I recently signed up to the website Trigger Street, which is a community website for amateur (budding) movie makers and script writers. This was to explore further the possibilities for the emerging industry of short movies for mobiles, which is really in its very early phase.
I found some very interesting short (”micro”) movies on the […]

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I recently posted about the idea of a “merged web interface” for mobiles. The idea was mainly about the UI, in particular having a search box approach to service discovery, both on and off device. This implies the other idea, which is that service location is transparent. The user might be using and configuring an […]

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There’s a lot of marketing excitement about presence in a mobile network, which is the ability to indicate your state, such as “online/offline”, “home/office”, “busy/free”, “bored/excited” and so on. Presence information can also be extended to indicate the type of communications you want to receive, where you are, the situation you are in (public/private) and […]

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I’ve recently been reading Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters. It is a fascinating book. You don’t have to be a screenwriter to enjoy it or understand it. I’m not a screenwriter, but I appreciate the craft of screen production. Moreover, I really love stories. I read lots of them to my kids.
When I first wrote about […]

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In the Blockbuster DVD chart, Taxi is the number one film, so perhaps the topic was lingering in my head and led me to the very interesting Google Ride Finder which I recommend playing around with.
Now, the idea is good, but the interface, despite its cleverness, is lacking. Why? Because it needs to be mobile. […]

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Half-way through the 100 ideas! I hope that they are proving useful in a variety of ways to the readership. I am not claiming originality, although I think some of them certainly are novel. The idea is to open up a landscape of possibilities, so that you - the reader - might find stimulation in […]

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I often imagine a phone interface that is simply a search-box, as bare and stripped down as the Google front page.
Most of the time I would be entering search strings based on names. However, unlike a search engine, there would be no need to hit “search” or “return”. I imagine that the search “results” would […]

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I have lots of friends and associates who ask “how do I get email on my phone?” A good question and, I guess, I’m a good person to answer it. Not only have I spent what seems like a lifetime designing, implementing, analysing, assessing and breaking mobile email systems, but I run a UK-centric forum […]

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In a recent discussion I participated in, the importance of the mobile as the focal point of device convergence was debated. There can be no doubt that an increasing number of features will gravitate towards the mobile phone in our pockets. However, this should not be the only model…
One question I have is whether there […]

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In my latest assignment, I’m up to my eyeballs in specifications. I’ve been going over all the specs relating to IP Multimedia System (IMS) and Push-to-talk Over Cellular (PoC) (…why that lower case “o”?) The general subject area is genuinely interesting….
Well, to me it’s interesting because I can see all kinds of interesting possibilities for […]

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It seems a sensible idea to have a shared meeting service on mobiles so that any group, no matter how small or large, can arrange meetings. I don’t mean office meetings, as that probably takes place via Exchange/Notes. It would be possible for an individual user to belong to as many meetings as they like, […]

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I hate that phrase - “killing time”. It ought to be banned. Time is much to valuable to think about killing it. Strange how that expression, despite its use of the ugly word “kill”, is a polite way of saying “wasting time”. This is a whole class of mobile applications - “time killers”, or “time […]

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I was thinking about my mobile as an alarm clock. As mentioned earlier, 60% of people take their mobiles to bed with them. Blogger “Digital Evangelist” brought to my attention some of the more sultry perils of this trend.
With push-to-talk allowing for “barge” calls, whereby an audio source (usually voice) can blurt out of the […]

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I am re-reading Beowolf to my kids and we have also started Moby Dick. These are fantastic stories. My kids, like most kids, love stories. I also make up stories, although this is a lot more difficult than reading from a book.
When traveling anywhere in the car, kids get bored easily. Who can blame them?
What […]

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Earlier, I posted about using mobile phones to convey emotional attachment, without using verbal communication. A while ago, I also posted about the possible use of mobiles as bio-feedback devices to attenuate stress through concious control of heart-rate variance.
I am now wondering if these two ideas can be connected. Is it possible to entrain one […]

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