Mobile Social Play — my Reboot 9.0 proposal

Vadr

I’ve just sub­mit­ted my pro­pos­al for a talk at Reboot 9.0. It’s on the three areas I am most fas­ci­nat­ed with at the moment: mobile, social soft­ware and gaming/play. After attend­ing this great con­fer­ence twice it’d be real­ly cool to get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to present there.1

Take a look at it and let me know what you think2, I’d love to get some feed­back up-front so I can maybe work that in there. What do you want to know about this topic? 

Curi­ous what this might be like? Take a look at the Pecha Kucha I deliv­ered on mobile gam­ing for a taste of what’s to come.

  1. If it does­n’t work out I can always turn it into a micro pre­sen­ta­tion.
  2. If you like it, vote it up!

links for 2007-03-30

IA Summit 2007 — Leaving Las Vegas

I’m sit­ting in the North West Air­lines World Club in Detroit using my eleven hour (!) lay-over to work away all the email and RSS feeds that have been pil­ing up dur­ing the past days of being (most­ly) off-line.

I had a great time at the IA Sum­mit. It was def­i­nite­ly worth the trip. Attend­ed lots of thought-pro­vok­ing talks and met a whole bunch of inspir­ing peo­ple. It’s inter­est­ing to now be able to put the Euro­pean IA scene in con­text of the ‘inter­na­tion­al’ one.

I’m sin­gle-quot­ing inter­na­tion­al, because to be hon­est, I think the IA Sum­mit is a North Amer­i­can event. Of course there were quite a few vis­i­tors and even speak­ers from out­side the US & Cana­da, but I can’t help but feel that the major­i­ty of atten­dees real­ly are not very aware of the tru­ly inter­na­tion­al char­ac­ter of the IA community. 

That’s a shame.

One exam­ple is some­thing I real­ly should have fixed dur­ing 5 minute mad­ness: the announce­ment of the Euro­pean IA Sum­mit. Apart from men­tion­ing the even­t’s name and URL, peo­ple weren’t exact­ly per­suad­ed to come over. It was­n’t even men­tioned that this is in the beau­ti­ful city of Barcelona!

Any­way, I’ll just use this oppor­tu­ni­ty to invite all my Amer­i­can col­leagues to make the trip and get a taste of how we do things in Europe. Seri­ous­ly, I’m sure peo­ple will enjoy learn­ing about the unique issues we’re deal­ing with (I did the oth­er way around). Like Jesse James Gar­rett said: “embrace ambiguity”.

On a dif­fer­ent note, I’ll prob­a­bly be doing a series of posts over the com­ing weeks like I did for the last Euro IA Sum­mit, once I get my notes ordered and fil­tered. Stay tuned.

links for 2007-03-23

Packing for the IA Summit

Just fir­ing off a quick post while pack­ing for the IA Sum­mit. Tomor­row morn­ing I’m tak­ing off on my flight to Vegas. For any­one curi­ous about my doings while in the states, your best bet is Jaiku1. SMS-ing the occa­sion­al update should be afford­able and won’t take too much time. No live blog­ging I’m afraid, I will be tak­ing plen­ty of notes2 and promise to do a prop­er write-up when back.

1. Although all the crazy Amer­i­cans are hooked on Twit­ter like an addict on crack, so to keep up with what’s going on there I’ll need to switch between two pres­ence apps. Grum­ble.

2. A fresh squared Mole­sk­ine pock­et note­book is ready for action.

links for 2007-03-21

Albert Heijn RFID epiphany

I was stand­ing in line at the local Albert Hei­jn1 the oth­er day and had a futur­ist’s ‘epiphany’. I had three items in my bas­ket. The cou­ple in front of me had a shop­ping cart full of stuff. I had an emp­ty stom­ach and was tired from a long day’s work. They were tak­ing their time plac­ing their items on the short con­vey­or belt. The cashier took her time scan­ning each indi­vid­ual item. The cou­ple had a lot of stuff and only a few bags to put their stuff in. Did I men­tion this was tak­ing a looong time?

I was­n’t being impa­tient though, I used the time to let my thoughts wan­der. For some rea­son my asso­cia­tive brain became occu­pied with RFID. Many of the items in the Albert Hei­jn shelves have RFID tags in them already. They use those to track inven­to­ry. Soon, all of the items will be tagged with these chips. That’ll make it easy to restock stuff. But it occurred to me that it might make the sit­u­a­tion I was in at that moment (stand­ing there wait­ing for a large amount of items to be moved from a cart, scanned and packed in bags to be placed back in the cart again) history.

Imag­ine dri­ving your over­flow­ing shop­ping cart through a stall and hav­ing all the items read simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. If you’d want­ed to get rid of the friend­ly cashier you could put auto­mat­ic gates on the cash reg­is­ter and have them open once all items were paid for (by old-fash­ioned deb­it or cred­it card or new­fan­gled RFID enabled pay­ment token). Walk up to the gate, swipe your token past a read­er and have the gate open, no mat­ter how many items you have with you. 

No more check­ing the receipt for items that were mis­tak­en­ly scanned twice (or not scanned at all, if you’re that hon­est). No more wait­ing for peo­ple with too many stuff in their cart that they don’t real­ly need. And no more under­paid pubes­cent cashiers to ruin your day with their bad manners!

Actu­al­ly, would that ever hap­pen? It would take a large amount of trust from every­one involved. There is a lot of trust implic­it­ly involved in the whole exchange. Hand­ing your stuff one after the oth­er to an actu­al human being and hav­ing that per­son scan them is a very phys­i­cal, tan­gi­ble way to get a sense of what you’re pay­ing for, and that you’re get­ting your mon­ey’s worth. With com­plete­ly auto­mat­ed RFID-enabled shop­ping, that would be lost.

It’s a banal, pedes­tri­an and sim­ple exam­ple of how this stuff could change your every­day life, I know, but some­thing to think about, nonetheless.

1. Albert Hei­jn is the largest super mar­ket chain in the Netherlands.

links for 2007-03-20

IA Summit 2007 — one week to go

IA Summit 2007 logo

While we’re on the top­ic of attend­ing events: I’m lucky enough to attend this year’s IA Sum­mit. It’s all the way in Las Vegas (a long flight from my hum­ble coun­try) so there’ll be plen­ty of jet lag to cope with. Also it’s just the con­fer­ence for me, no time to attend the pre-con­fer­ence work­shops (which is a shame real­ly, because there’s plen­ty of inter­est­ing stuff). Regard­less, I’m look­ing for­ward to expe­ri­enc­ing the moth­er­ship con­fer­ence after two years of being at the Euro IA Sum­mit and meet­ing lots of new inter­est­ing peo­ple. Per­haps I’ll see you there?