In connection with my last post I found another valuable advice for everyone designing mobile web applications and services.
Mirjana Spasojevic (Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto) and Rachel Hinman (Adaptive Path) offer the following design principles:

• Think uniquely mobile, not mini-PC
• Think always with you, not just on-the-go
• Think building and reinforcing common ground and identity
• Think access to what’s essential, not just browsing

I recently read some interesting thoughts about ubiquitous computing. The first was an interview with Takashi Matsumoto at WMMNA. Besides the many interesting projects he talked about, I especially liked his definition of ubiquitous content.

“Ubiquitous Content” is an idea of a new design objective of our lives in the post-PC era. In 20th century, a notion of media contents has been meant contents like movies, music, animations, video games etc. Figuratively speaking, such contents were entities supplied in containers designed as “boxes”. But now, a spread of networks and a realization of ubiquitous computing technologies are going to change those styles of media. The container is not like a “box” any more: It will change its forms freely to give us advanced computer augmentations in a specific context and it will be sometimes invisible embedded into our environments. It is more appropriately called Ubiquitous Media and it will be a new style of media. When we design such Ubiquitous Media, we need to think about the container as our environments in which many things are cooperating rather than a single hardware, a single software or a single standard. Users will not need to be conscious of those medias, therefore such containers emerge for users as “their lives” themselves. “Ubiquitous Contents” are contents for such media. Those must be “experiences” in “their lives”.

Altough not complety new, I like the metaphors of boxes and containers.

Even more inspiring was Yvonne Rogers article “Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing: Engaging UbiComp Experiences.” She suggests a new way of thinking and working on UbiComp. It must engage people in what they do at a moment, not making decisions for them. A shift from proactive computing to proactive people.

A promising approach for working on new and successful concepts for all these new technologies that are about to go mainstream or already had.

Finland is on eof the most sophisticated mobile markets in the world. So communities-dominate.blogs.com believe that in the near future other countries will follow. The past has proven so.

In Finland last year already 18% of all phones sold were smartphones. Worldwide it was only 8%. Cameraphones? Around the world, more than half of all phones sold last year were cameraphones, but in Finland, 60% of all phones sold were high resolution cameraphones of 2 megapixels or above. While worldwide 32% of phones sold were musicphones (with in-built MP3 players) in Finland over half of all phones sold were musicphones. Does that spell good news for the industry which also sees India, China and Brazil as the big growth countries where bargain basement phones rule? The average retail price for phones sold in Finland grew by 10%. And finally an interesting argument for simultaneous convergence and divergence - while cameraphone sales kept expanding, the sales of stand-alone digital cameras also reached an all-time record in Finland. Source for the data: Kauppalehti 5 Feb 2007.

I guess everyone read even once about the limitations of mobile phone and that the PC is superior when it comes to use internet. Anders Borg however presents a nice diagramm that might change some views.

And by the way if you think about your daily use of the internet what is it your are doing? And do you really need a PC for this?

http://www.abiro.com/news/2007/02/mobile-phones-not-so-limited-after-all.html