weblog June 23, 2006   Networked Handheld Device Interface Delirium (NHDID). Recent conversations led me to think a bit more about what I would see as possible next steps in the evolution of the user experience offered by networked handheld devices. As you might know I've often voiced my frustrations with current mobile devices, from the (missing) alignment of the values expressed by hardware and software, to misconceptions around our understanding of the role context of use should play when designing mobile interactions, from the overarching importance given to efficiency and effectiveness rather than to pleasure and satisfaction, to the adoption of UI paradigms taken straight from other digital tools, such as (mainly) PCs, media players and cameras. What follows is an attempt at giving structure to ideas that have been long bouncing in the semi-empty cavity between my ears. I'll provably fail, just so that you know. I'll start by detailing three "sources of grief", to use them as inspirations for possible paths worth exploring. For the first source of grief I'll start by drawing a parallel with a a series of long-running activities that date back to my Whirlpool days. We researched people's mental models and their latent, unmet needs to create User Interface strategies that provided frameworks for the development of control systems for various product categories (washers, dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens etc.). Extensive attention was given to people's evolving necessities in various phases of their "life with a product", for example their progression from novice to expert, but also to varying conditions in their interactions with appliances within any given "phase". This goes back to previously mentioned reflections on seeing the context of use not just as the physical and social environment surrounding people, but as something people bring with them to that environment. A typical example set in a "washing" scenario in this case is that on certain occasions people might be in a hurry and wanting to only do "just what's needed" to get their washer going with minimum involvement. In other occasions instead they might want specific items to be handled extra carefully, and might thus wish to adjust specific parameters of the washing cycle, such as lowering the temperature or adding a "delicate" option, possibly wasting a bit more time in exchange for added reassurance against potential damages. This basically means addressing the needs of different users with different levels of expertise, but also those of the same user in different (mental) contexts. One of the results of this activity was the identification of three "layers" of engagement, which were called Action, Adjustment and Customization, and were used to create a "spectrum of deepening commitment" in terms of time/cognitive resources spent interacting with the appliance. The Action layer included just what was needed to get the appliance working, the Adjustment layer gathered controls needed to tweak default settings to meet specific requirements, the Customization layer allowed people to either change default settings forever to their individual liking and/or to create personalized programs. The end result was an effective architecture of engagement, that allowed people to decide how extensively they wanted to tweak the basic available cycles based on the trust in their own skills and on self-management of time/cognitive resources. Fast-forward to today and mobile handsets. Other than a few accelerators (alphanumeric-key shortcuts or long key-presses) and main menu item order re-shuffling there's hardly any sign of acknowledging that people are not just novice or expert users, but have varying needs that change over time and are dependent on ad-hoc contextual conditions. The second source of grief has to do with the nature of the dialogue supported by current digital tools, actually the interaction language itself. It's not a secret that most of the common applications found on today's mobile devices still have productivity at their kernel. This is a legacy of the PC "office" metaphor, that together with desktops, files and folders is rooted in the idea that digital tools are there for us to "produce" with them, whether it's a spreadsheet, a text document or a presentation. The prospect that we could use these tools to share our deepest emotions with loved ones, to watch TV, to stream music to our stereos, to explore virtual worlds (and the real one too), or to just plain have good ol' fun was probably not the highest priority for the genial minds at Xerox PARC, those minds that shaped the world of computing as we know it today. Whether it's a media player, a digital camera or a mobile phone as soon as the complexity of the feature-set grows the reference paradigm is soon that of a hierarchical organization of data nested within data boxes, and of applications that generate and manage them. Applications that are ever-more usable, but that often lack any emotional appeal whatsoever. Again who says efficiency, effectiveness and productivity should drive most, if not all, UI design decisions? The third source of grief is the-one-fits all approach to the standard assortment of "core" applications that reside on most of our mobile devices, and their lack of task-specificity. Today's most common incarnation of a networked handheld device, the mobile phone, is often referred to as a hyper-personal object, a tool that not only allows us to communicate with others and keep in constant touch with our data sources, but also one that has become the holder of our most important information, a memory enhancement, an object that's come to be perceived as a channel of self-expression, even a personal shrine. Funnily enough though such a hyper-personal object gets a hyper-generic set of applications, and each one of them is just as well generic in nature. Pick any 10 handsets from different manufacturers and/or carriers and look at their Phonebook: why should a 60-year old grandmother who uses her handset to talk to her family have to handle her loved ones with an application that could also just as easily support a businessman juggling 200 professional contacts? On a deeper level still, why are said "contacts" all treated in the exact same way when we know that 75% of our communication is actually done with only 5 to 10 people (quite a few people I know just rely on their "recent dialled numbers" list for most of their communication duties)? Even more puzzling: who says that the people you know should be necessarily handled like a dry list of "contacts"? Recent articles have once more highlighted people's latent and explicit desires for mobile phones that do less. I have to admit not necessarily agreeing. While I absolutely advocate for simplicity, I am also always wary of the risks of simplification. What I think needs to be inferred from what people usually say in this case is that they use their mobile phones in specific ways, and they'd like the onboard assortment of widgets and gadgets to reflect their habits. This applies also to people that want their mobile phones to be just phones. In other words I think people want mobile devices that fit their individual needs, with simplicity being one of them, not necessarily the only one, as we are multi-faceted creatures and some of us thrive on complexity. I could also take off on a tangent about the fact that I've come to think that people tend to buy handsets because of cool-looking hardware, and then become frustrated putting up with software that's unfit for their specific demands, but I'll restrain myself to avoid a(nother) lengthy digression. Let's try with a real-world example, take a hardcore Flickr user. Today's cameraphones are arguably ideal platforms to feed a flicker aficionado's fixation to capture the moment and share it with others (cost of photo uploading notwithstanding). In this context what is the percentage of the experience actually devoted to taking the picture? 10%? 20%? The other 80% in this case actually consists in reviewing, filtering, tagging and uploading content. Commercial applications like Shozu, open-source initiatives like MobUp, and soon even native Nokia N-Series cameras have built on top of similar considerations, providing ways in which photos taken with a mobile handset can be uploaded to Flickr. Still I find myself thinking: how could a Flickr camera be designed from the ground up? Not a Flickr uploader working on top of a standard camera, mind you, a full-on Flickr camera. Could it get rid of most if not all the digital camera-ish features and functions and leverage innovative UI strategies for streamlined tagging schemes? Would it even need to save photos locally? In other words could a Flickr camera exist separately from the full camera application and not be built on top of it? Could a Flickr power user choose to have that camera installed, and not the standard one, when he/she buys a camera-equipped networked mobile device? Consider reversing perspective: why would a non-Flickr user have to put up in the future with even more, unneeded feature-creeping camera options that will only cater to the specific needs of Flickr users? Could people get applications that better fit their desires by being customized and task-specific? Enough grieving, time to be pro-positive. The timeframe for what I have in mind is probably 3 to 5 years out, as I am not smart enough to go beyond that time horizon, from the tactical (micro) to the strategic (macro). Exploring new interaction languages, introducing pervasive architectures of engagement, focusing on task-specificity, personalizing the nature, number and integration of "resident" applications, de-coupling and re-coupling hardware and software. That's starting to sound like a statement of intents, doesn't it? For the sake of having a consistent reference I'll also try to use the infamous Phonebook as an example. A word of caution: all that hence follows should be considered a possible direction, not a solution. The first and possibly easiest step is probably that of looking at individual applications, changing the nature of their language of interaction whilst introducing different layers of engagement in the process. Steven Blyth's "Social Fabric" and Ana Camila Amorim's "Connecting People. Disconnecting People. Reconnecting People." IDII theses are very different but interesting examples of what I mean with changing the nature of the interaction language (full disclosure: I've been Ana Camila's thesis advisor at IDII). Another example that comes to mind can be found on Roberto Tagliabue's website, which also showcases work he did for Motorola's advanced concepts group. Roberto Tagliabue, Steven Blyth and Ana Camila Amorim's concepts. These three examples try to provide alternatives to the "list of contacts" approach, using a spatial metaphor (more about this later), and integrating elements of presence as well. Visualizations range from the literal (people represented with photos), to the allegoric (people represented with avatars) to to the abstract (people represented with geometric shapes). All these examples also try to move away from a statically homogenous treatment of contacts, either varying their size or changing their appearance to reflect frequency of access. This can incidentally also turn these visualizations into tools of self-reflection, subtle indications of our communication patterns that can make us more aware of who we contact the most and who instead gets forgotten. I am not touting these examples as "ideal solutions", but as an open space of possibility, proofs that alternatives are possible, we just need to shape and test them in the real world. When looking at implementing varying levels of engagement things get quite a bit more complicated. As I've already mentioned in the past a somewhat crude but effective first set of answers could even be found in providing basic and advanced modes, so that people that do want handsets that actually do less (or appear to do so) could be provided with the means to hide unnecessary features and functions, even entire applications, to still have them available if and when they might need them at a later stage. This paradigm could be applied to the entire UI or on a per-application basis, and be made available during the first start-up sequence. An evolution of this concept could look at turning current profiles into modifiers that will pervasively change the way a handset behaves and feels, with Nokia's 5500 Sport possibly showing promising signs in this direction with its Instant Swap key... imagine for example instant swapping to Flickr mode, with the camera application structurally affected by this adjustment. A second set of answers in this area could be provided by software that adapts over time through usage. I will say upfront that when it comes to interactive systems I am not a big fan of implicit customization, such as menus that change automatically without direct user intervention, like Microsoft's infamous frequency-of-access-based disappearing items, or mobile phone messaging application that remember the last text input mode... which is never the mode you actually need now. Explicit customization on the other hand, relying on users to specify what they want to see and what not, also has its drawbacks, with the risk being that no-one will ever spend time actually specifying their preferences. The truth must then probably lie in the middle, in assisted forms of customization that leave users in control, the initial "mode" setting example being one of them. Another way to look at this is thinking in terms of what Mark Weiser called "beautiful seams": designing the points where the system takes over in ways that allow users to create clear mental models of what is happening, and of how they can act upon the suggested adaptation, even at a later stage. Look for example at what RSS aggregator NewNewsWire does with its highlighting of "dinosaur" feeds, weblogs that have not been updated in a long time: what could be ways for similar concepts to be applied to mobile devices, further enhancing their role as tools of self-reflection on our own usage patterns? The problem of building an effective architecture of engagement could also be tackled by re-looking at applications themselves, to make them more task-specific, so that users could be delivered a tailored experience from the ground up. When it comes to task-specificity potential reference points are already available, and they are called widgets. Widgets are vertical applications that tend to do one thing only and do it very well, and various companies have already been investing in mobile versions, like Nokia's recently-launched Widsets. In the context of this discourse widgets might even be a bit too vertical, with the sweet spot probably lying half-way between traditional applications and today's widgets: application modules geared towards supporting a specific experience, such as the Flickr Camera mentioned previously. Think also in this light about the 3 contact-handling concepts mentioned above: due to their underlying spatial metaphors they will have trouble scaling up to support a large number of contacts in a small-screen environment, but they could be perfect for handling our 5 to 10 to 20 special contacts in a special way, leaving more traditional applications to support the other 150 we keep on our handsets just so that we don't forget their numbers. Pushing this model to its extreme consequences could also lead to interesting results though: what would a fully widget-ized application feel like? Let's for example look again at our friend the Phonebook, not as a monolithic, all-encompassing contact administrator, but rather as a deconstructed assembly manager of sub-tasks: contact creation, access, modification and so on. Imagine embodying these sub-routines into task-specific widgets, loosely joined within subsequent task-flows. A module optimized for contact creation, another one for contact retrieval, another one still for contact visualization, each of them optimized for the specific task at hand. What could be the "glue" keeping all of these modules together? How about a resurrected version of the command line, such as Zi Corporation's Qix, or a voice-controlled take on the same concept, introducing multi-modality to the mix. In other words how about an effective way to zero-in onto the action/task that needs to be accomplished, to be then be presented with the appropriate module to accomplish it? Hmmm. Widgets and modules take us naturally to the next step: personalizing the nature, number and integration of "resident" applications, tailoring the experience to the specific needs of individuals and allowing people to choose their favorite interface flavors. This step it's a bit more far-fetched, as it implies structural changes in the way the interface layer is conceived and deployed, and even in terms of business models. I've already mentioned in the recent past that one of the promises of uploading Firmware Over The Air (FOTA), is that of shifting to a "shell without the ghost" paradigm: being able to buy the hardware with hardly any software pre-installed. I've also mentioned dreaming of the day when we'll "tend to our interfaces like to a collection of beautiful, nimble, integrated, task-focused widgets". Here we go. Imagine buying the latest and coolest formal execution of your favorite form factor: a paper-thin clamshell with a huge screen, or a button-rich candybar with hi-res camera, or a low-tech brick with fat buttons and a smallish screen. Imagine turning it on for the first time and being confronted not with the handset's interface, but with something that sits halfway between a configuration wizard and a widget collection, a collection that will vary based on what features and functions your hardware of choice can actually support. Imagine either being offered to reply to specific questions about your intended usage of the handset ("I just want to make phone calls, thank you") or being able to directly select your choice of deconstructed applications ("That Flickr camera module looks just like what I need."). Imagine being asked if you just want to migrate your existing UI set-up to the new hardware, thanks to well-known principles that decouple hard data from soft presentation layers. Imagine building up and down your onboard collection as you go along, fine-tuning it to your ever-adapting habits and evolving needs. Imagine our friend the Phonebook coming in alternate incarnations that play with the same data-set, with business users stoically sticking to boringly "productive" versions, and kids sporting instead crazy Disney-fied graphic-intensive variants, populated by animated bouncing avatars. Are you still with me? Good. In this last scenario all that we've discussed so far becomes a possibility, even sticking with whatever UI layer your current device of choice is currently welcoming you with. You can also start to imagine "curated" collections of modules, endorsed for example by music experts, or mobile TV buffs. Widget playlists! Download my perfect portable video-maniac set-up for free! Opportunities here also lie in the way the various players in the mobile value chain might be able participate to the UI party. An "open" model where talented developers could find room to sell their wares, exploring new niches and paving the road to daily-improving modules. Could this be a way to rejuvenate a market that sees mobile application sales dropping? Don't think me too foolish or over-enthusiastic though, I know very well how unlikely this future currently is, with all the aforementioned players having no desire to open their gardens to somebody else's bees. This "open to all" scenario is likely to be hard to come by, but that's not a good reason not to hope it someday will. Maybe it will be the wide availability of cheap handsets with open Linux OSs that will turn upcoming flat data plans into platforms for creative designers/developers to shape new ways of interacting with our networked handheld devices. Maybe it will be one of the big players, embracing user freedom and satisfaction. Maybe it will be an outsider with a stellar brand, a player that has lately shown signs of OS agnosticism, allowing its archi-rival's software to run smoothly on its beautiful hardware. Maybe. There's one last step that's missing from this picture: moving features and functions outside networked handheld devices, and into the environment, into things. Turning your mobile tool of choice into a remote control for the physical world, a gamepad for it even. Maybe that's a story we'll save for another time. Posted by fabio sergio | 6:02 PM | permalink ............ June 15, 2006   The world around our screens. In the last few weeks my thoughts have been filled with visions of networked handheld devices, ubiquitous communication/connectivity and of the things that will make up the Internet of Things. It all started with the second Blogject workshop, organized by Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker in Lausanne. Precious thought-provoking hours were spent with Nicolas, Timo Arnall and Marc Hottinger, looking at what role mobile devices will potentially play in the near future, a future populated by physical objects enhanced by digital technologies. We looked at Blogjects' agency as generation, storage and circulation of aggregated information, and at how that information will influence people's thinking and behavior. We talked about enforced and voluntary adoption, about individual and social benefits. We imagined Nike's Nike+ evolving into a social service platform that will motivate (and even obligate!) people to walk more. We turned MySpace into a semi-automated repository of people's consumeristic patterns, from "filtering things through people" to "filtering people through things". We asked ourselves if agency necessarily implies (human-like) personality. We sketched, stuck scribbled post-it notes on mobile phones, ate fondue, went to sleep, then got up and sketched some more. We wondered if and when Nabaztags will be spotted (information) foraging on Google prairies. It was fun and inspiring, as all workshops ought to be. As you've probably realized by now my recollections are somewhat blurred, and my notes almost absent, but I hope Nicolas and Timo will put together wonderfully well structured reports of what-really-happened, so for the serious lowdown you only have to wait a bit more, rest reassured. The workshop rejuvenated aging neurons and provided further inspiration for my contribution to the "Interacting With The Real World" MEX 06 panel, held a few days later, in London. That in turn informed my talk at Interaction Frontiers, in Milano (which also featured a video contribution kindly sent by Nathan Shedroff... thanks Nathan!). My presentation, "The World Around Our Screens" (PDF, 1.4 MB) mashed-up my MEX talk with ideas taken from last year's "Mixed Reality Check". What follows is not really a transcript of my talk, but rather a recollection of the points I tried to make. When I was kindly asked by Leandro Agrò to participate to Interaction Frontiers I immediately accepted, glad to be able to contribute to one of the handful of such events held in my home country. Faced with the task of adding signal and not just noise to the conference I promptly resorted to my trench tool, the dictionary, to look for inspiration in the etymology of the conference's keywords: avatars, intelligent agents, affective and adaptive interfaces, ubiquitous computing. One term particularly stood out. The word "Avatar", as defined by the Oxford dictionary comes from the Sanskrit term "avatAra", descent, and stands for the: "... manifestation of a deity in bodily form on earth, an incarnate divine teacher, an embodiment, as of a concept or philosophy, in a person..." What I think this definition hints is that even when it comes to interacting with deities human beings acknowledge that the required experiential plane needs to be that of our daily perception of reality, a plane in which our body's physicality is an essential attribute. The term Avatar as widely adopted in the world of digital media usually refers instead to a screen-based graphical representation of an entity, often human in nature, that makes our interactions with he/she/it easier to manage. In the adoption of the term from Sanskrit what happened to embodiment? I've long thought many of us currently suffer from what I half-jokingly call "Reversed Binoculars Syndrome": making things that are distant feel even more distant, instead of looking for ways to get them closer to us. In this sense our current enthusiasm for screen-based artifacts, our self-imposed confinement to the four boundaries of a screen often leaves me a bit puzzled. I myself spend the good part of the day acting on files and folders, piloting a little cursor to represent my intermediated will in a distant intangible world that treats three of my five senses as unnecessary baggage. How will the Internet of Things change this perception, and why is embodiment relevant in this context? A short story might help me get the point across. Milano's public transportation authority has decided to join modernity and recently substituted most of its paper-based documentation with smart cards. Similarly to the Oyster system in London, customers can now swipe their piece of plastic next to a reader to gain access to both above and below-ground transportation. I was explaining this to Timo Arnall during his visit to Milano last December, as we were riding on a bus. An elderly lady, seeing us pointing towards the metallic box that houses the reader, smiled to me and said (in Italian): "In the past you had to stamp the ticket. Now you can simply caress the machine." What a wonderful way to frame in one poetic sentence the potentialities hidden in the interaction with digitally-enhanced physical artifacts. Two words stand out here: simpl(icit)y and caress. The first one is an obvious consequence to Matt Jones' "I touch a thing and it does a thing" axiom: no more need to look at sequences of menus. The second one, well the second one is much more fascinating to me and talks about the fact that a physical object implicitly offers richer emotional affordances than a digital one. We store forever boarding passes from trips we don't even remember, objects we've practically held in our hands for a few minutes, but we change our computer's operating system on a whim as soon as a newer version is available, something we've looked at and interacted with for endless hours every single day, sometimes for years. Would you ever consider (even mentioning) "caressing a folder" on your desktop? With what? Why is embodied interaction and all of the above more and more relevant? Well, because we are ready to undergo a shift in the way we'll be relating to things, digitally-enhanced networked things. We're entering an "era of pervasive networks where we'll be in the network, not on it", to use the words of Julian Bleecker. An era of Mirror Worlds, in which the digital and the physical will overlap and merge. Adam Greenfield's "Everyware" and Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things" explore in detail the opportunities and risks such new scenarios will bring to our socio-economic table. Both are books people should read, even if they couldn't care less about RFID, Ubicomp and techno-social speculations, because as Adam states in Thesis 24 "Everyware, or something very much like it, is effectively inevitable.", and in Thesis 16 "Everyware can be engaged inadvertently, unknowingly, or even unwillingly.". What will be the nature of this new breed of digitally-enhanced physical objects then? How will we relate to them, when the value of our relationship with an object will overshadow that of the object itself? How will we engage with them in a meaningful dialogue? The spectrum of the nature of Blojects, Spimes and Everywares will span wide, but two incarnations are already appearing: (Smart) Talkative Actors, things that will be able to communicate with us directly, and (Dumb) Silent Agents, things that will need further mediation to disclose their secrets. With (Smart) Talkative Actors we're back to Avatars. Embodied Avatars. Intelligent agents that will leverage our natural ability to relate to the world in physical terms, using languages we've learned from watching, hearing, touching, savoring, pushing, turning, shaking and breaking things ever since the day we were born. As Oren Horev recently stated during his IDII thesis presentation "... we learn naturally to 'talk to the hand', we think in terms of vectors, of physical constraints, embodied cognition is how the body learns how to relate to the physical world...". Talkative Actors will communicate with us using movement, sound and visual stimuli, they will be calm and evocative, they will assist and help us... and annoy us too. In their current incarnations they will also be probably somewhat limited in number, as they'll tend to be resource-intensive (requiring a power source and constant connectivity), and also possibly because we'll be able to speak only to so many squirrels and rabbits before we'll start to feel a bit silly. Left: Stefan Marti's Cellular Squirrel. Right: the Nabaztag. The vast majority of things constituting the Internet of Things will be (Dumb) Silent Agents. Blogjects. Spimes. Everyday things that will generate and circulate data about themselves and the context around them, data that will be aggregated into information by other things. Information that will be cross-referenced and interrelated with other information, top-down and bottom-up. Information that will change they way we relate to objects, allowing us for example to avoid buying foods we are allergic to or products that don't fit with our value systems. Research projects such as iBuyRight are early versions of ethical shopping filters made available at the point of purchase and enabled by aggregation of distributed knowledge, but also Amazon is already trying to turn impulse buying into delayed delivery at a better price. Compared to (Smart) Talkative Actors (Dumb) Silent Agents pose a problem, a problem of local interaction. How to establish dialogue with a pair of jeans, a vase, a shoe, a chair? Bruce Sterling talks about spime wands, and Mike Kuniavsky would probably speak about magic ones. I am not nearly half as smart as either one of them and my answer is simpler: we're already carrying such objects with us, most people still just call them mobile phones. I know: all of the above to then finally go back to screens, small screens? Probably, at the beginning at least... but not necessarily, or not for long. First of all we (as in "the industry") have to start thinking about these products not as terminals but as conduits, not tools where information is displayed and handled but devices that will be used to imbibe things with information taken from other things. The other, more profound change has to come in terms of interaction language. In this sense a look at what's happening to controllers in the video-gaming arena might be useful. While Microsoft and Sony are still fighting the processor and polygon battle, Nintendo has been hard at work on the Wii, a controller that promises to set new standards in the intuitive way players will manage their screen-based representations. To swing a sword in a game, they'll simply swing the Wii. A closer look at the Wii will reveal a 4-way joystick, a few buttons, a loudspeaker, a vibration module and not much else. Add a screen and the description above will fit any mobile phone currently in production. Oh yes, sorry, add plenty of motion sensors to the mix. Could the Wii be a role model for new interaction languages that will help us manage our dialogue with digitally-enhanced physical objects, using the same embodied cognitive toolbox we've spent most of our waking hours unconsciously fine tuning? What will be the grammar of that language? Will we simply drag and drop information from one object to the next? Will we for example solve the archetypal VCR "blinking clock" problem by dragging and dropping the time from the nearest clock into it? Or will we rather use simple gestures to control complex behaviors? Networked Handeld Devices: gamepads for the physical world. This is only the beginning. Posted by fabio sergio | 6:37 PM | permalink ............ June 08, 2006   The trouble with scanning the horizon today. John Thackara's "Putting The Future Into Perspective" (PDF, 5.4 MB) looks with a critical eye at techno-enthused "horizon scanning" (the discipline formerly known as "futurism"): "Horizon scanning looks far into the future, but it does so through a telescope that looks only for developments in science and technology at the expense of other, equally rich dimensions of life. All this matters for design because there is a growing demand for ‘design-led futures’, and those futures are being described exclusively as technology-based ones, whether they add value or quality to our lives or not. Horizon scanning does not have to be tech-fixated. The next horizon is people, and they are standing right in front of us." Are current future-casting practices really just based on vague promises of a world made miraculously perfect by technology? What is the role designers should play? Posted by fabio sergio | 7:32 AM | permalink ............ June 05, 2006   Search engines for things. Wired magazine recently quoted Wang Jianzhou, chairman and chief executive of China Mobile: "I met with Google's CEO for the second time, and we both share the same idea: how to turn cell phones into a new kind of Internet search engine." Hmmm. In the dawning age of the Internet of Things networked handheld devices will not be used to just search for information on the Internet. They will be used to search for information stored in things. Posted by fabio sergio | 7:16 PM | permalink ............ Not bored yet? Visit freegorifero's weblog archives for more useless words.

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