New Tech Post - Mobile

Citizen Sensors: Individuals' Mobile Updates Contribute to a Bigger Picture

John Breslin — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:50:19 +0000

Citizen sensing applications range from public health to disaster relief.

In 1999, before the advent of Foursquare, mobile Twitter clients or sensor-enabled phones, a somewhat prescient Neil Gross in Bloomberg Business Week said: "In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations." A new area of research called "citizen sensing" has emerged since then that aims to derive collective knowledge from the actions and reactions of individuals armed with internet-enabled mobile devices.

In the past ten years, we have seen the growth of online social networks, but there has been a parallel surge in sensor networks, many of which are also connected to the Internet. These usually consist of multiple static or inert sensors that capture certain readings from their environment whenever they are programmed to do so. Also, many people are now carrying some form of sensor-laden device - a mobile phone, a tablet, a fitness device - from which sensor readings can also be retrieved. This is sometimes called 'human-in-the-loop sensing', but sensors are also being carried by cars, animals and other moving entities.

There are various advantages for human-in-the-loop sensing. For collecting data in large urban areas - for example, for environmental or traffic monitoring purposes - it can be both expensive and time consuming to build large networks of sensors in these areas. Having people walking around with sensor-enabled devices makes sense due to the high population densities in urban areas and the willingness of people to contribute sensor data if it will have an eventual positive impact on their lives.

Five years ago, a team in UCLA wrote a research paper on 'participatory sensing', which uses, "mobile devices to form interactive, participatory sensor networks that enable public and professional users to gather, analyze and share local knowledge." Applications were described in the areas of public health, urban planning and even creative expression. In 2007, Michael Goodchild described citizens as sensors in the field of volunteered geography, when he talked about, "[humans] equipped with some working subset of the five senses and with the intelligence to compile and interpret what they sense, and each free to rove the surface of the planet."

More recently, a professor in Ohio's Wright State University, Amit Sheth, outlined the notion of 'citizen sensing' whereby people are, "Acting as sensors and sharing their observations and views using mobile devices and Web 2.0 services." A citizen sensor network is "an interconnected network of people who actively observe, report, collect, analyze, and disseminate information via text, audio or video messages." In particular, Sheth presented work in which semantic annotations were applied to Twitter microblog posts from 'citizen sensors' in order to provide situational awareness, e.g. in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

If interpreted correctly, the data that is available from citizen sensor networks can have a wide variety of applications. Some of these include: earthquake sensing (people interested in acting as citizen seismologists can apply to Stanford for a tiny seismic sensor for their computer); disaster relief (there are various platforms available from Ushahidi for disaster response); traffic monitoring (Dr. Liam Kilmartin at NUI Galway is leading a project that uses mobile apps to monitor and reduce traffic congestion in Galway); and environmental data analysis (UC Berkeley and Intel provided personal air quality sensors to community members in California as part of their Common Sense project).

In a previous article ("What If Your Car Could Tweet?"), we briefly talked about how sensor readings could be attached to microblog posts through the Twitter Annotations extension. Twitter Annotations will allow arbitrary metadata to be attached to any tweet. There is an overall limit of 512 bytes for this metadata 'payload', and each metadata item is expressed in the form of "type":{"attribute":"value"}, e.g. "movie":{"title":"Planet of the Apes"}. Inspired by Twitter Annotations, work is ongoing with David Crowley at DERI, NUI Galway to attach mobile sensor data to Social Web content, to develop mobile sensor-specific extensions to the SIOC de-facto standard developed in DERI, and to build Android apps that use this data model. The next step is then to provide novel methods for interpreting and visualising the data for different domains.

At the moment, you can attach geolocation information to a tweet, and every tweet is timestamped, but what if you could append temperatures, air pressures or other contextual information to a tweet? When combined with the actual texts of the tweets themselves, this combination of human-contributed and machine-contributed data could potentially be very useful.

Cork Security Software Company Working with Giant US Retail Chain

Conor Harrington — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:30:37 +0000

As mobile phones grow smarter every day, the consequences of losing them become more severe. As well as friends’ and contacts’ phone numbers and personal text messages, phones can contain potentially sensitive emails, access to online banking as well as photographs which may not be easily replaced.

When Irish company YouGetItBack.com was founded in 2004 by Paul Prendergast and William Fitzgerald, with then-CEO Frank Hannigan, it was initially focused on the production of physical tags. The team were soon joined by Pat Lynch and Peter Bermingham, and the company pivoted into the area of mobile device security, developing software which help deter the theft, and aid recovery, of mobile devices, tablets, and laptops, while continuing to make physical tracking tags.

“We kind of came to this market when it wasn’t desperately fashionable”, recalls Paul Prendergast, now the company’s head of sales. “Only about two and a half years ago, you’d walk into a carrier and smartphones might only be 6% of their portfolio; that now is over 50% and it’s growing rapidly."

Following the change in focus, the company went, “Into R&D mode," and only returned to the market in the past two years, which Paul understatedly describes as having, “Gotten quite interesting."

The Cork-based company’s Mobile Superhero software is now available across a range of platforms including Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry, while an iPhone version is available in the United States. Laptop and Tablet Superhero software is also available, as are the physical tags with which YouGetItBack.com started.

Where YouGetItBack.com has really excelled, though, is in the provision of white-label solutions through collaborations with partners including Best Buy, Tesco, Vodafone, and Telefonica.

YouGetItBack.com’s software is now available in every one of electronic retail giant Best Buy’s U.S. stores as part of their Geek Squad Black Tie Protection. Like Mobile Superhero, this software offers features such as remote, automatic, and SMS locking, SIM change locking, Device Scream, Location Mapping, Theft Deterrent and Recovery Encouragement.

“The feature set is very, very strong”, says Paul. “We’re one of the very few companies globally who have got large-scale anti theft implementation in place right now with big clients, and that gives our customers peace of mind because we’ve shown we can do it with big customers at a huge scale. We’re in every one of their [Best Buy’s] 1,200 stores with those programmes. And for a very small security software company based in Cork, that’s a very big win for us," says Paul.

“It’s really a case of working with large insurance companies and warranty providers is our main focus right now. That may change, as the market matures, but I think that’s definitely our primary focus.

“We’re big believers that we should leverage Telefonica’s brand, Best Buy’s brand, or Tesco’s brand, as opposed to trying to build our own brand, and that’s working quite well."

It has worked so well that, in addition to the USA, they have just closed their first deal in Mexico, and are active in Canada, the Philippines, Spain, the UK, Holland, and Ireland.

“We’re currently at about twenty staff and we expect to increase our staffing quite considerably over the next twelve to eighteen months. There’s a large number of deals that we have just signed that will be going live in the next three months and they would be household names, so that’s going to be good for us."

Paul attributes the company’s success to a skilled team, and a dedication that has seen the group, “...pretty obsessed about the whole anti-theft, loss recovery space for a large number of years”.

“It’s a very strong engineering company. Peter [Bermingham] has built an incredible engineering team, and typically, when we’re up against other competitors, major, billion-dollar organisations, we’re beating them hands down, because the engineering and technology is better, because we’re very, very focused on what we do.

“It’s very hard for people who’ve only entered this space in the last nine to twelve months to have the depth of knowledge that we have had.”

“So, we’re kind of a small, little success story in Cork City, but it’s the strength of the technology team that’s really the basis of our success today.

Paul acknowledges that Enterprise Ireland have played an important role in YouGetItBack’s success, with their international offices providing invaluable advice and connections.

“Enterprise Ireland have been with us literally since day one. When you’re relatively small and you don’t have the contacts, Enterprise Ireland are a huge asset to any company that’s exporting globally, and whether it be Japan, China, Australia, South America, you name it, these guys have huge contacts.”

Although commercial contacts will have to be maintained in these new markets, Paul maintains that the company’s core development team will remain in Cork.

“It’s quite fashionable to outsource a lot of software development, but the quality of development, and the amount we can get done with a relatively small team is incredible. Big clients of ours are always very surprised that we can get stuff done so quickly, to such a high quality, with such a small team, so our view is, “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it."”

44 Billion Apps to be Downloaded in next 5 Years [VIDEO]

Tom Murphy — Mon, 02 May 2011 12:07:07 +0000

Recent research speculates that based on current trends over 44 billion apps will be downloaded in the next five years

Report by Ina O'Murchu.

NB: Some wind noise in parts.

mobileminder: Keeping Children Secure on the Networks

Conor Harrington — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:11:59 +0000

The recent proliferation of affordable and easy-to-use smart phones has resulted in many children having unlimited access to the Internet and potential exposure to unsuitable content which is beyond the reach of any parental supervision.

Mobileminder is a product from Dublin-based start up Associate Mobile which allows parents to monitor their children’s mobile-phone activity, and to also utilise their phone’s technology to ensure their safety. The product is currently available for Android smart phones.

Founded in 2011 by Don Corbett and Brian Shannon. Associate Mobile is one of the participants in the Propeller Venture Accelerator program in Dublin City University’s Ryan Academy.

Mobileminder was launched “very quickly” says co-founder Don Corbett. “We wanted to see if it could get any traction, if the market really validated the proposition and if people would really buy it. People did buy it, and we used that as a market research exercise to get viable feedback on how we could build out version two.”

Version two of Mobileminder is, he says, “much, much better, there’s quite a lot of innovative stuff in it, very cutting edge”.

“It’s a complete parental supervision platform for mobiles and also a safety platform for mobiles, so it allows a parent to set a location for their child and when the child reaches the location the parent gets notified that they’ve arrived safely.”

Among the features offered by Mobileminder are:

Geo-fencing:The parent can set a geo-fence area and receive a notification when the child enters this area.
Flagged words: This allows the parent to input words which might indicate bullying or inappropriate content, and if these appear in the child’s SMS messages, the parent will be alerted.
Web browsing filter: The mobile can be set to, “create a safe environment on the mobile for the child to surf the Internet so they won’t go on to an inappropriate site by mistake."

Don and Brian have noticed that in the blurring of the lines between mobile phone and computer there was a gap in the level of protection afforded to children. “It’s about giving the same tools to a parent on mobile phones that are available for the Internet to protect their child”, explains Don.

Don has identified the controversial areas of “sexting” and cyber-bullying as cases where Mobileminder might prove particularly effective. With proposed anti-sexting legislation pending in many U.S. states Don envisages a high demand in the American market.

Access to the lucrative U.S. market is crucial in this regard, and the Propeller program gives Associated Mobile, “a foothold into the U.S. without having to actually move to the U.S.,” through their links with Arizona State University.

The Propeller programme has been “brilliant” in many ways admits Don, even down to its connection with the Ryan Academy. The Ryan Academy, which this week partnered with Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to provide entrepreneurship training for postdoctoral researchers at research centres in Irish Universities, holds a special significance for Don.

“Tony Ryan is a legendary Irish entrepreneur. It is great to actually affiliated with something that associated with him.”

As regards life outside Propeller, Don’s aims are simple, “Survival. We want to put things in place that will allow us to give ourselves more runway so we can survive until we can close a funding round.”

He is hopeful that revenues from Mobileminder will be sufficient to allow Associated Mobile to survive, and retain some independence.

“We don’t want to be completely dependent on closing a funding round. The start up world is, well our company is anyway, fighting to create revenue, even if it’s short term revenue through services, just to stay alive so we can build that proposition. We don’t look on ourselves as someone who burns through investor cash while validating our proposition; we’d rather validate the proposition while we’re fighting and struggling, get the investor cash and then scale. That’s kind of the mentality that we’re taking forward here.”

iPhone and Android Tracking Files [VIDEO]

Tom Murphy — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 14:21:48 +0000

For more background to this story you can read this article: "iPhone: Tracking or Logging?"

iPad: The User Experience

Lisa Jackson — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:38:44 +0000

With the imminent arrival of iPad 2 into our stores, the team here at New Tech Post began discussing what it is about the iPad that has made it such a success. Despite its perceived flaws (namely the lack of Adobe Flash or a USB port), Apple reports that it sold 7.33 million iPads in the last 3 months of 2010. Why?

In answering this question, the room was divided between those who regard it as merely a scaled up iPod Touch and those who view it as a can’t-live-without device. With this divergence in mind, we decided to investigate how iPad users interact with the tablet and what its true benefits are.

One of the main benefits appears to be the simple user interface which is quick to power up and allows instant access to items including emails, news, pictures or Facebook.

John Breslin sees the iPad as, “a casual device. If I really need to do something serious I’ll do it on the laptop. It’s more for casual browsing or for the kids for playing games. There are great things for kids on it, kind of educational games. My two-year old, you can see her doing puzzles on it that she would never be able to manage on a PC.

“It’s relaxed. When you’re sitting at a PC it’s not relaxed, you’re holding this thing like a book and it’s more casual. You’re not going to be in the same frame of mind doing stuff on a PC than you would be with this device.”

The question of style and marketing is never far from the discussion of an Apple device. Deborah Kemp, an avid Apple fan from Boston says, “There is this weird thing that happens with Apple devices where it's hard not to want the latest/greatest version even if there's nothing in the new package you really care that much about.”

Currently, Deborah owns the classic iPod, iPad 3G, MacBook Air, iPhone 4 and counting. Marketing appears to be a significant factor for why some users purchase this tablet device.

But there is more to the succes of the iPad than excellent branding. Lifehacker recently held an ad-hoc Facebook poll which revealed Evernote as a key app for users of the iPad. Evernote allows a user to save ideas, tasks, notes, webpages, photos, view PDFs and more. It can also be installed on other devices to sync content across a number of platforms.

For users who wish to obtain news and information, the iPad and other tablets have been attributed with the ability to provide news content in a more compelling format. It has even been noted that, “publishers hope that tablets will turn out to be the 21st-century equivalent of the printed page.”

Public consumption of news and media is expanding and the iPad offers a new platform for a consumer to digest it.

RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann), Ireland's National Public Service Broadcaster, released a dedicated iPad application last month.

Executive Director of RTÉ Publishing, Múirne Laffan, explains why RTÉ chose to launch a dedicated iPad app, “It’s really not a case of one size fits all. The reason people are buying iPads is they can do something on them that they can’t do on an iPhone.”

“iPhone apps need to be simpler so that people can work their way around them. If you’re trying to touch something on a touch-screen that’s small — so many times you’ll end up hitting the wrong thing. You need something with less clutter. But with the iPad, given the size of the screen, you can get into more detail.”

Múirne believes that, “Media consumption isn’t declining, it’s actually growing whereby you were somewhat time-based or place-based with more traditional media in terms of; you read your paper in the morning, you watched television in the evening and you listened to the radio in your car. Now people are consuming media everywhere on the go all the time and that goes for TV, radio and print.”

“In terms of content, I think people are doing more with it, I think they’re engaging more, they’re sharing, they’re saying, ‘I like this article or feature’ and they’re pushing it out to their friends. I think that we’re becoming, not just content savvy, but I think were becoming bigger consumers of content.”

“With regard to how the iPad revolutionizes this, is that it makes up for the shortfalls in a smart phone and I think predominantly that’s size. It found a gap and the gap is that it’s bigger. But it’s still highly portable.”

On reflection, it seems that the success of the iPad is in its delivery of something extremely simple – a larger screen size while retaining portability – allowing for casual interaction with the device. Even if it is just a grander scale iPod Touch, this concept in itself has tapped into the needs of a network of users worldwide.

NFC: Using your Mobile to Make Natural Connections

Conor Harrington — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:57:39 +0000

Near Field Communications (NFC) is a form of wireless technology that allows users to receive or share information at short ranges of typically 4cm or less. NFC devices can also communicate with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags. It is a technology that has been developed especially to work with mobile phones.

The development of NFC-enabled mobile phones such as the Google Nexus S, has led to the possibility of using a phone as a digital wallet for contactless payment such as that offered by Visa’s Paywave or the
London transport system’s Oyster Card.

NFC technology allows the sharing of information between two NFC mobile devices once they are in close proximity, in a similar way to the way Bluetooth operates, but in a much faster and more convenient way.

In order for two NFC mobile devices to connect, they need only to be within range of each other. Both users confirm the operation, and information may be transferred between the two units.

This can allow users to transfer items such as store vouchers between two “digital wallets” but could also have a transforming impact on the way we engage in social networking.

Two years ago, researchers from the Chair for Information Systems at Technische Universität München developed a prototype application called NFriendConnector which allowed NFC-enabled phones to interact with Facebook.

The prototype, which was submitted to the NFC Forum’s, Global Competition in 2009, came from a desire to, “Use Near Field Communications to map your social life much more easily to your online social life on Facebook," according to the Munich University’s Philip Koene.

His colleague Felix Köbler notes that, “Just using Facebook or any other social network and sitting in front of a PC device will not be the future."

He continues, “In the past when people came together in virtual communities in precursors to the social networks of today, people connected online and then transferred their social relationships from online to offline. Now it is basically vice-versa. People map their real social relationships into facebook, so we think that any application that is enabling or even supporting this process is of great help to people."

The application allows users to swipe their phones alongside each other and download each other’s Facebook profiles to be browsed at a later time. It also contains a function that will match user’s profiles, and generate automated status updates.

“All you have to do is touch the cell phone of the other person and you can make a new friend connection, or you can make a new status message that tells your community on facebook that you have now met this other person. We thought it would be a kind of neat way to map your real life on to your online social networking," says Philip.

He explains that, “The broad idea was that you kind of have data, for example, that you met this other person in real life, that you’re at a specific location in real life. You can gather this data quite easily because you just have to touch something with your telephone, that’s all that’s basically needed. And then you have an app like NFriendConnector where you can map this data easily on to your social network."

The application is not available at the moment as it was, “Used from a research perspective actually," says Felix. “The prototype is basically two years old now so that’s quite a long time when the markets are being filled with applications.

"NFriendConnector was developed in a University setting so with developing it, doing research with it and then publishing it; a lot of stuff happened in that time."

Philip notes that the speed with which mobile technology is developing also presented a problem, “We developed the NFriendConnector for the Nokia NFC-enabled cell phone of the time which was rather a low key device compared to today’s smart phones."

A version of the app which translates its features to the Google Nexus S phone is in development. “We don’t have a title, just a working title right now. We hope to bring it onto the Android marketplace when it’s finished just to evaluate it when it’s finished, maybe in a few months," says Philip.

“What we saw is that people see payment as the big application for NFC, but through our presentations we met other people who see social networking as another possible driver for NFC," notes Felix.

Philip explains why he his optimistic as to the future of NFC-enable social networking thus, “The whole touch metaphor is extremely simple. If you set the application up right, the user won’t have to do anything else other than touch something and that will then be mapped onto a whole range of social networking sites."

“It kind of had a slow start, but we believe it’s coming. NFC enables, in my opinion, a very natural interaction with your mobile phone. You just have to touch something with it to start an interaction."

“The guys from industry always tell us that it’s coming and that this will be the year of NFC. NFC really has a lot of potential and we’re hoping that it’s coming to a bigger market and that we can do broader research with it."

IMS: How Telecoms is Becoming More Like the Internet

Tom Murphy — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 08:51:35 +0000

Next Generation Network (NGN) technology is a term that refers to the transition from the traditional technical organisation of telecoms services to one that is based on IP, the Internet Protocol. The TSSG who are based in the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland have been researching and prototyping the technology that is going towards building the telecoms architecture of the immediate future. This new type of telecoms structure is referred to as IMS, the IP Multimedia System.

The older system, Signaling System 7, (SS7) was a well standardized, elaborate, complex set of protocols for building telephony functions such as carrier pre-select services, computer-telephony integration and pre-pay. But the application and service model had some big weaknesses.

As can be seen in the main picture, it was vertically integrated so a developer or innovator was limited to building a specific application on top of a specific subscriber data layer with specific media functions and a specific network interface. As a consequence, there were lots of different protocol variants for each kind of application.

Shane Dempsey is an NGN architect at the TSSG and he explains further, “ It meant that the only people who could run a telecommunication service were network operators working with system integrators.

"It was a massive system integrations exercise because you had to know, for example, lots of different variants for the protocol for a particular equipment vendor for this network operator who has a speciality for this equipment and so on. The question becomes, “How do I make this work?” This led to really expensive development life-cycles.

“IMS is not child’s play but it is a lot less hassle. Because it’s a lot less hassle there are API layers being built on top of it.”

IMS has a horizontal model for its architecture as opposed to a vertical one. This allows for a common database for subscriber data and common media function capabilities. Telecoms architecture starts to look a lot more like internet architecture.

One of the many reasons for shifting to this new telecoms structure was a realization that the success of web based applications, particularly those based on social networks, on the internet implied that there were similar opportunities to be exploited in the area of mobile technology.

Shane points out that, “Previously, telecoms vendors didn’t believe that they needed additional ways of storing information like the contacts that you have, your directory of friends, the presence that you have or your dynamic information like your location. It didn’t really occur to them that you needed that.”

However, creating that functionality in SS7 was difficult because of the inherent complexities. However, the move to IMS is not necessarily straightforward.

When you move to a mobile internet it becomes necessary to move to a packet based network. Once you are doing that you might as well have IP switching in the core.

Shane goes on to say, “IP in the core network isn’t a huge deal because the internet is IP at the core. But pushing IP out out into the network is a big deal because previously it was based on time slot technologies. If you are making calls, voice is time slot orientated. [By means of Time Division Multiplexing — TDM.] So moving to IP is a major effort in terms of standardization.

“Packet switching is a kind of a colloquialism that internet scientists use. The packets aren’t of a fixed size but the data can be divided up into packets and you don’t necessarily get the same throughput at every second. So you can get a voice traffic coming through plus internet traffic where people are sharing all sorts of files, documents, audio, video, etc., which are being sent over the same connection.”

By having foundation layers that are common to all parts of the system a great many applications of which some are in some form of existence today become easier to build and easier to deploy.

For businesses, for example, it will be easier to have:

Corporate Directory: You can have your own business contacts on your mobile phone but it is now possible to access your companies own directory if it is active.
CRM: Applications will be easier to build. It will be much easier to be able to see who is on or off the grid and where they are.
Communication Log: For corporate audit services.

For more general use the Rich Communication Suite offers functions on our mobile handsets that we are familiar with from the internet such as:

Calls enriched with multimedia sharing.
Video call and conferencing.
Hi Definition quality voice calls.
Enhanced messaging.
Mobile and desktop convergence: All the operators are making web service APIs available for the IMS platforms. This will allow third party developers so build applications that can set up conference calls, pull presence information and pull location information and so on.

As Shane states, “We’ll effectively be using internet communications everywhere.”

Shane has a slideset that you may view for further information.

Zolk C: Using Mobile Pervasive Services to Enhance User Experience

Tom Murphy — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 08:38:42 +0000

Zolk C is a company that provides interpretative guides by means of handheld devices for exhibitions, museums and tour sites. It can be used wherever there is a need to enhance a visitor’s experience to a given venue. Zolk C was spun out from the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG) in 2008 and through an ongoing innovation partnership the TSSG is driving the Zolk C technology

John McGovern is a researcher in the area of mobile pervasive services and is Head of Technical Projects at Zolk C.

Pervasive services allow services to be seamlessly available anywhere at anytime and in any format. Pervasive is defined or utilized under a number of themes:

Location
Context: Which can be defined in three ways:
- Where the user is
- Who the user is with
- What resources are available to the user
Sensors
Self-learning: Context definition and context interaction based on the ability to self-learn.

Up until recently if you went to a museum or a tourist site you could be provided with some sort of device that could only give you some audio to help guide you around the location. What a user would expect from an interpretative tour running on a mobile pervasive service would be far richer and far more extensive than just simple audio.

The National Trust for Scotland wanted revamp the visitor experience to one of their major sites of national importance, the place where the Battle of Culloden took place. They wanted to mark out locations on the battlefield that were of special interest. However for reasons of sensitivity and aesthetics they didn’t want to clutter up the site with placards and signs.

Here is a video of the technological solution to this brief that Zolk C were able to provide:

John explains further, “Context is one of the key drivers behind pervasive services. Every action and interaction that the user has on the device and with the device is monitored and logged and is being fed into the engine. So we can use this to profile and model what users are doing and what users aren’t doing.

“In that engine as well we have built a positioning algorithm that allows us to fine grain positioning indoors. We are able to take multiple sensors and augment the location information that we are able to get from that and provide a more accurate pinpoint of where you are.

“What we are then able to do for Zolk C is enable them to layer the content and rich media [audio and image files for example] on top of that positional information. They can then provide a bespoke interface for their client which coupled with our location engine is a really powerful tool.

“From that we can predict things. If a user has gone through a museum and has spent the morning looking at the armoury section and as a consequence missed something else in the exhibit we can raise an alert and say something like, “Did you know there was another armoury section behind door B?” for instance. We are able to tailor the experience to individuals. This is real data in real-time that would be relevant to the tour provider."

A WiFi framework has been added which gives us the benefit of real-time communications. Previously to upgrade a device it would need to be plugged into a PC and synced. Using WiFi all the devices can be upgraded simultaneously in about twenty minutes if they are all switched on and working.

The ability to communicate leads to the possibility of networks forming and from networks communities can form. John explains, "A big thing that is coming down the road is the ability for tour operators or exhibitors to add communities and by allowing users to think they are part of a community it really increases the traction to the website.

"If you were at Culloden say, and you took pictures of your family you would be able to load them into the Culloden community site and then you can share those pictures with other communities that you may be part of such as friends or co-workers. We have been able to allow them to do that quite easily.

"We can do device to device communications and device to server communications as well. For example, if you were to spot a deer on the lawn on your tour you could broadcast out to other devices, “Come look, there’s a deer on the lawn.”

Mobile pervasive services making use of information derived from context - who the user is, who the user is with and what resources are available to the user - will become a tradable commodity for service providers going forward.

As John points out, "To be able to take the relevant data in terms of context, provided targeted advertising based on that content directly to the users will definitely be worth a lot of money.”

LocalSocial: The Difference Between Proximity and Location

Tom Murphy — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:02:34 +0000

Sean O’Sullivan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rococo. The original vision of the company was to make it easier for developers to stitch proximity function into their apps. Sean and his colleagues noticed that the Application Programming Interface (API) of every Bluetooth stack (the way protocols that communicate with each other are sometimes organised for convenience) was completely proprietary. They figured that they could create value by creating a common and consistent API using the Java language.

As well as helping the work on the technical standard — JSR-82 — for connecting Bluetooth with Java, Rococo provided a set of tools that enabled developers to develop apps that would enable them to take greater advantage of Bluetooth. In addition they licensed their own implementation of that standard to the mobile phone handset manufacturers.

As of June 2010 Rococo’s technology was deployed on over a 180 million handsets worldwide.

However, the advent of smartphones has produced new challenges. For the most part they do not use the JSR-82 standard. In response to these changes in the mobile landscape Rococo have developed a product using their own proximity platform called LocalSocial.

How did the changes in the market lead to the deveopment of LocalSocial?

“It led us to broaden our field of view to offer a proximity platform that could work with Bluetooth, NFC, WiFi and other short-range wireless technologies. “

“We’re dealing with proximity. We are all about making it easy to detect if you are near a person, a business or a device of interest. Near, in our world means anything from two feet to thirty or forty feet.

“Location is a well-served part of the market at the moment. Engineering on mobile handsets is incredibly well-serviced. The core functionality of figuring out where you are is done by a combination of GPS, cell ID and reverse WiFi lookup.

“Our technology is independent of whether you are inside or outside of cellular or GPS coverage. We are also neutral to wireless technology. This means we can stitch in support for new and more exotic short range wireless technologies as and when they get jammed into cell-phones

“Because we are interested interested in proximity we use any short range wireless technology that does “proximity” well. Bluetooth is excellent because it is installed in all smartphone and more than half of all the rest of the world’s mobile phones.”

What is the difference between Local Social and Foursquare?

“Foursquare is really two things — an app and a platform. We are really much more a platform. We don’t necessarily have a bell weather app as yet that shows off the platform.

“One things that we do have in common with Foursquare is that we also believe that we can monetize the interactions between businesses and people as part of what the platform can do.

“What’s different is that we start off by saying, “Here’s LocalSocial, it’s a platform." Third party developers can register, build apps that use the platform and stitch proximity functionality into their apps much easier then they could do otherwise. We are actually promoting the platform to developers.”

Why would anybody want a proximity device? What would be the use of it?

“For handset manufacturers smartphones have been taken a lot of the action over the last couple of years but social networking technology has also been driving a lot of innovation on those platforms.

“Mobile apps have been a huge driver in user activity and user acquisition for the social network sites. In one of our demos we show what happens when you have Linkedin working with proximity.

“One of the things you can do is share your information (you control the amount) with people that are nearby. Conversely you can browse the Linkedin information of those same people.

“This can mean you can search for someone in the room who is interested in social media or interested in Bluetooth or whatever.

"The core that makes LocalSocial tick is that with your permission we store information about your Bluetooth MAC address – your unique Bluetooth address contained in the chip on your phone – online. We let you associate other information with that and decide how that might be shared with people that are physically near to you.

“We have profiles that contain versions of you social network settings. For example if you are in what you might call work mode you only share your linkedin information. If you are in say, party mode, you can share your Last.fm information for example.

“Person to business is the area that we have had the most interest to date. There seems to be some good evidence of demand for these sort of interactions."

Use Of Blackberry OS Surpasses Apple iOS In the US

Tom Murphy — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:12:10 +0000

According to StatCounter, an Irish web tracking site whose mission is "to help our members easily understand their visitors, so they can make good decisions to become more successful online," the BlackBerry OS has passed Apple's iOS in the US in terms of mobile internet usage. BlackBerry OS had 34.3% of the space while Apple's iOS had recorded 33%.

One possible reason for this increase in the use of the Blackberry OS could be the recent drop in price of the Blackberry Torch from $199.00 to $99.00. But as Blackberry has only shipped 5.4 million phones in the last quarter compared to 14.1 million iPhones sold in roughly the same period, the amount of handsets available in the market may not be the determining factor.

Blackberry has traditionally been the mobile tool of choice for large enterprises. This is not necessarily because they had a better phone, but simply by being first to market with a mobile email system that was easy to integrate with the already present in-house data exchange systems.

Large scale enterprises are still the place where most of America’s business gets done. It may not be too wild a notion to suggest that the increase in the usage of Blackberry’s OS is because after long years of recession, there is more activity taking place in the world of big business.

More email is being sent, more information is being exchanged, more business is being done. This statistic may be the first real indicator that things are starting to move forward again.

Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, points out another significant aspect of this change, "These figures suggest that developers should not be developing solely for the iPhone to the exclusion of BlackBerry and Android."

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than three million websites. You can read more about StatCounter in this article, "GlobalStats: The Value Of Analytics".

Mobile Phones: Frontier of Possibility

Tom Murphy — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 07:59:54 +0000

Mobile telephony represents the single biggest opportunity for new business while at the same time being one of the most significant enablers for growth available today. One of the more interesting aspects of the market is how the the law of unintended consequences comes into play. Text function was originally an afterthought and was only left in as an expensive option for business. It is now the world’s most widespread data service. Developing world mobile banking systems not only helped to give the world’s poorest and most ill-served people the opportunity to access the benefits of having a bank account but the technology has proven to be so effective that we may start seeing it in more technically developed societies.

It is a reminder that we are all living globally now and that changes and developments in one part of the network whether it is social or technical, have ramifications for all parts of the network.

(1) Most important fact about mobile phones - there are billions of them!

The figures are phenomenal. There are over 4.426 billion subscribers to mobile services around the world. China Mobile is the largest with 500 million subscribers. Since there are just over 6bn people on the planet it would seem we would be close to saturation point but that doesn't seem to be the case. Nokia and Apple, for instance, are shipping their devices by the millions and there is no sign at all of a let up in demand. According to Gartner mobile sales grew 35% in the last financial quarter. Over 417 million units were sold worldwide in a three month period. 81 million of those handsets were smartphones.

(2) Smartphones are very popular but regular phones still sell very well.

According to these figures only roughly twenty percent of phones being sold are smart. That is that they can be used in the way a computer can be used to run applications that are more advanced than can be found on a phones with regular features.

Cost is one inhibitor but access to wifi is another. Even in the developed countries many rural areas have difficulty accessing broadband and consequently a lot of the capability of a smartphone is reduced. 3G works but most times it is much slower than wifi. Some apple iphone apps are inhibited from downloading on the network due to their size and wifi has to be accessed. In the remoter areas of the world which includes large parts of Europe and America this can be a problem.

Smartphones are built on smart platforms.

Symbian OS: is used mainly by Nokia and has the largest footprint by far.
Android: Which is owned by Google and is probably the most developer friendly.
Windows Phone: Microsoft software which has been retargeted at the consumer market.
Blackberry OS: Which originally targeted its phones at corporate use but is slow in finding a wider appeal.
iOS: The Apple platform and is highly integrated into many other Apple products.

Combining the opportunity for development apps for different platforms and across different platforms with the variety of handsets available all sorts or permutations and possibilities exist.

Although most of these operating systems are quite tied in tightly with manufacturers the scope for third party developers to make a contribution is huge.

(3) All sorts of opportunities to play for

With such a variety of devices and platforms the opportunity for the “killer app” to arise is very limited. But the opportunity to create niche apps that do specific tasks very well. Apple has over 300,000 apps available in its store now with Android having over 100,000 apps available for download.

In a previous article "The Collective Brain App" we described how by bypassing the browser and allowing users to directly access what they specifically want a whole new network of interactions becomes possible. We can become genuinely networked as individuals with our own array of apps reflecting how we see the world and what we want from it.

(4) There is still plenty of change to come

For the entrepreneurial opportunity exists in growing chaotic markets. The mobile telephony market is far from reaching maturity and there are still some massive game changing possibilities around the corner.

One such is the possible introduction of embedded SIMs. This means that companies like Apple or Nokia can take over the billing and service responsibilities from the main carriers and establish a direct an intimate relationship with the customer. This would leave the carriers as the providers of 'dumb pipes.'

Embedded SIM technology also allows the smartphone to act as a wallet by allowing users to pay with their handsets.

The carriers are not going to cede easily but whatever the outcome the mobile phone market will have shifted in its space and with that there will come even more opportunities.

GeoLocation: A View from The Dublin Web Summit

Ina O Murchu — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 05:47:20 +0000

The Dublin Web Summit held at the end of last month had six hundred attendees and over fifty speakers, many of them major players in their own fields. The Summit itself was not about specialism but about bringing people together and the range of talks combined with the degree of knowledge and experience as seen in both speakers and the attendees reflects how big the Web itself really is in terms of being an object that affects almost every part of our daily lives and as a subject deserving serious consideration.

It covered a wider field of subjects than any one article could hope to address. So to keep it simple we have focused this article on geolocation. We see more and more of this technology incorporated into our mobile phones and our Social Media services everyday and we think the best is yet to come and probably very soon.

Checking in is a very specific way of indicating your geographic location. Almost any app can use location in some shape or form making location a more contextual and relevant experience to the user.

In his talk at the Summit, Matt Galligan, the Co-founder and CEO of SimpleGeo talked about providing developers with an easy way to understand the coordinates supplied by devices so they can build geolocation functionality into their application. Essentially SimpleGeo is trying to enable a world where app developers do not have to worry about many of the complexities that surround handling geolocation data.

A coordinate is just a coordinate. While latitude and longitude coordinates are a good way to describe a location on Earth they don't tell you much else. The coordinates could either the centre of a city or the centre of a desert. Translating a coordinate into something useful and meaningful, for example the weather for where an individual happens to be, is what makes geolocation technology useful. Matt spoke about several current apps:

Bump is an app that is used to swap contact information (much more environmentally friendly than business cards!) Two phones literally hit or bump each other and contact details are swapped.
ShopKick is another useful app by knowing where you are standing it can notify nearby stores of your presence. If those stores are running a promotion from inside the app the user may then receive a coupon or points if they then choose to enter the store.
Best Buy and Macy’s in the US are currently using this app as a business to consumer experiment instore to help personalize the shopping experience for the shopper with discounts appearing directly on their receipts at the till.

As we know, many consumer cameras are now being produced with geotagging features. You can now organise your photos by location on maps with geotagged photos. The same goes for music and sounds. These pieces of media can be geotagged and then layered over Google Maps. You can experience a place in the world from an entertainment and scientific perspective. We are able to know more and more about any given place in the world beyond the "this is where I went on my break" abilities we now have. School field trips will never be the same again.

Brad Fitzpatick of Livejournal created an Android App to open his garage door. He has a webserver connected to his garage door opener so he can open it over the network based on his geolocation. When riding his motorbike home as soon as he gets within a certain distance his garage door opens automatically. He can ride right in and park his motorbike in the garage without having to remove his helmet and gloves. Brad has also made this app available here.

Matt Galligan also uses geotechnology to control devices in his home as well. His iphone has an app that connects to his wifi network and then connects to a Control4 box. Control4 is a company that produces home automation control systems.These can control every electronically controllable item in the home. Matt has it connected to many of his devices; his Xbox, his heating and his television. Each individual light switch contains a wireless receiver and transmitter in a little box.

It uses a technology called Zigbee (802.15) which is designed for short range communications. However, the current range of smartphones don’t have this chip in them as of yet so none of the apps can communicate directly with the lights in a home but who knows what possibilities will be developed in the near future.

Privacy issues

With all this data available privacy is always going to be a concern. However, the responsibility of revealing your location comes down to:

The App
The user

The user is responsible for exposing the location and thankfully all the smartphones make this very clear. The iPhone, for instance, tells you when your location is being queried so you know about it.

One Step Further

How we view geolocation information may change redically in the sense that mobile devices may not always mean smartphones. Matt spoke about new glass panel overlays in his presentation. He showed the audience Graphene sheets. These are sheets of carbon just one atom thick. They have great strength, flexibility, transparency, and electrical conductivity.

The information surrounding you in your environment can be made available on the graphene sheets simply by holding them up and viewing objects in the environment through them. For example, you can see the value of houses in your locality by measn of making data and geolocation data on the web explicit in real time.

It seems by the very fact that we are physically somewhere and are always engaged with our environment these new tools offer us ways to enhance our geospatial awareness in ways we are only just starting to be able to grasp. It is clear that in the future geolocation is going to be a large part of everything we do. Geolocation technology is already blurring the edges between our offline and online worlds and the gap is becoming increasingly seamless.

Social Devices Become Social Themselves

Tom Murphy — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:06:17 +0000

Adrian Avendano and Ellen Dudley are Irish entrepreneurs based out of Barna, Galway. Their current venture is Crowd Scanner. An application which not only allows you to share information using a mobile device but also to do so by physically sharing the device itself.

Just one example of its many useful applications would be in a meeting where consensus is being sought. A quick poll question can be set up in the software and then the device, (currently it is an iphone app but ipad and android apps are planned), can be passed around the participants who can enter their choice from a selection. The total of votes are then compiled when the device has finished circulating. Thus a quick, easy and unobtrusive sense of the prevailing sentiment in the room can be obtained in a shared, sociable manner.

Their work on Crowd Scanner is a direct evolution of their personal interests in bringing people together to create new conversations and generate new ideas. Ellen has a bio-medical background and Adrian comes from the world of computer science. As he says; “learning is our crack-cocaine. Everyone has something interesting to say regardless of who they are and meeting interesting people is a fundamental part of our life. That’s what keeps us alive.”

A prior venture to Crowd Scanner, meetforeal. was their attempt to bring people together to share ideas. A speaker was invited to give a talk which was then followed by timed discussions. Attendees were encouraged to switch groups at given intervals to continue the sharing of ideas with a constantly changing set of people.

The events themselves were very successful but required a great deal of organization and promotion and proved to be not very scalable. As Ellen puts it: “What we loved most about the events was the mingling afterwards but the amount of work you had to do was disproportionate to the value derived.”

So a new way had to be found to bring people together to create new conversations Being essentially creators and designers they turned their attention to how technology could encourage greater and more meaningful human interaction.

The idea of Crowd Scanner came when a client of theirs misunderstood an instruction in an application on his iphone. He handed his device to Adrian to complete the process and in that moment the idea of using a mobile phone to connect with someone else was born. Instead of looking and interacting with a screen of a phone the opportunity arose to make the device itself inherently social.

Mobile phones are highly personal instruments and many may feel reluctant to hand over such an important life tool to a complete stranger. But it is all about context and good sense. Ellen: “By giving someone your phone you are saying you trust them, you break through the ice completely. This person has trusted me with their phone and there’s an interesting question on the phone and I’m going to answer it.”

The action of handing over the phone creates the opportunity to bond with people who may otherwise have remained strangers and aids the construction of a more meaningful social experience.

Ellen goes on to say: “It fulfills the need we had with our previous meetforeal endeavour in that we can now meet people anywhere. We don’t have to do all this promotion and organisation. Finding a speaker, finding a location and finding the people to attend. We just have Crowd Scanner on our phone and that enables us to initiate meaningful human connections.”

Adrian and Ellen are now fully engaged in developing commercial applications for their technology. They have trialled the software on trains, on the street, with students and friends, at events they attended and in different cities such as Galway and San Francisco.

The pitch has been fully developed and well-practiced. They got to the final eight (out of forty-two) at the TechCrunch Summer Pitch Battle! in July 2010. They were also chosen for App Circus in San Francisco but were unable to attend because of #ashcloud, (the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volano in Iceland) which grounded flights all over Northern Europe. However, they were able to submit a video instead and as a result they now find themselves in negotiations with an angel investor.

Apart from the small size of the Irish market and lack of a large enough support structure they have found that being seen as entrepreneurs hailing from Ireland to be a distinct advantage. There is no doubt that the Irish are held in high regard overseas. Also, they find it beneficial to be away form the faddish, me-too culture so often pervades startup hotbeds in other locations.

With six hundred downloads a week and rising their focus is now on creating specific use applications in the conference and event sectors where there is the possibility to add a new level of connection for a lot of people who happen to be in the same room. Connections and conversations that could lead to all sorts of new and interesting possibilities.

Getting The World On The Communications Grid, One Smartphone At A Time

Tom Murphy — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:25:45 +0000

Last November, I returned from a long trip that covered a number of African countries in which, at times, I ended up in some pretty remote spots. Internet connections are sparse and unreliable even in built up areas, and while I did at one point go for a few days without any connection at all I managed to survive. On thing I discovered is that there is a big difference between choosing to go off the grid and not being able to access the internet at all.

It struck me quite forcibly how much of my life - while not dependent on internet access in the absolute sense - is highly reliant on it being available when I do want access. Not being able to use Skype and having to pay exorbitant local mobile phone charges was just one of the many issues that we had. None of the communication challenges we had prevented us from doing what we were supposed to be doing, but the absence of a good quality stable connection did add unexpected layers of difficulty, expense and complication. I say stable because apart from the few days when we were really out of touch, there was always some sort of internet link to be had. It just didn't work very well.

Back at our home, our offices or workplace and on our phones, we nearly always have some access. (I don't want to make distinction between where I was and where I normally reside by using "western world" and "developing world" labels. They can be very misleading and unhelpful but I would like the reader to assume that I refer to my normal internet access state as a place with a sound working infrastructure.) This always-online aspect to our cultural, business and domestic lives has grown rapidly in the last couple of years. But until its enforced absence I was surprised at the extent of my reliance on quick and easy access to the internet.

The most apparent manifestation of the use of new communications technology was not in the use of desktop PCs or laptop, or even internet cafes. It was in the widespread availability and intense use of mobile phones. They were everywhere. Telephony costs are high and most people seemed to be on PAYG SIMs and texting was the main form of communication.

It is quite conceivable to me that as cell links improve, most folks in regions outside the main communication hubs will skip the laptop and desktop computer and do all of their internet exchanges on their mobile phones. Portability and convenience are the main drivers. In my western always-online world, a smartphone is something useful to have on the train or in the pub as a fill-in device between my main communication nodes at home or in the office. For many people around the world, the smartphone will be their primary tool for continuous access to the internet once the infrastructure is in place. Which, hopefully shan't be too long.

I was left with two conclusions about online technology from that trip. Smartphones will come to dominate the world of communications, and stable internet connections are the surest and fastest ways to spread prosperity and, fingers-crossed, peace.