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Susan Crawford @ tnw2012 keynote

May 1, 2012 Comments (0) Tweet

By: thenextweb
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2nVcS3NPvo

Susan Crawford @ tnw2012 keynote

The 5 rings of mobile at the London Olympics

April 11, 2012 Comments (0) Tweet

Check out our new 31 page report on mobile apps for London 2012.

Go For Gold with Mobile Apps: Olympics 2012

Key metrics, who’s doing what, successful applications, key brands, top developers, future trends and more…

Thinking about how you can tie the Olympics, Mobile and your brand together for London 2012?

The London Olympics 2012 is going to be the most connected and watched event in history. As a result Corporations and their brands are trying to connect with the mobile fans during such a global event where athletes from all over the world will be celebrating victory and defeat. How does your company tap into the emotions providing instant updates and gratification to the mobile population around the globe?

You will find inside this report

- What some of the Fortune 500′s are planning

- What has been shown to work well in the past

- What are the hot trends that you might want to include in your app

- and more…

Download the report. http://www.exicon.mobi/report-download/olympics2012

And if you are looking to get mobile by July 2012 or even plan for the World Cup or the next Winter Olympics, feel free to contact us, amanda@exicon.mobi to talk through some options.

Exicon can help take your business mobile as well as connect you to top developers globally.

Electronic Countermeasures @ GLOW Festival NL 2011

March 26, 2012 Comment (1) Tweet

By: liam young
Source: http://vimeo.com/user5313848

In the skies above the city a drone flock drifts into formation broadcasting their local file sharing network. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm they form a pirate internet, an aerial napster, darting between the buildings….

Today we are much closer to our virtual community than we are to our real neighbours. This death of distance has created new forms of city based around ephemeral digital connections rather than physical geography. The infrastructure that drove the development of the city was once large permanent networks of roads, plumbing and park spaces but are now nomadic digital networks, orbiting GPS satellites and cloud computing connections.

Revolutionary communities are coalescing around social networks and text messages and occupy the city with the force to topple governments. The U.S. military’s has development autonomous aerial drones that they can be launched across a place like Egypt, when the government cut off internet access to prevent people from organizing protests. These drones would fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure.

Electronic Countermeasures is a project inspired by these new forms of nomadic infrastructure. The project explores the design and manufacture of a flock of interactive autonomous drones that form their own place specific, temporary, local, WIFI community- a pirate internet.
We have built a flock of GPS enabled quadcopter drones from components that were originally intended for aerial reconnaissance and police surveillance to create this flying pirate file sharing network. The drones are autonomous and drift above the public spaces of the city as a balletic interactive aerial choreography. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local wifi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere.

The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with. It is a site specific file sharing hub, a temporary, emergent online community where content and information is exchanged across the drone network. When on location, a visitor can log onto the drone network with their phones and laptops. When the audience interacts with the drones they glow with vibrant colours, they break formation, they are called over and their flight pattern becomes more dramatic and expressive. Impromptu augmented communities form around the glowing flock. Their aerial dance and dynamic glowing formations give visual expression to the digital communities of the city.

By Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today
www.tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com
twitter: @liam_young

with
Eleanor Saitta
Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
Superflux

Drone Pilots
Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
Eleanor Saitta
Tobias Rosenstock

Project Team
Denis Vlieghe
Mond Qu
Dessi Lyutakova

Supported by
Mu Gallery, NL
GLOW Festival, NL
Buzzflyer

Music by
Clint Mansell, Drive OST.

MWC 2012 Summary

March 26, 2012 Comments (0) Tweet

This year Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saw the biggest ever participation with some 80,000 total visitors. The official delegate number exceeded 67,000 (up 11% over 2011) from 205 countries, with 1,500 Exhibitors, 3,500 CEOs and 3,300 media representatives.

Exicon was present in Barcelona with a team of seven supporting two of our own events and speaking on a panel with McCann Erickson, Coca Cola, Mastercard, and Nielsen.

Furthermore the team had
- 27 existing, new and potentially new customer meetings
- 23 developer interviews
- attended 6 launch and “fringe”events

This industry remains a growth industry with a strong demand for talent, experience and resources. Operators are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation and are trying to find their role beyond being just a carrier of data and traffic. In addition to the usual themes around applications, infrastructure and devices the core themes this year were
- mobile Health
- mobile Money
- connected devices and sensors
- mobile Engagement (advertising)
- mobile Enterprise
- LTE (or 4G)
- Traffic offloading onto WiFi

However my key takeaway was that:
Apple, the key innovator behind this mobile revolution was again not present. Take it how you like, but this demonstrates that they remain dominant and this is not likely to change in the next 2-3 years. Nearly every phone from the delegates at MWC was an iPhone. Ewan Macgregor at “Mobile Industry Review” has a good article on this http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2012/03/bad-news-almost-everyone-at-mwc-had-an-iphone.html

1. Consumerization of Mobile
The consumer will buy their own devices as the competition in the mobile device space increases. This will drive down the cost of mobile devices fast. Huawei announced their Aspire model, ZTE was handing out tablets, TCL Alcatelonetouch was aggressively customizing smartphones for operators, Nokia announced their new phones, Samsung was omnipresent, Lenovo is just getting ready to enter the market and Blackberry is working on its own strategy… and these are just the big names.

With the cost of mobile smartphones dropping, the adoption of smartphones is going to be much faster than forecasted. Android is the dominant OS for smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia are trying to re-invent themselves. Sony, who bought out Ericsson from the joint venture (funny how it went from Ericsson phones to SonyEricsson JV to now Sony) was irrelevant.

The last interesting observation is that the devices are predominantly from Asian brands, with the software still from the North America. The intelligence is in the software though.

2. Moving from Mobile to Mobility
It’s no longer just about the mobile industry, businesses have recognized the importance of mobility. With more tablets entering the market, the competitive pressure for speed combined with the “instant gratification” generation, the adoption of tablets in the corporate world is rapidly increasing. This in turn is fueling the need for businesses to extend their business assets (products and services) onto these mobile terminals.

3. Data & Measurement
The importance of data is inherent. Identifying the right data sets, capturing this data before cleaning and de-duping the data is essential to begin working with it. Data is critical in order to provide a contextual user experience in a mobile world. With your mobile you have now the added dimension of space/location. Combined with time, mobility and a 3″ to 9″ screen, usage patterns and traffic derived from the data will provide much richer context in future services and greater monetization.

This video by Michael Rigley shows you the kind of metadata your mobile network captures with the example of an MMS (multimedia message) http://vimeo.com/34750078. Obviously there are a number of companies working to support operators with their unstructured data. We had a number of partners on this topic with clients such as HP with Autonomy and Vertica products and developers from our network Neuralitic, Lynx Analytics and more.

4. Privacy. It’s dead. Get over it! It’s about Trust and User Control
“Privacy is dead, deal with it.”– Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems
If consumers want and expect services and applications for free they are going to have to give up something in return. This something is the data showing how they use the services and applications (this data is anonymized btw).  Whilst it has the advantage of providing a better user experience targeting more relevant services and content it does carry the risk of confusion and abuse.

Privacy in return for free services, particularly on mobile is over. Governments and regulators are trying to keep up with the pace of technology and find ways to remain in control whilst enabling their economies to remain competitive.

There is general consensus that governments should not regulate in this area. They are too much aligned with legacy industries with legacy laws put in place during times before the digital age. SOPA, PIPA and ACTA are both examples of what happens when governments get involved.

Governance is still is a concern and a ”creative commons” type approach seems to be bubbling up. On a panel Exicon and Coca Cola were proposing such an approach.

To add a bit of flavor check out this Ted-X presentation on the “$8-Billion iPod” from Rob Reid http://youtu.be/GZadCj8O1-0

The users want to be able to control their privacy online. Companies need to provide their users with the tools to manage their privacy and control the settings. Consumers also expect to be told what rights they are handing over, when using services and applications. They expect to trust the corporations with their data and this is more “ethical” than legal. It’s not easy for corporations to navigate this, but it is a process.

If you don’t want to give away your data, you can pay for premium services!

5. You can’t do it on your own
It’s become very clear that with the current speed of innovation happening simultaneously on multiple fronts (mobile, big data, consumerization, virtualization, social etc etc), corporations can’t keep the pace on their own. There is a clear shift toward appreciating the importance of ecosystems of partners, but a lack of understanding how to embrace and build an ecosystem.

Software companies have mastered this, working with third party partners building applications on their operating systems and building features in the software. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc have a strong history and legacy investment in developer ecosystems. More and more technology companies are building out these skills to extend their capabilities to the more nimble and faster moving smaller companies and start-ups.

This trend will rapidly move across into the enterprise world with Walmart, J&J, Coca Cola and Mastercard already investing in developer communities to exploit the mobile opportunity.

6. AR the cool new technology, still trying to find a market
This is a trend that is going to stick. Still early days, but this has potential for the future. We held two demos at our events. You can check out the following videos:
1. Aurasma, a UK technology owned by Autonomy and now HP
http://youtu.be/Gt2bR8-_3LY
2. Wikitude, an Austrian company, who have some very interesting projects coming out very soon
http://youtu.be/g-0cuqeUvCQ

Now you’ve seen it, imagine when you  combine this with the Microsoft Kinect (which you buy with your Xbox)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_cYKFdP1_0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0wGFR1pt-Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBBCMudnAKM

We will be sharing the content and takeaways on our Facebook page and on Slideshare. Follow us there, you can get some additional background for our events here:
1. The Innovation Exchange with Qtel www.exicon.mobi/qtel
2. mPowered Brands with HP and Intel www.exicon.mobi/mpowered

Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right

March 20, 2012 Comments (3) Tweet

By: GoogleTechTalks
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZGCPap7GkY

Google Tech Talk
January 24, 2011

Presented by Sebastian Deterding

ABSTRACT

Foursquare, GetGlue, Nike+, Badgeville: From reading news to fulfilling your hearts’ desires, more and more “gameified” applications and “gamification” vendors doll out points and badges to users, promising anything from increased user engagement and retention to plain mind control. While some hold that adding such game elements to non-game applications opens a new decade of design, others criticize current implementations as shallow “pointsification” and overselling of a new digital snake oil. What lessons do games really offer for user experience design? Which criticisms are valid? And what can designers interested in “gameifying” an application do to steer clear of the worst pitfalls? In this talk, researcher and designer Sebastian Deterding provides an overview of the current gamification movement, its most troubling blind spots, the motivational powers of games, and how to design for a playful experience that is truly meaningful to its users.

Sebastian Deterding – Sebastian Deterding is a user experience designer and game researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he currently pursues a PhD on the motivational psychology of gameified applications. He speaks and publishes internationally on gamification, social games, and the social contexts of video games at events such as the Gamification Summit, Gamescom, reboot, Playful, or DiGRA. His work has been covered by The Guardian, the LA Times, The New Scientist, EDGE Magazine, and Fast Company’s Co.Design. He co-hosts the Gamification Workshop at this year’s CHI conference in Vancouver. Web: codingconduct.cc Twitter: @dingstweets

Google TechTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics including Current Affairs, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Humanities, Law, Entertainment, and the Arts.

DISCLAIMER

The views or opinions expressed by the guest speakers are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Google Inc.