Today at the Supernova conference there was a Techcrunch panel on the next great ideas in Mobile. The panelists were Michael Arrington, Kevin Werbach, Roelof Botha and Andreas Kluth. The companies that presented focused on important themes to advance innovation in the mobile environment including mobile goods, avatars, games and interfaces.
For more information on the technology some of these companies will be using, check out our Location Technologies Primer.
MobileLab is a hub for mobile phone research and innovation at the University of Texas at Dallas. The lab has support from Ericsson, TI, Apple and Samsung Mobile. Their technology overlaps persistent 3D images over the real world on your mobile phone screen. One of the initial applications is a “mobile avatar” that appears on a person’s shoulder.
Mobile Dead is a location-based mobile zombie game. It uses GPS or other location data to find your position and the position of other players. Players choose to be on either the blue team, which is the human team, or the green team, which is the zombie team. Users can message each other with twitter-like short messages. Each player has a health and experience level, and a short profile. The game is played by picking up virtual items, which can then be used as part of the game. Those items, can also be traded with other items (such as trading a soda can for a crow bar). Players pick up weapons (such as chain saws) to fight against the opposing team, with weapons having varying levels of strength and damage. The game play is like other turn-based MMORPG’s where players take turns to hit each other until one wins. When you win fights you gain experience points.
The game seems interesting, but it will require a critical mass of players to be viable (unless you want to walk around and just pick up items). The game is going to be in beta in the New York City area in July, and you can signup today if you are interested in trying it out.
Using a a laptop and a mobile phone FrontlineSMS allows users to send and receive text messages with large groups of people. It can be used in a number of ways including disaster relief coordination, field data collection, conducting public surveys, organizing protests and more.
Skydeck is a little like Mobile Me from Apple, except that for voice calls they keep a log of all calls (incoming and outgoing). Skydeck provides real time data for all the calls you make, and you can mark calls for follow-up, tag them, etc. The application here is for it to be used in sales or industries where you need to log calls for billing. You can easily go back and search for names, and it provides a better level of relationship management for phone calls. So it is like a mini-CRM around phone calls. There are some social aspects to the application, as it wil rank your contacts depending on how often you speak to people – so when you view your address book it will show your most common contacts at the top. They claim that they are providing a more powerful address book, which is a very common and important function on cell phones, yet at the moment most address books are simple lists of contacts.
The Skydeck presentation also talked a bit about data portability issues with cell phone carriers. The demo displayed how T-Mobile (and other providers) lock away your call usage data and don’t provide an easy way to access it and use it in other applications. Additionally, they covered how various US carriers have disabled SyncML on phones, to prevent users from being able to extract and use their call data in different ways. Skydeck looks like a very interesting for those who use their phone for phone calls frequently as part of their business.
Glancing Pad is an effort to create a new human input method for mobile devices that replaces keyboards and works better than other alternative methods. The goals of the project are to not require sequential entry, a single-handed method and one that is easy to use and efficient. The Glancing Pad is a touch-pad style decide where through a series of finger movements and touches a letter can be entered.
The input method seems interesting, and similar to gestures that are available on current track-pads, except that the gestures and movements on a Glancing Pad are actually used to enter text (although one letter at a time). It will be difficult for users to train themselves in using this form of input pad, and it isn’t clear how this technology will be made available. We didn’t get a chance to see a live demo today, but it is an idea that does have some potential.
Frontline sounds like it could potentially serve a humanitarian need as well as help fill political voids.
How will they make money and still have a philanthropic goal
wow real tables – love it – wish all conferences did this!
Is there a calendar of all the planned TC events ? It’s always nice to hear about them after the fact but it would be cool to not miss them at least sometimes.
I don’t see what’s the usefulness of Skydeck’s service. It is one of those feel good things to have as a Web 2 out there.
Here is my question is why would John Doe wants to find out who they have had communications with in the last few months or so? What users are gonna do with the social graphs that Skydeck system produced about their cell phone records? Does it help them optimize their phone bills , in which case is a good thing, because the system helps users save money or does it help them find out the number of calls that were made to John Doe over the last 6 months or so, in which case it is useless information to know about (zero value information)?
There is no obvious benefits to users in using Skydeck? Currently, users can just look at their monthly phone bills to see their phone records and perhaps if they wish, they can input that data into an excel file for book keeping or analysis. So, I fail to see the usefulness of such a service.
I think I see maybe 2-3 women in that photo? And not very attractive ones at that.
Leah Culver was there. she was smoking hot but i think she bounced early.
Count the number of links and content to crunchbase and then to the actual sites – theres more crunchbase here than content!
Very nice and interesting this Glancing-Pad… I hope it become a real think, not just a new gadget that nobody likes… I remember at 1991 Condex Fall, when I saw a stick, that simulates all keyboard keys with one close hand… was amazing… but that think never hit the streets…
I don’t get the value of Skydeck. Also, my understanding is that the carriers will turn off access to services like this once they become popular. Skydeck polls your account frequently to see how many minutes you have used – yeah, right, the carries will love that – NOT ! It’s clever and would be a curiosity for a wile, but doesn’t have any value to the user. It’s yet another web 2.0 social networking thing, but a very boring one (John called me 7 times – wow!) and I think these guys should leave social networking to people that can add real value and depth, not just the cellphone calls they made !
Skydeck has little value proposition. Don’t be fooled by their marketing speak. If you don’t know who your friends are without them, you are clueless.
And I’ll say this again, if your company needs personal credentials to function, you can go fuck yourself.
Don’t ever ask for usernames/ passwords, we spent far to much time educating the consumer about this issue. Never again.
I agree that Skydeck doesn’t really add any value. But that is the one I see more people using (out of the ones here) – mayyyybe the zombie one (in an odd place where people are really, really bored)
The pad thing looks pretty interesting – it’d be good to try to catch a real demo (but the idea of it sounds good)
Here’s another idea for mobile services, location-based specifically. The idea is using sensors on mobiles to “poll” certain conditions (whether it is UV, pollution, traffic, temperature, etc)
All,
The people who get the most value out of Skydeck are those who make hundreds of phone calls a month and currently have no way of keeping track of those calls *at all*. They are typically lawyers, realtors, salespeople, executives, consultants, and business development people.
@Frank: you never have to give us the username and password for your cell phone account. You enter those into our toolbar, which retrieves your bills on our behalf and uploads them to Skydeck.
Jason
Idea behind Glancing-Pad is worth to consider – one handed text entry without gesture recognition. But the problem – one has to remember gestures before use it. Twiddler is another type of chording input device aimed at one handed text entry and few people use it.
I’m not sure that it can overcome such a problem already faced by Twiddler.
Is there any free mobile software, using which I can send free SMSs?
Any suggestions?
test