iCrowds : Everyware

{ Author Archives } Martijn Kriens

Everyware

One of the most interesting developments I see at the moment is the move to ubiquitous ICT. ICT in the form of small unobtrusive sensors, smart ICT that takes the context of the user into account (based on all those sensors) and feedback mechanisms to users that do not use explicit displays do this much more on an "experience" level, e.g. by changing the colour of light. I recently read a book called Everyware (as in Hardware and Software) that says some interesting things on this. Sort of like using computers without really using a computer.... A very nice example of this is the "unpronounceable rabbit". It connects to the Internet, is able to sniff RFID tags and communicate by talking, changing colours, communicates with his ears and all kinds of other things. And the rabbits can talk to eachother so you can send messages to a friend by just twisting his ears.

2008 11 26 everywareTags: everyware, nabzatag, rabbits Comments (1)

Innovation

At the moment I am very much involved in Living Labs. Living Labs are an important development in research, design and development. At the core of the living labs idea is that the gap between design and reality is growing. More and more products and services have social networking aspects or location aware functionality. These aspects are very hard to simulate in a normal laboratory like Home lab at Philips. Amsterdam Living Lab is the initiative that we are starting in, surprise, Amsterdam. Here we are changing Amsterdam in a large scale laboratory, together with Waag Society, University of Amsterdam and Telematica Instituut. Together we try to create new design, develop and test processes based on real life user experience. For this measurement tools and sensor to measure reality will be developed and new design processes that take this real life data into account. More locations in the Netherlands are developing such an approach. Living Lab Leiden is involved in development of wireless services, Rotterdam Climate Initiative is developing new approaches to saving energy. Approaches that take the real life behaviour of people into account. For the ...

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2008 11 26 Living LabTags: innovatie, innovatieplatform Comments (0)

Google bank

Banks are of course very much the focus of the news these days. One of the interesting news items a journalist found out is that Google already has a banking license in the Netherlands. Bank are potentially one of the sectors that will change a lot because of business possibilities that a technology like SaaS will enable. Competition will come from completely new sectors because they are better at reaching the market or using the “intelligence of crowds”. While searching a little further I found this blog post from Jeff Jarvis where he is asking for examples of bank services that Google would be very good at. Examples are peer to peer lending, more transparency around transactions in stocks, open source platforms to increase functionality (E-invoices anyone?). In a way Google checkout and it’s competitor PayPal are already on the move. In my view banks really have to start thinking on how to really innovate their processes through which they create value for their customers.

2008 11 24 businessmodelTags: finance, google Comments (0)

Flabbergasted

This is very interesting picture that shows the difference between the opportunities for saving energy between Europe and the USA. I do not think there are many households in the Netherlands that do not use a programmeable thermostat, often even integrated with a outside temperature sensor. This is something we have to keep in mind when comparing research on energy saving between the USA and Europe.

2008 11 04 EnergyTags: Energy, usa europe Comments (0)

Oops, sorry, forgot the attachment …

who does not know the feeling of feeling utterly silly when sending an e-mail in which you say that you are enclosing an attachment after which you forget to include the attachment. I know it happens to me and most people around me. But Google is paying attention! They now have a new function where Google scans the text of you e-mail and when it thinks you intended to include an attachment it gives you a reminder. I think this is a nice example of paying attention to your users and deliver services that are based on looking what people are really doing and what really goes wrong while doing it. I understand from the google groups that discusses this that it does not really work very well at the moment (it misses a lot of cues when there should be an attachment) but let's hope they will get it right. At least they are trying ...

2008 10 09 Uncategorized Comments (0)

User interface 2.0?

Some time ago I bought an iPhone and I must say I love the user interface. It all feels very slick, every function does what you think it should do and looks very nice. However, I recently downloaded an iPhone app from the NOS that shows you teletekst directly on you iPhone. very convenient. However, I was wondering myself that it is quite a remarkable that this application for the iPhone is that popular. It is a user interface designed for TV's with minimal interaction and minimum use of graphics. Of course the original idea was that through this simple view and interface it was easy to use and easy on the hardware. All reasons that are completely not valid on the iPhone platform. I wonder where the popularity comes from. Is it because people are used for so long to this interface or are minimal interfaces more powerful than we think anyhow? Amazing..

2008 09 19 user interfaceTags: nos t Comments (3)

Transparancy in politics

I recently came across this website that is dedicated to fact checking on political statements in the USA. If you listen to the candidates for US president it is often very hard to know if they are talking the truth, bending the truth in their direction or lying outright. Interesting to see that this website (and there are several other ones like this one) are increasing the transparancy a lot. It is shocking to see how much "distorted truths" are being told by these politicians. The power of sites like these is that it will be getting harder and harder to stretch the truth once very white lie is monitored..

2008 09 07 PoliticsTags: Politics, transparancy Comments (0)

MobileHCI

Last days I was present at the MobileHCI conference. I was involved in this conference as sponsor chair. This conference deals with how to design and use mobile devices and experiences. There have been two issues that I found remarkable. The first is the fact that two research projects dealing with the design of user interfaces showed that people preferred to use the slower interface. In one example they had developed an interface with special icons to use in the address book of the phone, targeted at illiterate people. Research showed that although people were faster through the visual interface they still preferred the alphanumerical one. Maybe they just did not want to be branded illiterate? The second project dealt with research on the amount of air pollution children are exposed to by their route to school. This Lancaster project gave GPS equipped phones to 12 year old children and had them make pictures and blog their route to school, through all seasons. These routes were compared to the known air pollution throughout the city. Also the children got asked questions on how they felt and on their health. Through this research they could show the children that they would ...

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2008 09 06 Living LabTags: gps, living labs, reseach Comments (0)

Durability 2.0

We all know we have to be very careful with energy due to the warming up of our planet, dependency on energy from areas in the world you do not want to be dependant on and other reasons. But we also know that it is very hard to find the incentives to stimulate people to save energy here and now. Problem is that there is too much of a time lag between the action to save energy and the advantages acquired. Recently I held a key note presentation at the conference "Greening the enterprise 2.0", focused on how to save energy in office environments. Especially in offices it is hard to stimulate people to save energy because they do not have to pay the energy bill themselves. Automatic systems are usually circumvented (people open windows in completely controlled buildings because the intelligent control mechanism for temperature is less intelligent than the maker thought) and therefore seldom delivers the result that we think of beforehand. And people are lazy. The picture on this post is from my own re-chargers in my office. I once placed a switch there to ...

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2008 08 28 EnergyTags: Energy, social networks Comments (0)

Concentration

While scanning through some of the articles I missed during the holiday season (you really do not need a computer on a terras in Barcelona eating Tapas and drinking wine) I came across this Article from Nicholas Carr (Is Google making us stupid). Central them of the article is that due to jumpy way we read on the Internet (following another link after some paragraphs of reading) our way of thinking may be changing. More and more it is becoming difficult for a lot of people to concentrate on long texts, let alone long books like war and peace. I do think this is a risk we are facing at the moment. In workplace research there is something that is called Attention Deficit Disorder. What it means is that people are so accustomed to browsing and wandering of a subject, checking mail all the time, reacting to chat and other disruptions that in the end they are not capable anymore of creating things that need concentration for a longer time. They are reacting instead of acting. I myself can sometimes feel this way: you have to force yourself to stay away from email and chat for several hours do finish ...

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2008 08 20 Workspace Comments (0)

Social netWORKing

One of the most fascinating developments there are at the moment at the workplace is I think the use of social networking tools. What can ben seen in several reports is that the use of social networking tools (for example to find the right person for a task) is growing rapidly within companies (Funny thing is that in many cases this is happening completely below the radar of the IT department). The tools are used for example to find the right person with the right expertise as close by in your network as possible. Directly based on previous work done by people like reports they wrote, memberships of communities, questions they answered etc. Maybe even based on the emails you sent to specific people though in this respect there are of course issues on privacy that we have to deal with IBM is developing some quite interesting applications around lotus connections dealing with social networking. Recently they have developed a tool called Atlas that is capable of showing you your network, how it relates to the subjects you are ...

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2008 02 24 workspaceTags: governance, privacy, social networks, workspace Comments (1)

Adtention economy

I came acros this interesting article about the value of clicks on adds on the Internet. Since advertising is beginning to look (Seem) like the holy grail to keep the Internet free for use it is amazing how little data there is on how and why people click on adds and what the real effects are. The following result out of the study is interesting: What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large. Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks. Seems a lot of research is needed to really understand how the relation between audience, click rate and real economic effects will be clear.

2007 12 03 businessmodelTags: adtention, business Comments (0)

Private?

I came across this article in the paper on Saturday about the fact that civil servants are adding and changing information on Wikipedia during working hours. Some time ago I blogged about the Wikiscanner and of course one can see more and more how important transparency is. There have been numerous cases where with the help of the wikiscanner people have been found out while trying to create their own truth ... However, the question is how are we going to deal with this transparency. Of course ciivil servants also use the Wikipedia during working hours and of course they sometimes also change information. Just like people in companies and people at home. Wherever we are we still remain individual human beings. One of the effects of Web 2.0 is that the different roles we have are more and more blending together. At all times of the day we are private person, employee, citizen, husband and father and can switch easily between all these roles. Somehow we have to learn how to deal with this transparency. The fact that information came from a computer within a public department ...

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2007 11 19 PoliticsTags: government, Politics, virtureality, web 2.0 Comments (0)

Surfing the beat

I came across this post from David Cohn about crowdsourcing beat journalism. Local journalist of course normally have their network within the area they publish about. But how much more interesting might this become if you know how to make this network much more involved in the news and each other. The same, in a way, counts for policemen. Especially community policeman need to have a strong social network in order to receive the subtle but important

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2007 11 02 crowdsourcingTags: blogs, crowdsourcing, police Comments (0)

Some things never change

Some times it surprises me in a way how little things have changed. This week we had our network event where many of our customers join us for dinner and some interesting conversations. This time we organized it in the museum of communication. Before the meeting they gave a short tour and showed us an old telephone switchboard. You know, where they had to connect phone calls by wiring connections by hand. Funny thing is , there were two features that already existed for a long time: voicemail and teleconference. When somebody was not reachable you could leave a message at the operator who would call the person at a later time. Also creating a teleconference call was easy but just wiring the different connections together. Pretty impressive 8-) . Other functions that caught my attention: they checked if a line was busy by touching the connection in the switchboard with a plug: when they saw a small spark the connection was busy. Connecting somebody from Groningen to Maastricht worked a bit like a router through gateways: they connected to the next switchboard, they connected to the next switch board etc. Pretty failsafe since ...

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2007 10 12 TechTags: communication, technology, telin Comments (0)

Scroogled

Rogier sent me this link. Especially this part was kind of icky: The man made a note, did some clicking. "You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail." Greg felt a spasm in his guts. "You're looking at my searches and e-mail?" He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink. "Sir, calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches," the man said in a mocking whine. "That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. "We do not look at your searches but at the add". Somehow this statement gives me the shivers.

2007 10 09 privacyTags: google, privacy Comments (0)

Google, formerly known as the NSA

I am member of a guidance committee for Rathenau instituut in the Netherlands for a project about privacy. In this project we deal with the changing concept of privacy in our society. I talked about it some time ago in this post. It still amazes me how much people put on the net (including what I put on the Net, look at the sidebar of this Blog). In this project a special website has been developed that invites people to comment on privacy, discuss and share all kind of ideas in a creative way around this subject (the website is www.privacyproject.nl). The information on the side ranges from exhibitionists to people putting an image of their passport on the web to people completely hiding how they look in real life. In the end a television documentary will be made out of it. There is one item on the site that is I think very interesting. A colleague of mine, Rogier Brussee, has a conspiracy their for some time that Google is in fact a front for the NSA. Funny thing is if you look in the history of Google ...

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2007 10 03 privacyTags: google, government, privacy, The Net, transparancy Comments (0)

Who do you call

When I start to work on something new the first thing you do is find a lot of information about the subject you are going to deal with. However, information only gets you started. In order to really understand a subject it is essential to talk to people that have dealt with it before. You can read a wall of books on how to cure diseases but there is no substitute for a talk with the real expert. In every field the amount of knowledge to make the right decisions is so vast, you simply can not write everything down. In the past I did a project for bakery's and my task was to write down how they make the bread. One of the issues was how we could describe the moment the dough is ready to be laid down to rest. Terms like stickiness, feel, elasticity and many others where mentioned but there was no way to get a good description to tell someone knew when it was OK. The only way to learn this was to work together with an expert and be shown how it was to be done. (this reminds me of a ...

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2007 10 02 governanceTags: information, Politics, transparancy Comments (0)

Symbiosis

I think the most interesting new adaptations of technology are the ones that make clever combinations of the real and digital world. You might say the ones that live in symbiosis, where the digital world feeds on the physical world and vice versa. Second Life I do not like since it merely involves the digital realm. Meeting somebody from a discussion group in real life creates great physical meetings and makes the discussion later on more interesting, knowing the other person also in real life. At the moment I am talking to an organisation involved in the safety sector. Practice for them is extremely important. Problem for them is that practice in real life is difficult and expensive. Not all situations can be created in real life (too costly or physically so destructive that it can not be done). On the other hand practice in the digital world does not feel real. It is hard to substitute loud noise, a roaring fire and wind and many people putting pressure on you. In a game you also can get the adrenaline working but different ... The idea of the project is to set up an environment where digital ...

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2007 10 02 gamesTags: games, interaction, web 2.0 Comments (0)