imran*ali

A few weeks ago, I helped produce O’Reilly UK produce their first Ignite event in the UK – a series of lightning talks, each lasting five minutes and no longer than twenty slides…

We closed out the evening with the BBC’s Ian Forrester pitching Tweetfoxxy, a playful ‘Twitter-bot‘ that helps match people for dates and, um, sexual liasons…almost a ‘booty text‘! Tweetfoxxy, collates a user’s preferences in a series of private messages, then seeks to pair you with matching users. It’s actually a very timely concept that builds on a very ‘now’ cultural nexus of realtime web services, sexual revolution and mixed-reality gaming.

Read Ian’s presentation at Slideshare…

This month’s launch of Google’s Latitude has brought an impressive location-aware effort within the company’s mobile services portfolio, bringing a simple ‘personal radar’ to the web that Yahoo!’s sophisticated FireEagle didn’t seem to be able to pull off.

However, did Latitude further fragment the social graph of Google’s various services?

Gmail and Google Reader have always implicitly utilised a shared address book as a social substrate within the Google universe and appears Latitude also mines this rich social network too. However, Jaiku, Orkut and even Dodgeball never seemed to benefit from the same relationships. Perhaps Google’s home-grown services flourish simply because they have access to core data services that Google’s acquired startups do not?

The acquisition of Jaiku provided Google with what could have been a powerful social-signalling infrastructure that may have but horizontally across all Google services. Sadly, even with the Gmail address book at the core, its not possible to offer a seamless social graph across the Google-verse yet…

Wow – this is the kinda whacky project that my old colleagues at France Telecom R&D used to be ridiculed for – using a cellphone as your ‘remote control for life’.

The town of Germany’s Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz has recently reduced its streetlighting energy costs by a quarter, simply by switching all lighting off by default and allowing citizens of the town to light individual units with a phone call.

The innovative civic infrastructure requires users to register their cellphone, then simply enter a shortcode identifying the area this wish to light up…these identifiers are ironically posted on nearby street lights!

Well, my old FT buddies were waaay ahead of their time and this project ‘lights the way’ for countless other great applications of cellphone telemetry. Interestingly, in the labs we focussed on providing telemetry for a person’s home, rather than their civic environment. I guess, as a society, we’re more sensitised to the inclusion of the ‘crowd‘ and social applications with shared trust than we were in 2002.

The project sets a great precedent for the cellphone as a passive trigger for various civic services that personalise themselves to citizens as they move through an area, providing a digital bubble that connects them silently with their community.

I can’t wait to see what the residents of Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz do with their Christmas lights later this year…some innovative public light shows perhaps?

Read more at Treehugger or a short video at BBC News…

Last week’s Mobile World Congress saw a lot of chatter on developer communities, application marketplaces. Our own Ewan Spence has covered many of the issues in some depth here and here.

One of the more interesting developments was the launch of O2’s Litmus, seemingly not just a store, billing platform or aggregator of applications, but comprehensive ecosphere for a developer community.

Telco 2.0 has a great analysis of Litmus, noting that the cellco is offering not just APIs to network services, but business + tech support, hosting, user community tools, marketing and notably,  distribution and marketing expertise.

Perhaps most significantly, Litmus includes the participation of O2’s internal venture capitalist unit, no doubt scouting potential investment opportunies for parent company Telefonica and shepherding promising application producers.

This throws up some interesting possibilities for Apple’s own efforts as competitive offerings begin to arrive, will we see Apple move to offer a broader range of support than simple distribution and billing, or will cellcos begin to regain some of the influence they conceded to Apple.

Blimey – I got through a whole post about cellcos without becoming irate! (Those infuriating bastards are finally doing all the things many of us advocated for years…)

Read more at O2 Litmus: Better than the Apple App Store…

In late 2007, here at Mobile Messaging 2.0, I wrote about the concept of ‘haptic messaging‘ and the notion of a ‘biological Twitter‘ that could sense and convey human emotions through mobile communication…now the future’s finally catching up with MM2.0 as the great Kevin Kelly turns his thoughts to ‘the mood phone‘.

Whereas previous concepts have used galvanic skin response (MIT’s Galvacticator) and haptic feedback (IDII’s Tactophone), Kelly described Panasonic technology that analyses vocal characteristics to determine ‘mood’, an iPhone app that uses accelerometers and a D-Link technology that infers from a combination of voice and body temperature.

Interestingly, the post reflects not on the quality and accuracy of the experiments but on the need to have our emotions reflected back to us, in case we inadvertently send social signals we don’t wish to share. Essentially, the lag between experiencing an emotion and being aware that we experienced it could make for some interesting sociological analysis.

What Kelly’s piece really speaks to is the underlying lack of sociological understanding in the design of communications services and products – a weakness that cellcos and telcos need to address as more and more human experience is mediated by technology.

Read more at The Mood Phone…

With the Israeli-Hamas conflict entering its third week and the war zone still off-limits to the world’s major media organisations, it’s increasingly difficult to get balanced reporting.

Whether balanced coverage is even possible or desirable, both sides are employing information warfare as a central strategy, with the Israeli authorities even deploying Twitter and Youtube to illustrate their perspective.

Last week, in discussing Israel’s Roof Knocking operations, I lamented ‘the lack of an Ushahidi-like service’ to enable grassroots coverage from residents of the afflicted areas. Fortunately, Al Jazeera Labs has taken up the challenge with its custom deployment of Ushahidi’s open source software – War On Gaza.

Mashing up text messages, maps of the strip and Twitter, the service is beginning to aggregate user-submitted reports from Israel, Gaza and even the West Bank, though according to Wired, the submissions are verified before publication.

It’s difficult to see how balanced coverage might be – but it’s certainly less filtered than official Israeli or Hamas sources, of course there may also be the usual accusations of partiality that’re made against Al Jazeera’s coverage.

It’ll be interesting to observe how War On Gaza pans out – as aid agencies and humanitarian aid begins to enter a potentialcivic and political vacuum, perhaps they’ll need to utilise the service as a guide to where assistance needs to be applied.

Ushahidi raises some important questions about how civic services could evolve – with emergency services and first responders utilising civic adaptations of Ushahidi, perhaps the deployment of police, fire and medical teams in peacetime environments could also be enhanced by grassroots reportage.

Every quarter sees the setting of new records in the volume of text messaging and each holiday season a test of every cellco’s resilience and availability in delivering billions of Christmas and New Year’s messages.

Australia’s Telstra predicted 76m text messages would see in 2009 down under, averaging around one thousand per second!

Interestingly, in breaking down their predictions for the holiday season, there are some curious usage and ethnographic snippets that’re more interesting that the ‘12m burgers sold’ message we usually see from cellco’s PR teams…

• Only 600′000 photo messages were expected to be sent.
• Only ‘tens of thousands’ of video calls are anticipated.
• Most messaging takes place between friends with only 2/3 of mothers receiving calls from their kids and only 40% of men contacting their folks!

I’m not sure what to glean from the generational non-communication between Aussies and their offspring, but it’s unsurprising that video and photo messaging represent only a small part of the total volume of messaging. The technologies, products and services have been around for the best part of a decade, but the usage patterns indicate that photo and video messaging don’t really appeal to a broad demographic.

This is reflected in how video messaging is used on the web too – with the volume of instant and status messaging eclipsing Skype video calls  and clever video services such as 12seconds and Seesmic.

Read more at Beep beep – New Year text messages to hit 1000 per second…

How very polite – rumours are emerging that the Israeli military has been employing ‘roof knocking’ techniques to let occupants of a soon-to-be-bombed home know that they have minutes to abandon their homes and lives before the brave boys of the IAF begin remodelling.

The phone, voicemail and SMS messages are designed to warn occupants and minimise civilian casualties at the intended target. Gruesomely, it’s more impressive that the Israeli military has the neccessary contact information, rather than the fact they’re using it to alert potential victims.

Sadly, what’s probably more neccessary in the propaganda fog of this war is the deployment of an Ushahidi-like service to chronicle the real experiences of Gazans, attacks in the Strip and the effect of rocket attacks in Southern Israel.

Read more at Israeli’s use phone, SMS to warn Gazans of bomb..

While we all accept that cellcos are bloodsuckers, last month’s edition of Wired revealed that scientists at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute are experimenting with cellphones that can actually test your blood!

Before you begin to panic, this groundbreaking new technology doesn’t quite literally suck your blood, but lighting a blood sample that a cellphone’s camera can then digitise and interpret using software developed by the institute’s scientists.

The technique displaces the large and expensive human and technological processes previously required to analyse blood samples, opening the way portable low-cost and almost real-time diagnosis, potentially in areas previously inaccessible to healthcare professionals. Now imagine coupling such a device to location data, air quality sensors and other environmental data – there’s potential here to learn much more about the implications of environmental context on blood makeup.

The implications of the institute’s discovery aren’t limited to medicine, implying that cellphone manufacturers and cellcos are blind to the potential of connected, sensor-rich cellphones; almost criminally ignorant of designing devices or platform services that smooth the way for this type of innovation to find widespread use.

Cellcos in particular are fearful of being commoditised down to a dumb pipe – well, they’re not creating much value at the ends of those pipes…

Read more at Scientists hack Cellphone to Analyze Blood, Detect Disease, Help Developing Nations…

The iPhone App Store has suffered criticism in some quarters for being dominated by consumer, social media and entertainment driven applications; a criticism that’s unfair in my opinion.

The first generation of applications has been driven by exploiting the iPhone’s unique gestural and locative novelties, great for showing off the capabilities of the device – and the imagination of app developers. Though this is perhaps alienating to small businesses and enterprisem who might see the store as a garden of expensive toys, the developer community is essentially findings its feet, before turning to more enduring and lucrative areas.

(Personally, I contend no application is as useful and as much a ‘killer-app’ as the combination of Safari and unlimited data…)

I think 2009 will see developers begin to movefully explore utalitarian apps and it seems Innerfence is one such app studio that will be leading the charge, notably with their Credit Card Terminal application, handily priced outside the 99¢ temperate zone of many application!

Credit Card Terminal essentially enables merchants to process credit card transactions simply by entering a customer’s card details, without needing dedicated terminals or wired connections, issuing receipts by email to customers…actually the experience sounds a lot like the staff with mobile payment terminals in Apple’s own retail stores. Perhaps along with Innerface’s 1000-strong customer base (including artists, locksmiths, car rental agents and jewellers), Apple themselves may become interested…?

Innerface’s work could help to shift the iPhone beyond early adopters into a very mainstream device for small businesses. Indeed, perhaps as a default bundled application, could Apple evolve into a rival to Paypal and Google Checkout?