MarCom Professional

No big spiel today, just a sexy piece of interaction work from Microsoft on the Engadget site.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/02/skinput-because-touchscreens-never-felt-right-anyway-video/

Skinput allows you to touch your arm to interact - a way of allowing sign language to be used as an input method, perhaps?

Anyway, another exciting and totally overlooked way of moving interaction forwards that is swamped by the mania for unresponsive, non-haptic and really quite irritating touchscreens…

And who’d have thought I would say the words sexy, interaction and Microsoft in the same sentence without being on drugs? More...

I had some lunch (darling) with mobile media guru Tim Stott yesterday, and while discussing some lovely media work around a certain sporting event coming up soon (not Henley or the Six Nations, I’m afraid) he let me into a dark secret.

Tim has an N97.

And he thinks it’s quite good.

To be fair, I had a play with his well set up device… and it is! In many ways it reminds me of Google’s personalised homepage, but has clever use of scrolling text to gently inform the user of all the device can pull together for you.

All the major features are there and convenient, and there is none of the usual ferreting around for what you need under piles of unnecessary rubbish that have plagued Symbian devices (especially network customised ones) The device interaction and touch screen was also very smooth, so I assume that it has received some form of firmware upgrade as well. More...

Engadget ran a nice piece the other day about some work being done by Deutsche Telekom, looking into using the magnetic field generated by the compass on your average smartphone.

Apparently, if you are wearing some form of magnetic handwear, then you can subvert the compass to pick up changes in the magnetic field caused by the movements you make. This can then be expanded so that you can get your phone to do specific things by waving your hands in a specific way.

Put aside the actual app ideas that have come flooding out of this, two things spring to mind.

The first is that can you use different rings for different gestures? So a suitably bling two finger lump for registering hip-hoppy gestures, and a pinky ring bearing the family’s suit of arms for upper class gesturing? What about a magnetic baton for conducting an orchestra? Or a Smiley ring for those still inclined to ‘build boxes’?

Secondly, I wonder if you could programme the ge More...

It seems the big bun fight at MWC this year was the war of the application store.

Not, as in previous years, the scrap for platform or handset supremacy, but the realisation that handset manufacturers and network operators need to consider how to create a unified development environment and experience for applications across all devices and networks.

This is a hugely big deal. Back in the dawn of mobile (well, 2002) myself and a certain Russell Buckley strived to sell the idea of applications as being the answer to brands’ mobile marketing requirements. There were two minor issues with that at the time. More...

So, Apple are allowing naughtiness back on their App Store, hey?

What a turn up for the books. At We Love Mobile Towers we are delighted with this fine move.

Because we are part of the dirty mac brigade? Well, not publicly.

The issue here is that, when Apple made that epoch defining move into the mobile world, they provided something that we mobilists had been screaming out for.

Stability.

A platform that has fixed rules, that has standards, that has an entire ecosystem all set up and ready to go. No being mucked around by the operators, no settings guff, no shifting ’standards’ quagmire, and just one screensize. More...

Aaron Franco published a very interesting piece today about Flash, and how it can be the Holy Grail for mobile app developers.

As well as some heated thoughts around Apple’s refusal to include Flash on the iPhone, but allow it on the iPad, he made the point that maybe Flash is the panacea that will allow mobile applications companies and developers to produce a build-once-deploy-anywhere application. Truly, the Holy Grail in our mobile world.

In fact, I would argue that this may well be the new battleground in the mobile world.

I agree that Flash has the potential to work well in mobile as an application front end, in that it has two core strengths. More...

Interesting headline I know…However, it’s not intended to be sensationalist, simply a matter of fact and also a topic worthy of discussion.

Facebook announced that active users of its mobile platform surpassed 100 million, each and every month. And, this usage happens on almost every carrier in the world.  If interaction and participation serve as the foundation for social media, then Facebook is setting the standard. Facebook is reporting that mobile users are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

According to estimates, the number of mobile Facebook users far exceeds the total active user base for Twitter, including mobile, Web, and through third-party applications. More...

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

In this update: we're still Buzzing; those Bing Maps chaps; and Facebook's five billion bits.


THE HEADLINES ... / THE LOWDOWN ... / IN OTHER NEWS ... / ON FACEBOOK ... / ON TWITTER ... / ON GOOGLE ... / ON YOUTUBE ... / BRANDS GET SOCIAL ... / ON MOBILE ... / THINKING ...



ON GOOGLE ...

Less than a week since the launch of Google Buzz, and already it feels like forever (but in a good way). More...

I caught the Gadget Show on TV last night and the team named their five favourite mobile applications. The only one I could remember this morning was the Photoshop Mobile app for the iPhone. It's free and it's a beauty, allowing for a decent selection of very quick and easy tweaks to photos taken with the iPhone (or stored on it).

I am deeply, deeply cross about the car parking charges at my local train station. There isn’t a bus I can take to the station, I can’t be dropped off every day and I have no friends. I have to drive to the station. And park. They put up the price of parking every year – I can’t understand why, it’s hardly a high maintenance facility. I’m so cross about the parking that, despite the operator’s attempts to make me pay for parking using a mobile phone, I have resolutely refused. I want them to have the inconvenience of counting the coins that I so religiously pump into the machine every day. More...