As you can see, Smartspace has been in a deep freeze for most of 2007. Despite this, we still get tremendous traffic and ongoing messages of interest from readers. We won’t continue publishing here, but we have started up over at our new location, Changeism, the blog for Changeist, our new venture watching the development of technology and its impact on our lives. We encourage you to make the jump with us! You can also replace the RSS feed for this site with the new one - readers shudl autodetect several feeds available under the Changeism URL.

Happy Holidays! 

In the words of a recent song, I’m not dead, just floating. After a busy travel period, I settled in to get some reading and other writing done, hence the pause in Smartspace content. Spring is here, and content will now bloom like the trees outside my window.

BusinessWeek carries an interesting feature on motion and gesture technologies in its latest edition. The article ties together threads that have been ongoing in the area of gesture-controlled media and interfaces (particularly in the area of advertising), motion capture for film and games, and new innovations such as multi-touch, which has gotten hot since the announcement of the iPhone.

Of course, most folks are all excited about the applications in marketing, such as with the interactive ads from adidas and Target the article describes. Less talked about but more interesting in the long-term are public infrastructure uses for gestural interfaces. Imagine being able to use a gestural interface to find your way around a foreign city or airport, based on your own orientation, not that of a flat map (could have used this when I went to Switzerland and back recently - the Geneva tram maps were a pain to understand to me). Or in public health care environments (show the doctor where it hurts, particularly if its inside - a first step before a costly MRI to locate a problem in 3D space). Or in museums (flick through a catalog of art, skip along a timeline, or explore an ancient building).

More and more, interface designers are looking at how to use gestural control to get around issues of literacy and language, and also age and ability. Most of us can point, and move an object to find another. Hopefully interface designers looking into this area will get together more often with information designers to collaborate on projects such as those I mention above. 

One flight cancellation, four flights, a string of espressos, 3 countries, 2 languages, a workshop, drinks, dinner and a stack of pain chocolates later, LIFT07 is off and running. Cheers to Nicolas, Laurent and the LIFT team for organizing a great day yesterday, and thanks to the 40-odd people who made it to my workshop. The questions, feedback, ideas and future profiles created were what I expected - provocative and diverse.

Thanks also to Mauro and Fabien for connecting with me in the first few minutes after my arrival, Bruno for pointing us to a wonderful dinner, and Michele, Wendy and Sandra for the invite to join along.

I was all ready to jump on my flight to LIFT07 last night when United Airlines once again failed to get an airplane to my airport to get  me there. So, Here I am, delayed another day, but champing at the bit to get to Geneva to join the group. My workshop is now packed, thanks to all who’ve joined in. Anyone who wants to meet up, drop me a line via the contact link on the sidebar here.

Meanwhile, keep up with the fun at Flow, the LIFT07 attendee blog. 

The train of thought that I started as I discussed Fabien Girardin’s Flickr heatmaps a few posts back, and which led me to thinking about mining consumer line-of sight data to target advertising, seems to be continuing here in a recent New York Times article about how advertisers are now looking to use what they would consider “unsold” space to place their messages. This phenomenon even has a name, urban spam.

But why just post the same ad for everyone to see?   Why not use an individual viewer’s line of sight as they travel as a “channel” into which to project ads and messages where blank space exists? Fabien’s recent post, illustrated here,  shows the “traces” left by Flickr photographers as they transit  Barcelona. Where his heat maps showed the locations of single images, the traces follow the path the photographer takes through the city, or his visual corridor, if you will.

I’m fortunate enough to be presenting one of the terrific workshops scheduled on the first day of LIFT, taking place February 7-9 in Geneva. Organized by a brilliant Swiss team, LIFT explores challenges and opportunities of technology in our society by engaging a stellar line-up of speakers and participants in three days of stimulating activities.

Hopefully appropriate to the theme, I will be talking about technology values - a concept created by the company where I am on staff as a futurist, Social Technologies, which describes how human values are shaping the next wave of technology in consumer lives. We developed the technology values concept by identifying common people-driven values that will be necessary for future technologies to successfully satisfy emerging social needs. The dozen values we identified arise from foresight exercises we conducted across a diverse range of industries, in the course of aiding organizations as they seek to shape products and services to meet these emerging needs.

In the workshop, I’ll introduce the 12 values in four sets, describing their drivers, how they manifest today, the underlying technologies that will be affected by their emergence, and examples of where they apply. I’ll then ask participants to engage in a brainstorming exercise to create new product or service concepts of their own, based on combinations of these values. It should be fun, engaging and help put the social back in the center of the technology experience.

If you haven’t registered but plan to attend, please jump over and sign up, and space is limited and only a few open places remain. Once you’ve registered, please sign up for some of the exciting workshops. I hope to see you there. Anyone who would like to meet up at the event, please drop me an e-mail via the contact page here.

That strange noise you heard around midday in the US today was the collective gasping of onlookers both in the room and watching online as Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s next major platform, the iPhone. I was one of them. It’s sexy, it’s smart, it’s the future of handheld computing and communications. Even if it has problems, like the Mac did in 1984, it will change user expectations of what a communication and computing device should do. Even if others may have thought of bits of the technology or applications, Apple is putting it all in one place and making it real.

One notable part of the announcement was the inclusion of Google Maps as a widget. Along with the simple to use gestural interface, the iPhone would promise to change how we walk, talk, relate and locate - except it lacks GPS. The iPhone has WiFi, EDGE, and Bluetooth, but no GPS technology inside that I can find. This is a pity, as it keeps the iPhone one step away from being fully useful as a location-context device. Sure it can tell how close it is to my face, but not how close it is to Starbucks.

Here are some possible applications just off the top.  

I’ve been asked lately to make forecasts about mobile technology, smart environments and some of the other areas I focus on, so I thought I’d feed the beast with five broad forecasts for 2007 (and beyond) regarding Smartspace’s topics of interest. They are in no particular order, though they are separated by what I’d call positive smartspace (location technology used for general social value) and negative smartspace (location technology used for top-down control). They represent technology and user trajectories that are converging in the near term, and for which we are likely to see mass-market interest (save for the last one). This isn’t Giga Om or TechCrunch, so I’m not making "hot or not" style predictions - simply putting down some thoughts as the year closes. Feel free to add your own, comment, offer a different view on those here or pass these along.

1. Mobile social networks gain traction in US and Europe - Services such as Dodgeball have been cute but not much more than basic flirtware over the past few years. However, 2006 saw the intro of GPS-able mobile handsets in the US, somewhat later than Europe, which enabled the introduction of various location-based services such as Verizon’s Navigator, Boost Loopt, and Helio’s BuddyBeacon, the latter two subject of my last post. With the buzz over MySpace, Bebo and Facebook calming down, and MMORPGs too involved or just not that interesting for many younger consumers, taking social applications such as the aforementioned social networks into a mobile environment and allowing location-based connections will be a comfortable next step both for users of these social networks, who are also prime customers of mobile LBS. With more media services launching on mobile networks worldwide, new types of social context can come into play to create new objects around which to socialize, either in a fixed location or on the move.
2. Play goes outside -  Following on this first forecast, we are seeing play take on new dimensions based on social applications. Communication becomes play and vice-versa. This shift will bring on outside (as in not in-home) dimension to this kind of play, with social communication and play becoming increasingly place-related. This is a bigger leap than the first forecast, but I think the fun aspect of location applications and social communication will converge and evolve more rapidly then these areas have emerged individually.
3. Social annotation emerges - One byproduct of this last convergence is social annotation of locations. This is already taking place in 2D environments such as Platial and various mashups that use Google Earth. However, applications such as Socialight are taking annotation out of the 2D environment and into the world around us. These applications are becoming more accessible via mobile devices (laptops, mobiles), allowing us to see user-generated content related to place. Again, the fun factor helps make this a desirable application.
   
4. GPS for security, not just wayfinding and socializing - GPS has been mainly focused on wayfinding in consumer markets thus far, with most of us using our own location and that of our desired target to get from point A to point B. We have also seen the emergence of social uses of location information as mentioned above. The newest twist is the use of personal position data for safety and security purposes - via childfinding services, parent minders and emerging applications of presence information. Fear and risk aversion are easy buttons for mobile operators to push, and some have gently made their way into this area through services ranging from roadside assistance to "kiddiephones". While neither of these have been breakout applications, the time is ripe as the potential benefits of the personal security aspects of location data become more well understood.
5. Negative smartspace trumps positive smartspace, for now - This is a fundamental conflict that is emerging around the application of technology in consumers’ lives: technology for social value vs. technology for control - bottom-up vs. top down. It’s fun to talk about new ways of connecting to each other, communicating, sharing. But the current world security climate provides ample cover for governments to utilize "location" technologies, from CCTV to GPS to RFID to keep a tighter rein on citizens, rather than use them to create or improve services that create social value - education, welfare, health, social communication. This tension will mark the way communication technology evolves over the next 50 years, let alone the next 12 months. I hope to map this in the way some map the world by values or religion so we can get a closer view of how smartspace technologies are applied at a local level. Watch this space!

Watching a rare moment of TV the other night, I caught a glimpse of a commercial for Boost Mobile, a US mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that launched a friend finder application this summer called Boost Loopt. The service’s tagline uses an oft-heard phrase in American hip hop culture, "Where You At?".

I found the commercial a bit strange at first, with two characters dressed in what looked like fat suits, one in green, the other in orange, calling each other, shouting the tagline. They were perfect spheres with heads and feet, like Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka, when she eats the candy and turns into a blueberry.

Then, the penny dropped. They were the dots on the map themselves, orange and green. I must be getting old. How else to be playful and yet get the idea of people as points on a map than to show them as, well, points?

Boost, and the other US operator to recently add friend finders via GPS, Helio, are not your average operators. Both are targeted at younger customers,  mostly urban, very social. Helio’s Buddy Beacon launched with the intro of a new handset, the Drift, in November, and Boost has now taken the initiative to raise the marketing stakes due to the competition.

Boost reportedly has 40,000 users for Loopt as a result of its trial of the service. Opinions vary about the speed and angle of ascent of the mobile GPS market, but what’s clear is that US operators are now comfortable enough to start pushing it to a tech-hungry younger user market, de-emphasizing the technology, and amping up the social dimension in their marketing–even if that means being hyper-literal in doing so.

I’ve switched Smartspace’s RSS feed subscription front end to Feedburner, and enabled a new option: subscribing to Smartspace via e-mail. See the sidebar at left for both options.

The existing RSS feeds are still operative, since they are already well subscribed (thanks to all our happy readers and backlinkers!). Existing subscribers can switch to one of the new feed sources, or stay where they are.

Look for an increase in posts in coming weeks as I am back from the road and well fueled.  

Two posts recently on sites I frequent pointed to two different means of visualizing the parts of cities most photographed by visitors, both using Flickr users as proxies for all tourists in effect. The first , done by Yahoo! Research Berkeley, simply uses the tag cloud approach to map the most frequent location tags used alongside images of London, creating a tag map of London as seen from photographers’ point of interest. As the Yahoo! team theorized: "Individual pictures taken at a specific location act as “votes” in favor of that location’s interest…"

The second post, from Fabien Girardin, analyzed Flickr tag data to produce "heat map" visualizations of similar data for other cities, primarily Barcelona. The same outcome can be seen — photographers tend to take (or at least post) images taken around the most known landmarks.

The reasons are probably manifold. People go to see sites they are most familiar with, and want to share evidence of their visit (or that they are "cultured" or have ticked the great world icons off their life’s list of tasks). They also go where the services and entertainment are, which are often clustered around these locations. Likewise, they are often visually more stimulating, due to the high traffic levels, attendant advertising, sight and sounds in general.

What can cities do with this information?  Potentially site commercial and public service infrastructure in these locations, or utilize tourist eyeballs more effectively by moving visual communication to these locations. These techniques also provide an inight similar to that found in Emotion Maps, which indicate emotional response of the visitor to the landscape — a psychogeographic tool to better understand how individuals interact with geography intellectually as well as physically.

Mobile wallet, anyone? Fourteen operators within the GSM Association, representing 40 percent of the world’s mobile customers, have agreed to a standard approach to implementing near-field communication (NFC) technology in mobiles, opening the door to using a mobile device to interact more directly with services and infrastructure by adding RFID-like technology to handsets. Applications include mobile ticketing, payment, access (by acting as a key), and interaction with advertising and annotated environments, for example.

I contacted Timo Arnall, design researcher and leader of the Touch project for his comments on the agreement:

"It’s good to see more moves for standardization, beyond the work of the NFC Forum. It’s also very encouraging to see that NFC is recognized as an important feature alongside the other technologies being rolled into handsets. In terms of the global rollout of NFC handsets, it will be a difficult challenge. It comes down to chicken and egg problems of simultaneous service rollouts, not just in different regions, but different countries, even down to the individual city level. More standardization of NFC hardware and software will ease this hurdle but it’s still a huge challenge."

Of course, the road to hell is paved with standards agreements, as I experienced as a close observer of digital payment standards in the mid 1990s. Hopefully the Japanese experience with NFC-like applications will provide ample case studies for other operators to jump on board and make NFC one of the next areas of development.

Also appears at www.mobile-weblog.com.

(Image © Timo Arnall)

In this age of place, at the dawning of the locative technology "era," a countertrend is emerging - fear of locatability. Stories have emerged of countries blocking updates of Google Earth datasets to protect assets - nothing new here. Now Gizmodo points to a new category of personal technology - the GPS signal blocker. Of course, one only needs a simple building to do this, but high tech can be applied as well apparently to block devices in a certain location from being able to lget coordinates using GPS.

Reasoning given? The excuse du jour: terrorism. Personal or public safety may indeed be one motivating factor for throwing up a 50m or 50km cone of un-locatability around oneself, home, or facility, but such blank zones will become more and more conspicuous as location services ferret out the "value" in every place.

I missed LIFT this year, but am booking soon for 2007. Nicolas and his crew have announced details about LIFT ‘07, which is scheduled for February 7-9. The line-up of speakers looks fantastic. Register before December 31 for lower rates.

Undersound is a design project I’d certainly like to see implemented: it’s a system by which mass transit users can share music with users throughout the underground system via a bluetooth network. It’s easier to read the original description than explain.

Interesting ideas behind Undersound include the ability to share and surf the music available from your fellow riders or previous users of a station, creating an emotional link between action, place, people and media. One can imagine the emotional tone of a station’s “soundtrack” would change based on the time of day.