micro:bit music making

The year 6 Fleetville Code Club has kept going during all through lockdown – we spent a lot of time in Minecraft, which worked pretty well for virtual sessions, since we were all sharing the same virtual space.

This term we did something a bit different: the students have been making and programming MINI•MU musical gloves. This is a kit designed by Helen Leigh based on the MiMU Glove – in turn invented by the musician Imogen Heap and her team. You can get a glimpse of what the full MiMU Gloves can do in the following video:

The MINI•MU Gloves are considerably simpler than the ones in the video – instead of picking up all finger and hand movements, they use the movement sensors on a BBC micro:bit to detect basic hand motions, like how much you tilt your hand front to back and side to side. It’s still plenty of input to use for a musical instrument though!

We received the glove kits thanks to the OpenUK Digital Kids Camp and Huawei – who sent out 3000 kits and provided some cool e-zines which we used as a basis for our sessions. The students had to first cut the pattern from felt and sew their glove together, then connect the micro:bit, sound board and battery pack – before programming the micro:bit to make their own sounds.

This was a harder project to get to work in an all-remote environment, and I think some of the students found it hard to stay engaged without being able to share their creations in real life. Even so, I was really impressed with what they managed to build. Here’s my favourite wishing one of the student’s grandparents a happy birthday!

The @FleetvilleJnr year 6 @CodeClub have been making and programming MINI•MU Gloves this term – here's my favourite recording for the #MicrobitVirtualConcert with @jrflorentine & @TinkeringStudio

Thanks to @openuk_uk for providing the kits designed by the amazing @helenleigh! pic.twitter.com/d7nJ7z32Uc

— Adam Cohen-Rose (@adamcohenrose) May 21, 2021

Taking it further…

The MINI•MU gloves make it easy to make a sound as they have a built-in speaker. However, the micro:bit can only make very simple beeps by itself.

I spent a bit of time trying to get closer to the full MiMU glove experience by sending the movement of the glove to something else that could make some richer sounds.

Scratch

One option is to connect the micro:bit to Scratch using its bluetooth connection. The Scratch site has very clear instructions on how to get the micro:bit connected – you need to install the Scratch Link software on macOS or Windows, or else use the Scratch app for ChromeOS or Android tablets; then install a special program on the micro:bit itself; and finally add the micro:bit extensions to Scratch and identify your micro:bit by the name it displays.

There’s a few tutorial programs to get you started on the Scratch site, and there’s a range of examples on the microbit site as well – including a theremin to make spooky sci-fi noises.

I’ve made another example that lets you make noises as you move either the mouse or the micro:bit around. You can have a go below:

Bluetooth MIDI

Another way to get better sound from the MINI•MU glove is to connect the micro:bit to a tablet or computer using MIDI over Bluetooth. MIDI is a music communication system that’s even older than the micro:bit’s BBC precursor from 1981, the venerable BBC Micro. You can use MIDI to describe starting and stopping a particular note, how hard the note is played (its velocity) and all sorts of other variations – and the system is supported by most music making programs, including things like GarageBand.

To get MIDI from your micro:bit to your computer or tablet is a little complex but once it’s working, you can make all kinds of sounds! Here’s some tips and tricks to get you going:

Build a project with the Bluetooth MIDI extension

To send Bluetooth MIDI from your micro:bit, you’ll need to add the Bluetooth MIDI extension:

1. In MakeCode, click Advanced at the bottom of the blocks
2. Scroll down to the bottom to see Extensions
3. Click that and type “midi” into the search bar
4. Make sure you click on the bluetooth-midi extension, not the plain midi one
5. You’ll now have some extra light blue blocks in the Midi category

Here’s a ready-made project you can start with – Pentatonic MIDI controller

Tilt your micro:bit left and right to choose a note, then press the A button to make the micro:bit send the current note. There’s a secret feature to use the light levels picked up from the LEDs – can you figure out how to use it?

Make your micro:bit easier to connect

micro:bit MakeCode projects have a secret option that makes it easier to connect the micro:bit to something over bluetooth. It would probably make things harder if you had lots of devices in a classroom, but if you’re just wanting to connect a single micro:bit to your computer or tablet then this will make your life much easier!

1. Go to project settings by clicking on the gearwheel at the top right of the page
2. Turn on “No Pairing Required: Anyone can connect via Bluetooth”
3. Click Save
4. Re-download your project to the micro:bit

The Pentatonic MIDI Controller project above already has this option set for you!

micro:bit to iPad

This is fairly simple – in GarageBand for the iPad, go to Settings (the gearwheel icon), click Advanced, click Bluetooth MIDI Devices, tap the micro:bit then tap the Connect switch on. If the micro:bit is marked as offline, click Edit and Forget the device.

Now you can use your micro:bit to play and record tunes in GarageBand – and choose any instrument you want!

micro:bit to Mac

macOS won’t connect to the micro:bit by itself and needs a little bit of prompting. Download and run the Bluetility app to see the micro:bit, then click the last service and the last characteristic (they should start “E95D93AF-” and “E95DB84C-” respectively). You should then see a Subscribe button to click in the Detail pane – and this should then make the micro:bit appear in your Bluetooth system preferences.

Now that the micro:bit is connected over Bluetooth, you need to tell the macOS MIDI system that it needs to listen to it. Open the Audio MIDI Setup app (it lives in /Applications/Utilities – or just use Spotlight Search). Make sure the MIDI Studio window is showing (if not, go to the Window menu and choose Show MIDI Studio). Then click the Bluetooth symbol in the MIDI Studio window’s toolbar, which should open the Bluetooth Configuration window and list your connected micro:bit. Click the Connect button next to your micro:bit and you’re finally ready to play!

Open GarageBand, create a new project, and add a Software Instrument. GarageBand should pick up the connected micro:bit immediately and play the notes that you send. You can then choose different sounds from the Library to make your micro:bit play whatever instruments you want.

micro:bit to Windows 10

I haven’t tried this, but there’s a very clear video by BEATNVISION that suggests using the MIDIberry app to receive the Bluetooth MIDI from your micro:bit and play sound.

Use the micro:bit connectors

As well as the movement sensors, the micro:bit also has edge connectors that you can use to attach all sorts of other technology. The MINI•MU glove uses these to connect the speaker, but if you’re going to use bluetooth to output the sound, then you can use the connectors to get more input.

Here’s the micro:bit wizard David Whale with his micro:bit guitar:

And if you really want to see how far you can go, how about using muscle movements to control your music? Here’s a video on how to pick up electrical changes from your muscles using a micro:bit:

Keep making music!

Handheld Conference 2013

An amazing conference, in a beautiful venue, with fantastic speakers and extra entertainment as bonus! Craig Lockwood created something magnificent today — and then told us there won’t be another Handheld next year! Let’s hope he’s just changing focus rather than stopping organising conferences.

Handheld this year was two conferences in one — the previous night's mini event and the much larger full day event. The main conference was focused mainly on responsive web design — and the implications that brings to the design process and to the implementation of the sites. Last year was a mix of both native and web experiences, and though we lost the native side, the web side was very strong — with speakers being the authorities in their areas (the people who wrote the books that everyone should read).

Some highlights before you dive in to my notes below:

• Hearing icon design tips from Jon Hicks, the designer of the Firefox logo, Skype emoticons and many other big name logos
• Learning about improving business participation in the design process from Andy Clarke & Mark Boulton: mobile and responsive design has big impacts on the design process that extend not just to the artifacts (comps, wireframes, etc) but also on the communication and interaction between the business, the designers and the developers.
• "measure your success in decades" — Jeremy Keith on web design
• "XML is like violence: if it doesn't get you what you want, you’re not using enough of it" — Graham Lee
• and, of course, Ling Valentine of Ling's Cars (if you haven't seen her website before, you must look now!), appearing on stage as a Dalek!

If you like your information visual, Luke Murphy from Ubelly wrote up some beautiful sketchnotes of the main conference.

intro + guess who

Syd Lawrence @sydlawrence, We Make Awesome Sh

• over 1,000 people in audience
• rickrolled the audience using twilio, node & pusher!
• everybody sent SMSs in with their seat column number
• then made calls back to 8 people in each quarter of the audience — playing 4-channel audio across the auditorium
• (unfortunately all our lanyards had been mixed up and only one person received the rickrolling call… but it was a nice idea)

The Long Web

Jeremy Keith @adactio

• 1907: Francis O’Neill, chief of police in chicago, noted down 1001 Irish tunes - The Dance Music of Ireland (“the book”)
• 1991: ABC musical format invented
  • text file, metadata at top, notes at the bottom
• mid-90s: Jeremy launched http://thesession.org
  • started by self-publishing a song a week
  • but soon needed other people to contribute tunes
  • 2001: allowed other people to submit tunes in ABC — Jeremy would then convert to sheet music & sound files
• site then languished for 10 years — still being used but Jeremy had no time to improve it
• finally got around to rebuilding the site in 2012
• interesting to see what had changed in web development in a decade
• biggest change: environment is no longer a desktop/laptop computer
• open device labs
  • Jason Grigsby tried to set one up properly in Portland with lawyers, insurance, etc. but got slowed by red tape
  • Jeremy just started with a tweet inviting people in to the Clearleft offices to test - then people started donating devices
• mobile first: mobile forces you to prioritise
• can also think about content first (or task first)
• Jeremy likes to start URL first
  • forget screens completely
  • think about structure of URLs
  • almost like doing an API design
• don’t think about the layout first — instead think about the individual pieces of content (pattern primer)
  • forces you to be very modular in your CSS
  • all the pieces must be able to work in any bit of your page
• if you’re thinking content first: then navigation comes second
• thesession.org does navigation by having navigation at bottom of the page — revealed with a simple hyperlink to the bottom (with a hyperlink back to top under the nav)
  • (capable browsers with more space have CSS to move it to the top)
• the logo is progressively enhanced too
  • full CSS support shows stitching, shadows, etc
  • less support means that the text & colour is still there but the details go away
  • error handling model — browser will just ignore stuff it doesn’t understand
• other progressive enhancements
  • escalators (enhanced stairs)
  • moving walkways (enhanced floor)
  • electric toothbrush (enhanced toothbrush…)
  • these rely on electricity to enhance but would still work without (kind of…)
• use javascript but don’t rely on it
• Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake): every user is a non-javascript user while the page is loading
• Andy Hume: progressive enhancement more about dealing with things failing rather than things not available
• don’t merge the stack levels — use javascript to enhance the HTML, not replace it
• on thesession.org have an ABC to sheet music form
  • by default submits a form that returns a GIF
  • with javascript, uses a JS lib to turn ABC into inline SVG
• similarly sparklines: previously used Google static charts
  • but google have deprecated the service and will be shutting it down in 2015
• instead generating sparklines using SVG with contained javascript
  • same SVG file, with different query parameters for data
  • could also put CSS (including media queries) in the SVG
• but SVG sparklines were slowing down the page load
  • so used conditional loading
• watch out for script loading in middle of page
  • especially third parties
  • the loading of your page stops until that script has finished loading
  • if it’s a third party script, you’re now dependent on a third party server to finish loading your page
  • e.g. if it’s twitter and the page is loaded from China, then your page will never finish loading… (twitter is blocked)
• “measure your success in decades”
  • the inventor of CSS put a bet on to say that HTML would be around for 50 years
  • he’s recently upped his bet to 500 years
• http://futurefriend.ly — the best way to work on future devices is to be backwards-compatible

Bruce Lawson on guitar

Bruce Lawson (@brucel) usually has a speaking role as Opera’s developer advocate, but today he taught us about HTML through song! The first, “like a rounded corner”, bemoaned the life of a CSS developer struggling with making his site lovely for iPhones:

Rounded Corner - Handheld 2013 from Besquare on Vimeo.

…the second was an ode to HTML5 to the tune of Living Doll (let's hope the video goes up for this soon too!):

• it’s so much better than five…
• never completing, flash defeating, living standard :-)

Living Standard - Handheld 2013 from Besquare on Vimeo.

Icon Design Process

Jon Hicks @hicksdesign

Jon was co-designer of the Firefox logo

• single icon files -> sprite sheets -> icon fonts
• less http requests, small size, scalable for different resolutions & sizes
• accessibility issues
  • can use unicode private use area to prevent reading out
  • but might also need to add an invisible span if no other indication on the page
• can use opentype ligatures to replace whole words with icons
• colour?
  • Apple have created an emoji font with 128px square PNGs — works but not scalable
  • BBC Weather use different glyphs that they colour individually — when combined they make a colour image
  • can do the same with a company logo
  • Microsoft Windows 8 emoji set uses layered characters with colour information built-in — means they are completely scalable — and translates automatically from Apple emoji font
• fonts available online, e.g. pictos: 324 interface icons
• discovery phase: usually start with 16px grid but consider an odd-numbered grid for some cases (e.g. arrows)
• two kinds of icons: models (iconic, real-world) & symbolic (learnt)
• follow conventions — use what people know already
  • use google image search
  • or the noun project: with a tag search
• don’t forget local knowledge
  • owl in East is stupidity
  • bowing in Japan needs hands clasped in front — otherwise it means “I want to die”!
• boxes and arrows survey of filled vs outlined
  • found that iconic, realworld icons were recognised faster than symbolic, but outline/filled made not much difference
• differentiation: padlock, handbag, 20kg weight
  • think about adding subtle differences
• tools & styles:
  • decide size, output format
  • see all icons in context together
  • balance can change depending on context — you might want to move the icon up or down to align with the rest of the icons or text
• outputting a font
  • need to convert any rounded corners, expanded strokes etc
  • reduce anchor points as much as possible — reduces file size
  • easier to do this in Illustrator rather than Sketch
  • end up with a folder of SVG icons
  • then use font custom command line
  • glyphs app (expensive but worth it)
  • github did a blog post on settings
• access icon on page:
  • data-icon attribute
  • class=”icon-blah”
  • use aria-hidden="true" to help with screen readers
• alternatives to icon fonts:
  • all icons in an SVG file — with LESS or SASS to calculate the resulting CSS
  • makes it easy to adjust
• webcode app
  • lets you code in CSS or SVG or canvas (JS)
  • but canvas is larger file size
• further reading:
  • Brian Suda: Creating Symbol Fonts
  • Jon Hicks: Icon Handbook

an open letter to the industry from an 8 & 11 year old

Again, a brilliant intervention — video and transcript available on Vimeo (or listen below):

An Open Letter - Handheld 2013 from Besquare on Vimeo.

The Business of Responsive Web Design

Mark Boulton @markboulton

• redesigning the CERN web site
  • “next year we’re likely to make an announcement which will fundamentally change our understanding of the universe — and we want your help to make it”…
  • people wanted to know updates
  • from different perspectives — from particle physicists to random public
    • scientists want words and specifics
    • general public still want updates but need gentler explanations & pretty pictures — the pictures don’t need to mean anything or even be related to the content
    • teachers & students want updates with things to do, lesson plans etc
  • same updates need three different perspectives
  • but then you need structured content and a whole new CMS & editorial process…
• in news, story is no longer headline, subhead, image & caption
• now it’s a seed with lots of links together
• “meta data is the new art direction” @studip101
• in old-style advertising, agencies would win an account, not a project
  • take time to understand our issues, to get to know us
  • accounts involve more risk, but greater rewards and closer communication
• house of cards & netflix:
  • kevin spacey said we don’t want a pilot
  • want a longer view on development of the series, without the restriction of cramming everything in to the first episode
  • only netflix said yes…
• sometimes useful to let the client beat you up a bit for a while until they wear themselves out
  • an aspect of working on an account not a project
  • painful in the short term, but leads to better relationship & understanding
• if your process is to gradually improve fidelity over time, where is “the design”?
  • it’s not really there any more…
  • no big reveal, no final document
• marginal gains — fix small percentages all over the place
  • but you need to look across the whole system
  • e.g. cycling teams take their bedding with them to ensure a good night’s sleep
  • if you’re struggling with a particular CSS you may want to look elsewhere in the system for a small gain
• we’re breaking new ground at the moment — so it’s all hard
• but we’re leaving a legacy for the future

carefully everywhere

Brendan Dawes @brendandawes

• title comes from an e.e.cummings poem:

  as when the heart of this flower imagines
  the snow carefully everywhere descending

• film posters are data viz

  • the story of the film —> an iconic image
• symbolize and summarize
  • e.g. Ridley Scott selling Alien: “jaws in space”
• photoshop like elvis
  • originally leather jacket, streamlined, designed for compositing large images
  • now it’s like fat elvis on the toilet…
• making tools for playing with graphics
• making dynamic logos
  • flocking points with trails avoiding words (almost)
  • word made of springs with collision avoidance from several circles
• you can represent everything with numbers
• and then you can transpose those numbers into other systems
• flash was great as it was self-contained (and didn’t need to check it ran in lots of browsers…)
  • ed: we’re still waiting for good tools for interactive web design
• building an app called Kennedy
  • captures the now: weather, current headline, etc
  • you own your data — can export to visualize yourself
• happiness machine:
  • finds people saying they’re happy on twitter
  • prints out their tweet on a receipt
  • receipts are much more personal than larger piece of paper
• french new wave cinema came about ‘cos there was a 16mm camera that you could hold in your hand
  • new camera angles, new scenarios
• using sound to animate & extrude a 3D object
  • can then print it out
• data waffles: 3D printed 3D graphs

When responsive sites work as well as a chocolate iPhone

Ling Valentine @lingscars, Ling’s Cars

Pushed onto stage in a Dalek costume by Andy Clarke & Jon Hicks!

Ling then proceeded to tell us that responsive design just doesn’t cut it.

• it’s a mobile phone not a TARDIS
• Ling's Cars website makes it enjoyable to read lots of information!
• buying a car is one of the biggest decisions you can make — a car lease is a 1-3 year commitment
• good quality video, pictures, etc requires lots of bandwidth
• most car dealers have even given up on the web — they just say call us now or visit us in the flashy showroom
  • Ling relies just on her web site
• but it’s really important to satisfy all the people who start on their smartphones
• start by building up trust with them — let them see the enjoyable information and encourage them to visit the main website with more time
• mobile site is attention grabbing — different from main web site
• first link is a free car!
  • send me a PDF via email
  • and a link to remind them to check the full website later
• various games to get people to interact — then get them to start reading car deals

Crafting your Toolset

Eddie Machado @eddiemachado

• created bones (a starter theme for wordpress)
• Craig asked Eddie to build the Handheld 2013 site and use it as a case study for building a response site
• start with a design persona
  • http://aarronwalter.com/design-personas
  • visual lexicon
  • don’t forget personality traits & voice
• sketch everything and share it as much as possible
  • don’t hold out for a great reveal
  • things move much faster if you communicate
• mock up little elements
  • Sketch app is good for this
• establishing a colour theme
  • work out complementary colours: http://sassme.arc90.com
• sass structure
  • partials — grid, mixins, etc
  • modules — components
  • breakpoints — different sizes & non-media queries
• icons
  • icon fonts from http://icomoon.io
  • picking up icon using class on a span
  • SASS lets you create an array of subclasses with a for loop
  • let’s you create named classes with their unicode references easily
• using grids from gridset
• autoplay videos don’t work on touch devices
  • so used plain images for mobile
  • included video sources but in a div not a video element
  • on non-touch (desktop) devices, swapped out the div for a video element using javascript
• checking page size using http://mobitest.akamai.com/
  • also use http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt
• use a similar technique for background images on mobile
  • leave them out by default
  • add them in using javascript

Codename Prometheus

Aral Balkan @aralbalkan

http://indiephone.eu

• top 50 web properties are closed silos other than wikipedia
• indie OS + indie Cloud + indie Phone
• will be crowdfunding in 2014
• planning to ship in 2016

How to call your client an idiot without getting fired

Andy Clarke @malarkey

• client participation is currently broken — how can we fix it?
• the challenges of responsive design are not in design & implementation
• many problems stem from the workflow
  • not something you can easily control
• pre-planning stage
  • content audit, information architecture, etc
  • user stories, personas, scenarios
  • screen blueprints, storyboards
• but the tools can limit creative experimentation
  • e.g. wireframes shown to & signed off by client even before they get anywhere near design studio
  • want to avoid setting expectations in the minds of the client
  • but the wireframe layout gets ingrained in the client’s mind — so difficult to move away from them
  • big problem if you need to cater for different screens
  • e.g. start a new claim / edit an existing claim works side by side, but doesn’t fit on mobile — lose the second item below the bottom of the screen
• try to move from documentation to better communication
  • a written description can leave the door option
• visual design:
  • static visual assets (comps) being used as currency
  • exchanged as specs, blueprints, QA tools
• but these should not be used in place of communication…
• it’s impossible to write a functional specification that reflects responsive design
  • especially when technology moves so quickly
• need to do open-ended planning
  • admit that things can change
• but combine graphics tools with code
  • design for the medium, using the medium
  • use tools like http://hammerformac.com/ and http://vanamco.com/ghostlab/
• go from testing to prototyping, all with the client in the room
• but having the client sitting over your shoulder can make a lot of people uncomfortable
• many customers still expect to receive static comps as design deliverables
  • are pleasantly surprised when told they’ll receive code
• designers & developers need to work much more closely together — and understand each other’s constraints and aesthetics
• static comps can’t demonstrate:
  • liquid layouts
  • flexible font styling
  • native forms
• can do atmosphere
  • typography
  • colour
  • texture — decorative elements, etc
  • ed.: this is kind of the same as Jeremy’s pattern primer
• Andy might start with photoshop for atmosphere, then go to pencil sketches and code examples
  • results can be a little soulless
  • but nothing stopping going back to photoshop to add detail
• clients love to be involved; to be part of the process
  • sometimes suggestions can add real value
  • other times they might not… it’s ok to tell them!
• rules
  • never ever share a picture of a web site and just ask for thoughts
  • don’t do a big reveal after weeks & weeks of waiting — keep client involved all the way through
• try to work physically alongside
  • if not, have daily Skype calls and a shared DropBox
  • even then, the client gets scared sometimes: “it’s not going to look like that is it?”
• have banned unstructured feedback!
  • don’t accept any feedback via email or phone unless it’s part of a structured feedback session
  • ask for specific feedback — typography, colours, styles, layout, etc
• don’t underestimate the value of the design input
  • not about ego, but respect for the work
  • just because the client is paying, doesn’t mean they get to have everything they want
• can set rules about how to receive constructive feedback
• take the time to explain the design thinking behind the outputs — clients are then far less likely to want to make changes just to make a mark
• host feedback workshops — and use them to get to know the client better
• another rule: only people who turn up to design workshops can comment or criticise the designs
  • this includes the CEO :-)
• it’s ok to say that client’s ideas are stupid…

Ten Commandments of Modern Web Design

Jeffrey Zeldman @zeldman

1. thou shalt entertain
   • Panic’s web site — they’re just apps in dull categories but they have a personality — and therefore a following
   • a list apart: geeky articles — but have an in-house illustrator
   • you don’t have to be an “illustrator” to draw — just try it yourself
   • old flickr used to welcome you in different languages — light touch, but subtly reinforces global reach of photography
2. test everything (including assumptions)
   • use Adobe Edge, Remote Preview or Ghostlab
   • can’t choose breakpoints based on specific screen sizes
   • recommendation: choose types of devices
3. thou shalt iterate
   • milton glaser: what is graphic design? “I move things around until they look right”
   • the web is always iterating
   • positioning sharing links on A List Apart:
     • tried to guide people to read down to the bottom before sharing — people stopped sharing
     • put teeny sharing labels at the top — lots of sharing
4. thou shalt ship
   • if you can’t delegate at the pixel level, you’ll never ship
   • even if it’s not perfect — you must ship
5. engage thy community
   • instagram stumbled when they upset their community by changing their licensing
   • monotype featuring independent designers on fonts.com — humanising the big company
   • a list apart: letting people opt-in to showing tweets on blog — until twitter changed their API and it stopped working
6. love thy user as thyself
   • think about use case compassionately
   • don’t make assumptions about amount of content
   • but do make assumptions about priority
7. thou shalt experiment (I think)
   • can play on your own personal site
   • zeldman.com: trying out content first with big type and no extraneous distractions
   • followed by 37signals, Medium, USA Today, New York Times, etc
   • ask how you can take things away from the page?
8. thou shalt make magic
   • instagram uploaded pictures in the background while you were still typing the comments
   • it worked magically fast
9. thou shalt prioritise
   • how to prioritise
   • kick ass kickoff meetings
10. to thine own self be true
    • hay net — used to be need hay / have hay
    • but then added lots of extra guff and completely lost the simplicity of the main form

…and this is not religion — it’s only design!

Finale

…singing We’ll Keep A Welcome in the Vales — When You Come Home Again to Wales

Welsh Veterans Male Choir - Handheld 2013 from Besquare on Vimeo.

MomoLondon: Data Driven Mobile Apps - Open data and more...

I missed last month’s Mobile Monday on Mobile Games but this panel more than made up for it.

Thanks to Jo Rabin and the rest of the Mobile Monday team for organising, and to Kasabi for the drinks!

Panel

• Chair: Matt Biddulph @mattb - http://hackdiary.com
  • used to run http://dopplr.com
  • then worked for Nokia as Head of Data Strategy in Location & Commerce apps
  • any mobile phone company is becoming an information company
  • a data driven app is one that gets better the more data it has
  • good example is the evolution of Foursquare
  • in the last few months, they have added features to let you explore the area around you
  • human interaction and input makes data come alive
• Leigh Dodds @ldodds - CTO, Kasabi
  • Kasabi trying to make data more accessible and easier to use
  • most of the apps I use are just interfaces to content, though not really data driven
  • data driven would be getting data from lots of people, or from historical data
  • favourite app is MyFitnessPal: a calorie tracking app that tracks everything he eats — either barcode or search
• Jeni Tennison @JeniT - Linked Data Expert, Technical Architect for http://legislation.gov.uk
  • been involved in data.gov.uk esp. linked data
  • mobile devices have a lot of context available
  • how do we create the API that allows us to get out just the data we need for right here, right now?
  • what is the UI to summarise the data and pull out the really interesting bits?
  • pulling in data from multiple sources
  • feeding back data
• Ian Holt @IanHolt - Developer Programme Manager, Ordnance Survey
  • quality of data is paramount
  • OS run masterclasses to help people use their data
  • favourite data app: ASBOrometer
  • what was important was people’s perception of the data…
• Hannah Donovan @han - Design Director, This Is My Jam
  • used to work at last.fm
  • thisismyjam is just coming out of beta
  • data driven apps provide a key to the mess of the universe around you

What are your favourite datasets

• LD: NHS dictionary of medicines and devices
  • recently been relicensed under new open govt license
  • everything that you could ever be prescribed
  • annotated with mappings through to product codes — so can scan a barcode and get a reference
  • good base data set as can reliably ensure people are talking about the same thing
  • a crucial problem in big data…
• IH: often the geo data is a backdrop rather than the actual IDs
• HD: echonest danceability
  • at a hackday made a prototype to throw a track at a robot to dance to it

Do apps get worse with more data?

e.g. twitter signal/noise dropping?

• HD: bad example: Spotify getting hooked up to facebook and timelines being spammed…
  • thisismyjam trying for a slower pace
  • doing things realtime is hard but just becoming possible
  • has been a trend just to add more realtime ‘cos it’s cool
  • but actually we want to see more useful social & cultural info not just realtime firehose (“API vomit”)
• IH: crowdsourcing is great but watch the quality…
• JT: developers like to put everything on the screen
  • but need to think about that the user wants to do and how they’re going to do it
• MB: should be a symbiotic relationship between designer and developer
  • not even back and forth, but an exploration

Good/bad experiences of designer and developer? How do you avoid API vomit?

• LD: pairing up with a designer to explore some ideas is really interesting
  • designer asking “can I do this?” - stretching the developer
• attendee: disagree completely! esp. govt should not pre-judge data based on use cases
• IH: there has to be cartographic decisions at some point
  • what do we do now that we want digital output from the data that was collected previously for paper use
• JT: there’s difference between what is available in the API and what’s shown in the UI

Historically, data was in libraries by default — in the public domain. But now owned by corporations. Have we sleepwalked into the police state?

• LD: in a library is not public domain - now data is more accessible
• HD: there were also people who controlled the content in libraries and only a few people had access
  • now the data is accessible from anywhere, not just in a big city centre

Combination of licenses from different data

• Creative Commons movement has tried to clarify the concepts of collaborative works etc
• If I want to take open govt data and combine it with wikipedia…?
• LD: there aren’t any hard and fast answers
  • still in a murky state
  • Creative Commons is very useful and people are starting to apply them to their data, but creative commons licenses do not apply to content in Europe
  • though there does appear to be CC 2.0 licenses available
  • been some work in Creative Data Commons
  • commercial data has custom licenses
  • generally assume that the most restrictive license applies
  • attribution stacking problem — might have to attribute 1000 people to use one piece of data

Where does the data in an app come from?

• IH: data may be untraceable
• HD: really important to tell your users where the data is coming from
  • we still need quite a lot of different sources
  • content, editorial, user generated
  • depending on what you’re looking for, the answer might be different every time
• JT: in legislation data, trying to maintain audit trails
  • if something goes wrong, want to know where

If data is important to people, it will tend to become free…

• IH: OpenStreetMap are a wonderful bunch of people
  • OS remit is to capture a high degree of detail
  • have to have a universal coverage of Britain
  • some of data has been released as open, and some is licensed
  • keep pressuring for what you want and it might be delivered…

A mobile data driven app: integration and consequence

• MB: important word is “driven”
  • there are plenty of static data sets, and data based applications
  • the thing that I do is magnified either by the depth of reference, or the other people who have done a similar thing
  • need to involve connected reference data and activity data
• HD: people are the special sauce
  • navigating a mess - the layers that people create around what’s around
• MB: in the first year or two, delicious.com/popular or the twitter hashtags were actually interesting
  • but with too much data, everything tends to bland
  • this is a huge issue with data driven apps
• HD: last.fm data was indie focussed
  • but when integrated with XBox suddenly changed overnight to reflect country wide
  • overall stats now reflect national taste
  • but can drill down by category
  • but need to watch out for the important filters — make sure you don’t lose the “friend dataset”

Data protection: need to ask users to explicitly opt-in

• IH: MapAction in Haiti
  • some events will create a lot of noise
  • needed to concentrate in specific countries
• JT: UK is pretty near the forefront of open govt
  • open data institute
  • hard to work in balance with legal framework

Privacy: user backlash

e.g. Path uploading your address book without asking

• LD: product development — want to get as much data as possible as that’s where the value is
  • from the consumer side, want to know where the benefit is for me
  • don’t want to give it away just for marketing or selling on
• HD: we’re currently working with blunt tools when explaining to user how we want to use consumer’s data
  • OAuth screens don’t offer room to tell you how your data will be used

Web or apps?

• MB: most exciting thing is the phone being full of sensors
  • the map (generated data) can become worth more than the territory (the app you build)
  • so always think about native apps over web
• JT: (as W3C contributor) should always be using proper web apps, of course…
  • but apps can always get more data than generic standard APIs
  • payment model is good on devices but not good at the moment on open web

Is there a good description of different types of data and how you might need to combine them?

• HD: use cases are fundamental
  • often see a tendency to make things consistent
  • but the different things may have different contexts
  • for example, last.fm on a TV with XBox is different to what you would want on your phone
• LD: took a while for the language of film to evolve
  • maybe we’re going through the same thing in mobile?

What kind of data stores are people using in real life? NoSQL, RDF, Oracle…?

• MB: more about really rigorous approach to data identity
  • have to keep provenance and individual promises

Is there any way I could buy and sell my data?

• LD: lot of work going on in this area
  • storing personal data and allowing apps access to it
  • My X (?) in the UK
  • Ed.: I couldn’t find a reference for this one

Announcements

• 19th March: ePublishing/eBooks
• 2nd April: DEMO NIGHT
  • applications open very shortly!
  • looking for 16 companies
• Mobile 360 Live
  • 20% discount for Mobile Monday London members

Google I/O 2011

Some brief notes on the Google I/O 2011 keynote this afternoon… It started kind of dull with Android stats that were pretty good but still seemed to be catching up on Apple, then gradually got better and better.

Google really does want Android to be “one OS everywhere” (I guess running “one web” webapps…) and the UI is improving. I look forward to the media content coming across to countries other than the USA, though the lack of any mention of music or movie labels leaves me in some doubt as to when this will happen. The presentations neatly glossed over the time involved in syncing music and movies between devices and the online service — even on a home wired network the data would take a long time to upload. And there was no mention of syncing between devices on the same LAN like Dropbox either.

The big news for me, however, was the accessories and android@home. By making it so cheap to add hardware integration with Android devices, there could be a real explosion of new products and the home automation market could finally break out of eye-wateringly expensive or home hacker territory. I’m really looking forward to more detail on android@home, but there’s nothing released yet…

android updates

• widgets can now be stretched
  • scrollable -> resizeable (just change XML)
• android can now be a USB host
  • keyboards, mice, game controllers
• google tv market open for devs this summer
  • will be based on android 3.1
• icecreamsandwich coming Q4
  • advanced UI
  • APIs to help scale UI
  • action bar able to reconfigure itself for available space

media

• movies and books now available through android market
  • can watch on web or on android device (e.g. android TV…)
  • seems to be US only (like Music)
• google music
  • cache music recently played
  • can “pin” music just like on movies to make available offline
  • downloads in background
  • 20,000 songs can be added to library
  • free in beta…
  • new music app works with android 2.2 and above

hardware

• new devices will receive latest updates for 18 months after first launch
  • (if the hardware allows)
  • guaranteed to come through reasonably quickly
• android open accessory
  • plug in an accessory
  • phone gets taken to app (or to android market to download it)
  • supports USB now and bluetooth in future
  • hardware design toolkit based on Arduino
• android @ home
  • android @ home framework
  • new low cost connectivity protocol for non-wifi devices
  • why not existing??
  • partnering with several industry players
  • LED lights & switches
  • tungsten demo with NFC chips in CDs cannot work unless Google get record label deals…

new devices

• Samsung 10.1 tab: 720p, 565g, 10.1”
  • lighter than iPad 2, at least as powerful…
  • just waiting for better interface

BarCamp London 8: The Future of TV

Simon Maddox — @simonmaddox

Simon gave a brief intro into how he watches television shows (I missed the beginning, but part of his setup involves using plex on his iPad and on his screen at home). He then invited a discussion which centred around whether TV would move totally to online streaming in the future, or whether the broadcast model still had some life left…

• coming soon: YouView (Project Canvas in a box)
• how do I find out what I should watch next?
  • often it gets a series or so in before I hear about it…
• where’s the last.fm for tv?
• some TV is funnier with the commentary on twitter (e.g. x-factor)
  • have to watch that live to experience it properly
• sports are also something people want to watch live
  • but there are not enough broadcast channels to cover all the matches…
• can’t ignore those without digital…
• olympic games will be a big test and a switchover
• does broadcast save money over streaming?
  • possibly at the moment
  • but being solved and won’t be so much of problem in the future
  • e.g. bittorrent being modified to support streaming
• perhaps the biggest change will be content producers
  • big players (ITV etc) may get smaller
• would like to have pay-based or advertising
  • Disney DVDs with non-skippable adverts are taking the piss
  • also problem with DVDs that treat customers as pirates
• older people may be afraid of giving away information
  • may be afraid of a personalised EPG
• sidereel.com — personalised EPG
• music industry revolution has been going for 10 years and is still not finished
  • TV industry revolution is going to take longer

Over The Air 2010

This was my third Over The Air and it more than lived up to the expectations set by the previous two. Billed as “a grass-roots mobile developer event”, Over The Air is an unmissable event on the mobile developer’s calendar — a weekend of fresh presentations from people who are at the cutting edge, mixed with an overnight hack-a-thon competition with prizes awarded in the final presentation.

This year the organisers went for a couple of keynotes (including the major coup of Tim Berners-Lee on the Sunday morning) as well as over 40 seminars on topics ranging from business oriented pitch and product workshops and DIY PR; through introductions to design & prototyping tools such as Flowella and iProcessing; all the way to detailed technical explanations and tutorials such as using Paypal’s mobile SDKs and Bryan Rieger’s excellent presentation on building mobile and desktop compatible web sites (of which more later).

I’ve put my rough notes on the presentations below, but it’s worth checking out the other presentations that were spotlighted on Slideshare and the other blog entries featured in the overtheair twitter stream.

I also entered the hack-a-thon competition and won Best Hardware Hack as well as Best use of “other features”?! for my LEGO Mindstorms robot with an iPhone brain that followed faces. I’ll be posting the code for my hack shortly…

Keynote: the art of emotional design

Aral Balkan — @aral

• when computers made the impossible, possible, features mattered
  • …and it didn’t matter if the interface was hard
• mobile phones are now a commodity, but we’re willing to pay extra for some things
  • “I think Apple is on to something”
• you cannot compete on features any more:
  • when infrastructure is commoditized, the differentiating factor is User Experience
• Le Petit Prince: “perfection is achieved … when there is nothing left to take away”
• you need someone with the authority and responsibility to say “no” to extra features
• “usable” = “edible”
• we want to aim for “magical”
• Aral tries to stay “naive” so that he can understand interfaces from the point of view of an everyday person (not a developer)
• don’t trick the user
• build in “delighters”
  • not required for interaction, but…
• oslo bullet train ticket machine:
  • just a credit card slot
  • exit also has a credit card swipe
  • can get a receipt later online
  • made a difficult decision: knew that fraud rates would go up
  • but worth it for increased usage
• dangers:
  • weakest link is what is not under your control
  • e.g. facebook pulled the plug on Feathers for Facebook (now Feathers Visage) without warning, just as the app was featured on the German and Austrian app store

DIY research workshop – informing the design process

Mark A.M. Kramer — @mamk

• users have different issues to those in the mobile industry
• Mark does “nomadic ethnography” — mainly based on trains :-)
• often finds himself being a participatory observer
• Mobile research methods
  • e.g. woman on circle line instinctively knew when network was available — put the paper down and switched to checking her mail
• iPhone is a good ethnography tool — can take pictures secretly!
• mobile also enables surveys in the field
• culture is changing:
  • mobile is enabling “just in time” — e.g. “just google that”

Mark then showed us various interviews:

• inventor of makerbot and thingiverse:
  • “share or die”
  • integrate game mechanics into whatever you’re doing
• reactable music interface:
  • play along
  • make it fun
  • can really make instruments with accelerometer
• feature phone user from Eastern Europe (no smart phone culture):
  • want something I can read my magazines on (comic books)
  • but want it portable
  • I’ve seen others using iPads etc.
  • social shaping of technology
• 10 year old — what I like about my iPod touch:
  • app developers will become rich if they make something that people like
  • he likes games
  • doesn’t want to pay for things

things to think about:

• eWaste — what about all those unused phones?
• social isolation
• generational differences
• impact on children
• designing for inclusion & accessibility

Orange Mobilise – the mobile volunteering initiative

David Simoes-Brown (Strategy Partner at 100%Open), Jogesh Limbani (Head of Open Innovation at Orange R&D UK)

• Orange using open innovation to encourage ideas to come in to Orange
  • The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki
  • Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky — 100 million hours of adverts watched over one weekend in America, equivalent to the amount of time taken to create wikipedia
• Orange want to help minutes matter
• Tuangou (cloud clout buying) in China
  • gathering people together to negotiate a discount
• Orange want to capture 5 minutes a day from the 3h 45m TV watching for volunteering
• Have previously launched Orange Rock Corps — can earn a ticket to a gig by volunteering
• 1 million people giving 5 minutes = a decade of real time
• http://mobilevolunteering.co.uk:
  • Orange building an app (iPhone to begin with)
  • Gathering ideas
  • Promoting existing apps
• Challenge:
  • can pick an app from suggested ideas
  • contact the author and go
  • OR submit an existing suitable app
• Orange will launch the top three voted apps & actions in October
• Will also launch 7 other apps & ideas as chosen by Orange rather than community
• Voting criteria:
  • You’re on the bus with five minutes before the stop — what can you do?
  • Popular & used often
  • Has a clear social or environmental benefit
  • Practical & attractive to a sponsor charity — needs a backup
  • Looking for a balance of actions:
  • research | lookout | reach out | skill set
  • Also looking for a balance of purposes
• suggest to look at latest & most active rather than top scoring

Rethinking the Mobile Web – a pragmatic look at creating an accessible and inclusive mobile experience

Bryan Rieger @bryanrieger

Bryan gave a fantastic presentation about how to make workable web sites for mobile and desktop use. There’s also a whole load of discussion on slideshare below the presentation about different approaches. The how-to bits of the presentation start from about slide 104, but there’s a load of stats up front to convince you that having a mobile-friendly site is worth it, and that mobile-friendly does not just mean iPhone…

Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu

View more presentations from Bryan Rieger.

• iPhone in US only covers about 6% of the population and only 4% of 5 major EU countries
• Huge impact but not huge penetration (at least of people, but huge percentage of traffic…)
• nice comparison of older (desktop) Macs vs recent mobile phones
• feature phones of today are the smartphones of yesterday
• the old devices don’t suck
• gs.statcounter.com stats from 02/2010
  • lots of Opera Mini in Nigeria
  • lots of BlackBerry in Australia
  • in Feb. the UC proxy browser ate Nokia’s Chinese market share
  • Nokia bought Novarra in March 2010…
• going forward, main browsers in use are WebKit and Opera Mini
  • coming up later are Mozilla Fennec (will be Firefox Mobile), Ovi & UC proxy browsers
• why is it ok to say “this site works best on Safari 4”, when it wasn’t ok to say “this site works best with IE 4…”?
• design “mobile first”
  • @media queries often fail — so taking a desktop site + media queries results in a desktop site on mobile
  • mobile site + @media queries => desktop site
  • not a new idea — just progressive enhancement!
• use screen and handheld types for first stylesheet
• book recommendation: DOM Scripting by @adactio (if jQuery not available…)
• http://tinysrc.net will resize and compress image for you
• infographics may need reinterpretation for smaller screens, rather than just resizing
• a bit of a dream: Bryan would like to extend the <img> tag to have multiple images for different screen sizes
• Q&A: Opera has device stats available from http://www.opera.com/smw/

Viral Survival Kit: Cloud Computing for Highly Scalable Apps

Matt Wood, Amazon Web Services — mawood@amazon.com

A quick overview of Amazon’s cloud services. Useful for working out what you might need. I was kind of hoping for something more technical, but this is good too. Especially useful is the link to the Amazon Simple Calculator, so you can work out how much your requirements might cost.

• Amazon started with two servers (1 db, 1 app server)
• They refactored so that:
  • dev teams could request resources on demand
  • wouldn’t have to worry about scaling & reliability
• AWS is a datacentre abstraction
• can provision a server in about 20-25 seconds (though Windows servers take a little longer due to security certificate isses)
• guardian open platform is delivered using AWS

S3 & CloudFront

• all data is replicated to three different centres
• scaled automatically as demand rises
• can have a reduced redundancy service at lower cost (only 5 9s rather than 11…)
• CloudFront provides CDN

other services

• RDS: relational datastore — MySQL as a service
• EBS: elastic block store
• EMR: elastic map reduce — hadoop on demand
• VPC: virtual private cloud — elastic resources in the cloud appear in your own network through a VPN
• CloudWatch: monitoring, autoscaling
• ELB: elastic load balancer

some detail

• m1.small available for about 8¢/hour
• m1.large has more CPU etc
• t1.micro is even smaller, only 2¢/hour
  • tight RAM constraints (600Mb), but has automatic CPU scaling
• can plan over longer term and get reduced price (0.07¢/hour if you pay $50 upfront)

designing for failure

• can attach an elastic IP address to an instance
• if server fails, can just repoint to another instance in the same datacentre
• also deal with datacentre failures
  • four regions (East Coast, West Coast, Dublin, Singapore)
  • each region has multiple availability regions
• RDS can enable master/slave with an API call

automation

• can pull monitoring data into ganglia
• monitoring can be connected to autoscaling
• can set thresholds for setting up and killing servers
• integrated with availability zones

security

• can have multiple roles with fine grained access
• provide mitigation against DDOS
• default-deny firewall
• see http://aws.amazon.com/security for details
• data stays within regions

Q & A

• Amazon Simple Calculator provides an estimate of costs

What Would Picasso Do — a panel of art and technology

Another brilliant Bryan Rieger production: find six people with interesting ideas and ask them to inspire the audience by talking about what they liked. It worked…

• Bryan Rieger: http://yiibu.com
• Filip Visnjic: http://www.creativeapplications.net/, curator of http://processing.org
• Jason Fields: Head of Multiplatform User Experience at the BBC, also runs http://app.itize.us/
• mills: ustwo
• Matthias Dahlström: lastminute labs
• Tom Hume: Future Platforms

What Would Picasso Do?

View more presentations from Bryan Rieger.

Tom has been thinking about…

• Joseph Beuys: “everyone is an artist”
• Music industry history is minuscule compared to whole history of art
  • we focus on near-sighted things
• Art doesn’t seem to scale
  • engineering efforts can take 100Ks of people
  • what would art equivalents look like
• Constraints feed creativity

mills is enabling creativity…

• granimator: enabling the public to create screen backgrounds
  • invite artists to contribute assets
• making creativity accessible

matthias has been playing with plasticine…

• dali from 1950s: gem-decorated heart with pumping action
• we work on the surface with the gems at the moment
• need to work deeper
• plasticine interfaces — when they’re rough, people want to grab them and play
• Sony has a big blue design book
  • explored wireless headsets in 80s
  • worked in the home, but in shared spaces you would get someone else’s music
  • dismissed at the time, but might now be treated as an interesting feature

Jason has been looking at apps…

• UK is much more advanced than US in area of IPTV & set-top boxes

Filip has been thinking about art…

• linear vs dynamic
• goals vs accidents
• framing / positioning
• interactive vs reactive
• sense of ownership

Q & A

• Are creative apps on iPad/iPhone merely frivolous?
  • e.g. Brushes, Magic Piano
  • TH: 11-point multitouch is not frivolous
  • JF: a device to interact with while watching TV
  • TH: Jeff Minter: apps for Amiga
  • no intermediation — straight onto the screen
• Are there any useful consequences of art-related apps? Can they be applied to productivity-related apps?
  • TH: epic win: a todo list manager that takes game mechanics and gives you experience points for completing todo items…

tweetalondoncab

This wasn’t a presentation on the main schedule, just the cabbie who started @tweetalondoncab talking about where he’s got to and where he wants to go.

• gone from 2 drivers to 120!
• however, can’t cope with more than 3-4 jobs at a time

process

1. customer DMs to @tweetalondoncab
   • may have to come back to them and get further details (inc phone number)
2. the chair account (protected account) advertises the job (removing specifics) with phone number of person in chair
3. drivers get a text alert when tweet sent from chair account
4. driver responds with a phone call and gets job allocated
   • receives phone number and address of pickup
5. chair account sends out that job has been allocated
6. chair account informs customer of their driver’s details
7. driver contacts customer by phone when they’re ready

also have @cabup protected account that provides shared information updates on demand & traffic — added value for drivers who join in

future ideas

• would like to include cab sharing
• still want to advertise to all drivers as it’s their decision to take it
  • first come first served at the moment
  • but would like to add in how long the driver would take to get there
  • especially for higher value jobs (e.g. Victoria -> Gatwick)
• want to attract people who would normally order a private minicab

constraints & ideas

• dealing with 3-4 jobs coming in at once
  • if can see all cabs on map, would be able to tell customers that can’t help within 30 mins
  • driver claiming job is pinch point
  • have a link to a page with how many minutes to be there
  • claim the job automatically
  • could have a form to submit info, so jobs are better structured

Keynote: Sir Tim Berners-Lee

I didn’t get to take many notes during Sir Tim’s keynote as I was busy finishing my hack (of which more in the next post). He was an inspiring speaker in his own way — you could see the passion for his subject shining through.

His main points were about ensuring things are referable, and that the reference can (and should) be done with URLs.

• if an app doesn’t have a URL then it can’t be linked
• it doesn’t get the interestingness — people can’t use it for other things

MomoLondon: Mobile Social Networking

Not the most thrilling of momolondon’s tonight. The panel format worked well and the chairs asked reasonably interesting questions, but I think it was the subject matter that just felt a bit samey to me. Even the twitter backchannel seemed a little subdued. Maybe it was just my cold…

The best bits for me were Steve Lawson talking about his experiences of trying to use his mobile for social media (where by media, he meant actual music and video production).

Priya Prakash of Flirtomatic also had some interesting things to say, but I felt that she didn’t really get into her stride. She said she was in the middle of a user experience analysis of her site and wanted to involve the audience in some research, but this never really happened. Perhaps an idea for a future Mobile Monday…?

Anyway, here’s my notes — as always, please add comments if there’s something that you want to know more about.

First Panel: Why are people going to be using mobile social media?

Panel

• Chair: Josie Fraser
• Steve Lawson - Musician/Consultant
• Luke Brynley-Jones - Trutap
• Paul May - Bluehoo
• Brian Fuchs - Internet Centre, Imperial College
• Graham Brown - MobileYouth

Steve

• broadcast model of connecting to audience is dying
• entry level of broadcasting has dropped
• how am I using it: with a great deal of frustration…
• currently using mobile to post data as things happen
• not using other people’s mobiles
• where is it going? for most people, it’s not the gadget that’s important
  • don’t want my audience to have to become mobile geeks in order to access
  • e.g. twitter
• I take the bus rather than the tube as I can be online during the journey

Luke

• had to focus on where users actually were
• a lot of users in asia — india, indonesia
• did 120 interviews with users and ex-users
• had been focussing on facebook, but 0% of users in Mumbai have facebook accounts
• further details:
  • typically 20-30 year olds
  • slight male bias, but not much
  • wanted to chat with their friends
  • wanted to flirt and meet others
  • location was important — e.g. there are transport problems in Mumbai
  • sitting there 2-3 hours a day chatting with their friends

Paul

• wrote a book in 2001 called Mobile Commerce — did very well in China…
• nowadays meetings never happen when they’re organised — instead people send you messages by every which way and you’re supposed to pick them all up and not be surprised
• in a proper mobile world, everybody here in the room would be communicating with each other, rather than just panel broadcasting out with no feedback
  • that was kind of happening with the twitter backchannel, but it wasn’t reaching the panel very well
  • Josie said she would have liked the twitter stream on the projector

Brian

• have to develop peer-to-peer architectures and decentralised payment solutions
• otherwise 3 billion devices will overwhelm the services

Graham

• “only two industries in the world that call their customers ‘users’… the mobile industry and crack dealers!”
• mobile social media is not relevant for youth - just want to look good and get laid :-)
• driven by:
  1. need to belong
  2. need to be significant
• go and see what red bull is doing with red bull music academy

Q&A

What about people over 35?

• Steve: most of my audience are over 30
• Graham: youth are future customers
  • mobile social media is not the sales channel
  • it’s about building the relationship in order to increase the sales opportunities
  • so youth are the future market (like banks)
• Simon Rockman: only successful phone aimed at older people was Emporio(?) in Austria
• Steve: “proposed twitter to my Mum — terminology was the barrier”
  • “as soon as I explained that it was like texting me and my brother at the same time, she wanted me to sign her up straight away”
  • “now if I tweet and text at the same time, she returns the tweet first”

What about privacy?

• Paul: we seem to have all agreed to become performers
• Josie involved with schools looking at use of mobile
  • looking at addressing behavioural issues such as happy slapping
  • rights and responsibilities

Terence Eden: is it a danger that there’ll be too much focus on iPhone when everybody use RAZRs?

• Steve: ok to target 10% if they can distribute to others — make content “tearable”

2nd Panel: Industry Perspectives

Panel

• Chair: Dan Appelquist — Vodafone/Mobile Monday
• Andrew Scott — Founder of Rummble
• Sean Kane — Head of Mobile for Bebo
• Priya Prakash — Flirtomatic
• Jennifer Grenz — Shozu
• Christophe Hocquet — Moblr/BuddyMob
  • have seen average session times of 3 hours!

What impact is flat rate having?

• Priya: one user came along to user testing with 6 different SIM cards and was swapping in and out as needed and for best rate…
  • as long as they can access the service, they will do what it takes
• Jen: big change for Shozu is roaming to wifi
• Sean: lot of bebo users are under 24, but are spending a lot
  • 30% of traffic on a lot of operators is going to mobile social networking

How many of your users are roaming? Is that impacting?

• Andrew: mobile by definition is something you travel with
• Sean: see a lot of users switching to roam-able services like text messaging

On deck/off deck

• Sean: need to be both off and on deck
  • starting today, wouldn’t bother with on deck
  • “all the friction is on deck” — you have to work with lots of awkward operator people
• Priya: if you could get rid of all those noisy banners operators should be able to make a fantastic personalised experience…
• Jen: non-operator driven discoverability is on the rise, compared to operator-driven
• Sean: haven’t figured out how to make mobile experiences viral — how do you share?
• Dan: Obama iPhone app — download and it examines your address book and tells you to call people in swing states
• Priya: need to have a contextual “share with a friend” — share a social object. It’s a challenge to find something suitable to send
• Jen: “this service is more exciting to me if you join”
• Andrew: released iPhone app, not Java, since 99% sure that it will be a good experience
• Priya: how many people in audience have sent something to a friend via a mobile internet site? answer: about 30-40%
• Sean: SMSs are not a long term strategy, but are good as a one off to bring people in to the network

How do you inform users of potential costs?

• Dan: maybe there’s a place for a mobile social network as a support group for those suffering from bill shock :-)

Privacy settings for location-based services?

• Andrew: you need to provide it, but you’ll probably find that no one uses that feature
  • What’s the minimum age? We copied what facebook do: 13
  • But it depends on the context of the network
• Priya: have to provide a social fuzzy location — otherwise it seems too freaky
• Jen: in terms of photos, people want to upload exact location but keep it private
• facebook privacy settings are quite granular, but possibly too detailed for anyone to understand
  • Josie: facebook ran into problems with data protection as it wasn’t clear that young people could understand the various settings — still an ongoing case
• if you support fireeagle, you have to support specific levels of granularity of location — cannot release data that is too detailed

Metrics — what’s the most important thing that you’re measuring that shows the health of your business

• Andrew: engagement, rummbling a place, rating a POI
  • iPhone app is 3-4 times higher than online
• Sean: how many more people using this week?
  • figuring out ways to use virality
• Priya: number of flirtograms
  • all about getting people from first use through to first paid item
• Jen: churn, defined by active use and returning users, month on month, year on year
• Christophe: click through rate, love

Setting up a working group to share location amongst mobile social networks

• Andrew: not sure what the name is yet, but have been talking to 5 or 6 other network — about 20 million users in total

Combining social networks with serious applications

• Andrew: 37% on a social network in US; Korea has 87% — waiting for critical mass
• Priya: working with BBC mobile
• Sean: causes, e.g tsunami-related, etc.
  • not quite at the phase on mobile where you can start to open platform — still fighting over getting users
• Met Office have just launched a Mobile TV channel, ad-funded

Summing up

• Jen: choice
• Priya: friends are overrated :-)

Next event

• next event probably second Monday in January
• also opportunities to sponsor the podcast…

BarCamp London: The Transmission of Tradition - Jeremy Keith

Slides available

Jeremy gave us a great rendition with his zouk. This blog post or the slides don’t really capture it — you need musical intermissions every few minutes :-)

John Philip Sousa hated both gramaphones & radio:

• problem was with his business model — he sold sheet music and did live performances

Irish traditional music — no tradition of making money from writing it

• some exceptions: people writing music to celebrate a sponsor
• most jigs, reels, etc: nobody knows who wrote them

The music was learnt aurally — still the best way to learn (all the little phrasings, etc)

Consequently, there was an enormous amount of musical variation in Ireland

Francis O’Neill, chief of police in Chicago, started collecting tunes

• Cliche — Irish policemen in Chicago If you could play an instrument you were guaranteed a job
• O’Neill’s 1001: “The Book” — saved music for future generations since population of Ireland was being decimated by famine and people leaving

Sharing music moved onto the internet with mailing lists

• no music or images, so ABC format
• software could take this format and output sheet music
• regional variations starting to die out, since most popular lives longer

Jeremy’s contribution: thesession.org

• now 3000-4000 tunes
• mostly public domain — some conflicts where 20th century ideas of licensing & intellectual property
• some people will compose a tune and not take credit — hope that it gets accepted

What’s going to happen with music in the future?

• like irish tradition? music getting out there, variations, mutations, etc
• or like Disney? extending copyright length each time Mickey Mouse comes up for expiry

Jeremy thinks the 20th Century might be a blip

• had the idea of the commons for a long time
• only been 100-120 years of having false economy of scarcity