I have an idea for a really cool service that I don’t see myself developing anytime soon. Though if there are some funders and mobile hackers who want to collaborate I would be willing to go for it.

The iPhone and recent Qik streams that I saw, gave me this idea:

Create a distress application on the iPhone. Tapping it shows you a Yes/No button to indicate whether you are really in distress. A distress call sends a live video stream from your iPhone, a cellular phone connection and your best guess location as received from Google Maps to a party who can aid you.

These parties can be one of two:

Social: Other users who use the service and who are nearby are alerted and they are expected to at least make the effort to move towards you and keep tabs of what’s happening. Heroic measures are not required but if somebody who’s feeling threatened is no longer alone their threat level usually also decreases.
This would imply a high level of social coherence and necessitate a way to penalize people ignoring distress calls. But I think the willingness to ‘make society work’ is present and seeing an old lady afraid of being mugged would prompt most people to at least walk over and check if she’s ok.

Premium: This is where you can make the money. The easiest case would be to connect the person to a 911 (or 112) central and have law enforcement officials assess the threat and take action. This works for the base case and in societies which have a functioning rule of law.
People who want extra protection or who don’t want to depend on official police could contract a SLA which depending on the amount of money paid could dispatch private security enforcers to your location by car or by helicopter (from $2000/month up or so).
I think there are enough people with enough fear that this could be a viable business model.

The problem with the premium model is that it opens up avenues towards a freelance police state (of the Blackwater type). For me and I think for the coherence of society in general, this makes the social model more desirable.

Direct communication and location information is going to have large effects on how society works and is organized but I think that has been obvious for some time now.

Determinism

And they pretty much taught us in our technical university that that technological determinism was not the way to go. There was some discussion but not nearly enough. In ethics classes I think the American approach of giving all the arguments and have students debate it out is far better, than the soft socialist Dutch approach of implying a One True Way (you’ll won’t usually find a convincing pro-Death penalty argument in course readers).

I’m not saying technology is the end all. But implementations carry with them their own values which are difficult to work around to say the least and technology which makes difficult or impossible things convenient, radically changes societies and is completely unquestioned by new generations. We have seen this and we’re going to see more of it in the future.

Fascinating story about Jan Chipchase, user anthropologists at Nokia in the New York Times. A man with the dream job for for anybody interested in human centered design and travel. Younghee Jung has a complementary blogpost detailing their experiences in and Chongqing, Dharavi, Jacarezinho and Buduburam

Fixed identity

A key point in the story is how cellular phone numbers provide a fixed piece of identity for people in societies where many things are usually unclear and people are on the move.

Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.

This is pointed out as a good thing enabling people in developing countries to have the same Just In Time moments as we here have been used to for a while. We generally use them to organize meetings more efficiently and it increases our effectivity and up to dateness.
The kind of information people lower on the pyramid need to exchange is usually much more vital and so of a larger relative worth. Access to that information leads to direct and large increases in their income, wellbeing and general control of their lives. The article is packed with examples and numbers.

Virtualized SIM

Many people use their fixed identity as an enabler for transactions, but for certain transactions a requirement could be the ability to shed your identity easily, take a new name and move shop to a different place.

For instance for the prostitutes advertised in cell phone booths around the world from the article:

The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Those people do not want a fixed identity that is traceable to a single account. A combination of the anonymity of the pay phone and the freedom of the cellular phone may be useful. Maybe not only for illicit purposes, but also for people who do not want to be tied to a single telco or need some other increased flexibility.

Innovations that help people take on multiple mobile identities are already springing up with multi-band multi-SIM phones, not only for business travellers but also used by residents of developing countries where plans have large disparities for different use cases.

This makes you wonder if the whole concept of the SIM-card, the modern day passport of the mobile citizen could not be completely virtualized. Instead of a phone with multiple SIMs inside, it could contain a virtual SIM driver that communicates with a server and retrieves appropriate SIM images as needed by usage, location an cost efficiency.

Fortunately this is not going to be necessary because freedom is being effectuated by flat rate data plans and VOIP clients on various phones (see for instance Fring). But I’m still waiting for the moment that I can buy a generic device and get a simple plan to connect it to the cloud wherever, whenever.

I already did a small review of the new Nokia N95 last week, but today I will be going into some more detail about what makes the N95 “tick”. The first day I had my N95, I played around trying to get Jaiku working over GPRS, and then I installed Fring to be able to use Skype over the Wifi. Obviously all this tinkering quickly drained the battery so here is a more detailed overview of “what computers have become”.

Battery Life (+)

One complaint of some reviewers is the battery life of the N95, but both I and another N95 owner noticed that this is probably only an issue in the first week because this is when you are playing around with all the functions. Once you start using the phone as a phone, and only occasionally use the display/video/GPS/wifi capabilities, the battery life is actually very acceptable. For me, even when using a lot of wifi, the battery life ranges from 1 to 1.5 days .

GPS (+/-)

The built-in GPS receiver is what sets the N95 apart from the other Nokia N-series phones. Unfortunately the GPS receiver is of really bad quality, and the antenna is located in the keypad, so for reception you will have to slide open the screen. In the first days I couldn’t manage to get a fix, but I recently noticed that if you stand still under a blue sky, it is able to make a fix on your position within a minute or two. This isn’t quite quick enough to solve my GPS issue, but it is fun.

Amazingly though, once you do have a fix, it really manages to keep track of your position. Even in places (half inside a building for example) where you would not get an initial fix at all. I did notice some inaccuracy here and there but in the end it does it’s job. The software provided is pretty detailed and uses internet (wifi, GPRS, UMTS or other) to download your maps. I manually zoomed in to the London area once and that was enough to never again run out of cached maps. A nice addition is the built-in search engine for finding interesting places (hotels, restaurants, etc) in your current area.

(more…)

My Jaiku Nokia N95 arrived today and obviously I had to make some nice unwrapping pictures. The package arrived within one day from Finland, which is strangely much faster than most normal packages here in the UK. Jyri had pre-installed version 0.49 of the Jaiku Mobile Client for me so I could directly start using Jaiku, but my Dutch GPRS doesn’t get recognized properly by the Series60 software. So, for now I don’t have a review of the Jaiku software as I will have to wait for my housemate to get back to help me with this.

Although the phone is quite a bit heavier and larger than my Sony Ericsson K610i, I do think I like it. Especially the combination of Wifi and GPS make it a very nice all-in-one device. I already managed to get Fring working on it, which means I can make Skype calls over Wifi wherever I have Wifi access. I can’t wait to use Fring on all those open Wifi networks out there like for example in The Apple Store Regent Street.

I also tried the built-in Flickr upload tool to upload a photo taken with the 5MP camera (see below). I think the quality of the camera is pretty good, and in combination with my Nikon D40 this camera is ideal for when I don’t want/dare to take my D40 out of my bag. Maybe it is a nice I idea to have a Flickr badge on this site with “live” images from events where I am at.

I still have to figure out 50% of the features and settings for two reasons. First off the manuals that were provided were in Scandinavian, and second I haven’t installed any Nokia software because I am using a Mac. Anyone know how the soon to be released firmware update for the N95 (as I was informed by an insider) can be installed on a Mac?

Summary (for now):

Pros

• Wifi
• GPS
• Skype over Wifi or HDSPA
• Acceptable 5Mp camera
• Nokia has recently released some nice iSync plugins

Cons

• Weird GPRS configuration
• Very big Media Button that gets pressed too quickly
• Too many buttons! (definitely not an iPhone)
• The Flickr username/password for the upload tool is not your normal username/password

In the end I am very thankful to Jaiku for awarding me this phone, and I think I am now even more a Jaiku fan.

Yesterday I buckled down and got a new cell phone subscription. I have been a loyal customer of T-mobile for the past seven years. The only effect this loyalty has had was to give them an effective carte blanche to screw me over. Their philosophy probably is that if your customer is too lazy to switch, you’ve got to incentivize them.

I identified Orange as being a lesser evil and took the cheapest one year plan from them I could get. I’ll pay €7,50/month which will be effectively doubled and all my actions will be substracted from that €15.

The customer service at the orange shop was of course dismal. This wasn’t in their flagship store but in their tiny retail outlet in Delft city centre.
They had no clue what HSDPA is and couldn’t tell me if and when Orange is planning to roll it out (Orange hasn’t released anything about this yet). They also couldn’t inform me about the availability of the Nokia N95.

I never want to be tied to a mobile operator for longer than a year. Usually I forget to cancel on time because every operator imposes a three month cancellation period so that means I’m stuck longer. They do everything to tie you down and squeeze the most possible money from you.
This time I am going to cancel my plan immediately. It would be nice if they would have offered that service in the shop.

My 3310 —proclaimed by some to be the greatest phone ever made— is not really cutting it anymore in this age of GMail apps and Jaiku presence. This means I’m looking to get a new phone.

N95

The N95 though very expensive looks like the mobile phone to get (look at the review on YouTube). But reading the review at GigaOM shows that it is everything but that battery life isn’t.

Builtin WiFi is nice to escape data costs when you are at home and at work. But the things I would be going for mostly are the excellent photo/video capabilities and the media features.
I’m looking for a pocket camera and combining it with a cell phone would seem to be the best utilization of pocket space. For unobtrusive shooting and shooting e.g. while sporting or going out a 1kg DSLR is too obtrusive. The N95’s GPS would mean that pictures could be automatically geotagged. It does all this and more.

The N95 is simply too expensive and the next runnerup candidate is the N73.

Rabo Mobiel

The other thing I had been considering is to take a mobile plan from Dutch bank the Rabobank called Rabo Mobiel. Rabobank has recently been offering very affordable mobile plans to its customers with the promise of digital mobile payment options for the future.

Payment possibilities here in the Netherlands are in the dark ages compared to the far east or even with the Nordic countries. I’m guessing that uptake will take a while but Rabobank are trying to get people on board with very competitive pricing (appealing to the Dutch) and a very well done advertising campaign.

This offering is cost efficient, sympathethic and promises to bring you to the future of payment. Still I didn’t take it because seeing is believing and switching banks is nontrivial.

See the introductory ad:

(I just got back from Spain and I have a cold. I had not gotten around to publishing this post yet.)

I got an invitation by Daniel Spronk to have lunch at the Eight Media office in Arnhem Friday two weeks ago. I was curious to their setup and having just graduated I had some free time on my hands. Cristiano had noticed their product Soocial during FOWA but I hadn’t realized that they were based in the Netherlands.

They are situated in a nice building a small walk from Arnhem centre. Their office looks nice, cosy and heavy on the Macs (see the pictures).

Total Experience

After a tour of the office I talked mostly with Daniel, Stefan and Salmon. We discussed what we we talked a bit about what they do, why they do it and where they’re going. Eight Media started out with Daniel and Stefan in 2001 as a small web agency and has since grown to the twelve people it houses right now.

They are very big fans of Python and Django because it is a nice language (Doh!) and Django enables them to setup site prototypes really really easily. I saw a demo of a site they were making with a Scriptaculous powered live search functionality which was very rich indeed.

Soocial

Recently they started working on a startup of their own called Soocial.

Soocial creates a central repository of your contacts which you can easily sync from your mobile with SyncML but also to any other location where you might want to have access to the people from your address book. Easy and seamless synchronization is key for Soocial’s success and they are taking the mobile phone as the primary access point to solve. This means they are busy building a SyncML conduit and easy ways of distributing and installing that on a variety of mobile phones.

They also provide a web interface where you can easily view and manage your contacts. Contacts are presented with hCard markup so you can easily access your data. I believe the plan is to expose an API so anybody who wants to write a plugin for other remote stores can do so. So if you want to send your data to Outlook, Highrise or GMail it should eventually be possible.

Sociality

Once you have a listing of somebody’s contacts, you pretty much also have a very accurate map of their social circle. Address books used to be nexus of your social interaction in the pre-web era. A little book scribbled full with names, addresses, phone numbers, notes, post-its and whatnot. A very rich carrier of social information which has seen very poor digital equivalents.

In the online world social interaction has completely diverged into closed applications each with its own silo of information. E-mail started it off, followed by instant messaging —which already has never been adequately supported in addressbooks—, mobile phones with calling and texting and it has gotten completely out of hand with the current diarrhea of social networking across all dimensions.

Convergence is unlikely to come up any time soon and without that the best we can really hope for is easy and painless interoperability. Soocial is building that, but it is undoubtedly going to prove really really difficult.

Soocial’s first take on the sociality of address books is to make updates propagate through your trusted social circle. So if you enter a new cell number, all your friends will automatically have it updated on their cell phones. They are aware that the data they store has much more applications and they will work further on that after the base functionality is in place.

I think one nice thing would be for me to enter my details using an OpenID with an hCard available at the same URL or at my provider. This way I could be always in control of my own information and still tie it into their network.

Their FOWA presentation got them a lot of buzz and they are now busy getting an alpha release out to their initial group of testers. The testing group is already filled up but you can still register. I did, but SyncML is not likely to work on my Nokia 3310.

The vibe I got was that these are nice guys who definitely know what they’re doing. They have a small, fun results oriented operation and they are scaling operations and attracting new people and having fun while doing so.

It’s interesting to see what will happen and it is fun to see that the Netherlands does have its own share of startups even in remote locations such as Arnhem.

I went to the Web 2.0 drink hosted by Tijs and René in the Hague tonight and I talked a bit to various internet sorts and got exposed to a whole lot of Jaiku.

Jaiku

I had already claimed my online presence at Jaiku, but hadn’t given it much thought since. Tonight Mark said that their recently released version was quite cool and Tijs briefly showed me the Jaiku mobile client on his Nokia.

The site is really usable and pretty social right now and the mobile app is nothing short of impressive (features). This really is a solid implementation of the vision Jyri Engeström laid out during his talk at Reboot called “Blind Men’s Baseball” (great presentation).

Besides nicely implementing a whole lot of social features, using a contact list to communicate with people is essentially the core of the mobile experience. If Jaiku would add VOIP to their site, you would essentially have a (mobile) communications profile which is both device and telco independent, which sounds pretty good if you ask me.

Twitter no more

The timing of this is pretty opportune since I was annoyed silly by a barrage of semi-nonsensical SMSes from Twitter lately. It feels like Twitter implements just one dimension in this space and falls short at that.

I turned off the SMS notification (end the pain, please!) and left a goodbye message for the Twitter folk.

Now just to get my hands on a somewhat more recent phone and a decent plan so I can play with the mobile presence part.