MobileUX

I was recently in London presenting on Mobile UX and the importance of data.  The conference organizers just edited and published the talk online (shameless self-promotion.)  The Hospital Club space was cool – a film screening room with theater-style seats, bean bags chairs in the front row, and a huge screen to present off of.  The lighting wasn’t ideal (as you can see in the video) but it slowly adjusts so you can see what’s on the screen.

Thanks again to the folks at UserZoom for putting on the event and inviting me to join them!

Starting on Black Friday two malls in the US – Promenade Temecula in Southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. — will track guests’ movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.

While the data that’s collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers’ paths from store to store.

From a information standpoint this could be interesting, albeit with a lot of noise. User’s are tracked via a unique identifier on their phone. Although the use of the data is anonymous, there is the potential that this location information can be tied to your personal info – name and cell phone number for example.

The cell phone carriers like T-Mobile and ATT track tons of this information already, so this is nothing new (theirs goes pretty deep – they can tie your location, data usage, purchasing, credit card, etc. together – and they are trying to figure out how to monetize all of this.)

So the question is: is this just another step towards us losing all privacy online, or are we kidding ourselves that it ever actually existed?  And is this moving beyond purely digital now that our motions in the real-world are being tracked?

Check out the GigaOM post for more details.

Great post on how specs are becoming more and more meaningless. I agree that this is particularly true for mobile (the point I was trying to make in my last post before seeing this article.)

Good stuff by MG Siegler: Death of the Spec

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I’ve started to hear the term “Superphone” pop up from time to time, first last year at a company meeting and industry event, to the latest in one of today’s MediaPost articles (superphones)

Somehow the evolution of the smartphone – our beloved iPhones, Androids, and Windows Phone devices, among others – is becoming super-sized, and mobile industry analysts (and some folks that read them) are defining a new category. Supposedly once the smartphone begins to break the 4″ screen size and the 1GHz processor speed, it has become “super”.

Why? Has your phone become more capable? Will you start to use it more? Will it augment your thinking and multitasking in ways you’ve never dreamed of? What is special about this arbitrary barrier?

On mobile, bigger and faster isn’t always better. It is not a desktop computer. There are trade offs, most notably in battery life, weight, and overall usability. Some of the 4″+ Android devices I’ve tried die after about 6 hours of use, and some of these are difficult to fully use one-handed, making it hard to reach all parts of the screen with my thumb. And, as Apple has shown, tight integration of the hardware and software brings efficiencies in performance, making the processor specs less and less important.

“Superphone”? Seems unnecessary and arbitrary to me.