I'm Bluetoothing some files from my phone to my laptop. My phone is sitting on the desk to the right of my laptop. I just caught myself absentmindedly moving the "Bluetooth transfer" window over to the right-hand side of my screen, so it would be nearer to my phone and help the photos transfer across quicker...

It's nice to see instinctual stuff intrude on decades of intellectual conditioning sometimes :)

Upgrade your company - Industrial opportunities for the internet of things, Vlad Trifa

(I arrived 15 minutes later, after the presentation)

Growth in open source sensor technologies. SAPs NetWeaver is an open source set of tech for this. Interop is important - companies want open standards.

[ Break-out session on threats and opportunities of embedded sensor networks ]

Now classifying thinking from the various groups into technological, social, interaction design and business aspects: T, S, I, B

Group 1:

1. Do we let computers decide? (S)
2. Do I trust these systems? (S)
3. How do we know we're safe from hackers either controlling or reading sensors? (T, S)
4. How do we ensure data is encrypted or safe? Should it expire so that by the time it can be encrypted, it's worthless? (T)
5. Is it healthy? (S)
6. How do you route traffic in a large network? (T)
7. Can we share network information freely and share it (e.g. Swiss train timetables and train positions)? (I)
8. Can we create our own on-the-fly networks? (I)
9. How do we present a "CPU-based-solution"? (T)
10. What do we want? (B)

Group 2:

1. Technology is neutral, use of technology is where opportunity/risk lies. (S)
2. Lots of opportunities for company appliances. (S)
3. How do we define access to data or limits of privacy? (S)
4. What happens at the end of these devices' life? What's their life cycle and ecological impact? (S)
5. Energy issues, energy scavenging from whatever you monitor (e.g. measure vibrations and simultaneously extract energy from them). (T)
6. Challenge of integration: will human beings accept this sort of thing on a large scale? What happens to people who don't accept it? (S)
7. Customers are looking for differentiation, but much of this technology is a commodity and everywhere - which doesn't bring that. (B)
8. Legally and in terms of privacy, we're lagging behind the technology. (S)
9. There's no standardisation of this stuff yet when it comes to RFID (and wireless or even power). (S)
10. Singapore is interesting: they've integrated some of these technologies and can monitor a great deal about their citizens. (S)
11. Maybe these technologies could be used for selective terrorism - e.g. use RFID readers to recognise individual Americans and therefore target individuals. (S)

Group 3:

1. How do we design for failure, for networks of sensors which have a finite life and depend on each other? (T)
2. The classic science-fiction vision of the future is seamless, with technology mediating everyday life. How might we use sensor networks to bring back serendipity? (S)
3. Digital sensors digitise everything, quantising analogue data. Does access to digital sensors reduce our confidence in the analogue (biological) ones? (I)
4. Measuring something changes our relationship to it - e.g. Nike+ changes my running habits. (I)
5. Younger generations may have a different relationship with this technology to us. We consider our homes to be what lies within 4 walls, when wireless networks extend our reach beyond these confined areas - an extension younger generations may unconsciously factor in. (Channelling Dunne & Raby here) (S)
6. Ethical debate: we embed chips into cats and dogs, when do we start routinely doing this to humans? (S)
7. Visibility: the dilemma of control over being controlled. (S)

Vlad talks about a "city of the future" being funded and built from scratch in Korea, which will be fully digital: no money, keys, etc: "New Songdo City". Also brings up the example of Octopus in Korea (must find out more about this).

Question from the audience: is there another model of exchange beyond bits and bytes of privacy exchanged for a smoother passage through life?

(Would this data have value if anonymised and then aggregated? Would this provide a means of playing with these sort of networks (which we don't fully understand) in society (which we don't fully understand) more safely? So, for instance: the room I'm in right now has 14 or so people in it. The fact that there are 14 people here probably enables us to make some sensible decisions around air conditioning, temperature, and lighting - without us knowing anything about who these people are. So would a sensor network which only provides information consumers with anonymised information be of any value?)

Q: how do we cope with different desires from different individuals? If I walk into a room and tell the window to open, then my dad walks in and asks it to close - who wins? How do we achieve consensus with these technologies as we do in a democratic way in our society?

LIFT 2008: Ubiquitous Computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals

A special treat, this one: Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin & Julian Bleecker.

Intro from Nicolas. Handover to Fabien.

Definition of ubicomp: dissemination and deployment of sensors, information processing, wireless communication in everyday objects and the environment: RFID, Nabaztag, Wi-fi in the home, GPS navigation systems.

Early vision: "The most profound technologies are those that disappear" - Mark Weiser

This evolved into calm technologies: things that "remain in the background and allow users to interact in a calm, engaged manner".

Philips' vision of ambient intelligence: relating to electronics in a more natural and comfortable way, making electronics smart.

Julian: inserting technology into everyday objects (e.g. a baby's pram) runs the risk of overengineering and ignoring social practices.

Failures: recurring crashes, lack of adoption from users, uncertainty, complication practices. Why? Product doesn't match expectations, bad design, poor product vision ("technooptimism"), poor integration into the value chain. It's difficult to differentiate between failure and its reasons.

Activity: write down an example of a tool/tech failure and 1-2 reasons for this situation. I chose 3G video calls (failed because there wasn't much demand and they complicate communication IMHO, rather than making it more lifelike).

Divide into groups: take 3 postits, discuss the idea, reasons for failure, capture these, describe consqeuences.

First group: discussing the ticket machines for the Geneva bus system. Lovely example of appalling design, multiple mis-labelled duplicated areas, horrendous pricing model, etc.

[...snip...]

Random quote: "ubicomp should be helping us make a choice, not replacing us".

Next group: electronic book reader. Cons of ebook readers: lack of content, expensive readers, resolution wasn't sufficient enough to make reading enjoyable. There's a big assumption of user behaviour, that the value added by moving to e-books outweighed the inconvenience of carrying your book everywhere. The value of digital content wasn't necessarily the same as the value of digital content. BUT recently there's been a generational shift towards consuming digital content; individuals now have different expectations towards digital media. Kindle is chunky, but will the future be a single device for reading? Or will any device with a screen gravitate towards e-book reading?

Banking is an example where the user normally has no control until an extreme event (fraud detected) occurs.

So, Sprint 5 came to an end yesterday and we did the usual review/retrospective morning, followed by lunch out at Yo Sushi and an afternoon of planning Sprint 6.

This sprint, we:

1. used our release plan to consciously reduce the number of projects we were simultaneously working on in the sprint, to see if less context switching improved our efficiency;
2. planned in a quantity of work which we knew to be achievable for the development team: in previous sprints we'd deliberately overcommitted ourselves across the board, mindful of the sheer quantity of work we have on;
3. had a few guys working on QA and bug-fixes for a large project we have on. Instead of estimating individual bugs and placing them up on the board on index cards we met every morning, pulled a days worth of bugs off our TODO list and estimated them there and then. The idea was to keep track of the quantity of estimated work completed without having to up-front estimate every bug;

And the result? We seemed to have worked more efficiently; the pair working on one of our two development projects finished ahead of schedule and were able to help out with the other project. According to pure calculations of estimated hours worked vs available hours, the efficiency of our development team doubled. I certainly believe that some of efficiency was down to tackling large numbers of small bugs (individually estimated at no less than an hour each and therefore adding up to more time than they actually took); but even discounting this and considering work outside this project, we'd improved considerably.

I look forward to measuring how well we do next sprint when we're tracking work in the larger chunks which are more traditional for us.

Things we learned this time around or have questions over:

1. Grouping many small bugs into single stories by theme (e.g. bundling 10 cosmetic issues affecting the Nokia 6230i) would seem to make more sense than considering them separately. Doh, I know - but still, we know it now;
2. I'm not convinced we understand how to plan design alongside development (so far the two have been somewhat separated in our scheduling). Talking to Nick today, we're not sure anyone does, mind;
3. Quite a few of us feel ambivalent about the value of the review meeting, where work from the last 2 weeks is demonstrated. I wonder whether we shouldn't invite actual customers down for this meeting - it might give it a little more focus, and who knows: perhaps getting them and the guys doing the work round the table might prove fruitful?

This post doesn't summarise everything we covered, of course - but hopefully it's useful if you're interested in this sort of thing.

After a post before Christmas where I expressed a little surprise at the exceptional response rates which Blyk were reporting, I had an email from Jonathan MacDonald, their Sales Director - and today spent an hour or so up at their offices talking about what they're up to.

I've found Blyk unusually opaque so far - being outside their target audience (which is strictly 16-24), I've not been able to sign up or try out the service, which means that most of what I knew of them was gleaned from press releases, blogs, and a presentation at MEX 2007.

Some of what I was told I've agreed not to write about just yet - so in the interest of objectivity (as if you can expect any here - you can expect this site to reek of my personal biases), I'm not going to comment on any of that side of things, positively or negatively. As for the other stuff: all the stats quoted below are from Blyk; they seem acutely aware of the too-good-to-be-true nature of these and are getting them audited by an independent third party.

The business is much more about targeting than I'd previously assumed. Their offering to advertisers is the same thing which folks like Tomi Ahonen have been writing about for years, and which the mobile industry has largely failed to deliver on to ate: aggregating vast amounts of information about subscribers and using this body of data to deliver relevant advertising. To do this, they're gathering information in three ways:

1. A lengthy sign-up questionnaire which is filled out when members first join; Blyk see a pattern of behaviour where members who've not initially signed up return once they see the coupons, ads and promotions which members who have filled out the questionnaire fully get;
2. "House messages" delivered from Blyk to its members once or twice a week, asking simple questions ("what's your favourite band", that kind of thing). They reckon that responses to these questions (which get a response rate greater than 29%) are almost a form of vanity publishing or self-expression - but they deliver useful data for targeting purposes;
3. "Dialogue" ad campaigns: i.e. those which don't just involve sending a message out to members, but asking a question and then delivering a message depending on the response. So "Do you want a cheap holiday" might be the opening message of a "Dialogue" campaign. If a member replies "yes" then two things occur: Blyk get useful information about that member for future targeting, and their advertiser can opt to deliver a useful, targeted promotion at that point;

As for commercials: 6 (according to their research) is the number of campaigns customers will bear per day (it feels high to me but with decent targeting I can see how that might work), and a campaign might consist of several messages. There's lots of possible variance here but I can see their argument that a campaign is not just a single message.

They don't seem to be being abused by their members. 75% of Blyk customers don't use their monthly allowance of (the bizarrely chosen) 217 texts and 43 minutes of talk time.

They do see a phenomenon that we've observed with services we've run in the past: a small (5%ish) percentage of responses to Dialogue campaign questions seem to be free-text answers, and Blyk see members messaging them directly and spontaneously with conversational texts. The geek in me is really curious to see what they do with this phenomenon - how they manage communication with these ardent customers... and whether they meet the expectation these enthusiasts have for human communication.

Overall: I have to say I'm less sceptical now, and once the figures they publish have some credibility (which could be achieved by a trusted brand backing them publicly, or via the transparent and open auditing they plan) I they'll get a warmer reception (and the rest of the mobile ad industry a bit worried, given their respective response rates).

If that happens, I'd expect to see other operators look to get their houses in order and start to do the same tying together of customer data that Blyk have achieved, in order to supplement their ARPU with revenue from the ad industry. After all, if Blyk prove the model there'll be an awful lot of mobile subscribers out there who *aren't* signed up with them.