucket, in an effort to give Myspace members the ability to share their profile info across the web. As Brand Strategy reports:

The system claims that this helps “open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and web identity.” It claims that this is the first time that a social website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.

Unlike the Facebook system Beacon, which tells people’s online ‘friends’ what they are buying/doing online if users choose to leave it active, MySpace claims that this initiative puts the user in charge of their own data: “Users will have control over what information they share and who they share it with.”

Myspace users can choose to share their photos, videos, network of friends, and any other publicly available profile info. While Brand Strategy wonder if this is “an attempt to make life easier for consumers or a way for corporates to gather ever more data on their users”, we’re pretty sure more than a few Myspacers will like being able to streamline the management of their public internet persona - something that most active Myspace users devote a lot of energy to.

Brand Strategy Blog: MySpace, Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter get into data sharing; the future of online profiles?

Social networking in physical products is an idea that we’re watching; and Schulze & Webb’s Olinda is an interesting example of how it could be implemented in everyday product design. Olinda is a digital radio that displays not only the music the listener is playing, but what his/her friends are listening to, too. Using wifi and Radio Pop, the BBC website that displays ‘now playing’ information, the Olinda registers what the listener’s set of friends are listening to. The site explains:

Each light is a button: you can tune in to listen along with them, discovering new stations via your social network. A friend will always appear at the same light, so you can write or draw on the radio to label it, and the lights are bright so you’ll know a friend has started listening from across the room. Olinda includes a connector on the side to allow for all kinds of extra modules adding functionality to the base radio, and – because the interface is simple – home adaptation too…

[Olinda's] hardware interface joins the base unit with the friends module. By buying extra modules – or by making their own using the open interface – listeners can adapt their product over time, perhaps adding a remote control or recording.

Modular, open-interface, and social - Olinda is a reflection of the future of product design; we’re excited to see other devices (DVD players, gaming consocontinueles, MP3 players?) continue going in this direction as well.

Olinda (Shulze & Webb)