3rd Research in the large workshop, this time at MobileHCI2012

Having visited already the previous serious of Research in the Large (2010, 2011) I was very much looking forward to meeting the large researchers again investing approaches, tools, research questions for conducting research by deploying apps.
This year I was talking about three topics. In the first paper [1] we investigated the compliance of users of updating their mobile apps. We analyzed the lifecycle of various versions of a released app and found that after one week still half of the users run an old version. Thus, we recommend that developers actively notify their users inside the app to conduct an update.
Throughout the workshop we received interesting comments regarding whether could differentiate within the non-updaters between active and no-longer active users. Furthermore, it could be interesting to cluster the users by age, categories of apps etc. in order to find out whether updaters and non-updaters share certain characteristics. Finally, it would be interesting to track whether the newly introduced 'update all' feature in Android increases the compliance. We might also collect updates histories of apps from appbrain.com and compare our results with other apps.
Then I talked about our analysis of apps [2]  (based on appaware.com stats) available in the Android market. We analyzed the volumes of apps being downloaded corresponding to the overall sales. In contrast to amazon which largely live on the longtail of products, the Android market clearly is a hit market, where the most popular products contribute the largest parts of the sales. Our conclusion was that niche apps are still hard to find on the Android market (in contrast to the recommender systems revealing niches in amazon), thus research should focus on developing recommender systems. Furthermore, we found there is a significant amount apps generating large revenues with rather low download numbers by premium prices. Thus, developers should consider to increase the price of their apps significantly.
Finally, I presented NFC Heroes [3] we motivates users by a card trading fight game to upload information about deployed NFC tags.
The feedback we received from the workshop to give more hints to users where NFC tags are, e.g. information about local deployment activities as NFC tags at bus stops in San Francisco. Later, we might also building a service listing places and services of NFC tags in order to educate and inform users where they could use the NFC feature. Finally, we should consider to also listen to NFC intends  from other apps on the phone in order to capture any NFC interaction of the user's phone.

 In the workshop we had 7 talks in total which all latest for only 7min followed by 7min of discussion. This gave us enough time in the afternoon for some more in depth discussion about how to recruit users and what to learn form app stores.
To start off the discussion Frank Bentley first motivated why to do field studies at all (compared to lab studies): investigate real usage, impact of new systems, usability, inspiration, qualitative understanding, or quantitative confirmation of a previous small study.
Then Frank listed various option for recruiting users: in addition to the practice of small studies via mechanical turk, craigslist, posters in stores, snowball sampling, classmates and lab-mates, in the large we can populate the what's new section app stores, app store ads, targeted Facebook ads, re-tweets, personal tweets, presentation, and advertising. Another idea mentioned was to treat user's privacy as the user currency, the user owns and can decide to release for receiving specific services/benefits in return. Finally, our discussions revealed that either way user are recruited it is essential that papers clearly document how this was done. This is the only way that readers and reviewers can judge on the validity of the results.
The second part of the discussion focused on what kind of data and which research questions could be specifically tackled by doing research using app stores. On the one hand we get stats about downloads and locations of apps, logs of button presses, and partly demographics. However, what we don't get is the context of use and insights into why people did or didn't an activity. Overall, we are limited to tasks users in the wild want to do which may limit to tasks which are fun or particularly useful. Finally, a remaining question is as the number of apps in the markets develops and matures, whether the effort of releasing a decent app would be still feasible in near future.
David Aymann Shamma reported about his experience collecting and analyzing data from a chatting app for watching videos remotely together. David focused a lot on responsibility and ethics of treating the data being gathered throughout the project. Handling this massive amounts of data and also highly sensitive data would be a new dimension of what we as researchers would be usually used to. David also recommended to be generous and consider deleting all the session which appear to be odd or incomplete.

Overall, I really enjoyed meeting all these people sharing an interest for doing research in the large. I'm looking forward to help running this next year again. It's probably also time to come with a manifesto or guidelines describing how to do research in the large. Collective experience of researchers in the domain (e.g. [4]) should motivate the community to consider this new research method going far beyond the established modes of user studies.

[1] Update Behavior in App Markets and Security Implications: A Case Study in Google Play, Andreas Möller, Florian Michahelles, Stefan Diewald, Luis Roalter, Matthias Kranz, 3rd workshop on Research in the large (at MobileHCI 2012), San Francisco, September 21, 2012. [pdf]
[2] Examining the Long Tail of Android Market, Nan Zhong, Florian Michahelles, 3rd workshop on Research in the large (at MobileHCI 2012), San Francisco, September 21, 2012. [pdf]
[3] NFC Heroes – Observing NFC Adoption through a Mobile Trading Card Game, Lukas Murmann, Florian Michahelles, Matthias Kranz, 3rd workshop on Research in the large (at MobileHCI 2012), San Francisco, September 21, 2012. [pdf]

[4] My App is My Experiment: Experience Studiesin Mobile App Stores, Henze, N., Pielot, M., Poppinga, B., Schinke, T., & Boll, S. (2011). International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction , 3 (4), 21.

MoMo #28 Mobile Internet of Things

The mobile monday switzerland, a community of mobile industry professionals, investigated the applications for Machine to Machine and the Internet of Things.
I in my opening talk I briefly talked about general concept of the Internet of Things of linking things to information.

The message I conveyed was to no longer focus top-down on general concepts of how to grass-root the Internet of Things but rather to explore its applications and let the architectures and concepts follow as an evolutionary process. Understanding the use of objects in daily routine and business processes should provide the starting point for Internet of Things research and developments.

Oliver Thyes from Swisscom gave several examples of Internet of Things services in Switzerland, e.g. Limmex - a watch with integrated wireless alarm upon a button press. He positioned Swisscom as the partner for businesses to manage Internet of Things services themselves as well as the billing of them coupled with security mechanisms. This again showed to me how mobile network operators seek in the Internet of Things to find a way out of the declining revenues of voice communication. However, instead of offering specific end to end services, e.g. track and traces of products or managed wireless sensor networks, these corporations still rely on the provision of very generic platforms providing bandwidth and billing of Internet of Things services.
Alexander Gellner from Ericsson looked on the Internet of Things from the perspective of a mobile network infrastructure provider. He was putting some predictions on display talking about several billions of devices being connected soon and of course finalized his presentation with Ericsson's prediction of 50 billions of devices. Assuming 50 billions running on SIM cards is ten times more than MNO's have today which probably would be an alternative to shrinking voice revenues. However, SIM connection will be only necessary in remote areas where no infrastructure is available.
Charles Upchurch from SilentSoft has reported about the practical challenges of sensing the status of oil tanks and assets in gas stations. He gave nice examples of how to build antennas and package devices to make them robust against water and frozen ice.
Philipp Bolliger from Koubachi, monitoring the health of plants and giving care advices, took the opposite approach. He proposed to get rid of this central sensing units but rather to rely on infrastructure which has become standard indoors almost everywhere: wifi. Instead of instrumenting each sensor with SIM connection just connecting to allows for a much more cost efficient approach.

From this event I learned that the Internet of Things still is a term which is occupied by various stakeholders to market their existing products. The ultimate vision of an Internet of Things instrumenting the world with sensors for multiple purposes and allowing third parties to run new services upon this infrastructure has yet to be realized as an evolutionary process departing from the island solution as promoted today.

I'm also looking forward how this mobile monday event also representing the first Internet of Things Zurich Meetup will evolve and get established as a new platform for entrepreneurs, designers and everyone else interested in doing projects related to Internet of Things.

Call for Paper: Workshop on Mobile Interaction in Retail Environments (MIRE) at MobileHCI 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS (with apologies for cross-posting)

=============================================================

Workshop on Mobile Interaction in Retail Environments (MIRE)

at MobileHCI 2011

http://dfki.de/mire

Sven Gehring, Markus Löchtefeld, Carsten Magerkurth Petteri Nurmi & Florian Michahelles

Stockholm, Sweden

August 30th 2011

=============================================================

People no longer only go shopping when they need something, shopping has become one of the most popular leisure time activities in economically advanced countries. Smartphone apps focusing on shopping are being increasingly adopted. The variety of available mobile shopping applications is huge, but the users’ and retailers’ benefit are yet to be understood.

The workshop on mobile interaction in retail environments (MIRE) brings together researchers and practitioners from academy and industry to explore the following research questions: (1) What are the unique properties and affordances of mobile applications for retail environments? (2) How can consumers be supported in their decision making process? (3) How can mechanisms of eCommerce be combined with brick and mortar stores? (4)How can social media be integrated? (5)Which are the new business concepts and channels suiting both consumers’ and retailers’ needs?

The goals of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• discuss latest solutions in mobile retailing;

• construct a roadmap for mobile retailing and

• build a community for this emerging and new topic.

We invite both case studies discussing real-world deployments and original research contributions in one of the following topic areas:

• mobile applications for retail contexts,

• infrastructure combining eCommerce with brick and mortar stores

• social media in the retail context,

• business models and social impact.

=== Workshop Format and Submissions ===

MIRE is a full-day workshop with an extended thematic scope and aim at wider audience with multidisciplinary insights being explicitly encouraged. We ask for papers that address one or more of the research questions mentioned above, or that describe findings that relate to these research questions based on systems the authors have built.

Papers should be formatted according to the standard HCI Archive format. (http://www.mobilehci2011.org/sites/default/files/MobileHCI2011archivalformat_final_acmcopyright.doc please remove the copyright notice). Papers should be submitted by email to mire@dfki.de. At least one author of an accepted paper is required to register for the workshop.

will be reviewed by at least three members of an international program committee. All accepted papers will be made available online and will be published at Sun SITE Central Europe (CEUR) Workshop Proceedings .

=== IMPORTANT DATES ===

April 20, 2011: Submission Deadline

May 15, 2011: Author Notification

May 31, 2011: Submission of camera-ready version

August 30, 2011: Workshop in Stockholm, Sweden

=== Website and more Information ===

http://dfki.de/mire

If you have any additional questions please contact us via:

mire@dfki.de

=== Organizers ===

Sven Gehring, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany

Markus Löchtefeld, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany

Carsten Magerkurth, SAP Research, Switzerland

Petteri Nurmi, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland

Florian Michahelles, ETH Zürich, Auto-ID Labs, Switzerland

=== Program Committee ===

Antonio Krüger (DFKI)

Antti Salovaara (HIIT)

Carsten Röcker (RWTH Aachen)

Enriko Rukzio (University Duisburg Essen)

Felix von Reischach (SAP Switzerland)

Frank Rehme (METRO)

Jörg Müller (T-Labs)

Michael Beigl (KIT)

Michael Rohs (LMU Munich)

Shin’ichi Konomi (University of Tokyo)

New AppAware Website online

Andrea Girardello and Andreas Budde have worked hard on releasing also viewable version of AppAware (showing you the current top apps based on users' installation events) on the web, see the result:
Thanks to the great adoption of AppAware by Android users our own server could not cope with the 130.000 events being shared by 55.000 users daily. Thus, we have moved out to the Amazon cloud. It's going to be an interesting experiment whether we can cover these costs by the advertisements displayed on appaware.org. We have already earned $1.39, so please keep on clicking onto the ads;)

Another interesting experience: There is the first appaware clone, see here, having the same features, same look and feel - just it doesn't work so far;)

It's not a bug, it's a feature: measuring rain fall through signal disturbances of mobile phone networks

Heavy rain floods canals and streets. Gaining more knowledge about rainfall would allow to more effectively manage canalization systems.
The Swiss Eawag analyzes the signal quality between radio towers of mobile network operators for that purpose. Due to the fine-grain deployment of mobile networks they claim to achieve more accurate measurements than the coarsely deployed weather stations can do. Comparing the data of 23 cell towers with 13 rain weather stations over a period of two months they could calibrate their system and derive rainfall from signal disturbance. Find details in German here.

Ubicomp in the large

Finally, there was a workshop organized by MobileLifeCentre which I considered really important: how to conduct ubicomp in the large considering all these app stores and mobile devices...

First the participants had 3-5 minutes to briefly report about their work and experience with ubicomp in the large. Examples ranged from social soccer fan apps [1] to architecture planning [2] and public displays [3]. Myself I briefly introduced Appaware but quickly realized that most of the people already knew about it when they showed it to me on their phones.

During the second part of the workshop we had a lively discussion about

• how to get users?
• how to keep control of the quality of the results?
• which research questions suitable to be investigated in the large?

Most importantly, the apps to be distributed have to create some value for the users, be it a game or a productivity app. Hitting the blogosphere is great which is probably best achieved by a well-designed app.

Keeping control of the data quality probably is a tricky one as we do not know who the users actually are: a bunch of people with nicknames. This might overcome by linking facebook profiles to the app, but this requires some added-value functionality of the app justifying this link. Throughout the discussions we found out that with every question we add to an embedded questionaire we limit and design the target group of users: only a subsets likes to answer - pure self-selection. Giving rewards and payment might be an incentive, but this again also incentivizes another special subset of users. There is probably nothing to be done than to try to capture as much information as possible from the users which has to be done in a transparent way with opt-out.

Finally, we struggled about why doing research in the large at all?

Reason were: because it matters more, gets closer to reality, finds unexpected uses, promotes the own lab, creates longer lasting results, gives something back to the public, yields more justified statistics...

In order to distinguish from pure app developments there should be a research question beyond simply finding out whether the crowd would accept a certain app.

I'm looking forward to the special issue following up on this topics soon to appear in IJMHCI.

Thanks to Henriette Cramer, Nicolas Belloni, Mattias Rost, Frank Bentley and Didier Chincholle for this great workshop!

Disappearing Computer - my first working day without a laptop

CfP - Context-Aware Intelligent Assistance (CAIA 2010)

Workshop held at the 33th Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-2010)
September 21–24, 2010
Karlsruhe, Germany, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Workshop Web Site: http://www8.cs.fau.de/inf8/events/CAIA2010


Welcome to CAIA 2010
--------------------

Today, the internet gives access to huge amounts of time and location
related information, such as local events, time tables of various
means of transportation, or news. Additionally, social network sites,
such as Facebook or Twitter add even more information from friends and
peers tailored to certain social groups sharing common interests. The
vast adoption of mobile phones and smart phones provides a widely
deployed gateway to this cloud of information while being on the move
anytime anywhere. As the attention of mobile users is always split
among many simultaneous tasks, valuable location-based services have
to be tailored to the users’ current interests and needs.
In order to implement such a solution, several research areas must be
brought together.

• Location based services are becoming accessible through mobile devicesvia the mobile network and make use of the geographical position of the mobile device in order to adapt their responses to the current location of the user.
• Pervasive and ubiquitous computing aims at developing new models ofhuman-computer interaction that thoroughly integrate information processing into everyday objects and activities that may be located anywhere. “Intelligent” applications provide location, situation and user adaptive information and in this way greatly improve the ability of information systems to successfully assist users.
• Mobile recommendation systems add another useful capability: they support a mobile user or a group of mobile users when making decisions ’on the go’, whereby they may leverage shared human experience, the ‘wisdom of the crowds’.
  

On the very bottom location data and context derived from various
sensors can act as an indicator for the user’s current activities. By
complementing the sensor data with domain knowledge of a specific
assistance scenario (like shopping, or health-care) we can go well
beyond this functionality: In assistance scenarios – in contrast to a
general setting – user activities can be assumed to be related to
certain well defined tasks. By formalizing those tasks and the related
user goals, additional meaning can be attributed to context
information. On this basis the integration of user preferences can be
achieved, keeping the user in the loop of control during concurring
and uncertain system states.

We shall emphasize that the fields and applications mentioned above
share similar problems, currently dealt with separately in the
distinct scientific communities.



Workshop Objectives
-------------------

It is the goal of this workshop to bring together researchers from the
fields of recommender systems, pervasive computing, mobile computing,
urban sensing, social networking, context- aware systems and human
computer interaction in order to foster the development of mobile
services in context. The main matters are:

• What is the nature of services provided to users on the move?
• How do needs and interests depend on contextual parameters?
• What levels of uncertainty have to be handled? / How is uncertainty handled? How can users configure and adapt systems’ recommendations? / How are preferences handled?
  

Topics of Interest
------------------

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Formal models of preferences and contexts
- Reasoning about preferences in contexts
- Context modeling
- User preference oriented route planning
• User needs and applications
- location based services
- social networks
- navigation and planning of transportation
• Mobile recommendations
- collaborative filtering
- Interaction of social networks and mobile recommendation
- Mobile feedback and interpretation of user tags
- Semantic aggregation of web 2.0 information and services
- Group recommendations
• Reasoning
- Case based reasoning in mobile recommendation
- Mobile speech technology and NLP
- Dynamic environmental attributes (DEA)
- Multiple goal recommendation
- Event ontologies

Demos and applications are most welcome!


Important Dates
---------------

Deadline for Submission: July 15, 2010
Notification of Authors: August 1, 2010
Final Version of Papers: September 1, 2010
Workshop: TBA. Between September 21 and 24, 2010
Conference: September 21-24, 2010


Submission Details
------------------

Papers should be formatted according to the Springer LNCS
guidelines. The length of each paper should be between 5 and 10
pages. All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF
format via http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=caia2010

Publication
-----------

The papers will be published on the workshop web site. Further publication options will be determined later.


Workshop Organization
---------------------

Bernd Ludwig, Univ. Erlangen
Stefan Mandl, Univ. Erlangen
Florian Michahelles, ETH Zurich

Programme Committee
-------------------

Florian Alt, Univ. Duisburg-Essen
Oliver Amft, TU Eindhoven
Alexandra Brintrup, Univ. Oxford
David Elsweiler, Univ. Erlangen
Günther Görz, Univ. Erlangen
Tatsuya Inaba, Univ. Keio
Paul Holleis, NTT Docomo Europe Labs
Thomas Kirste, Univ. Rostock
Rob van Kranenburg, Founder of Council
Matthias Kranz, TU München
Kristof van Laerhoven, TU Darmstadt
Marc Langheinrich, USI
Alexander De Luca, LMU München
Carsten Magerkurth, SAP Research
Marcus Meyerhöfer, IT2Media
Alexander Meschtscherjakov, Univ. Salzburg
Jörg Müller - T-Lab
Hans Jürgen Ohlbach, LMU München
Felix von Reischach, SAP Research, ETH Zurich
Francesco Ricci, Univ. Bozen-Bolzano
Christoph Schlieder, Univ. Bamberg
Ute Schmid, Univ. Bamberg
Edmund W. Schuster, MIT

my2cents released: comment and twitter about products

Finally, Stephan Karpischek has released my2cents for Android. my2cents connects consumers and their opinions about products: they use their mobile phones to read EAN/UPC barcodes and enter a short comment to be shared among social networks, e.g. Twitter. Watching the livestreams of comments should be very interesting as diffusion and adaption start to happen. Please install from Android Market:
See also our poster [1] at Pervasive 2010.

[1] My 2 cents - sharing comments about retail products on Twitter, Stephan Karpischek, Anton Rau, Florian Michahelles, Pervasive 2010, Helsinki, May 2010.

Someone did a youtube video on AppAware - Thank you very much!

Youtube has really become great channel to also visualize and illustrate research results in a very self-describing way. However, the really new experience for me was to see someone else doing a video on our Appaware application (btw, thanks to our 20.000 users we are have collected more than 1 million events!). It's really very well done, to the point and correct - Thank you very much, Adroinica!:


Probably the next step now is to find someone writing the papers for us;)

At the GS1 Marketplace

Just two weeks ago Stephan Karpischek and I did another trip to Brussels in order to present My2Cents at the GS1 Global Forum. Among all the supply-chain applications GS1 has initially started it was really refreshing to see the several mobile applications coming up that enable also small retailers to retrieve information about the issuing authority of barcodes, e.g. using Mobile GEPIR. With My2Cents we even went a step further showing how actually consumers themselves can add comments about products and can retrieve the impressions and opinions of others. Obviously, the herb bouilons (only available in Switzerland) we've chosen as sample product for commenting have raised so much interest that some of them have disappeared after our demonstration...

AppAware - outrageous adoption...

Just two weeks ago in my last blog entry I reported about Andrea's first release of AppAware. We already got a thousand users after the first day, it was just incredible.
The week after it got even better when different blogs started talking about AppAware. Currently we have about 5000 active users creating more than 10.000 events (i.e. install/remove/update) per day!!! That means if you have the app running on your phone almost every second you receive update.

This massive adoption actually motivated Andrea to take the next step: to allow to filter for local events only. Accordingly, you can find out which applications are being used and installed around you. So if you arrive in a new city you can find out which apps are being used there...try your self it's really exciting!

AppAware - find out which Android Apps are hot

Our group has again released a new mobile phone application. AppAware allows to share online your Android application installs, updates, and removals. Out of these events, AppAware calculates a popularity measure. As such, users can learn from each other which apps are hot and which are not. Additionally, the install/update/removal events can also be shared via twitter.

If you want to try it out install AppAware from the Android Market (search for 'AppAware') or scan this barcode. You can also browse the recorded apps from your desktop computer: http://appaware.org

Please provide us with your feedback.

Mobile Services in Retail: Opportunity or Threat?

As we have been developing several services in the past (e.g. my2cents, APriori) putting more information about products at the consumers' fingertips, I also stumbled over some critics. Tim O'Reilly has put out "buy where you shop" in a recent blog entry. As consumers could abuse and ruin the small shops providing the nice physical experience of the product but don't get a share if you decide to still buy the product online. However, other approaches [1] propose to combine both worlds and to provide benefit both instead of cannibalizing each other: physical stores become showrooms for online stores and receive a share of the online purchase as a reward.
To that point GS1's MobileCommerce group has yet released another whitepaper [2] outline the various opportunities for retailers to attract customers using mobile technologies.
Focussing on hybrid shopping, i.e. the combination of both online and physical stores [3], is probably more promissing, as consumers probably will never realize the long-term implications (i.e. small shops have to close due to competion from e-tailers).

[1] Lee, K.J., Seo, Y.H.: Design of a RFID-Based Ubiquitous Comparison Shopping System. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (KES’06) (2006)
[2] Mobile in Retail - Getting your retail environment ready for mobile, A GS1 MobileCom White Paper
[3]Cassar, K.: The Online and In-Store Crossover Conundrum. In Nielsen Consumer Insight Magazine, 2008

Swiss Peaks titled as "one of the best iphone apps for skiing"

Some time ago I mentioned the release of our first iphone app SwissPeaks/WorldPeaks which provides you with the names of the mountain your iphone camera is currently capturing. Just yesterday the swiss newspaper TagesAnzeiger picked it up and called it "one of the best iphone apps for skiing" (read the entire article here).

We've released our first Layar: Peaks

We've finally released our first layar (see here) "Peaks" - a layer giving names to the mountain you are looking at using the Layar application on Android. Enjoy the nature with knowing more about it!

Ambient features beat GPS indoors

Surroundsense [1] implements the simple idea of integrating various ambient features of an indoor location, such as sound, light, and acceleration pattern of the user. The authors present architecture which they test successfully to distinguish between 51 different business locations. In order to deploy that one should check whether assumption that the ambience of places remains stationary really holds. It also remains unclear to me how to actually train such a system...

[1] SurroundSense: Mobile Phone Localization Via Ambience Fingerprinting
Martin Azizyan, Ionut Constandache, Romit Roy Choudhury
ACM MobiCom, September 2009.

Whitepaper: Mobile Advertising - 2020 Vision

Ogilvy and Acision have published a White Paper called "Mobile Advertising – 2020 Vision" exploring how mobile advertising will look in 2020 (download here). They lean back about the quality of predictions in general but envision some nice scenarios: a car advertisement (see to the right) can trigger different meanings for different users ranging from buying, renting, or tuning a car. Later they mention serendipity through ads of trusted advertisers, interaction between devices (e.g. buy a shirt an actor on TV is wearing through your mobile).
However, as an essential prerequisite the true adoption of mobile phone is required, not just doing geeking things but using it for continuously for boring routines in daily life. I still wonder how get there looking at the recent 'flat-rate' Swisscom has overed a few weeks ago: 169 CHF/month (!!!) for unlimited data and voice NOT including roaming...

Visit from Aaron Beach

Just last week we had been lucky to listen to a talk given by Aaron Beach from Boulder university. He got in touch with me since we discussed one of his papers [1] in my seminar this spring term. In his talk he discussed the potential of mobile social networks. In particular I enjoyed his touch-me-shirt, which allows to establish facebook links once hugging a real person in real life. This is a nice example of how to bridge this two worlds. However, the problem he reported on is, that the current facebook API does not allow anymore to establish friendship links through events happening outside facebook. So the power of facebook can be sometimes frightning and can even hinder new developments.
In the interesting discussion he mentioned a nice observation: pupils in school in Boulder set their ring tones to higher frequencies (>17.000Hz) most grown-up adults, teachers, cannot hear anymore in order to continue the use of mobiles in class even if it is prohibited...

[1] Beach, A.; Gartrell, M.; Akkala, S.; Elston, J.; Kelley, J.; Nishimoto, K.; Ray, B.; Razgulin, S.; Sundaresan, K.; Surendar, B.; Terada, M.; Han, R., "WhozThat? evolving an ecosystem for context-aware mobile social networks" Network, IEEE , vol.22, no.4, pp.50-55, July-Aug.

Some after-thoughts of an accident in the mountain in Japan

Japan is an exciting country, Tokyo a jumping city, thus, I took the chance of catching some more silence in the beauty of Nikko mountain. The weather was kind of bad, rainy and stormy, but we did not really care. Next morning when we departed from the shelter a Japanese joined us on the tour to Mt. Shirane. He was not in as good shape as we were but we could not leave him alone either. The paths had been in really bad conditions, really different from the Alps. Obviously, we were a little bit slower, therefore the Japanese was good help decrypting kanchi from sign posts.

On a very steep descend he suddenly slipped, slided down out of control and only came to stop 80m later.

He was tough guy took out a first scarfe and I helped him to get it over his 1.5cm bleeding wound on his head. I could reveal our position from the built-in GPS of my phone, gave it to my friend who continued hiking down to a spot with cellular coverage to call the rescue service. It took almost 2h until the rescuers came and got our wounded down to the valley.

Finally, we and, especially the Japanese, had been lucky, however, I spent some thoughts what could be improved and how technology help:

1. My phone has GPS but there is actually *no* pre-installed application to query GPS location. Luckily, I managed to start a map application (Pocketmaps) that gave me the coordinates in some hidden options sub-menu. Still there is no simple way of just "send coordinate to...".
2. Eventhough we had the coordinates the rescue services couldn't make sense out of latitude/longitude values. I still don't know why, I had the coordinates in the standard format WGS84 and the coordinates where right: http://www.gorissen.info/Pierre/maps/googleMapLocation.php?lat=36.816400&lon=139.3914&setLatLon=Set
3. My friend finally found out which number to call, in Japan it is 119. He could get forwarded and called back a few times. They also could give him an email adress where he could send images of the sign post and shrine close (to share kanjis of the sign posts he couldn't read) by his position. Today, there is no standardized emergency interface where you can send data to. We have shown some development for car accidents [1] but this sms/mms/email interface would be really required to make use of state-of-the-art technology in our pockets. Today emergency numbers are voice only.
   
4. My friend accidently found cellular coverage. When I crawled up 10m back to the path to have a better space to wait, I also had very weak signal again. Couldn't we just collect locations in a public database of phone-calls being made in mountain and make that available to everybody? (Let's not discuss about full coverage, it's already worth something to have discrete locations were you can make calls - even network operators might like it and send out volunteers to measure signals). At a later stage that could be even marked in maps.
   
5. Luckily, our phones had enough power. Years ago mobile phone adoption was driven by the need for safety, today that has shifted towards entertainment. However, in remote areas such as mountain it is still about safety again, eventhough the use pattern is different. Thus, couldn't the phone warn you while doing fun stuff as listening to mp3 "your phone can only guarantee you safety for ten more hours...".
6. We both had priceplans for our phones. What happens if you run out of prepaid during an emergency call. Is there a simple way for rescue services to convice your operator to waive your limitation, I doubt it.
   

Our mobile devices today are far more powerful today than the landing gear of Apollo 11. Hence, let's make some effort of exploiting that not only for gaming and entertainment but for more essential applications, such as survival.