The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up

Lars Erik Holmquist has a guest post at CrunchGear (also featured on TechCrunch) about the past, present and future of mobile and ubiquitous computing. It relates ubicomp research - including many FAL projects - to the possibilities that have opened up with new infrastructures, and argues that the rate of innovation in mobile services is about to take a quantum leap. Follow the link to read the whole article:

The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up by Lars Erik Holmquist

Foursquare + Spotify = Spotisquare!

Mobile 2.0 just released Spotisquare - a mobile web app that connects music to places!

Some places just remind us of a specific song, sometimes we feel places could use a little music. The idea is to have people share what music fits a place and the people that go there. Beats to navigate the city centre, some nice ambient to go with that scenic view? Or maybe you want to share that awesome band you saw at that one club? Life needs a beat. By making collaborative playlists anyone can express their experience of a place using music.

Spotisquare connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. It is a mobile web app that adds music to places. Point your mobile browser to m.spotisquare.com. You can just use Spotisquare to check-in on Foursquare, but it also connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. When you find a venue that has a Spotify playlist, you can listen to it in Spotify, and also add your own songs to it. You can add a playlist to a venue with our connector.

φ² scanner for foursquare released!

Mobile 2.0's excellent intern Sebastian Büttner just released φ² Scanner, an Android app to check-in using barcode stickers to foursquare.

Mobile 2.0's φ² project explores different ways of physical check-ins for location-based services and the connection between ‘the visible and virtual’. This is all part of Mobile 2.0's bigger location-based services project, which involves both user studies on people's usage of existing services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Brightkite, etc), and development of new concepts for location-based services (such as making hidden services visible at physical locations).

Download the first φ² app & generate your own barcodes at phi2.mobilelifecentre.org.

Digital Flowerwall in the spotlight

Since early May Autonomous Wallpaper, or the “Digital Flowerwall” as we would like to refer to it nowdays, is being exhibited here in Kista at the newly inaugurated Digital Arts Centre (DAC). This project has been a bit cold for a while, but has recently attracted renewed attention and will be demonstrated during the Stockholm LOVE festival! In a nutshell people can send digital pictures from their mobile devices to the wall (via Bluetooth or mail), and then plant a seed on the screen (using a pen) that will grow into a beautiful flower that is based on the sent picture.

Research in the large!

We’re organising a workshop on Research in the Large: using app stores, markets and other wide distribution channels in research at UbiComp2010, Sept 26th in Copenhagen, large.mobilelifecentre.org (with an associated special issue for IJMHCI).

Distribution of mobile applications has been greatly simplified by mobile app stores and markets. Both lone developers and large research and development teams can now relatively easily reach wide audiences. This provides a huge opportunity for both iterative development and gathering research data. However, an overview of successful strategies and ways to overcome the challenges inherent to wide deployment in a research context is not yet available. How do we need to adapt evaluation and research methods? How do we address validity & ethical concerns when doing research on such a large scale? As researchers from both industry and academia we need to share our experiences so we can make the most of this opportunity.

Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost and Nicolas Belloni (FAL/Mobile 2.0), together with Frank Bentley (Motorola) and Didier Chincholle (Ericsson) are organising a workshop at UbiComp2010 to do exactly that. Go check out the workshop call, send us your position paper and/or contribute to the associated special issue of the International Journal of Mobile HCI. More info at large.mobilelifecentre.org