Talk "Mobile telephones as a consumer interface to services and applications" @ SEREC, ETH

I was invited at the symposium RFID visions and reality.
The session started with a policy overview from Florent Frederix of the European commision. Then I had the opportunity to talk about the specific features, building blocks, and challenges for developing successful applications for the mobile phone (slides here).

We had a quite extensive discussion about how to develop innovative applications (market pull vs. technology push), effect of free wireless access everywhere, and about the date when finally NFC will become available in Europe. I learned that the reason for adoption in Japan is that NTT Docomo just had the power to force device manufacturers to build it into the phone.
Another talk I enjoyed was about GPS and indoor positioning system, an interesting one was an inertial sensor system - not for planes - but for people in buildings. You find the program of the event here.

Mobile phone and OSes

Today, we had the first talks in my seminar Business Aspects of the Internet of Things. We had quite inspiring discussion about the differences between PC and mobile phones. Whereas the PC receives full attention of the user, mobile apps have to deal with divided attention and have to be more to the point - which spans a nice play ground also for our own research on mobile apps [1][2][3]. Whereas the OSes have consolidated in the PC area, the mobile phone domain is still experience quite a variety, a nice - subjective - overview can be found here [4]. We had a wild discussion and showed that as, whether to choose iphone/symbian/android/windows mobile at some point becomes a religious discussion. Interestingly, one student mentioned that she only uses her phone to conduct - an important application we all must not forgot despite the excitement about all these great smart phone applications today.
Why I am thinking all about that now...I have to give a talk about that tomorrow...

[1] Supporting a Mobile Lost and Found Community, Dominique Guinard, Oliver Baecker and Florian Michahelles, in Procedings of ACM MobileHCI, September 2008, [PDF].
[2] A Mobile Product Recommendation System Interacting with Tagged Products, F. von Reischach, D. Guinard, F. Michahelles, E. Fleisch, PerCom 2009, Galveston, March 2009, [PDF].
[3] Oliver Baecker, Florian Michahelles: Claim Reporting, Demo @ Pervasive 2009, Nara/Japan, (forthcoming)
[4]Giz Explains: Illustrated Guide to Smartphone OSes

Stretchclock - Persuasive Technologies

If you've already spent to many hours in front of your computer, perhaps this little gadget can persuade you to change that now...

Google Latitude - really feel what privacy means

Google Latitude [1] is a great service. You can install it on most mobile phone platforms (S60, PocketPC, Blackberry, iPhone/Android are yet to come) and can share location information with your friends on the mobile phone (or also on the PC) at differen levels of detail, no location sharing, city level, or precise location.
Having it installed for a few days I still experience it as a gadget, it's fun to check whether my and my colleague's actual location really matches with google's prediction and quite often it doesn't - anyway, that will change quickly, I'm sure.
The set-up of the application is rather simple, especially because of the fact that google already knows so much about me, I had been sharing with me them voluntaritly for quite a while: of course I use gmail, so I already have the account. The pic for my profile I just can take from picasa, I can link this blog to my profile, there might the social network, my experiences/videos on youtube...and the location, suddenly it fits altogether! I wonder how I react, when the US immigration officer tells me in ten years "you can keep you passport in your pocket, Florian, we saw you coming and have already identified you through your google acount!"...a new feature perhaps called google passport?
Currently, google latitude really reduces the where-are-you/when-do-you-arrive calls. While I'm cycling home, my wife can see which route I take, whether I go straight home or take some lovely detour through the forrest - and that's with my consent that she knows about it. I wonder though whether the police will bill me in ten years for all the one-ways I cycled through in the wrong direction. Currently, Google denies to store any tracks just the current position. But that could change and Google could report my sins...
I also wonder whether new services, let's call them 'correctizers', might appear that allow me to 'correct' my current location or also to 'repair' my history trace.
I don't think we will live in a big-brother world soon, I guess it will rather be the 'small brothers' we share information with either voluntarily or also by social pressure, [2] envisions this rather nicely.
What was also intriguing me is that most of my colleagues - researchers in ubicomp/internet of things areas, dealing with location-based services etc. - just declined my inquiry to share their location with me. Obviously, privacy becomes important when you really can feel it...

[1] www.google.com/latitude
[2] David Brin: The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, Perseus Books Group, 1999.

Ugly barcodes?

One argument for RFID sometimes is that because it does not require line-of-sight the ID's would not disturb the visual appearance of products. However, I found some examples which follow the opposite approach: make the barcode part of the design:
[1] http://www.barcoderevolution.com
[2] http://www.artlebedev.com

Some articles about the Internet of Things

An article [1] just pointed me to the fact that the vision of the Internet of Things is about ten years old now, after early work has started at Auto-ID Center at MIT. This was my trigger to search for current papers describing and discussing the Internet of Things.
A rather critical articel, [1], proposes to envision the Internet of Things as a hierarchy of objects with different capabilities instead of a network of fully peer connected items, as layed out in the early days of the Auto-ID Center [2]. In order to develop robust business cases, these heterogeneous requirements (tagging of strawberries, cheap items with short life-time, is different from cars with changing configurations) of objects have to be tackled with different technologies, e.g. barcode/RFID/sensor-networks. This is a reasonable argument against building an Internet of Things only RFID, RFID should be part of it, but others, barcode, as well.



Finally, I found a master thesis describing an art project about collecting and sharing stories about objects [3], which the authors calls an internet for things. It's probably not the killer-application but could be a nice consumer gadget for the EPCglobal architecture.

An interesting (but weired;) article is [4], where Rob Kranenburg (btw - the supervisor of [3]) argues for a society that should be in control of the (ubicomp) surveillance technologies it develops. The article is a little bit copious but provides nice arguments for why consumers should be empowered to play a mature role in an Internet of Things.

[1] Bob Williams, What is the Real Business Case for the Internet of Things?, Synthesis Journal, iTSC, 2008
[2] McFarlane, D.C., Sarma, S.E., Chirn, J.L., Wong, C.Y., and Ashton,
K., „The Intelligent Product in Manufacturing Control“, Journal of EAIA, July 2002
[3] Patrick Plaggenborg, Social RFID - internet for things, Master Thesis, Utrecht School of the Arts, August 2006.
[4] Rob van Kranenburg, The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID.

Immersing into a robot

Just before christmas a new toy has arrived, the rovio robot. It really does look frightning (though the developers designed it to let hard working parents remotely communicate with their kids at home...)



Actually, it's not really a robot it's rather a remote controlled toy. The rather limited autonomous features, such as 'go home to base' or 'follow path' do not work that well (see also reviews at amazon).
However, it's funny to walk through a shared office space late at night spying on who's still there. The exciting part also is, that the other one doesn't see who's currently controlling the robot (showing it could also be a nice feature though). You really start immersing into the robot while controlling it through the web-interface. You learn the dimensions of the robot know what you can pass and what you can't. Navigation in the dark is rather poor, but luckily we our office lights react on motion. Another exciting part are colleagues the get annoyed and carry the robot away (which corresponds to 'tele-porting' in computer games) and you have to find your way back again to the base station - hopefully, before rovio runs out of battery.
Despite it's limited functionality and it's current flaws Rovio is really fun.