Intel ethnographer Genevieve Bell was featured on BBC Radio 4’s “Sunday” Programme about the increasing infiltration of personal mobile tech into spiritual practices around the world.
» BBC Radio 4: Sunday: Mobile Phones and Spirituality [5mins 43sec, Real Audio]
Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker on ringtones:
‘An architect in her mid-thirties said, âI spent three days of
productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed
metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my
personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live
with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this
phoneâs gonna go offâwhat are they going to hear?â’
I think I must know this person.
[via the excellent 3 Quarks Daily]
Priya Prakash, who I used to have the privilege of working with (She was part of the awesome design team I got to work with on iCan) has come up with a useful wap hack to help those affected by the South-Asian tsunami disaster.
This from Smartmobs:
Tsunami Helplines is the mobile WAP site for all the emergency numbers and has been specifically designed for mobile use. It has been put together for easy mobile access in situations where people have no access to computers and don’t know who to call for medical aid or for fieldworkers wanting to find out consulate/local hospital/authorities emegency helplines to give to victims/relatives.
The Tsunami Helpline WAP service is at: http://www.priyascape.com/helpline/index.wml for WAP browsers.
Good on you, Ms. Prakash.
A few quick mobile links to string together (aside: that would be a nice del.icio.us metaservice, “del.icio.us trails” being able to link together delicious posts into a narrative or a trail in the memex-ian sense)
Like Janne, I’ve finally entered the 3g future with the arrival of my Nokia 6630. I did a smidge of work for Hutchison 3g back before they launched as 3; and back then it was all about getting web or tv ‘multimedia’ into a walled garden for paid download.
No walled gardens in Finland to speak of, so a mobile version of >ahem< Loosemore’s Law has kicked in – I want to do the same basic stuff (send MMS’s to flickr, the odd emergency finding of an address using google) but quicker – and boy is it good.
Perhaps the dawn of 3g that lets you go outside of clunky operator portals will hasten some content innovation – let a thousand mobile flowers bloom outside the walled garden.
Russell Beattie has just written about his Mobdex experiment where: “What I did was import 600+ Public Domain eBooks from Project Gutenberg and I’m dynamically reformatting the plain text to be readable on the web and modern mobiles with WAP2 minibrowsers”.
Perhaps Mobdex is something that the BBC should really consider picking up where Russell has left off, because as Martin Belam notes: “The future of the BBC is mobile, according to ‘the kids'”
One beautiful marriage of an old medium with the dynamics of the new I discovered on BoingBoing, a site where an artist is painting a piece in oils once a day and posting it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have that arrive every morning on your phone?
At DesignEngaged, Pete B-W gave an enlightening talk on the potential of Flash on mobile devices, and Remon Tijssen (of Fluid Interactive) showed some of the interactive ‘toys’ that he had developed.
While never a great fan of Flash for the general purpose web, for mobile, where both connectivity and attention can be scarce, it could be a very powerful platform, especially for introduction more delight, flow and seduction into the everyday mobile user experience.
Finally, a lazyphone wish… I could think of nothing better as a mobile delight than to have the Flickr zeitgeist on my 6630, cycling through my friends photos as a screensaver…
var zg_person_scope = 2;var zg_scope_nsid = ‘35034345541@N01’;
Please excuse the dodgy prototyping!
Petafloptimism 