Ken Banks writes about his experience with mobile technology in Africa.
“When it comes to mobile innovation, the gap between developed and developing countries is not much of a gap at all. Mobile innovation in the West, largely technology-lead, sits in contrast to that in the developing world where combating the geographic, economic and cultural constraints [...]
The recently published Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies looks like it has a lot of interesting pieces in it.
Digital Divides and Social Mobility
The Mobile Makes Its Mark – Lara Srivastava
Shrinking Fourth World? Mobiles, Development, and Inclusion – Jonathan Donner
Mobile Traders and Mobile Phones in Ghana – Ragnhild Overå
Mobile Networks: Migrant Workers in Southern China – [...]
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Posted 31 May 2008
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Also tagged: academic, book, cell, culture, ethnography, media, mobile, mobility, phones, poverty, research, society, sociology, trends
Continuous partial attention is one of the side effects of mobile networked computing; it’s parasitic on our desires to feel connected to other people.
“Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. Each activity [...]
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Posted 22 May 2008
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Also tagged: attention, continuous, cpa, fragmented, lindastone, msr, multitasking, partial, research, society, trends
Dan Hill put together a piece with the title “The Street as Platform” describing in narrative form the interplay between technologies in the public environment, many of them mobile. It’s not groundbreaking, as he notes in the introduction, but the story form is a nice way of capturing some of the possibilities that mobility bring.
“In [...]
An article in The Economist discusses the financial impact of access to mobile phones for fishermen in Kerala, India.
“This more efficient market benefited everyone. Fishermen’s profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months. And the benefits are [...]
The design of mobile technology is influenced by the technologies of mobility. That is, the way we’re mobile has an impact on the tools we use (kind of obvious, of course).
How are the changes in the technologies and culture of mobility going to affect people’s needs? How are cultural norms going to adapt to changes [...]
Blueflavor has published an updated version of their previously published presentation about designing for mobile web.
Link: SXSW 2007 Mobile Web Presentation (blueflavor.com)
Dan Saffer notes the passing of Robert Adler.
“Interaction design lost a pioneer last week when Robert Adler died in Boise, Idaho on Thursday. The name probably doesn’t ring a bell (there’s not even a wikipedia entry on him), although it should. Adler, along with Eugene Polley, designed The Space Command, which was the first wireless [...]
Robert Strohmeyer writes about the Open Cell Phone Project, a project intended to create an open software and hardware platform for the creation of GSM mobile devices. As Robert correctly comments, the way most mobile phones are made today (closed platforms, generally hard to modify) doesn’t provide very good support for the backyard hacker community.
“Hardware, [...]
Some questions about whether sharing presence information is just a ‘cheap’ form of social interaction.
“”But some say the flood of information becoming available through mobile phones and other means is not always such a good thing. “I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information,” said Danah Boyd, who researches social media [...]
Looking to the past in helps us get perspective on the futures we image for technology and society. This article reviews the Dick Tracy wristwatch phone, the Picturephone, and the set-top box for the home television.
“In retrospective writings about Picturephone, several reasons are frequently cited for its failure. Chief among these reasons are: that it [...]
An interview of Laya Gaye – a researcher working in ubicomp.
“What I find interesting with mobile music is that it democratises the use of music technology and takes it to the streets. The field develops very quickly so it can take various directions at the moment: mobile music is by nature multi-disciplinary, at the crossing [...]
How the Sony Walkman came to be.
“There were some cassette recorders available at the time, although they were not designed for the general public. Sony called theirs Pressman and marketed it exclusively to reporters. These recorders lacked stereo sound and were very expensive. They also used (typically) microcassettes, which had no support from record companies [...]
Published by Gabriel White.