Rashmi gives a great summary of the IBM annual seminar about user interfaces (called New Directions in User Computing conference). Since this year's focus is mobile computing, I am very interested in what has been said there. Attendants seemed to be recurent people from the field form the human-computer interaction field (like people from Intel..:). Of course I haven't been there, but judging from Rashmi's post is rellay appears that there is nothing new under the sun:
No one has figured how to get people to buy apps for the mobile phone. Ian asked audience how many people had bought apps for mobile computing. Very few had. [I fully agree with that statement, there are different reasons but it's so true -nicolas (...) an thinks social mobile apps will be first apps for the mobile phone that people will buy à la Dodgeball [hmmmm still the same story here] (...) One basic premise behind all these types of apps is "Location Assumption" or the fact that you need to know (at least approximately) what the users location is. Question is how to do that. GPS is one method. However, it does not work inside buildings. Additionally, it does not have a Z dimension. (...) --Ontological or personal naming problems are many (what does place mean to you) 46.133 North might not mean much to me, but the Chinese restaurant on El Camino might be very meaningful. [yes it's better to use PLACE instead of SPACE, see Harrison and Dourish for that matter, it now apply to mobile computing! -nicolas] (...) Albany: Recommendations through location histories (M. Chen/J Froelich) [yet another recommender system, at the end, there will be so manye different recommender tools that there won't be enough critical mass on each to get a interesting database... -nicolas]
Why do I blog this? if this sort of ideas are now common, it's REALLY time to move forward, and I am a bit disappointed that some new trends (like the power of self-declared positioning) are still not mentionned (perhaps because it's less sex from a tech engineer point of view). However I like this idea: "Phones have a call log. why not have a place log". It sounds intersting but be there could be privacy issues!