Popwuping

Pre-smartphone, I used to frequently play with location based services (remember plazes?). At that time the check-in or attributing of ‘place’ was largely assigned manually with pings sent by sms, the web or a hacked together script. All this effort was done as an attempt to track where I spent my time, share which places had open networks, broadcast my location to other services and provide an unjustified means for my wife to know where I was at a particular time. The effort required to enter your location and the general geekiness of the activity prevented mass adoption. Now that it has gone mainstream with services like Foursquare and Facebook smartphones could soon reveal a person’s every move (and allow advertisers to profit from it). As reported by The Sydney Morning Herald:

Google and Facebook are putting location at the centre of their businesses. Both have launched services that broadcast your location to friends – Latitude and Places respectively – and within weeks Facebook will allow participating retail outlets, restaurants and cafes to offer special deals to Facebook users who ”check in” with them.
Greater rewards are on offer to those who bring their friends. Searching for stuff on mobile phones is already a $US1 billion business for Google and demand by advertisers to have the number of their nearest outlet listed next to their Google ad is one of the fastest-growing areas of its business.
Given that many phones are always on and constantly transmitting the position of the user, Jacobs says it is easy for advertisers – and others – to develop a pattern of someone’s whereabouts. ”It wouldn’t take long to work out where you are and where you live. I’m not suggesting that someone is going to fire a missile at your house but finding out where you live is very sensitive information to be handled by third parties. I think we’d better get used to living in an age of less privacy.”

Read the full article.

My favourite Nokia designer Younghee Jung’s two piece series Use of Multiple Mobile Phone Numbers provides an interesting look at the global phenomenon of multi-SIM phones that can talk on multiple networks at once. Using multi-sim phones is a decision based on economics, access and control.

Many mobile network operators offer cheaper rates for inter-network calls, especially in markets where competition among network operators is high. Highly cost-conscious consumers naturally get multiple numbers for cheaper calls. While it may not take too much effort to acquire the new number itself, this comes at a cost of efforts and skill: Remembering, or identifying who in your social network has the number belonging to a specific network operator. People develop a tactic, such as indicating the network operator in the name stored on the phonebook. This is not an exclusive behavior only for the developing economies, however. When the 3G network was newly introduced in Japan several years ago, many Japanese consumers also owned two numbers, one from 3G for cheaper messaging & data connection, another from existing network for cheaper voice calls.

Use of Multiple Mobile Phone Numbers. Via textually > Boingboing > Kottke.

Nick Bilton reports for Bits on whether the adoption of a new operating system be enough to reverse Nokia’s fortunes or if perhaps a more fundamental change is required.

Some say that Nokia’s failure to get much traction in the smartphone market and its other problems are rooted in its bureaucratic corporate culture. But Adam Greenfield, a former head of design direction at Nokia, sees it a little differently. He said the company’s engineering driven culture is also responsible, explaining that the engineers at the company see the design of the software on a mobile phone as secondary to the guts of the device. For example, he explained, executives at the company proudly promote the innards of a phone, almost like a car company gleefully showing a customer the engine under the hood.
“The engineers at Nokia brag about the number of megapixels a new phone has,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “But they don’t understand that if you can’t find the button to use the camera on the phone, it doesn’t matter how many megapixels it is.”
An executive who currently works at Nokia and asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak about the company agreed. He noted that even though thousands of Nokia employees work on design and user interface, engineering is still the company’s focus, and design is thought of as “secondary within the company.”

It’s worth noting that some engineering driven companies are doing quite well – HTC is a good example – both HTC and RIM have acquired some excellent design companies of late but it takes time for these acquisitions to have lasting effects on corporate cultures. Nokia’s changes have to come from within which is likely far more difficult.
Read more.

The Telegraph reports that though the latest mobile phones may allow you ‘tweet’, ‘poke’ and ‘check-in’, all most people want to do is text.

Mobile technology evangelists have been predicting the death of the humble text message for a decade, but a new study by Deloitte has found texts are still very much alive and kicking.
Deloitte found that 90pc of smartphone owners send at least one text message a day, compared to four in 10 who access social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, on their phones. Half of British adults access emails on their phones.
More than three out of 10 of those aged between 18 and 24 send at least one text message every hour. It is thought that children and teenagers, who were not included in the study, send an even greater number of texts.

Forget tweets, all we want to do is text, says study. Via textually.