Well, so far, all I can say definitively is that it’s fully Web2.0 gradient-fill compliant.
Inaugural Mobile Monday London: November 7th…
UPDATE
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If you have arrived here by searching for MoMoLondon, let me be completely clear, this is not the site of MoMoLondon!
If you are planning on going to Mobile Monday London,
- please do go and join the group/mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon/
- Visit and bookmark the nascent official site: www.mobilemonday.org.uk
- Make sure you PRE-REGISTER on the mailing list
———-
I’ve just been on a conference call with the group that are starting up the London ‘branch’ of the Mobile Monday events. If you’re not familiar with them, then they have been running ideas, debate and networking events about mobile technology, business and culture around the world for a few years.
The first London Mobile Monday (or, MomoLondon) will take place on the 7th November at Vodafone’s offices on the Strand in central London from 6pm. N.B. YOU WILL NEED TO PRE-REGISTER FOR SECURITY REASONS! Visit the MoMoLondon Yahoo Group for details.
The theme was tentatively set as “Connecting the physical and digital world” – with topics such as location-based services, optical code reading and some others to be agreed.
One of the messages that came out loud and clear from those participating on the planning call was that it should be idea-rich and powerpoint-light.
Yay!
Also, it was stressed that what interested most people was to move forward the thinking as a whole at the intersection of business, technology and user-experience.
One other idea that was strongly supported was trying to get academic and industry research in the mix – so that we finally can move on from the “Joe arrives in a new city and wants to find his nearest pizza” use cases…
Personally, I’d like to see the definition of the mobile discussion stretch outside of just cellular – to personal media players, connected game decks (anyone from Sony London Studio still reading??) and ubiquitous computing.
From a very selfish viewpoint, I’d like a monthly event about mobile tech, design, business and culture that I looked forward to, so, I’ve tried to mail a few folk I know who work on designing user-experience for mobile to get them roped in, and hopefully posting here, cast the net a little wider and get more user-research and design folk involved.
Here are the details of the group if you’d like to join:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon/
The main driving purpose is of course to get together those in working on mobile digital stuff to talk, drink, swap ideas and have a laugh. Please do pass this on to people you work with if they would be interested, and hopefully see you soon at one of the MoMoLondonsâ¦
Hume channels Huizinga
Carlo Longino on Gizmodo posts an article with a title very close to my heart, The Casual Games Revolution. It features extensive quotage from Tom Hume of Future Platforms, including this ludic beauty:
“The other thing to consider is that play is a very natural thing for any mammal,” Hume says. “We all play, where it’s hopscotch, bingo, scratchcards or CounterStrike. My cats are casual gamers.”
Which has left me feline like a game of something…
Sorry.
“The city that ate the world”
Has to be in the running for best article headline of the year, and – simultaneously, a Morrison/Ellis story waiting to happen. It’s in fact from a piece by Deyan Sudjic on the singularity of citybuilding that is China, and specifically Beijing:
There are dumps of steel everywhere. So much steel, in fact, that it starts to become only too clear how the Chinese hunger for the metal has pushed up world prices to the point that British construction sites are rediscovering the art of building in concrete. There is enough steel here to explain why Australia has reopened iron-ore mines and why ship brokers have taken bulk carriers out of mothballs from their anchorages in the Falmouth estuary…
By some estimates, half the world’s annual production of concrete and one-third of its steel output is being consumed by China’s construction boom.
Definately worth a read, if just to boggle at the rate of change of the rate of change, conveyed by Sudjic’s personal recollections of his visits to Beijing over the last fifteen years. And also how “starchitects” like Rem Koolhaas frame the somewhat Faustian nature of their work there:
Westerners such as the critic Ian Buruma question the propriety of designing a building that can be seen as endorsing the propaganda arm of a repressive state that tells a billion people what to think. It is criticism which Koolhaas dismisses with growing impatience. ‘Participation in China’s modernisation does not have a guaranteed outcome,’ he told one interviewer. ‘The future of China is the most compelling conundrum, its outcome affects all of us and a position of resistance seems somehow ornamental.’
Resistance Is Ornamental – the cry of the globalist neomodern Borg-in-Prada?
The perils of living a digital double life
From a comment deep down in this gamesblog post on the success of Nintendogs:
I died on WoW last night too, as I was feeding my Rat Dog!
A dilemma doubtless to be repeated as the artificial becomes a-life less ordinary…
Casual Services: The ambiguity of work
In a post rich with ideas from Russell Beattie, this one stood out for me:
“Casual Services – I wonder if thereâs a way to apply the lessons of the success of Casual Games to Web 2.0 type services? I think this is what the 37 Signals guys are really doing with their suite of apps, no? Backpack, Ta-Da and Writely are all easy to pick up and start using, easy to share, and yet are compelling in their own functional way. Yes, there are more advanced, all-encompassing services out there like Salesforce.com, but though theyâre the same thing in a way, they meet completely different needs. I need to think about this more, but I think thereâs more analogies to be made along these lines.”
Absolutely.
I think this adds to Janice and JJG’s thought of ‘feature-stingy apps’ from their interview with David Weinberger at Supernova this year as it accentuates the positive about an app being mr. in-between…
Sorry. That was terrible.
The ambiguity of pay
If you were in any doubt of the enclosure-acts-like enabling power of rights technology, or the jeremiads of Cory Doctorow et al, then pay attention to what Andrew just pointed out:
“So has no one else pointed out that until today, all those Music Videos in the iTunes store were free to watch? That kind of sucks, no?”
!!!
Loop Guru
About the most amazing (recorded) performance I’ve seen and heard in a while: Jamie Lidell performing live [Quicktime, BIG!] found via the USC IMD blog.
The shipping bones
Saturday morning – Foe remarked on my Pavlovian response to the opening bars of “Sailing By”, the music that introduces the late-night shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4.
Usually I am asleep by the end of it, or well on my way. Sometimes I can last until around South Utsire before I’m snoring like a taser’d walrus.
We have a DAB digital radio by the side of the bed, and Foe’s idea was to have the latest shipping forecast spooled on there for on-demand consumption, whenever you needed a nap.
I went one further, suggesting it gets spooled to your mobile, in order to take it where you want – a nap in the park, or if you’re been travelling to other timezones – a digital, portable melatonin replacement to get you to sleep wherever, whenever. The audio could be transmitted by bone-conduction under your pillow, as not to disturb others.
Foe then trumped this suggestion by taking the bone-conduction theme to its natural conclusion – the shipping forecast implanted, resonant in one’s bones; the offshore outlook of your sceptred isle sending you a-slumber whenever your head rested on your shoulder…
MUDning
Following through a link from Andrew Otwell’s post on Ning, to see in the comments a bottlerocket from Dav Coleman, perhaps reflecting that providing people with Lego-like code lets them ‘play well’:
“theyâre a bit like descendants of MUDs when you think about it”
Oh my.
Yes.
Paging Yoz to the red courtesy phone.
Petafloptimism 