Category Archives: Mobile Phones

Realtime Object Recognition

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In the field of realtime, one of the most exciting areas is augmented reality on the mobile.  Part of that is of course recognising what the phone is looking at.  That can be done by the G1/ iPhone 3GS in the sense that they can combine GPS location with compass and accelerometers to know pretty much where the phone is.  But by adding object recognition into the camera feed, they can complete the picture.  A pretty impressive demo below:

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Posted in Mobile Phones, Technology, UI

R.I.P. Telephone Numbers

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As predictions go, I think this is a pretty solid one, though the timing may be out:

By 2020, no-one will use telephone numbers any more.

Let’s face it, these days we don’t twirl the dial, press the buttons, or call the operator.  You enter your new contact’s number into your cellphone/Outlook – and then never looked at again.   Because why should you?  When you call them, you find them by name (not number), when they call you, you know who it is by their name appearing on the screen (not their number).   And then much of the time you’ll contact them by email/twitter/Skype or whatever other means of comms that is closest to hand.

So what’s the point of telephone numbers? 

It would be just as (un)useful to go to a website by typing in 209.85.171.100 instead of google.com.   Or giving someone’s address as Longitude 48.8889, Latitude 2.123234….

No, the future of communications is seamless (see my other posts about twitter/sms/etc) both in terms of what methods we use to pass the message, and how we identify where that message is going.

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Posted in Mobile Phones, Other

Message Me. ANYHOW.

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In amongst all the buzz surrounding the Palm Pre launch at CES last week (including an up to 50% share price hike in one day) was something really interesting – and possibly game-changing in the longer term.

I’ve long thought that the youngest and heaviest users of technology today want just one one thing: to communicate.  They don’t particularly care, fundamentally, how that communication is done.  It just needs to be useful, usable, instantaneous and fun.

Say I get a message from a friend about meeting up later.  Do I really care whether it’s email, SMS, twitter, facebook message, MMS or a blackberry message?  No, I don’t.   I just care about the message, and replying to it.

In fact, it actually gets in the way when I have to remember what technology the recipient has (it is a blackberry?  will they get my email instantly, or should I SMS?  Are they on Skype on the PC? etc. etc.) before I send a message.

So what have Palm done?  They’ve created “Combined Messaging” – all the different kinds of message from one contact go under that one contact.

It just makes sense.

In the longer term, I believe that all the conduits of messaging (from Twitter to SMS even to email) will just become that – conduits.  Invisible, unbranded, uninteresting.  I don’t want to know how my telephone calls are routed, and I won’t want to know how my messages are routed!

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Posted in Mobile Phones

Finally a use for Video Phones

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Video calling has never taken off despite a long history of attempts starting in 1955, and culminating in today’s front-facing cameras on 3G handsets.  But finally someone has worked out a useful application: signing for the hearing impaired. 

The technology behind it compresses data with attention to skin tones (hands/face) as that’s what is conveying the important information.  That’s needed because 3G hasn’t properly hit the US yet, so the compression needs to work over GPRS-speed connections; also, sign-language is too fast for existing compression methods.

More over at SciAm.

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Posted in Mobile Phones

Rent-a-Crowd, Apple Style

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Just spotted this on the excellent Register:

Actors paid to queue for Poland’s iPhone launch

Mobile phone carrier Orange Poland admitted today that it hired actors to stand in line for the country’s iPhone debut.

“It was a part of our marketing strategy, the concept was thought up at Orange Poland,” the company told the Associated Press. “The aim was to ‘warm up’ the atmosphere around the launch of the iPhone.”

 Orange said they set up fake queues in front of about 20 stores around the country. Meanwhile, there were no lines outside of rival Era retail stores which also carry the iPhone in Poland according to several reports.

Well, there you go, the rent-a-crowd marketing method is still going strong.  Or Poland has realised that there are better phones than the iPhone!

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Posted in marketing, Mobile Phones