However, the approach taken by WorkSnug seems odd, and somewhat flawed. They make a big deal of the Augmented Reality nature of their service – the ability to “look through” an iPhone screen and see labels on nearby buildings indicating the location of likely workplaces. This is just a crazy way to approach the problem. Think about it. To successfully find this sort of location using this sort of interface will only work when all of the following things are true:

• the mobile device knows the current location
• the mobile device knows the current direction (in 3D space, it seems!) of view
• workplaces in the local area are registered with the system
• the user is looking in a direction where there are registered workplaces
• the user is near enough to registered workplaces that they can be projected on nearby architecture

Arguably the hardware and infrastructure may be able to provide the first two of those conditions, and in the (unlikely?) case that the service takes off then we might achieve the third point. But the last two are the killers. Are the WorkSnug folks really imagining streets filled with laptop-carrying execs twirling like dancers while holding their iPhones aloft just on the off-chance that they might catch a glimpse of an office with a spare desk?

Fundamentally it’s a problem with data density. In areas so densely packed with eligible workspaces that they might be visible using such an AR approach, finding one is not really a problem and the solution is not very valuable. It’s in the areas where working space is harder to find (suburbs, small towns, rural areas, industral areas, …) that this kind of service has value, but these situations are exactly the ones where Augmented Reality makes no sense.

By all means run a registry of workplaces, and show them on a map with details of how to get there, but give up on the AR, please.

Oh, and also give up on the pretending that the service is busy by scrolling a bunch of pregenerated activity messages on the home page. It’s been many times before and just makes the creators of the service look like liars and charlatans.

It’s nice to read that at least one person also finds this odd.

In a more general sense, though, this is interesting from a user-interface point of view.

I’m all in favour of giving users the ability to personalise their service as much as possible. Being able to paint the walls and move the furniture is a great way to get comfortable with a service. But the point of this is that each user is customising their own experience.

CRBT breaks this model. With CRBT, each user is, in effect, customising someone else’s experience. As an approach, this can have significant impact on usability, causing congnitive dissonance, a feeling of powerlessness, and a reluctance to use a service.

If you are designing a service, please think twice before adding features which allow one user to change the experience of another.

ShareMe -The Mobile Future : Mobile Search is Not GOOGLE SEARCH

However, it seems that there are ways to support a small footprint Java virtual machine on some of this class of devices. This in turn opens up opportunities for deploying some of my own small-footprint java software here.

Wolf Paulus’ Web Journal:PhoneME, a JavaVM for the Fonera FON Router.

SitePen Blog » PhoneGap, Palm Pre, and the State of Mobile Apps

THE NIELSEN COMPANY ISSUES TOP TEN U.S. LISTS FOR 2008 (PDF)

Classroom response systems – elearnspace

The thrust of the article is that the use of specialist handsets is limiting, and it considers alternatives such as commodity mobile phones using bluetooth, SMS and so on. But it still misses the point. Even while acknowledging that students have massive access to communication technology, its use in education is almost universally limited to answering multiple-choice quizzes.

This is “in the box” thinking. A quiz is an extremely blunt instrument for measuring student engagement and learning. The lack of a “back channel” of information flow to the teacher has been a limitation of education ever since the first students gathered at the feet of a master. This unidirectional transfer has become such a part of the educational process that it is no longer questioned. Sometimes it is even seen as a virtue, rather than an unfortunate consequence of scale. Communication from student to teacher is carefully isolated in the small bubbles of tutorials, seminars, and one-to-one chats. “Proper” education, it appears, takes place when listening to lectures and reading textbooks.

With pervasive communication technology we now have a way of breaking out of this constraint. Think of the possibilities!

• Imagine every participant gets to indicate privately whether the pace is too fast or too slow.
• Imagine every student is free to raise non-interrupting questions or misunderstandings, and others get to answer them or vote them up if they have a similar problem. Common problems can be addressed immediately, others can be dealt with individually later.
• Imagine student notes, thoughts, and problems could be shared both with the teacher and the other students during a session, as well as being recorded for later use, rather than each student having his or her own “silo” of bafflement.
• Imagine a screen with a real-time “dashboard” of student interests and concerns as the session progresses, so a teacher can adapt and drive the session with open eyes.
• Imagine students could “log in” and “log out” of sessions without disturbing other students or the teacher, and yet still be able to track what they have missed.

All of these things are technically possible. Most are possible using commodity “clicker” hardware, let alone the power of a modern mobile phone, Wi-Fi iPod, or laptop.

Before dismissing this as a pipe dream, consider that these things routinely happen at technical conferences, where it is not uncommon for a large proportion of an audience to be twittering, blogging, messaging and commenting throughout each presentation. Strangely enough, this does not seem to result in the wisdom of the presenter being swamped by mindless chatter, rather that it is amplified, distributed, and even sometimes corrected.

BBC News: The mobile future is calling

How to Send Picture Mail via SMS / MMS on the iPhone at JAW Speak

iPhone University: At ACU, Students Navigate College Life via Apple iPhone – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership