Apple released an iPhone App with which you can remote control iTunes on your Mac or Apple TV.

There is even a nifty feature that allows friends to request songs when they are at a party at your house (iTunes DJ).

They were a bit early though with the release date. I predicted September 2008, but it came out June 2008.

The SAP Future Retail Center researches usage scenarios with RFID tags. I had the chance to visit it thanks to the Alumni Wirtschaftsinformatik of the University of Zurich.

The technology is already used in closed systems, e.g. during the supply chain on palettes. But there are still some technical issues that prevent RFID tags from being used on every product in retail stores:

• A lot of the demonstrations did not work at all.
• When scanning a shopping cart, the scanner only recognized 98% of all products.
• RFID tags are still too expensive.
• There are scanning-problems when the shopping cart contains certain materials. For example:
• water (orange juice etc.)
• metal (also Tetra Paks)


• The market for RFID tags is still fragmented. Most vendors only sell scanners, or tags, but just a few vendors sell everything.

Conclusion
Having in mind that RFID retail stores are a hot topic for years, it was astonishing to see that the prototypes are more a proof-of-concept than really ready for the market.

Main points:

• the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content
• Challenge: how to rank real-time social media (e.g. from Twitter)?
• broadband will be way faster than today and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

Read more at the NYTimes

I tried to find some information about the coming installment of wi-fi in my hometown Zug.

So I searched for "WLAN Stadt Zug", but only found the official postulate of the local party FDP. I was more than suprised to see no news-article from the local newspaper "Zuger Zeitung".

My parents said that they read something about wi-fi in the newspaper, so the article was in the newspaper but can not be found via Google. If they would publish a title and a teaser in the internet, maybe people below 40 would also get interested in reading local news.

Only those who pay $50 per year additionally to their yearly subscription can access the newspaper-archive by internet. But why should I pay if I don't get informed about interesting news-articles via a Google-Search?

Some time ago I received a parcel from Taiwan. A company called Mobile Action asked me if I wanted to write a blog-review about their new GPS-Logging solution.

They do not only sell the GPS-receiver (called i-gotU), they also provide a software (called @trip PC) to combine the pictures with the GPS-data and an online-platform (called @trip) to upload your GPS-tracks and pictures.

The i-gotU GPS-receiver is obviously smaller than the Garmin Etrex Vista (which I wrote an article about some time ago).



I took the i-gotU on a trip:


Here the advantages and drawbacks that I found using the i-gotU:

Advantages:

• The software automatically detects the i-gotU and you can import the GPS-data. The import of the photos from the camera also is a smooth process. The software automatically connects the GPS-data and the pictures and presents them on a Map. The whole process of importing GPS-Data, connecting it to the pictures and uploading it to the web is as easy as possible.
• It's fun to re-walk your trip via the PC-Software or in the web. Check out my test-track:
  http://www.a-trip.com/tracks/view/31639
  If you push play you can experience the way that I went.
• The i-gotU is small and water-resistant.
• You can directly upload photos to flickr or picasaweb while uploading your trip, which is great!
• It's cheap at about $60.

Drawbacks:

• The software only runs on Windows, so you need a PC or a virtual machine like VMWare or parallels. I used VMWare Fusion.
• There are only 2 LED-Lights to communicate the current status of the i-gotU, which is not really user-friendly. ("What is the meaning again of the red light on an d the blue light blinking?") Check out this short video:
  
• A big no-go: @trip Terms of Services refer to the privacy policy of Mobile Action, but there is no link to that privacy policy. Even on the homepage of @trip there is no link to the terms of service or a privacy policy. This definitely helps not to get trust into @trip.
  

You can buy the i-gotU on Amazon:
Tracker i-gotU GT-120

My master's thesis Ontology-Based Cultural Personalization in Mobile Applications is ready to download as a PDF.
For your convenience the bibtex for citation is available at the website of the University of Zurich.

If you would like to get a short overview about the thesis, you can check out the slides of a talk I did about my thesis:

I cleaned up my room and got rid of old technology.

I found a Microsoft HelpPoint in an electronic retailer "Fust" in Zug. Seems like the HelpPoint need some support itself. Isn't it ironic?

The mobile application "Mint" makes it possible to pay with your mobile phone and keep track of your spendings.

For example at the grocery store you can pay with Mint. The amount to be paid is sent wirelessly to Mint and you can select your preferred credit card or bank account:


You enter your PIN-Code and you are done:


Afterwards MintBudgeteer calculates your new budget and shows you how much money you have left to buy stuff:



This scenario and the images are taken from a presentation by John Pettengill. He states that future mobile internet should not just be the internet on a smaller screen. The presentation is embedded below. The scenario starts at slide 60.

I did another guest post on UsabilityBlog.com, this time about the annoying "user trap" when adding a new user to your LinkedIn network. You might remember my last article about the Sony Ericsson PC Suite. I thank Paul for letting me contribute another article.

A copy of the post is archived below. If you want to comment about the article, you can do so at the UsabilityBlog.

How fast things change. I wanted to write about a workflow in LinkedIn, which had annoyed me for months, but they have fixed it in the meantime, before I could publish the article.

So anyhow, here is the article:

One of the most used functions in Linkedin is to add a new user to your own network. If you don't know the e-mail address of the person or other personal information you can choose "I don't know xy".

Then the user can enter a personal message and click the "Send Invitation" button. Which opens the following message:

The only way to proceed is to click "Go back to xy's profile". The personal message is lost! You stepped into the Linkedin user trap.
Of course, according to the Linkedin policy you're supposed to add only contacts you personally know, but since you can bypass this rule anyhow by selecting "Friend", it's illusory to educate the user by punishing him to re-enter a personal message.

There are two solutions to avoid this unpleasant interaction:
- A "Close"-Button instead of a "Go back to xy's profile"-button
- Pop up the message immediately, when the user selects "I don't know xy", instead of giving him the feeling, that he now can enter a personal message for that person.

As we can see, they solved it with a "close" link.

Youtube implemented the "deep link"-Feature which appeared in newsofthefuture in 2007. The predicted date was quite accurate (October 20th, it was introduced on October 30th) but the year was one year too early. It was introduced in 2008.

If you want to test the deep-link feature, try this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ULVQOneeZE#t=2m16s Unfortunately with several tries it only worked once for me.

In Viddler this still works better: http://www.viddler.com/explore/rocketboom/videos/1312/77.31/

The MIT Technology Review asked different people what the future of the web will look like. Besides "mobile" and "higher access speed" there were also some interesting converse thoughts.

Bjarne Stroustrup - Designer of the C++ programming language
The total end of privacy.

vs.

Mena Trott - Cofounder of Six Apart
I can easily see someone putting 75 percent of their day online. But it won't all be public. The ­majority will be for that person's eyes only; it will be more a record for that individual.


Leah Culver - Cofounder of Pownce
Open standards will always be the future of the Web.

vs.

Jonathan Zittrain - Professor of law
An abandonment of open standards and services (like the collective hallucination that is our distributed e-mail system) and a return to the gated communities


Richard Stallman - Founder of the Free Software Movement
I see a danger in the Web today: doing your computing on servers running software you can't change or study, and entrusting your data to U.S. companies

vs.

Marc Benioff - Founder of Salesforce.com
Companies such as Salesforce.com, Google, and Amazon are making it possible to create and run powerful business applications in the cloud, and that will change the economics of the software industry forever.

Reminds me of the blog entry about the BBC article.


Picture by courtesy of visual think map

There is an interesting talk of Marc Laperrouza at the LIFT Conference about the use and the social impact of mobile phones in Asia especially China.

I picked one of his slides as a teaser, watch the full video below



The video can also be found on the LIFT Website.

Be sure to download the slides as well because the are not readable in the video.

For the mobile phone menu of my master's thesis I needed some icons.

I found following good sources for free icons:

Silk icons
Very well designed and a lot of icons for different subjects
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

vbarchiv.net
A huge archive. Not smoothly designed though, most icons look like Windows icons in the 90s did.
http://www.vbarchiv.net/download/icons.php
for free use

Pinvoke.com
http://pinvoke.com/
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license

Mini Pixel Icons
Icons available in different color sets.
http://www.ndesign-studio.com/resources/mini-pixel-icons/
Write a link back to http://www.ndesign-studio.com/ if over 10 used


Based on the Silk icons, i created some more icons:



I put the edited icons online licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Download as zip file.

Check out the current Carnival of the Mobilists at Wap Review which contains my blog post
February 23, 2010 - Comment text from books with your mobile phone