mobile

Excellence In Advertising

June 16, 2011

I was asked the other day to name my favorite advertisement. In terms of effective engagement, I think branded apps are the best combination of free-to-the-consumer utility and on-going engagement for the brand. I recently downloaded an app to help me find the closest Chevron gas station because my dealer said that their special gasoline [...]

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iPhone Tracker Art

May 13, 2011

Dav Yaginuma, my brother-in-law, exported his iPhone’s location data and, using the open source iPhone Tracker modified the settings to create very fine grained view of his whereabouts. I would have thought an aggregated view such as the one above would give a strong signal to where he lives and works but I guess he [...]

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Douglas Adams on Location-Based Services

May 11, 2011

Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, spoke to a room full of telecom executives in 2001 and in the middle of pleading with them to improve the call quality along the 101 freeway near his home in Santa Barbara, California, he also included this nugget describing a world that is just [...]

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Clever Hack for Mobile User Studies

April 30, 2011

For less than $100 you too can whip together a pocket cam rig to film test users of your mobile app and spot trouble areas. From the Artefact blog: Staring over your participant’s shoulder isn’t creating the most natural situation when testing user experiences. You get less than ideal viewing angles, participants can’t get into [...]

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森の木琴

April 5, 2011

OK. Making fun of Sharp’s Touch Wood phone’s naming was an amateurish cheap shot. Mea culpa. NTT’s advertising campaign for the phone is pure, beautiful, brilliance. Advantage NTT docomo!

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Location Traces as Art

March 28, 2011

Determined to teach others how much data telecom providers not only harness but retain, German Green Party politician, Malte Spitz, sued his cell phone service provider, Deutsche Telecom, for his location data. What he received was raw data of his location, signal strength, and when he was on the phone.  Working with the German newspaper Zeit, he then [...]

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will.i.am on chips talking to chips

February 23, 2011

In a post last year, I paraphrased a quote, “If you are not paying for a product, you are the product.” Will.i.am recently updated this quote with the line, You are either the person getting pimped, or you’re the person doing the pimping. The video below of will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas speaking with John [...]

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Touch Wood Phone?

February 21, 2011

I love Japanese design, everything was looking great about this latest concept model from Sharp. The concept was really cool (you can read more about it on WirelessWatch Japan) until I heard the name. What’s that in your pocket again?

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Mobile in Japan – ON FIRE!

February 18, 2011

comScore released their Mobile Year in Review report for 2010 which, for some reason, includes Japan for the first time this year. Japan has been years ahead of other markets for some time now and their findings, summarized in the graph above, confirm that. In their words, Japan is, “perhaps one of the most mature [...]

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Push Button Social Networking

February 15, 2011

HTC announced two phones with dedicated buttons for Facebook. The touchscreen Salsa and ChaCha (pictured below). Running Android Gingerbread 2.3.3, HTC modified the Sense UI to integrate the Facebook into the experience. According to the HTC press release, The Facebook button on HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa is context-aware, gently pulsing with light whenever there [...]

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