22 posts
With the advent of NFC and a wave of new mobile phones supporting this new technology will it improve the shopping experience for us consumers or will it be another failed attempt by banks, operators and others to create another "eWallet"?
This week, our topic of conversation on the blog is design. From design thinking to user experience design and even learner experience design, a term I thought was fairly new but seems to have been mentioned back in 2004.
First, Zaana Howard from Swinburne University in Australia talks about design thinking on the fly, using Agile principles.
Read on for more.
Color is a new mobile location based photo app that lets you share photos with people around you. There's no need to follow friends because the social connections are based on distance. I like the concept - viewing real-time collections of photos from people experiencing one event like a party or gig. Color also lets you to shoot video, something I'd love from Instagram.
Continuing with our mobile theme this week, here are a few videos from Google's Think Mobile conference last month which touch on different aspects of mobile: its use in marketing, the development of mobile technologies such as near-field communication and so on.
Time for some mid-week chuckles. Overheard in the recent past at Made by Many (click through for the full list!):
OH: "Satan still has some good in him, unlike Rupert Murdoch"
Tue Mar 22 11:07:01 +0000 2011
James Higgs
As part of our focus on mobile this week, here's an interview with Ivo Jansch, the founder of mobile technology startup Egeniq. We featured one of his presentations in one of our 'Slideshares of the week' posts not too long ago. Ivo is also an author and speaker, and is a PHP/iPad/iPhone/Android developer. Previously, he was CTO of ibuildings, a PHP development agency, for 10 years.
Serendipity (and a poorly communicated change to the SXSWi programme) dropped me into an intriguing session entitled "Our devices: how smart is too smart?" presented by Genevieve Bell from Intel (referred to here as 'Intel's Secret Weapon').
The SXSW posts will no doubt continue to pour in in bits and pieces, but it's time to go back to the curated weekly data. This week, we'll be looking at mobile. Made by Many recently obtained a presence in Sweden to focus specifically on mobile, so it's a good time to focus on the topic.
Like many people, I left Austin with a lot to think about. I feel as though I spent six days taking information in and just stacking it up in my mental overflow lot to wait until I have time to process it (that would be this weekend).
The conference is all about the immediate and the instant, which makes it a shift for me, as my preferred method of interaction and consumption is long-form: long chat, long article, lots of time to think. So before I wander back to my old ways, here's a short show-and-tell on the week gone by.
2011 was my first time at South By South-West. Before I left I'd been given a range of advice, from drinking my year's quota of tequila in 5 days to avoiding most of the panel based sessions harder than I'd be avoiding healthy eating. It's passed in a whirl, with each day blending into the other until now that it's all over it feels like one helluva long day has just ended, not a whole week.
So did it meet my expectations? Yes it did, and more. It was an incredibly stimulating, vibrant and inspiring experience which has left my brain spinning. But, because there has to be a but, my only issue was that it did take me a day or two to perfect picking out the good sessions to attend. I'd been warned to expect more breadth than depth, and to stay away from sessions that were too close to my day to day work, but I was initially tripped up by sessions which sold their topic very well in the programme and then turned out to be nothing more than an exercise in selling the speaker and his/her start-up/book/app during the session. If I'd wanted to listen to a marketing pitch, I didn't need to fly 10 hours across the Atlantic to find it. A good talk should put sharing value first, and self-promotion second.
