Mobile Shopping

I read this article in the Guardian (October 19th) about shopping with your mobile. It talks about a great deal of things, like electronic tickets for Manchester City games, and the ways they're looking at developing this idea - similar to the Oyster Card gone mobile. They say the system is secure - so there's plenty one could develop from that.

Memory-Stick Single

I did one day actually buy a paper, the Guardian actually, and in it was an article about Keane's latest single which they brought out on a memory stick... I think it's quite interesting to read - it talks about something Robbie Williams did on a memory card intended to be used on mobile phones and PDAs - but due to cost it didn't take off. I should imagine that is now becoming an avenue for the future.

It also talks about the history of music platforms a bit, apparently Jamiroquai released his greatest hits album to mobile users first.

There's definitely a little world evolving there.

Read the article here.

Stop Stealing Sheep... and invent a tiny font.

I remembered seeing something in Spiekermann's book on digital device typefaces, and have included it here. It's quite technical, but also quite interesting.

The Mini 7 series he talks about is available here, but unfortunately costs money. I found some other fonts on dafont.com - they have the Nokia font, and if you search for mini it comes up with some interesting fonts that may be of use.

>Click here to see the full page<

Spiekermann, E & Ginger, E.M. (2003). Stop Stealing Sheep (2nd Edition). California: Peachpit Press.

Hmm, something to combat my idea...

"Besides graphical assignation manufacturer decided to modify wallpaper depending on time of day: in the morning you see sun, and in the evening you see blinding lights of Kremlin wharf, cars will have their headlights turned on. An interesting addition to interface, but that’s not all, there are more interface improvements.

Time is not the only event that can be transferred into graphical approach. For example network reception level: good signal – sky is blue, no signal or weak one – sky is covered with clouds. At first you don’t pay much attention to this small feature, but after a month you will look on the sky instead of standard bar, information can be acquired instantly."

Read the rest. (Search within the page for "Living World")

I love their ideas and what they've done with it. Though it sort of covers what I was talking about with time and location in regards to my idea - which is a little annoying. But it still leaves room for me to develop on the other areas.

There's definitely some innovative thinking in there, worth a look. And I want the phone.

The "Zune".

I didn't even know there was going to be a Microsoft competitor until I saw this article - but then I never paid attention to the I-Pod all that much either. If you can't afford something, you tend to ignore it.

As far as I'm aware the I-Pod doesn't have wireless capabilities yet - I did find this article discussing the possibilities that would open up (and also they raise the question of who wants to watch a movie on a 3 inch screen? But I suppose the way sharing media is changing, that's no longer such a huge issue) - I guess Microsoft beat them to it?

Anyway, this article talks about what the Zune can do, with all it's wireless amazingness, and what Apple say to that. I personally think it's a bit late for Microsoft to launch a competitor in a hope to overtake the I-Pod, but I guess we shall see.

ETA: I just found this - the Zune's already second place in the US MP3 market - but still has a long way to go to catch up to I-Pod.

Another Metro, November 13th.

>Click to see the full article<

Remediation

"Television, film, computer graphics, digital photography and virtual reality: our culture recognises and uses all of these technologies as media..." >click here to read the full extract<

Bolter, JD and Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation. London: The MIT Press.

I read Bolter and Grusin's Remediation a few weeks ago, and whilst the book in general was a nice solid foundation for thought, I didn't tag a lot of the pages as directly useful for this project. I did however tag this extract, I think it links into what Richard was saying in his lecture about different media coming together, the way television's changing, and the whole idea of convergence, market niches and what not. It's not very long, but worth thinking about.

Video Banking - Immediacy

>Click to read the full article<

Another article from the Metro - I can't afford a real paper. November 13th Edition.

This reminds me of something the guys who wrote Remediation talk about - the need for immediacy. It talks about the fact that they are trialling it based on the way their customers want to bank. The technology available now I guess for them to be able to do this - and it's certainly a novel idea. But like the article says - the customers would need to have the technology, and the means to fund having a 3G enabled phone... I guess we'll see how it goes.

Additional articles can be found here and here. The official site for First Direct's mobile trials is here.

A link to an article about HSBC allowing customers to access their accounts via text messaging is here.