Looking for a good space for a creative meeting?  So were we.

As an innovation team, we’re quite keen on getting out of the office and into a fresh environment for being creative, designing things or generally having a bit more space.  However, especially in London, the easiest choice for an offsite meeting is often a bland and boring meeting room with regular office furtniture and no natural light.  Or, for those of you with money to splash around, it is a funky specially-designed creative space that costs in the region of £1000 for a day.  So, in an effort to be creative, we’ve tried to find a range of venues that are good value, good creative meeting spaces, have natural light, power sockets, perhaps internet access and in an area where we can find decent coffee, snacks and lunch.  Once you start looking, it turns out there are all kinds of beautiful church halls, studios, dance halls and community spaces out there, often aimed at local events or charities or small classes and groups.

I’d be really interested to hear what everyone out there recommends, and I’ll share some of our finds here too.  First up - take a trip down to Brighton - an easy hour by train from London so very doable even for a half-day session.  We’ve had some good sessions at the Lighthouse, but the main appeal is the life around the city centre and the characterful shops and places to eat.  Second - this week we’ve had a day at InSpire in Elephant and Castle.  Not the most salubrious address but a short hop on the tube from central London.  A curved-ceiling crypt, part of a church, garden outside, a gentle breeze, and a raucous high street up the lane with plenty of supplies for a picnic (if a bit trickier for a sit-down lunch).  Lovely.

An airy cafe is always useful for a meeting in town - not a crammed Starbucks but somewhere with a bit of space.  Recently we had a meeting where we had to be near the MEX conference in Wallacespace (itself a good meeting space - although I don’t know how pricey).  Marek Pawlowski of MEX recommended the Wellcome Collection cafe near Euston and that worked out really well.

We’ll add more recommendations here as we try them out - but please let us know your favourites!  You can always also try one of the sites such as Creative Space Agency or LondonMICE.

A few weeks back I made my first trip to Dublin to attend XTech 2008 (Live blogging? I’ve heard of it). The subtitle of the conference was ‘the web on the move‘ and in my ignorance I thought that this simply referred to web access on mobile phones (a favourite topic of mine at the moment).

On arriving it was obvious that the multiplicity of meaning in that phrase was completely lost on me. The organisers had three topics in mind:

The future of the web

How the web is moving forward (Web 3.0, if you like). To many attendees, the Semantic Web is that future.

Data portability

Our data is ever more portable in the sense of intelligible file formats, but there is now the problem of moving your data around when the Web 2.0 world insists on locking it into proprietary silos. How do we solve this problem?

And yes, web clients and servers that move

Fire Eagle. More on that later.

It was only when I had been around for a day or so that I realised that XTech had started life as an XML conference some years ago. That change of emphasis was not to too pleasing to one attendee I met in the coffee queue. She was a lecturer specialising in XML for an Irish university. She heard one speaker say something like ‘We want this to be simple, so obviously no XML…’. Her heart sank.

XML, JSON, s-expressions… we are all the same under the skin. Can’t we just get along?

Anyway, a mere month after the event, here are my personal highlights from Dublin…

Simon Wardley

Simon Wardley is, amongst other things, a professional keynote presenter, and he likes to smash convention. His 408 slides in 43 minutes covered innovation, de Architectura, commoditisaton, things-as-a-service and ducks.

The most enlightening section for me was the discussion of invention versus innovation. I hadn’t grasped the difference between these two before, and I’m meant to be working in an innovation team. Apparently, invention (or discovery) is the eureka moment. From this comes an idea, and the innovation is the first(-ish) attempt to put the idea into practice. Simple, really.

Simon has a wealth of experience in the IT industry and was able to share a few war stories in the pub later. He told us of his time working for a bank where the atmosphere was so competitive that rival development teams would trash each other’s source code repositories. Makes me glad to work in the pink palace.

JavaScript: The Good Parts

Javascript has a bad reputation amongst many developers. I have to admit that, until recently, I shared the widely-held belief that Javascript was the devil’s own language (rather than, say, Japanese)

Douglas Crockford (who has been described as “the Yoda of Javascript”) made a very strong case that this reputation is undeserved. In fact, Javascript-the-language (as distinct from Javascript-the-crufty-web-wrangling-system) is a thing of rare beauty. It was the first language to introduce the concept of the closure to the masses. It has a super-cool prototype-based inheritance. Oh, and it’s the world’s most popular programming language, at least by number of installed interpreters.

But Javascript has its bad parts (hence the name of this talk and Douglas’ new book). There are all sorts of gotchas to do with the arcaner parts of the language syntax. Douglas has managed to address these by writing jslint which defines a sane subset of Javascript and validates your program against it, warning you if you stray into dangerous syntactic territory.

He told me that he may spin off this more narrowly-defined version of Javascript into a new language. He has yet to devise a cool name for it — Secure Javascript is what he’s calling it at the moment on account of its lack of dangerous global variables, but it’s one to watch whatever it’s going to be called.

A video is available of a similar talk he gave last year.

Why you should have a website

It was standing room only for this talk by one of the great minds at the W3C, the Albanian Amsterdamer Steven Pemberton. He was laying down the law. Several laws, in fact.

The first was Moore’s Law. Steven talked about its consequences in everyday life. I didn’t realise my phone was as powerful as 30 Crays (although if you’ve ever waited for the web browser to start up on an N95, you may doubt it).

The next was the slightly lesser-known Nielsen’s Law (as in Jakob Nielsen) which says that available bandwidth will double every year or so. Steven showed graphs of the bandwidth available from his ISPs over the years, which seemed to bear this out.

But the interesting law for this conference was Metcalfe’s Law. That’s the one that says the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users in the system.

Steven’s contention was that Web 2.0 sites which lock you into their network effectively cut the web in two, hence halving the value of each half and so quartering the value of the whole network. Facebook is an obvious case of this phenomenon, although Flickr was used as example in the discussions after the talk, much to the annoyance of the Flickrers in the audience.

So, onto what you could call Pemberton’s Law. Well, more of a vision than a law. We should each have our personal website on our own little webserver (an actual low-wattage piece of hardware in our houses under the stairs or somewhere) where our data lives. That data is marked up semantically (RDFa, to begin with), and aggregators make use of that extra richness to create new and exciting services. Our data stays where it belongs, and there is no lock-in. The network achieves its full ‘Metcalfe value’. Welcome to Web 3.0.

The BBC Programmes Ontology

Tom Scott and his gang at the Big British Castle are doing a lot of work on the semantic web, and in a domain that I like to think I know something about - British telly and radio! So I thought I had better make a beeline for their talk.

According to the beta BBC Programmes site, their aim is to ensure that every programme the BBC broadcasts has a permanent, findable web presence. But that’s only the start of it, as they used to sing on a certain show in the seventies. Here’s the document that describes the ontology. Jolly impressive, and Creative Commons to boot. Here’s all you need to know about ‘In the Night Garden’, for example. And again, this time in all its gory semweb detail. You can see more of the fruits of their labours at the http://bbc-programmes.dyndns.org.

The new Freesat set-top boxes in the UK have an ethernet connection as standard. Given that Freesat is half-owned by the BBC, I suggested to Tom that the data in the programmes database would make a killer EPG. He didn’t disagree. I think it’s only a matter of time.

Fire Eagle

Evan ‘rabble’ Henshaw-Plath (the Obi-Wan of location-based services?) spoke about Fire Eagle from Yahoo Brickhouse. I can’t really describe it any more clearly than he does:

It’s a system which lets you collect your location from any number of sources, such as your cellphone, and then provide that back out to other applications. Fire Eagle then lets you fuzz your location and control who is using it. Share the city you’re in with dopplr, the neighborhood with facebook, but let the taxi locator see your exact location.

There’s quite a bit of buzz around this service, as evidenced by the haste with which attendees made their way to the front to receive developer invites. I’m pretty sure we’ll be making use of Fire Eagle before long — it’s a great idea.

CHIP Project

As part of the lightning 20:20 presentations (20 slides, 20 seconds a slide — a very entertaining format) Natalia Stash talked about the brilliant CHIP project at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Using a wealth of semantically-enriched data, users of the CHIP software can plan a tour around the museum on their PC, with the software providing recommendations about exhibits. The tour can then be downloaded to the user’s PDA, for use whilst wandering around the building.

The web, as they say, on the move.

Other random observations

1. Rock shandy doesn’t contain any shandy. Or rocks.
2. Erlang is starting to make inroads into the web-development mainstream. See CouchDB.
3. Mapstraction is an abstraction layer over of various javascript mapping interfaces. It does what it says on the tin. I like that.
4. I haven’t marked this up in RDFa, therefore I’m partly responsible for the slow take-up of Web 3.0. Sorry about that.
5. Esse est percipi.

Is searching for and sharing music and videos the killer social app for mobile, and can it ever be as fast as a web experience?  Last week I was at the MEX (Mobile User Experience) conference in London, with about 100 other people from around the world.  Here I’ll share my highlights, especially about mobile search.

Taptu does mobile search for “content” (think music, videos and the like).   Steve Ives explained their ambition to get to a sub-30 second search, from entering search terms to getting satisfying results. To help achieve this Taptu has their own summary screen for each search result, to ensure fast and consistent loading. According to Steve, “the end of the task isn’t finding, it is sharing” and they have a white paper on their site explaining this in more detail - “Making Search Social” (registration required). As a travel company our take on social search is a little different, as we sell inherently social products - most holidays are booked by one person but several are going, the same with restaurant bookings or theatre tickets. We can use the inherently social nature of, for instance, a group of friends going to the theatre as a way to create products suited for social networks (see our TheatreClub app on Facebook).

Scott Jenson manages mobile UI design for Google, and he gave an excellent talk on Google search on mobile, with a big cheer for his opening remark that “the mobile web sucks” - and that it is a case of “MacroMyopia” - overestimation from the short term hype and underestimation of the long term impact. The typical search starts with opening a browser, selecting a bookmark to go to a search page, connecting to the mobile internet, typing in a query, and finally getting results. On a mobile this takes 35 seconds, a lot of which is waiting, whereas on the web it is under 9 seconds, and most of that you’re doing something. He explained in detail how the native search client they’ve developed for Symbian phones cuts out the first two stages entirely, and they then acquire a connection at the same time as you’re typing a query. The time goes down from 35 to 13.5 seconds. They’re also trying to get you the answers to your questions right on the search results page more often, to save you having to click any further (or leave the Googleverse!). So searching for a film may lead to cinema times directly in your search results, with your location remembered over time or guessed. The end result of this is that “raw” search becomes something for geeks, similar to Taptu’s attempts to provide you music or video results directly, or the Yahoo’s oneSearch custom rendering of different kinds of content depending on your query. Conveniently, this faster and better user experience also creates a new set of walled gardens for the search providers.

A few more highlights from the event:

Are voice interfaces entering a new phase? Robert Weideman from Nuance described a voice recognition system for the iPhone with a portion running on the handset and the hard work done by a server.

Is fashion a bigger driver of the mobile industry than technology? Are our devices really our avatars - representations of ourselves? 71% of 11-18 year olds use their phone as a media player.

There was a nice idea for browsing a music collection using a grid with semi-transparent overlays showing grouping of different kinds of music from Tom Airaksinen of Ocean Observations. Is there a theme where the “content is the interface” - looking at UIs like coverflow on the iPods or Google maps?

Several of the discussions during the conference highlighted the amazingly arrogant attitude of the phone operators, and their protective stance over “their” customers, who can’t be trusted with web browsers or normal payment methods such as credit cards. Rather than billing customers for provision of voice and data, they seem to have got themselves in a situation where they’re providing customer support for all mobile functionality, including any third party sites or applications. The room seemed equally divided between those shaking their heads the the insanity of this and those seeing it as perfectly normal and reasonable. On the subject of mobile payments, Amazon’s SMS ordering service was highlighted as a great and simple application, and the recent paper on Digital Money from Intel was recommended.

The final and best talk was Norman Lewis‘ rant against most of what had been said earlier, with a plea to look deeper at users’ real intentions and activities.  He highlighted the shift from street culture to bedroom culture; a risk-averse society keeping kids safe at home.  In this context digital technologies provide space and autonomy, a means of communication, entertainment, self-expression and simply gaining acknowledgment.  Hence it is less surprising that the majority of bloggers are teenage girls rather than the digerati.  The lesson is to focus on the user experience and to architect systems so they can capture users’ real intentions.  Advertising here is an enemy of innovation, as it encourages clickthroughs and page views rather than polishing the user experience.  And to put the hype around the current crop of US and European social networking sites in perspective, he pointed out the example of QQ.com in China, an instant messaging and mobile social network with 300M active accounts, US$240M a year in operating profit, only 13% of which was advertising (the rest is mobile and online digital goods).

This Tuesday NESTA organised the Innovation Edge conference, and rather than the usual line up of web 2.0 luminaries we were treated to actual famous people including Tim Berners Lee, Bob Geldof (photo courtesy of RachelC) and Gordon Brown.  If you’re curious the event was filmed and videos are available.

NESTA’s mandate appears to be to encourage innovation in the UK, providing early-stage funding, policy guidance and “making innovation flourish” via events such as this.  The national aspect of this is what caused the most interesting debates at the conference.  On the one side we had the NESTA Chairman Chris Powell and Gordon Brown, who see innovation in the context of competition between the UK and accelerating economies such as India and China.  According to Powell “we have to run ever faster” to keep up, with a clear emphasis on technology driving the pace of change.  On the other we had Bob Geldof and Sam Pitroda, who see this as an opportunity to collaborate to solve global problems, with the competition between countries a red herring at best.  Not having seen Dr Pitroda in action before, I was impressed with his unflappable ability to berate questioners for asking the wrong questions, and for not questioning enough our fundamental assumptions.  Why are university degrees 4 years long all around the world?  What kind of education does a 6-year-old with a strong command of Google need?  Why are the best brains of the world solving the problems of the rich (referring to the attraction of investment banks to the best qualified Indian engineers and scientists), who really don’t have problems to solve?

NESTA’s UK focus is hard to pin down as well.  For instance, we have a team in London composed of roughly half Brits and half Europeans, but our company is US-owned - we build products for markets over Europe - and if they needed serious scale we’d get support from our development centres in India or Poland or Argentina.  Are we UK innovators or not?  I’d guess that our decision to physically work in London means the answer is yes, doing our tiny bit towards encouraging the creative class here.

A constant refrain throughout the conference was the rise of the social entrepreneur as the current edge where innovation is happening, with Muhammad Yunus‘ Grameen Bank cited many times.  This is a great challenge to those of us working on mainly technological innovation!  Bob Geldof quoted George Bernard Shaw - “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.”  According to Geldof, “social entrepreneurs are the unreasonable people of the moment.”  Rowena Young of NESTA claimed half of all MBA students have expressed interest in social entrepreneurship, and 25% of under-35-year-olds want their financial adviser to advise on ethical investments.

When asked about how to go about innovating, most speakers concentrated on two excellent bits of advice - don’t be afraid of failure - and don’t hesitate to dive in.  Some choice quotes:”give people a long leash” (Berners Lee), “if you can calculate the return on investment you’re not innovating” (Berners Lee), “She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all” (Geldof quoting Dylan), “Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.” (Geldof quoting Murray), “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” (Geldof quoting Goethe).

We also got to find out Tim Berners Lee’s inspiration when designing the web - a Victorian book called Enquire Within Upon Everything (one of my favourites - in section 1368 - Cautions for the Prevention of Accidents - “never meddle with gunpowder by candlelight” - not stupid those Victorians).  On Sir Tim’s first proposal to build the Web, presumably for storing documents on nuclear physics rather than Victorian advice, his boss at the time wrote “vague but exciting” - an excellent aspiration for us all!  With his current slogan for the web - “humanity connected” - he introduced WSRI and its bold goals to create a multidisciplinary science of the web, to parallel cognitive science’s efforts to understand the brain.

Overall a strange event - too big (with 3000 attendees) for networking - unclear goals (is this about an innovation community, if such a thing exists, making suggestions to the government?) - but around half the material was inspiring and perhaps that’s enough.

How do you build a location-aware mobile internet site or app?  There are at least 3 sources of data, but none of them easy.

When thinking about travel-related apps for phones, knowing where you are is generally really useful.  Some phones have GPS included.  If you write an app of some kind you can persuade people to install, that’s great, you’ll then know where the phone is (apart from the time it takes to acquire the initial position, and the fact that it eats up your batteries fast!).  But if you’re working on the mobile web, you don’t have access to a phone’s GPS.  And plenty of phones don’t have GPS anyway.  So what can you do?

One option is to ask the phone operator to give you the position of the phone - they know this because they know which cell towers can see it.  It’s a pain to have to do a separate deal with every phone operator, but there are various aggregators in the UK to make this less painful - for example Mobile Commerce, MX Telecom.  There are still downsides - it is expensive (nearly 10p a lookup), it only works for people who aren’t roaming.  And in most countries apparently there are no aggregators.

Another option is to use one of the open databases of cell tower IDs and locations.  We haven’t really investigated this in depth yet - there are clearly several of them at different stages of development - for example OpenCellID, ZoneTag, CellDB, CellSpotting, GSM Location What’s the coverage like?  Could they be combined?  Presumably they work whether or not you’re roaming?  And in the USA cell tower locations are supposed to be in the public domain, although without the IDs the operators assign this isn’t the complete solution (see the Navigating the Surface blog for some ideas around how to fill in that last gap).  Of course knowing which cell towers the phone can see can’t be done from a mobile web page (can it?), but if you’re willing to create a downloadable app then this is a solution.

Finally, if your phone has wifi you can use a database of locations of wifi hotspots to locate it - this is commercially available from Skyhook and can be tested for free, or there are open versions such as WiGLE.

Of course you can always just ask a user to type in their location - a city and street name for example.  But that would be cheating :-).  Although if gateways such as FireEagle take off then there are many ways for people to say where they are, via different web apps they use as well as phones.

There’s been speculation about how Google Maps on phones determines location (for instance from the Mobile Observations blog and the Mobile Phone Development blog).  We know they can use GPS and wifi location where available, but they also use cell ID positioning.  I’d assume they have their own database of cell tower IDs and locations, as this seems a very Google-like thing to amass.  If they’re driving around anyway capturing photos for Street View, wouldn’t it also be easy to gather up cell tower and wifi hotspot locations?  Can the cell tower IDs be detected from the air - while getting detailed imagery for maps?  Of course another option is to rely on the users who have GPS phones, and have Google maps surreptitously log cell tower ID sightings - sounds a bit evil, but that is exactly what is claimed in an interview with Google’s product manager for Maps for Mobile.  At the scale Google runs, it must be more efficient to have your own worldwide database than to deal with every phone operator individually.  The only way we’ve seen so far to get at this data is via the iPhone SDK Core Location feature.  But if the data is being passed backwards and forwards from Google Maps on handsets to a server, it is only a matter of time before it is hacked…

If anyone has any further light to shed on this topic, feel free to chime in - we’d love to hear if there are better solutions!

This week the Innovation Reading Circle was held here at the lastminute.com office in London, and the book was Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  Information from the organiser Nico Macdonald is on the event page.  The book is an excellent read if you’re after an introduction to the world of social software, open source, group coordination and suchlike on the internet.  It doesn’t go into as much depth on specific topics as some other recent books (such as Six Degrees on networks and small world effects, The Black Swan on power laws, Democratising Innovation on open innovation and open source), but it provides a great overview.

It’s central thesis is that it is much easier to form groups on the internet than it was before, and that this is a significant and permanent change to our society, both in terms of economics and in terms of social organisations and politics.  Shirky argues that this explains phenomena such as the “mass amateurisation” of photography enabled by flickr, the ability for loosely coordinated groups to take on complex, serious work (such as bigger open source projects, the origins of Linux), and various kinds of collective action that have quickly built up critical mass to challenge large institutions (e.g., the Voice of the Faithful organisation protesting against the Catholic Church).

The book also nicely delineates areas that technology can and will affect, and basic human social truths than will not be changed.  For instance, although private and group communication can now happen in the same medium as professionally produced material, there is still a distinction between 1-to-1 and broadcast communication, and this difference will continue.  “Fame” is the inevitable result of the scale of human relationshops - the difference between inbound and outbound traffic.  In every 2-way medium, very popular practitioners are forced into a 1-way pattern of communication, as their inbound traffic is too high to be able to respond to all messages.  On the internet, everyone will not be famous for 15 minutes.

Snowstorms shutting down Gatwick, high winds diverting planes over Italy - the odds were against it - but I finally made it to the CHI conference in Florence 2 weeks ago.  It was an intense few days, with over 2000 people attending and 9 parallel tracks.  I’ll share highlights and thoughts here.

Location

We’re very interested in location-based services.  Highlights in this area included a description by Paul Dourish of some work investigating GPS-tagged parolees, and their perceptions of space and accountability given the legal constraints they were under.  These people are not early adopters of technology (at least not willingly) or a target audience or even representative of future users of location-based systems, but as outliers their experience can usefully inform work in this area.  Louise Barkhuus described some work on Connecto, where in the style of microblogging tools such as Twitter or Jaiku users can tag their location and share it with friends using a phone.  This ended up being used as a channel for banter and storytelling, helping to support group relationships.  The interesting part was the use of personal tags to create a private geography.  Victoria Bellotti and Ellen Isaacs from PARC showed the results of some experiments with Magitti, a mobile “leisure guide” tested in Palo Alto (where else?), allowing users a one-handed selection of activities (Eat, Buy, See, Do, Read).  Are we so easy to categorise?  I suppose “Do” covers a lot of options.  Some interesting findings here around the social role of the person with the device within their group - being perceived as controlling and disconnected from the others.  Incidentally, this talk was also the first I’d heard of the “No Yelpers” signs.  Kenton O’Hara (formerly with HP labs in Bristol) gave a fascinating insight into the obsessive world of geocaching - one of the things that struck me was the ability to see places in a new light via the defamiliarisation that came with following geocaching clues.  Johannes Schöning from Westfälische Wilhelms University showed a system to automatically construct a story arc between two points in a city to guide tourists in an engaging way - linking the description of one attraction or landmark to the next - using wikipedia entries as the source material.  Finally, a team from Yahoo Research and Berkeley showed MapChat, a system that helps would-be daters agree on a place to meet by providing maps and restaurants as referents for web-based chat.

Search

Probably my favourite demo of the event was of Feldspar (video), by Polo Chau from CMU.  This is a system that uses constraints derived from associations from the Google Desktop index to allow a very different kind of search - for instance, where is the web page mentioned in the email from that person I had a meeting with in May?  Genius, and immediately commercially useful.

Mobile

Christine Anderson from Microsoft described a sort of stacked accordion / carousel control that is being trialled across continents as a mobile start page - potentially this kind of control (that requires arrow keys and a select button) could be used for other kinds of mobile interaction.  Maryam Kamvar from Google presented a lot of data about usage of search on mobile, particularly around auto-suggest features.  Leah Findlater (an example of a name influencing career choice?) showed some evidence that adaptive UIs will be more appropriate for small screens than large. Nokia labs in Palo Alto presented a system to recognise buildings and features of the environment using a phone camera (in real time in the viewfinder!), first downloading nearby patterns from the GPS location.

Physical Interfaces

These kinds of systems are definitely the most fun - and often the most futuristic.  LilyPad is a way to make your clothes interactive using fabric connections and the Arduino platform (see how to make yourself an accelerometer shirt).  Stane (video) uses microphones embedded in a textured “stone” to detect different kinds of rubbing or scratching a user does - well enough to function as an iPod control for instance (one that can be trained to ignore all the rustling and jostling inside a pocket, and that can be used purely by touch without having to look at it).  Jamey Graham from Ricoh Innovations showed iCandy - a barcode printing and recognition system tailored to making album covers visible in our houses once more - watch the video.  The Slurp talk by Jamie Zigelbaum of the Media Lab had the best slides of all - hand drawn like this.

The Rest

Yang Li from the massive dub contingent showed ActivityDesigner - a sophisticated prototyping tool allowing direct representation of user actions and situations, with photos from user studies directly visible in the tool.  The CityWall project in Helsinki (paper) is a multitouch display in a public place, showing user-submitted photos among other things.

K-Sketch, a simple animation system, was one of several pieces of work exploring the tradeoff between simplicity and expressivity, and using the NASA TLX assessment as a measure of the complexity of workload as subjectively reported by participants.  Subjective simplicity is an interesting way to capture the appeal of well designed interactive systems.

Some final little nuggets of goodness - Sigma Lenses - map lenses that change transparency as you drag them to remove the problem of not being able to see what’s under them - Katharina Reinecke (a student at the University of Zurich) used a 5-dimensional model from cultural anthropology to personalise a mobile user interface according to cultural preferences - the Sun Dial system is a “techno-spiritual design” that subtly supports Muslim prayer practices on a mobile phone screen.

In general the main criticism of the work presented at CHI is that there is a tendency to overgeneralise from user tests with 10 or 15 people, often fellow students or university employees.  This can be valid for finding usability problems but doesn’t seem enough to draw more general conclusions about how interesting or useful a new service or design might be.  A very memorable part of the trip was also (allegedly) the world’s best ice cream - whether it really is or not (and it was fantastic) - at under €3 is this one of the cheapest “world’s best” things available?

As promised - some more details on PhoneFight - there’s a video from Mobile Monday available (thanks to Ribot) - and a nice photo below from Over the Air.  If you’re a bit of a phone hacker with a Nokia N95 you can also download the app from Betavine.

Photo by MrTopf

We went to the excellent overtheair event over the weekend, with an amazing concentration of mobile developers (and gadgets).  Our entry to the 24-hour hack development contest  was a bit of fun dreamt up  by Richard Jones and Russ Anderson.  Disappointed that someone had beaten them to it by working out how to connect a Wiimote to a phone handset via bluetooth, they decided to go one better and do away with the need for the Wiimote at all.  Phone Fight let’s you wield your Nokia N95 like a sword, and fight your similarly equipped opponent, anywhere!  No need for a connection, server or console.  Instead the two phones connect directly to one another over bluetooth - and the built-in accelerometers detect your slashes and blocks.   The judges liked it - we got prizes for Best Hardware hack, Best design / user experience prototype and (best of all) the Fun Award.  Photos, videos and links to the software will be coming over the next few days.

For those quizzical about what virtual sword fighting over bluetooth has got to do with online travel or entertainment… yes we see what you mean, and please leave a comment if you have an amazing idea!  But suffice to say that we believe mobile apps are going to get a lot more engaging over the next few years, and we’d like to be at the forefront.

As we’re developing mobile applications this year, we’re starting to attend some of the related events in London, and the good news is there’s lots of them.  Tomorrow we’ll be at Over the Air, CHI and Mobile Monday next week, and MEX coming soon.  One trend that’s interesting is the widening gulf between the lowest common denominator mobile internet sites designed to work on older devices and the dazzling speed of what can now be done in native code on newer devices.  Take a look at these video demos of 3D mapping and using the phone’s camera as an optical mouse.  These two together combined with GPS take us right into the world of locative art - geopositioned 3D rendered objects - as for instance envisioned in William Gibson’s Spook Country, but on handsets rather than virtual reality helmets.