The compass functionality is still a bit underutilized

The media seems to be a bit obsessed with hardware, iPhone and its “killers” and software (“apps”). This is technology after all. For me, much more interesting phenomenon are applications. I’m not talking about software but more generally what we use the technology for. In “Salmon of Doubt”, Douglas Adams put it well that “[we] are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” I believe that iPhone and what have followed since it are enabling just this. I also believe by just being “stuff that works” was the feature that made iPhone what it is today, while Nokia was fiddling around with technologies.

When I’m talking about mobile phones as Human-World Interface, I’m not really talking about augmented reality. For most part augmented reality is just hype and worst of all, it was just technology. There was some cool factor in being able to see where the London Tube stations were, but all of a sudden it seems like people are far more interested in “monetizing” the technology instead of looking for applications.

Instead, in my view one of the examples of how iPhone gives you an interface to the world around us are the public transportation guides. With access to your location, you can easily check out when the next bus or tram arrive and what bus or tram you actually need to take to get wherever you’re going. I think that the applications for more specialized uses are more interesting, like snipers using iPhone for calculations and doctors using it for stethoscope. For me, Human-World Interface could be summarised as the ultimate universal remote for the world.

I think we’re finally arriving to the vision of a PDA. What the things we used to call PDAs a decade ago were crucially missing were mobile internet and user contexts (fe. location). One important part is also a universal information exchange protocol, and for most part the Web fills that role on modern phones. Right now it would look like instead of general-purpose web, one-application “Apps” are the way to go. I don’t think this is a sustainable way forward, though. It works as long as you only focus on one device (like the iPhone) and you believe in an Apple monopoly, but if/when in the future we have forward-incompatible iPhones and plethora of smartphones running Nokia’s Maemo or Google’s Android, you might be better off falling back to the common Web.

Google’s opinion is that the Web will eventually win, but you have to keep in mind that their whole business depends on that. In the short-term, there’s still loads of money to be made in Apps, but in the long-term investing in the Web will pay off. It is however quite hard to justify investing for the long-term unless you have boatloads of capital, but Google’s planning to be here for that long. There’s no money to be made in infrastructure or technology per se (as RSS and Atom have shown) but once you have an application that depends on them, it all pays out (but you really need an application that has or adds value, not just a fancy feed reader/parser).

One of the still-in-R&D technologies for smartphones is Near Field Communications, which would enable one to (finally?) use one’s smartphone for paying for public transportation or at point of sales. Unfortunately this stuff has been so long in the pipeline that it might really be a technology in search of a problem. It is however a foray into the world where we would use our smartphone to interact with the world.

A similar idea of replacing one’s wallet with one’s mobile phone has been one that Nokia et al. have at various times tried to push, but like NFC, the main problem is that the advantages are not really significant (yet?) and there are serious drawbacks compared to the things you actually have in your wallet. For example, the credit card you have in your wallet is probably almost universally accepted, unlike mobile payment. Overcoming this rather crucial shortcoming is a chicken-egg-problem, however for mobile phone manufacturers. The companies that should develop this stuff are the credit card companies.

The same thing goes for everything else, like using your phone to open your garage door. The two things that need to happen for a universal remote for thw world are open technologies (in this case an API for your garage door), which in turn requires a business case for the companies to open up their interfaces. Only then is the Internet of Things possible. I believe that for Internet of Things to emerge, there’s little point in just identifying everything around us, but also interacting with them. Other than implants, mobile phones seem to be the best thing we have to do that.

Digital Chocolate’s Trip Hawkins has said that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and for him, it’s vastly superior to what Kirk had in Star Trek. I’m not as optimistic about iPhone of today, I’m sure there’s going to be much more cooler things in the future. Of the things that we have right now, I have to agree.

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I’m a little sick with the flu, hence a few days off blogging, but I just wanted to share this with you (the video from vbs.tv does not seem to show up in the rss-feed).

It’s the story of Carlos Amorales, a Mexican visual artist, who does some pretty interesting things, including: graphic design, installations, performance art, and co-founding a record-label. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (it’s only 14 min.!), worth checking out is:

• 01:15, when he shows how me makes his illustrations by keeping a digital database of images in different shapes. All in black, though he occasionally uses red. If you think these simplistic, then look at some of his installations (next point), and you see that these are just the beginning, really.
• 04:40, when he shows some of his installations and talks about how they give the audience the ability to enter the work. It made me think about how creative developers/artist can use the new technology of “augmented reality” to create layers above art-installations that take you more into the experience. Any museum I go to these days, I always get the audio-tour as  it adds to my understanding of what I’m seeing. The same could apply to pointing your mobile camera at it and seeing a visual augmentation. Of course, this is where those infernal copyright laws come in; I think this is something that should be done first with certain avant garde / independent artist, to show-case the potential…
• 09:20, when he talks about his record label, Nuevos Ricos (turn down your speakers before clicking this link), for which they created a manifesto, which included giving all the music away for free. Instead the focus was on performance, on entertainment. I mean, well it’s completely ridiculous and you can see that it’s more of an experiment to understand youth culture. At the same time, it is something that many anti-copyright people (including me) have argued for, that music should be about the performance, not about making money from a shiny disc / digital file. But in the end, maybe music/art should be about self-expression and we all express ourselves in different ways. Some, like the clowns in the video, who have very little musical talent, will prefer showcasing themselves. Others will prefer to just make music and make a living from that. We live in a very nuanced world, after all…

End thoughts, hope to be back this Monday.

Vincent

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