By: VideoJug
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgNYvQBMYIg

Visit http://www.videojug.com – for thousands more how-to videos and tutorials!

Paper Airplanes don’t look particulalry menacing, but you wouldn’t want to find this plane flying at you in a dark alley at night. With a unique two-pronged approach to flight, it’s a nightmarish HELL PLANE.

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Ok, so my first task – internet.

No one wants to roam when traveling as it severely damages your wallet, SEVERELY! Airports generally don’t have simple wifi access, (although I have to admit that Qatar was pretty good). Finding a shop to purchase a prepaid card is only possible on high streets and even when you have tracked one down they are crowded so you end up queuing for hours to get any kind of service.

In Scandinavia it takes on a whole new dimension. Everything is self-serve and tied to a “local mobile” or to a credit card with a PIN.

ATMs

Now, coming from Hong Kong I never had to use my credit card PIN, so I basically didn’t even know I had one. I decided to withdraw some cash, but the banks and ATM tie your withdrawal to your savings account instead of your current account so unless you are sticking your cash into an almost interest free savings account you can’t withdraw it either.

I went to change the British pounds I had left over but that also turned out to be difficult as the exchange counter had shut at 10pm.

Payment for Local transport.

Ok not to worry I have a credit card I think…. so I head to the airport train, again its self serve which is great, but, oh sure, it only works with a credit card with a PIN!….I try a couple of combinations hoping that it might have lodged in the more primitive part of my memory. Nope, even a neanderthal man had no idea. I know…I’ll try my bank card to see if that works, nope!

Luckily I noticed a lady at a counter and told her my situation. She was kind enough to use my credit card, print a receipt for me to sign and gave me cash so I could get on the train to Oslo and get in a cab. The cab driver was surprisingly enough able to allow me to pay using credit card with a signature.

On the way back after all my meetings I grab a taxi to the train station. There was no counter. There are only machines to buy tickets… I’ll just get on the train and see what happens. Play the ignorant tourist and find a conductor who can take a credit card. We arrive at the airport and next thing I know there are gates where I need to swipe my ticket through to get out. Again I had to leverage my “people skills” to get out.

Now hanging out at the airport… trying 50 different ways to get access to a free 1 hour wireless connection using both my UK prepaid number and my Hong Kong mobile number to get sms passwords…what we do on a journey.

Argh…no battery left and nowhere to charge it!

Next stop San Francisco,

Stefan

By: thenextweb
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2nVcS3NPvo

Susan Crawford @ tnw2012 keynote

Go For Gold with Mobile Apps: Olympics 2012

Key metrics, who’s doing what, successful applications, key brands, top developers, future trends and more…

Thinking about how you can tie the Olympics, Mobile and your brand together for London 2012?

The London Olympics 2012 is going to be the most connected and watched event in history. As a result Corporations and their brands are trying to connect with the mobile fans during such a global event where athletes from all over the world will be celebrating victory and defeat. How does your company tap into the emotions providing instant updates and gratification to the mobile population around the globe?

You will find inside this report

- What some of the Fortune 500′s are planning

- What has been shown to work well in the past

- What are the hot trends that you might want to include in your app

- and more…

Download the report. http://www.exicon.mobi/report-download/olympics2012

And if you are looking to get mobile by July 2012 or even plan for the World Cup or the next Winter Olympics, feel free to contact us, amanda@exicon.mobi to talk through some options.

Exicon can help take your business mobile as well as connect you to top developers globally.

By: liam young
Source: http://vimeo.com/user5313848

In the skies above the city a drone flock drifts into formation broadcasting their local file sharing network. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm they form a pirate internet, an aerial napster, darting between the buildings….

Today we are much closer to our virtual community than we are to our real neighbours. This death of distance has created new forms of city based around ephemeral digital connections rather than physical geography. The infrastructure that drove the development of the city was once large permanent networks of roads, plumbing and park spaces but are now nomadic digital networks, orbiting GPS satellites and cloud computing connections.

Revolutionary communities are coalescing around social networks and text messages and occupy the city with the force to topple governments. The U.S. military’s has development autonomous aerial drones that they can be launched across a place like Egypt, when the government cut off internet access to prevent people from organizing protests. These drones would fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure.

Electronic Countermeasures is a project inspired by these new forms of nomadic infrastructure. The project explores the design and manufacture of a flock of interactive autonomous drones that form their own place specific, temporary, local, WIFI community- a pirate internet.
We have built a flock of GPS enabled quadcopter drones from components that were originally intended for aerial reconnaissance and police surveillance to create this flying pirate file sharing network. The drones are autonomous and drift above the public spaces of the city as a balletic interactive aerial choreography. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local wifi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere.

The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with. It is a site specific file sharing hub, a temporary, emergent online community where content and information is exchanged across the drone network. When on location, a visitor can log onto the drone network with their phones and laptops. When the audience interacts with the drones they glow with vibrant colours, they break formation, they are called over and their flight pattern becomes more dramatic and expressive. Impromptu augmented communities form around the glowing flock. Their aerial dance and dynamic glowing formations give visual expression to the digital communities of the city.

By Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today
www.tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com
twitter: @liam_young

with
Eleanor Saitta
Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
Superflux

Drone Pilots
Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
Eleanor Saitta
Tobias Rosenstock

Project Team
Denis Vlieghe
Mond Qu
Dessi Lyutakova

Supported by
Mu Gallery, NL
GLOW Festival, NL
Buzzflyer

Music by
Clint Mansell, Drive OST.

Exicon was present in Barcelona with a team of seven supporting two of our own events and speaking on a panel with McCann Erickson, Coca Cola, Mastercard, and Nielsen.

Furthermore the team had
- 27 existing, new and potentially new customer meetings
- 23 developer interviews
- attended 6 launch and “fringe”events

This industry remains a growth industry with a strong demand for talent, experience and resources. Operators are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation and are trying to find their role beyond being just a carrier of data and traffic. In addition to the usual themes around applications, infrastructure and devices the core themes this year were
- mobile Health
- mobile Money
- connected devices and sensors
- mobile Engagement (advertising)
- mobile Enterprise
- LTE (or 4G)
- Traffic offloading onto WiFi

However my key takeaway was that:
Apple, the key innovator behind this mobile revolution was again not present. Take it how you like, but this demonstrates that they remain dominant and this is not likely to change in the next 2-3 years. Nearly every phone from the delegates at MWC was an iPhone. Ewan Macgregor at “Mobile Industry Review” has a good article on this http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2012/03/bad-news-almost-everyone-at-mwc-had-an-iphone.html

1. Consumerization of Mobile
The consumer will buy their own devices as the competition in the mobile device space increases. This will drive down the cost of mobile devices fast. Huawei announced their Aspire model, ZTE was handing out tablets, TCL Alcatelonetouch was aggressively customizing smartphones for operators, Nokia announced their new phones, Samsung was omnipresent, Lenovo is just getting ready to enter the market and Blackberry is working on its own strategy… and these are just the big names.

With the cost of mobile smartphones dropping, the adoption of smartphones is going to be much faster than forecasted. Android is the dominant OS for smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia are trying to re-invent themselves. Sony, who bought out Ericsson from the joint venture (funny how it went from Ericsson phones to SonyEricsson JV to now Sony) was irrelevant.

The last interesting observation is that the devices are predominantly from Asian brands, with the software still from the North America. The intelligence is in the software though.

2. Moving from Mobile to Mobility
It’s no longer just about the mobile industry, businesses have recognized the importance of mobility. With more tablets entering the market, the competitive pressure for speed combined with the “instant gratification” generation, the adoption of tablets in the corporate world is rapidly increasing. This in turn is fueling the need for businesses to extend their business assets (products and services) onto these mobile terminals.

3. Data & Measurement
The importance of data is inherent. Identifying the right data sets, capturing this data before cleaning and de-duping the data is essential to begin working with it. Data is critical in order to provide a contextual user experience in a mobile world. With your mobile you have now the added dimension of space/location. Combined with time, mobility and a 3″ to 9″ screen, usage patterns and traffic derived from the data will provide much richer context in future services and greater monetization.

This video by Michael Rigley shows you the kind of metadata your mobile network captures with the example of an MMS (multimedia message) http://vimeo.com/34750078. Obviously there are a number of companies working to support operators with their unstructured data. We had a number of partners on this topic with clients such as HP with Autonomy and Vertica products and developers from our network Neuralitic, Lynx Analytics and more.

4. Privacy. It’s dead. Get over it! It’s about Trust and User Control
“Privacy is dead, deal with it.”– Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems
If consumers want and expect services and applications for free they are going to have to give up something in return. This something is the data showing how they use the services and applications (this data is anonymized btw).  Whilst it has the advantage of providing a better user experience targeting more relevant services and content it does carry the risk of confusion and abuse.

Privacy in return for free services, particularly on mobile is over. Governments and regulators are trying to keep up with the pace of technology and find ways to remain in control whilst enabling their economies to remain competitive.

There is general consensus that governments should not regulate in this area. They are too much aligned with legacy industries with legacy laws put in place during times before the digital age. SOPA, PIPA and ACTA are both examples of what happens when governments get involved.

Governance is still is a concern and a ”creative commons” type approach seems to be bubbling up. On a panel Exicon and Coca Cola were proposing such an approach.

To add a bit of flavor check out this Ted-X presentation on the “$8-Billion iPod” from Rob Reid http://youtu.be/GZadCj8O1-0

The users want to be able to control their privacy online. Companies need to provide their users with the tools to manage their privacy and control the settings. Consumers also expect to be told what rights they are handing over, when using services and applications. They expect to trust the corporations with their data and this is more “ethical” than legal. It’s not easy for corporations to navigate this, but it is a process.

If you don’t want to give away your data, you can pay for premium services!

5. You can’t do it on your own
It’s become very clear that with the current speed of innovation happening simultaneously on multiple fronts (mobile, big data, consumerization, virtualization, social etc etc), corporations can’t keep the pace on their own. There is a clear shift toward appreciating the importance of ecosystems of partners, but a lack of understanding how to embrace and build an ecosystem.

Software companies have mastered this, working with third party partners building applications on their operating systems and building features in the software. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc have a strong history and legacy investment in developer ecosystems. More and more technology companies are building out these skills to extend their capabilities to the more nimble and faster moving smaller companies and start-ups.

This trend will rapidly move across into the enterprise world with Walmart, J&J, Coca Cola and Mastercard already investing in developer communities to exploit the mobile opportunity.

6. AR the cool new technology, still trying to find a market
This is a trend that is going to stick. Still early days, but this has potential for the future. We held two demos at our events. You can check out the following videos:
1. Aurasma, a UK technology owned by Autonomy and now HP
http://youtu.be/Gt2bR8-_3LY
2. Wikitude, an Austrian company, who have some very interesting projects coming out very soon
http://youtu.be/g-0cuqeUvCQ

Now you’ve seen it, imagine when you  combine this with the Microsoft Kinect (which you buy with your Xbox)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_cYKFdP1_0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0wGFR1pt-Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBBCMudnAKM

We will be sharing the content and takeaways on our Facebook page and on Slideshare. Follow us there, you can get some additional background for our events here:
1. The Innovation Exchange with Qtel www.exicon.mobi/qtel
2. mPowered Brands with HP and Intel www.exicon.mobi/mpowered

By: GoogleTechTalks
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZGCPap7GkY

Google Tech Talk
January 24, 2011

Presented by Sebastian Deterding

ABSTRACT

Foursquare, GetGlue, Nike+, Badgeville: From reading news to fulfilling your hearts’ desires, more and more “gameified” applications and “gamification” vendors doll out points and badges to users, promising anything from increased user engagement and retention to plain mind control. While some hold that adding such game elements to non-game applications opens a new decade of design, others criticize current implementations as shallow “pointsification” and overselling of a new digital snake oil. What lessons do games really offer for user experience design? Which criticisms are valid? And what can designers interested in “gameifying” an application do to steer clear of the worst pitfalls? In this talk, researcher and designer Sebastian Deterding provides an overview of the current gamification movement, its most troubling blind spots, the motivational powers of games, and how to design for a playful experience that is truly meaningful to its users.

Sebastian Deterding – Sebastian Deterding is a user experience designer and game researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he currently pursues a PhD on the motivational psychology of gameified applications. He speaks and publishes internationally on gamification, social games, and the social contexts of video games at events such as the Gamification Summit, Gamescom, reboot, Playful, or DiGRA. His work has been covered by The Guardian, the LA Times, The New Scientist, EDGE Magazine, and Fast Company’s Co.Design. He co-hosts the Gamification Workshop at this year’s CHI conference in Vancouver. Web: codingconduct.cc Twitter: @dingstweets

Google TechTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics including Current Affairs, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Humanities, Law, Entertainment, and the Arts.

DISCLAIMER

The views or opinions expressed by the guest speakers are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Google Inc.

By: DLDconference
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2bR8-_3LY

Matt Mills, Introduced by: David Kirkpatrick

Based on the MMS you can build information on the
- Sending User and recepient
- Data packages on both sides
- Location and type of communication across the parties
- Relationship between the 2 parties based on Frequency
all this from the Metada associated with MMS

Check it out.

By: Michael Rigley
Source: http://vimeo.com/nonomy

Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network.

BFA Thesis
CCA Graphic Design

A few months ago, Stefan, the CEO charged into the office evangelizing about this great mobile app he’d been trying out -“Expensify” (www.expensify.com) – and that we were all missing out.

Now, Simon, our CFO, was naturally completely uptight (sorry, Simon) about the impact that it might have on extra workload for our finance team and the reliability of our records going forward. In fact he found that the system would not only meet the current requirements but would also save both traveling employees, and the finance team, significant amounts of time. He therefore gave the process a good kick and piled more of us onto the bandwagon.

I have to say that it is a great app that allows me to take a photo of the receipt as soon as I get it, tag it according to pre-set policy guidelines that Simon has set. I can submit it directly from my phone but I tend to do a quick review sitting at my laptop so that I can do a last reality check. Also, I can also check the status of all my submitted expense reports at any time

And if I do end up at home with a pocketful of receipts that I have managed to miss then Expensify is so easy that I have been known to get my 11 year old to give me a hand. Luckily she is young enough not to know the child labour laws and happily uploads all of the expenses, properly dated and tagged etc.

Well worth the investment and it’s a huge hit with our team… and my bank manager.