These are the rules I follow for my work related e-mail:

• I don’t use any kind of taxonomy to archive my messages. I have just one folder called “Archive” where I move all the messages that I may consider useful in the future. I trust search enough to be sure to find everything I want in a timely manner. Truth is that you will never be able to find what you want when you need it even with the most detailed taxonomy you can imagine. It’s also true that managing a complex taxonomy is really time consuming.
• Important to notice that there are very few messages that I keep in there. I tend to delete everything that is not meaningful to me for some reason.
• I am the General Manager in the Milan studio in frog design and I ask all the people in here not to copy me on every e-mail they send. I trust everybody is a professional and that they can do their work. If there is an issue on something, pick up the phone or just reach my desk.
• I have just another important folder called “ACP” that is an acronym for “Ad Culum Parandi” (Thanks to @agaved for the name he suggested during the old times in 3). In that folder I archive stuff that may be critical to save one of the most important things in my body. I’ll let you guess what it is.
• I check my message one every two hours and I have disable notifications. If there is something really urgent it should come through my phone or via a visit to my desk. Everything else can definitely wait for two hours.
• I am a big fan of Three Sentences and I use that rule every time I can.

These are my basic rules. More could be written on how I manage the content. Maybe another post in the future will be worth writing.

Do you have other rules? What are they?

Leave your comments. I will be happy to read.

Music has been one of the first areas where this become a reality.

With iRig you may turn you iPhone or iPad in a music studio. Just select the software modeled amp and effects and you are ready.

You can turn your iPhone in a POS accepting credit card with Square.

You can have a Geiger counter using a probe connected to your iPhone (here), or just simply use your phone camera to do it. (here)

You can measure distances using echoes (here).

There are dozens of application to check your heart rate using the mobile phone camera and flash, and one of your fingers.

Your phone can be used as a baby monitor, or a spy device if you like.

And these are just the applications I can remember right now. There are hundreds!

As I was writing in my previous post I think this is definitely a new area we should look at for innovation in mobile.

It shows how the environment around you can be connected to your mobile phones in ways that we could not imagine a few years ago. Current smartphones have so many sensors that we have just started to scratched the surface.

The interesting point is around technology. I am sure that engineers were not thinking about a distance measurement device when they place a mike and a speaker in your mobile phone. There will always be someone who will try to push the hardware and software to new limits. This already happened in the past with SMS, and the new hardware and software now available have just made that world closer to people willing to explore and innovate.

For sure you will not just place phone calls with your mobile. Not anymore.

Last week I had the chance to attend a big conference, and i was sitting in front of hundreds of people looking at them while they were listening at the speakers.

I always use these events as opportunities to observe people, and what they do. I am not working for a mobile telco operator anymore but my passion and love for mobile has not (yet) left me.

Everybody was sitting there in front of device screen. Lot of mobile phones, lot of tablets, few PCs.

And I was thinking: wow, mobile is there, really!

Some of them were taking pictures, others were recording the different speakers, some were sending status updates to Twitter or Facebook, or just reading e-mails during boring talks.

I knew I had to make a very short comment on a keynote and I just decided to tell this people why I think mobile is so important.

Your mobile is always with you

Can you think of any other consumer electronics device which spends more time with you? My mobile phone actually is spending with me much more time than my wife. Think about that, and realize that your user is there .

The user has time while in mobility

Time is a scarce resource. Just think about the time you spend on your phone to kill time while waiting for something.

The mobile phone delivers emotions

Isn’t that true? Think about it. Did you ever receive a message like this “Beatrice is here! Both mom and baby are doing fine”, “I think we need a break. I’ll call you”, “We won the deal! great job”. Positive or negative, they are emotions.

Objects can now talk to your mobile phone

Today, more than ever in the past, object are able to talk with your mobile. Barcodes, QR Code, NFC, pictures are just a few of the methods the real world can use to connect with your phone. This is a new dimension, and an important one.

You are always connected to the net

Well, ok, most of the times.

You mobile phone has many sensors

GPS, gyroscope, camera, and microphone are just some of the many ways your phone can collect data from you and the environment around you.

Would you add something to this list? Please, feel free to leave a comment if so.

If we look at the definition of innovation on Merriam-Webster online dictionary, here is what we get:

1. : the introduction of something new.
2. : a new idea, method, or device.

It’s quite simple, isn’t it.

Somehow when we think about innovation we always think to some scientist working in his lab full of expensive equipment. We feel like innovation is not simple at all.

Yesterday night I was cooking some past. I do like cooking and I have a few cooking pans on fire. One to boil water for pasta, another with some eggs in it, and the last one frying some bacon for Carbonara pasta.

I was cooking on autopilot and when bacon was ready I did not notice the handle was too close to the other pan and got very, very hot.

I hurt myself, nothing serious.

The main purpose of the handle on the cooking pan is to avoid these kind of problems, but it did not work since the handle was too close to another source of heat, the other cooking pan.

The original handle concept works for the majority of uses, but it could not avoid me to get hurt by heat. Since its original design, it did not change much. There are some fancy cooking pans with thermometer on the handle to check food temperature, but that’s more related to the food than to the safety of the user.

Yes, you know that handles can get hot and you should always use something to handle those pans. This is a rational thought. You have to think about it and not always you think, specially when you have three pans running at the same time.

There can be innovation in cooking pans? Obviously, yes.

We can think of:

• Having pans made of efficient material that will optimize energy spending.
• Different shape of pans for different food type.
• New nonstick material.
• Method to make cooking faster and better.

As you see, there is lot of room for innovation in pans. Most of the things I have written will take a lot of effort into development.

I was just thinking about an easy one.

I was just wondering why nobody has ever thought of having handles that can change color if they heat.

The usual nice looking black if everything is fine. Yellow if it’s hot, but still manageable, and red if it’s really hot.

Anyway, Carbonara pasta was great.

We will hold a special event at our Milan studio during the Salone del Mobile week.

Holger Hampf and Max Burton, both Executive Creative Directors at frog design, will give a speach on the future of product design in a connected world.

If you have some spare time, want to meet illuminated people and enjoy great food then join us on Friday April 15th.

We started looking at mobile device trends and one thing was quite evident: devices were getting smaller and smaller.

Here’s and example of what I was using at the time.
Motorola V60, great J2ME implementation for that time though.

Other similar handsets I was play with were the Ericsson T28 and the Nokia 8310. Small size and light weight was the main driver in GSM devices evolution.

Then we started to think what a UMTS mobile phone had to look alike and which services we were going to deliver to our clients. It was pretty much clear that the trend was going to be very different.

Multimedia was going to drive devices to bigger screen sizes and, possible, touch displays.

Year after year we saw screen size increase reaching what we see to day.

You range from basic candy bar mobile phone with a 2.2″ inches display up to the 3.5″ iPhone display and to the new Acer Stream 3.7″ display.

Touch and display size are playing a big role in the game today.

A new trend is emerging: satellite display devices.

The first example of this is the Sony Ericsson LiveView.

It’s a very nice device. 1.3″ display size, Android based. The Sony Ericsson LiveView will connect to your mobile phone and will display caller ID, incoming SMS, facebook notifications, twitter update and so on. It’s definitely a satellite of your mobile display small chunks of relevant informations.

What I like the most if that the device is programmable and you can install already baked applications from the Android market. Eventually Sony Ericsson will release an SDK to allow third parties to develop applications.

Actually Sony Ericsson already did this kind of stuff in the past with a bluetooth wrist watch that was able to display phone notifications. It was not programmable at but it was the first step toward LiveView.

Some other quite nice devices, not really converging to the mobile phone world are devices like the Texas Instrument eZ430 Chronos. It’s a programmable wristwatch that is equipped with short range communication features that will allow you connect the wristwatch with your personal computer.

Another interesting device, fully programmable via an SDK, is the inPulse wrist watch. It first appeared couple with a BlackBerry device allowing the client to see notifications without picking up his phone. In this case connectivity is provided by BlueTooth.

I definitely think these are interesting devices that may open up opportunities for new applications.

Notifications, quick interaction with a background application running on the phone are just the beginning.

There is a lot of space to build new stuff with these devices. Somehow I think this can be part of the future of mobile.

Which one would you get and what for?

Honestly I think that for the time being I would go with the Sony Ericsson LiveView, even if the inPulse is quite tempting.

I think it is one of the best product we ever designed, even if it had a troubled birth, somehow.

From a technical point of view it is nothing else that a MiFi device; a WiFi/UMTS router for domestic use.

The original idea was very simple. Let’s take an existing MiFi architecture, redesign it for domestic use, and simplify the end user User Experience.

Sounds easy, isn’t it. Well, it wasn’t.

Design wise it’s made of two different pieces. The first piece is the device itself. It can be plugged in a wall outlet and it will starts its operations automatically.

The second piece is a cradle where you can plug in the main device in order to place it on a desk or on any flat surface.

Design was an interesting exercise. We analyzed all of the MiFi devices and UMTS/WiFi routers out there and we dissected them from an hardware point of view. What are the functions of all the LEDs? How do you power the device? What visual indications are given to the user? How does the device communicates its status to the client?

The same process happened on the software side. How do you configure the device? How do you connect to the 3G network? How is the connection managed? How do you configure your WiFi connection?

We found that most products were complex, unfriendly and ugly. Well, most of them.

Our goal was to have a simple, simple, simple device.

The next step was to strip out everything.

What is important for the customer? The answer was an easy one:

1. He wants to know how strong the 3G signal is.
2. He wants to know the status of the device.

That’s it. Nothing else.

This is why the device has just one visual signal indicator in the front showing the strength of the 3G signal and a set of blues LEDs in the back to visually represent the status of the device.

We wanted our client not to be scared about the device and the configuration.

If you look at the main device it’s a very simple one. It has a plug on the back, one button in the front and that’s it. When the client will take it out of the box the very first thing that he will see is the wall plug. The only thing he can do is to plug the device. Nothing else.

Then some magic happens. The device turns on automatically, connect to the 3G network and powers up the WiFi interface. In less than fifteen seconds the device is up and running.

Now you are ready to connect to the Internet.

Just look at the quick user guide and type the WiFi password on your personal computer and your connected.

Three simple steps compared to a much difficult path with other devices.

We have seen other products with huge user manuals and CDs in the packaging. We did not want this.

The packaging is very simple. You have the main device, the cradle and just one leaflet with the quick user guide. That’s it.

The quick user guide has been designed to be visual in order to show to client what he has to do to connect to the Internet in three single steps.

My team has worked really hard on this product, and it is not perfect. What’s the reason?

Any product, or service, you design has to cope with existing processes in your company and we had to go through so many hurdles with this. We come down to compromises that somehow made the product less friendly compared to what we originally designed. Well, you know. That’s how it works.

Nevertheless it is something I am really proud of.

Thank you to all of my ex-team who has worked on this and to all of the colleagues that made this happen: Adam, Sergio, Lavinia, Mauro, Marco, Oronzo, Francesco, Marco, Marlene and so many others.

We wanted to create magic, and now I still do!

Yesterday night I come across this dicussion on FriendFeed. (Sorry, it’s in Italian)

Here’s what happened. Paola Caruso has been working at Corriere della Sera for seven years with several temp contracts. Honestly temp contract is not the right word to describe the type of contract Paola has been working with. It is quite difficult to explain to a non Italian reader which is the sense and scope, if any, of these kind of contracts.

Anyway, back to the story.

After sever years of hard work one of her colleagues resigns and she finally thinks it’s her turn to land the job. Guess what. It did not happen. The job was assigned to a fresh school of journalism graduate. If you live in Italy you will quickly guess why: friend of a friend, possibly a very important friend.

For this reason Paola decided to voluntary stop of eating and drinking.

Corriere della Sera is a private company and their can hire who they want. No discussion on this, even if, at least internally, they should justify those choices with someone who has been working seven years with, as I read, good performances.

The most absurd thing here is that the company seems to have used a temp contract for seven years to avoid the hiring of a full time employee. This is where we should investigate and ask for clarifications to Corriere della Sera.

This is a very common issue in Italy and we can’t stand with this anymore.

For the time being I will personally stop buying the newspaper and I have just deleted the application from my iPhone and my iPad. I will also stop reading the online version. Not much, I agree.

Dear Mr Ferruccio de Bortoli, editor in chief, would you please explain us what’s happening and why?

[Update]

I have received some personal messages on this with some criticism on what I wrote and I think they deserve an answer.

It’s quite clear that we do not know what criteria Corriere della Sera’s has used in hiring someone in place of Paola. The fact that she has not been hired in the first place does not automatically mean that someone else has been pushed to that position. That’s not the point I was making here.

The main point is that in Italy we have a labour law that is killing this country or, to be less dramatic, not applied as it was supposed to be.

This is why I think we cannot accept what’s happened to Paola, her being just one of those 20% of the working force in Italy in the very same situation.

And this is why I would like to read an explanation from Corriere della Sera.

Short. Jim Furyk, a pro golfer, was disqualified from a PGA tour event because he showed up late at the tee.

Why did this happen? Simply because his mobile phone where he set the alarm died because the battery was drained.

I think that this has happened to almost any of us at least once in our life.

This would have not happened if the pro had used a more common alarm clock with much more long lasting batteries.

So, it the mobile phone the jack of all trades, master of none?

I think so.

Nowadays mobile phone can do a lot of task usually performed by electronic devices.

They can act as an alarm clock, they can take pictures, they can read and send emails and so on.

As we have seen their battery can easily drain and fai to wake you up; the pictures you can take may be worse than those you can take with a dedicated camera and your desktop email client is for sure better than your mobile one.

At the end of the day we are keen to sacrifice some functionalities in order to aggregate them in one single device.

What do you think?