Mobile Monday: Trends in Japan

I could attend the Mobile Monday in Zurich which had the topic Trends in Japan. Koji Fukada, President of YUMENI Inc., gave a tele-presentation live from Japan. He emphasized the importance of social networks on mobile networks, yielding fives times more users than accessing these services from desktop computers. I also liked the twitter-wallr being projected next to the slides where some people from audience did a pretty good job in posting summarizing life tweets of the talks...

Second Daniel Scuka, former editor of Mobikyo claimed in his talk that the mobile business success in Japan is not due to the unique user culture, instead it's the unique competitive culture in the business environment and regulatory regulations. The different carriers were competing not just on services but also using different communication technologies. This has fostered much more innovation than in Europe (see also here for details about this talk). I especially like table the showing "innovations" of the iphone having been released before.
Finally there was the talk of Jan Michael Hess, founder of MobileEconomy. He was reporting about the success of Felica and deriving lessons for Europe. He was a proclaiming Japan being six years ahead. However, what I didn't was the trick he was playing: taking the huge number of wireless payment and assuming that all of those would use this technology on their phones while there wireless cards being used in Japan as well.

Overall, I was pretty impressed from what we can learn from Japan. However, we also have to be careful to consider and understand ecosystem: I'm pretty convinced that the success of mobile internet in Japan largely depends also on the long commuting distances. Japanese often commute an hour and more to work using public transport where making calls is strongly forbidden. So, people have to do something else with their phones...gaming, web surfing, social networking.

Workshop report "What Can the Internet of Things Do for the Citizen?" released

A few months ago we have organized the CIoT workshop at Pervasive 2010. Together with 25 participants we discussed mobile applications using Twitter and Facebook to facilitate urban interactions, opportunities for user innovation, as well as changing perceptions of privacy.
Throughout the workshop, we asked the participants to think of issues and aspects relating to citizens and IoT write them on sticky notes. The entire group then organized the notes and clustered them into topics. The resulting clusters were crowd-sourcing, system design, business models, and privacy. As a consensus we derived that research should not only on development but also on deployment in order to evaluate the use of systems.
For more details see our workshop report in the current issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing [1].


[1] What Can the Internet of Things Do for the Citizen? Workshop at Pervasive 2010, F. Michahelles, S. Karpischek, A. Schmidt. IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 102-104, Oct.-Dec. 2010, [PDF, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2010.88].

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!

NFC is back!?

I was just glad to see several reports praising the opportunities of NFC and documenting activities of several players that suddenly recognize NFC: the mobile network operators AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have started to test NFC according to Bloomberg, the online payments giant PayPal has partnered with Bling to implement payment, Facebook is experimenting with RFID according to AllFaceBook, Apple has hired an NFC expert and acquired several patents to implement NFC into the upcoming iphone 5 as TechCrunch reports, and new entrants as Google, Microsoft and others see NFC's advertising potential by linking a consumers' transaction history to their current location. Last but not least every "Nokia smartphone will have NFC, regardless of fact that the technology lacks a business model or any market demand", according to NFC World.

It would be great to deploy new consumer services current 1D-barcode applications are paving the road for and to revert on NFC which just provides a much better user experience than barcodes do [1]. Finally, we could move away from services where users deliberately have to scan items and arrive at services that push information to users once certain items enter the scanning range.

Back to the future of NFC - it has taken time, would be great to finally make it happen. Yet another step towards the internet of things for everybody...

[1] An Evaluation of Product Identification Techniques for Mobile Phones, F. von Reischach, F. Michahelles, D. Guinard, R. Adelmann, E. Fleisch, A. Schmidt, In Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC13 Conference in Human-Computer Interaction (Interact'09), Sweden, August 2009, [PDF] [Talk]

Internet of Things and Citizens

I really get the feeling that moving from RFID, a technology for businesses, over an architecture for the internet of things, at least initally for businesses as well, to DYI consumer and citizen technology starts to touch the ground.
Rob van Kranenburg has released his report about the The 2nd Annual Conference Internet of Things Europe 2010. He outlines

integration of policy recommendations, applications and cloud to store

standards to go hand in hand with applications

more effective application of governance

multi stakeholder consultation process

migrate terms: seamless might shift towards usability: seamless experience, hard-coding might shift toward social values, in the sense of standard making will also mean not only technical but also interaction and value

as necessary step to achieve this vision. I do not agree with

What we need: an (EU) device:

as I do not believe that development and adoption of devices can be mandated. Obviously, I'd appreciate alternatives to all the Androids and iphones, but either it happens or it doesn't - but it can not be governed. Instead, I'm really intrigued by the opportunities of IoT is changing the relationship between the individuals allowing to scale democracy to finer-grain decision making. Which, obviously, requires education and debates about 'sensor wisdom’ very early on in schools.

Most importantly, it's already happening today:

express your opinion on everything, everywhere and in public
rewards shopper behavior, beginning when they walk through the door. Consumers rack up points for scanning products, testing products or even visiting a dressing room.
a mobile wallet—consumers can buy, send and redeem gift cards
users can find deals up to 20 miles away

INTERNET OF THINGS 2010 - Call for Workshop Papers/Call for Videos

INTERNET OF THINGS 2010 (IoT2010) is calling for workshop contributions and video submissions. See www.iot2010.org.

International Conference for Industry and Academia
Nov 29 - Dec 1, 2010, Tokyo Japan)
Organized by Auto-ID Laboratories at
Keio University, ETH Zurich & University of St. Gallen and MIT

Call for Video Submissions
IoT2010 invites submissions by Sept 10 of draft videos (2-5min long) that showcase the interlinking of physical world and cyberspace as a central theme to inspire other researchers and to educate the general public.

Videos will be shown as part of the main IoT 2010 program on November 30th and December 1st and to a general audience via youtube.

Please visit www.iot2010.org/video for further details on the submission.

Call for Workshop Papers
IoT2010 plays host to a range of interesting workshops (all on Nov 29) in the area of the Internet of Things. We want to draw your attention to the deadlines of the workshops that still invite and accept submissions.

Please see www.iot2010.org/workshop for details and follow the individual links to the workshop homepages for detailed topics, deadlines, and submission information.

Peephole to the future

I found this video quite inspiring:

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

I think it's pretty realistic. Hopefully, the output will be designed less intrusive and more seamlessly. Probably it won't be based on augmented reality only but rather rely on (cheap) displays and incorporate other networked output devices, e.g. picture frame/mobile phone/ipad/tv/radio.

Given the information overload I experience in Japanese stores, I'm surprised how other people just got used to it...