Future Applications Lab

APPNATION is a new conference and exposition focusing on the burgeoning consumer applications economy. It will focus on social and mobile apps across all devices and platforms and the editorial focus will be on the business conversation including monetization, new media business models, advertising and marketing best practices, and consumer insights and analytics. APPNATION will take place September 13-14 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.

Of particular interest is the closing keynote event:
A Tribute to Mark Weiser, the Father of Ubiquitous Computing, and the Rise of the Mobile Mash-Up
Panelists:

• Lars Erik Holmquist, Mobile Life Centre, Swedish Institute of Computer Science
• Mike Kuniavsky, Orange Cone, author of Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design
• Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of the Ubiquitous Computing Area, Palo Alto Research Center
• Mattias Rost, Mobile Life Centre, Swedish Institute of Computer Science

The panel will look back at the dawn of ubiquitous computing at PARC, and ahead with the rise of mobile apps and beyond.

The conference can offer a discounted academic rate with 50% off the regular fee for full conference passes ($397 net cost). Simply go to online registration at www.appnationconference.com and use the code: DIFC50

We have finished study of Portrait Catalog under the disguise as Most Wanted during the Ung08 youth festival! The festival lasted four 5 days during which a countless number of teenagers visited the tent, more than 400 had their picture taken and around 300 installed the app!
We are now analysing the data from the study.

Mattias Jacobsson, Ylva Fernaeus and Rob Tieben made a rendezvous in Aarhus, Denmark where they presented the paper entitled "The Look, the Feel and the Action: Making Sets of ActDresses for Robotic Movement" at the Designing Interactive Systems conference. Plenty of amazing research were presented together with live demonstrations of art and technology pieces e.g. lumiBots. The contrasting artistic music like the improvisational jazz and the ambient live band during the wonderful -probably the best in the world- conference dinner are things that attendees will remember for quite some time.

FAL and Kulturskolan are running a mobile mugshot competition for youths 13-19 years at the Ung 08 festival! You can get your photo taken and share it using our mobile app, the Portrait Catalog. The best networker (who shares the most pictures) will win a phone from our partner Sony Ericsson. The event runs until Saturday, July 14. Here are some pictures from the Most Wanted tent in Kungsträdgården, Stockholm...

The Portrait Catalog is a mobile phone app that lets you share a picture of yourself with your friends. The twist is that you can only get a picture directly from another person via Bluetooth, so to collect pictures you have to meet people in real life! We will be giving away the Portrait Catalog at the Ung 08 festival, a 5-day event for youths between 13 and 19 organized by the City of Stockholm. Users will also have a chance to get their personal photo taken, and share this through Facebook and become the festival's Most Wanted. To encourage the use of the app we are giving away Sony Ericsson Xperia phones as the prize for the coolest photo and for the best networker - the person who has shared the most photos during the festival! You can find us at Kungsträdgården in Stockholm during August 8 to 14.

Lars Erik Holmquist recently held a remote lecture on Designing Digital Artifacts, as part of the course Advanced Contextual Design at Keio University. The lecture was recorded (as PowerPoint slideshow with voiceover) and is now available for viewing in two 30-minute segments. You can view the lectures by clicking on the links below, or download the files to view later.

The first part of the lecture introduces the concept of digital artifacts and puts in in the context of the development of interactive and embedded computing systems.Click here to view the first part or download for offline viewing (307 MB .mov file)

The second part gives a number of examples of digital artifacts designed by the author and collaborators, drawn from over ten years of research.Click here to see the second part or download for offline viewing (299 MB .mov file)

Between 6th and 19th of June we will present the Digital Flowerwall at the Stockholm LOVE festival together with KTH. Please come and visit us at the ICT pavilion set up at "Skeppsbron" and try it out! Kudos to GoldWare for providing additional hardware.

Lars Erik Holmquist has a guest post at CrunchGear (also featured on TechCrunch) about the past, present and future of mobile and ubiquitous computing. It relates ubicomp research - including many FAL projects - to the possibilities that have opened up with new infrastructures, and argues that the rate of innovation in mobile services is about to take a quantum leap. Follow the link to read the whole article:The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up by Lars Erik Holmquist

Mobile 2.0 just released Spotisquare - a mobile web app that connects music to places!

Some places just remind us of a specific song, sometimes we feel places could use a little music. The idea is to have people share what music fits a place and the people that go there. Beats to navigate the city centre, some nice ambient to go with that scenic view? Or maybe you want to share that awesome band you saw at that one club? Life needs a beat. By making collaborative playlists anyone can express their experience of a place using music.
Spotisquare connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. It is a mobile web app that adds music to places. Point your mobile browser to m.spotisquare.com. You can just use Spotisquare to check-in on Foursquare, but it also connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. When you find a venue that has a Spotify playlist, you can listen to it in Spotify, and also add your own songs to it. You can add a playlist to a venue with our connector.

Mobile 2.0's excellent intern Sebastian Büttner just released φ² Scanner, an Android app to check-in using barcode stickers to foursquare.

Mobile 2.0's φ² project explores different ways of physical check-ins for location-based services and the connection between ‘the visible and virtual’. This is all part of Mobile 2.0's bigger location-based services project, which involves both user studies on people's usage of existing services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Brightkite, etc), and development of new concepts for location-based services (such as making hidden services visible at physical locations).

Download the first φ² app & generate your own barcodes at phi2.mobilelifecentre.org.

Since early May Autonomous Wallpaper, or the “Digital Flowerwall” as we would like to refer to it nowdays, is being exhibited here in Kista at the newly inaugurated Digital Arts Centre (DAC). This project has been a bit cold for a while, but has recently attracted renewed attention and will be demonstrated during the Stockholm LOVE festival! In a nutshell people can send digital pictures from their mobile devices to the wall (via Bluetooth or mail), and then plant a seed on the screen (using a pen) that will grow into a beautiful flower that is based on the sent picture.

We’re organising a workshop on Research in the Large: using app stores, markets and other wide distribution channels in research at UbiComp2010, Sept 26th in Copenhagen, large.mobilelifecentre.org (with an associated special issue for IJMHCI).

Distribution of mobile applications has been greatly simplified by mobile app stores and markets. Both lone developers and large research and development teams can now relatively easily reach wide audiences. This provides a huge opportunity for both iterative development and gathering research data. However, an overview of successful strategies and ways to overcome the challenges inherent to wide deployment in a research context is not yet available. How do we need to adapt evaluation and research methods? How do we address validity & ethical concerns when doing research on such a large scale? As researchers from both industry and academia we need to share our experiences so we can make the most of this opportunity.

Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost and Nicolas Belloni (FAL/Mobile 2.0), together with Frank Bentley (Motorola) and Didier Chincholle (Ericsson) are organising a workshop at UbiComp2010 to do exactly that. Go check out the workshop call, send us your position paper and/or contribute to the associated special issue of the International Journal of Mobile HCI. More info at large.mobilelifecentre.org

GeoChat for Android just made its appearance on Ericsson Labs website. Ericsson Research who run Ericsson Labs have rebuilt our Java ME version of GeoChat for Android to utilise their enabler APIs. Their version is now instead using Mobile Java Communication Framework, and their own Maps API.
GeoChat is a map based chat application that let you create chat rooms over geographical regions on a map. In order to talk to people also interested in a particular location can join in and chat with a chat room put at this location. By placing the chat rooms at different zoom levels the chat rooms can have different size, where a chat room on street level can symbolize a particular café, and a room on country level can symbolize a whole country.
A video of GeoChat can be found here, and the Android version can be found on Ericsson Labs website.