Mobile Data Input: find, organize and share….
Thomas Menguy | November 19, 2006Mobile devices are, at least for me, some kind of “data gathering plateforms”. I want to take photos, record sound, take short notes and have everything well organized with as less as possible work to do to organize this data and find it.
It’s why PalmOS has been so successfull in its time: it was easy to get and find your data, and it was well integrated with your PC, where your real data is at the end of the day.
With the addition of Photo/Video capture in mobile phones, data gathering can be brought to a next level: thanks to GPS data/ time data/ recognition software it may be a snap to recognize a place, a shop, a good you want to buy and compare it in real time to online retailer, etc.
Seen at GigaOM » Nokia’s Blue Sky Ideas great Nokia’s experiment, that may go further:
The Mobile Augmented Reality Applications project explores utilizing camera equipped mobile devices as platforms for sensor-based, video see-through mobile augmented reality. The project also investigates new and exciting applications enabled by this technology, and UI solutions and paradigms motivated by the restrictions of the mobile devices.
A raw photo is at least better that nothing, but is is really a pain to find one when you have thousand, to find this christmas photo of your baby boy … it’s why Picasa (from google) or Adobe Photoshop Elements exist : easily add and use a photo metadata. For using Photoshop Elements, and trying to tag manually each of my photos, I know it’s a pain…and everything that can automatically add meta data to a photo worth it! Date is the obvious one, location is a great one, data recognition another.
There is room here for great services, web 2.0ish, using goole maps, some place repository, etc … and update on flickr 
.
Local search engines like google desktop , Copernick or Windows Desktop search come here to the rescue by indexing those metadata.
Something I use a lot in my day to day work are whiteboard photos, after those brainstorm/Architecture meetings, the added value is nearly always on the black board with scheme, annotations and so on…and the easy way to go is taking a snapshot, and if this snapshot could use OCR (good one) and become searchable, I would use it in a heartbeat!
An example of a “mix” for data gathering is 2D barecode, see this news to go further:
Microsoft adopts QR Code as standard for Windows Live Barcode October 27, 2006 on 12:51 pm | In Technical, Standards, Web 2.0, Applications, Mobile Phone, 2D Barcodes, Situated | It seems that Microsoft have discovered the 2D Barcode. Expect to see a proliferation of mobile 2D Barcode products and services in the next two years, now that Microsoft have just released Windows Live Barcode (still in Beta).
Mobile Learning » Microsoft adopts QR Code as standard for Windows Live Barcode
Data sharing is another beast and get a lot of buzz recently. I’ll quote some of the blog I read about the phenomenum:
Told You So: Social Networking on mobile EXPLODING, worth 3.45 B dollars in 2006 We love digital communities and social networking, obviously, as we set up this blogsite – Communities Dominate Brands – and wrote the book of the same name. And in the six hundred or so blog entries at this blogsite we’ve discussed just about every significant social networking site and digital community from eBay to Skype, from MySpace to YouTube, from Habbo Hotel to Worlds of Warcraft, from Flickr to Ohmy News, from 2nd Life to Twins Mobile. And on and on and on.
With the growing popularity of sophisticated telephones, Informa forecasts that globally, operator revenue from such services will rise to more than $13 billion by 2011 from $3.45 billion this year. Asia is the most active region, with revenue from “mobile community services” of $1.8 billion this year, followed by Europe at $721 million, according to Informa. Leading the way are companies like Cyworld in South Korea, a creation of SK Telecom that allows cellphone users to share pictures, clips, music, ring tones and games.
MOBILE user generated content and social networking worth 3.45 B this year
This seems to make a lot of sense. Recent reports are showing that social networking platforms made for mobile applications are generating a global net of 3.45 billion dollars. This is more revenue than the other social networking otherwise known as Web 2.0. Not bad.
GigaOM » Up Next, Mobile Created Content
According to Telephia three percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, representing nearly eight million consumers, say they use their cell phones to take personal videos. That isn’t that high, but that percent jumps to 6% for consumers that have purchased a new handset in the last six months — particularly those that bought the Razr V3 series. In Europe, Telephia says the numbers are even higher with Spain at 15%, Italy at 14%, and the U.K. and Sweden at 12% and 10% respectively.
GigaOM » Will Goobe Go Mobile?
So yes, people are really collecting data, and are sharing it … but the added value of those sharing services seems to rely on data recognition, automatic categorization, easy search, promotion and access …(see veeker for example).
Let’s see the new automatic meta-datas!
Update: Look at http://www.like.com/ and its “father company” Riya this is really a picture search engine by similarities (found via Techcrunch) … like the recent buyout by Google of Neven Vision to add face recognition to Picasa: so it is coming!
Update 2: look at this about qwerty keyboard :
Is hardware QWERTY really overrated? Have you noticed how some new smartphones from Nokia have given up on hardware qwerty on their devices?
SmallDoses » Blog Archive » Is hardware QWERTY really overrated?
For me and for now … the full keyboard has really changed how I use my smartphone (I was a graffiti champion before ), for me the best compromise.
