This is Swipe, a blog by pinch/zoom about mobile, design, user experience, usability, development and the future of technology.
How can a country where millions of people are so poor they’ve never even used a computer be the world’s biggest user of Twitter?
Created by Rob Vargas, based on data from a study by the University of California at San Diego.
This graph by George Kokkinidis tries to make sense of this Guardian article showing which mobile companies are suing each other over mobile patents.
But if that phone is a lifeline for a young girl learning to read; if it is a source of secure transactions for a business woman starting out on her own; if it serves as a tool of resistance for a dissident voice who stands up for human rights; and when it becomes a global positioning tool for a community member protecting her forested lands against global warming; then that cell phone just might make all the difference in the world.
(via Good)
These are early days. Right now, editing for the iPad feels similar to making television shows just after the Second World War, when less than one per cent of American households owned a television
Do not worry about web design or software design. The mobile phone is something for herself, believes mobile guru Brian Fling.
Brian spoke about designing mobile experiences at the Frontend Conference in Norway last week and ended up featured in Norway’s Computerworld.
If you don’t speak Norwegian, there is a translation here, and below are some of his key points:
We’ll post here when the slides and videos are available.
Apple has just announced that they’re releasing AirPrint, which will automatically find printers on local networks and use wifi to print from your iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
This will be available with the OS update in November, and they’ve already released a beta version for developers on the Apple Developer program.
“AirPrint is Apple’s powerful new printing architecture that matches the simplicity of iOS—no set up, no configuration, no printer drivers and no software to download,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users can simply tap to print their documents or photos wirelessly to an HP ePrint printer or to a printer shared on a Mac or PC.”
Finally—I can use my iPhone like a Polaroid camera and print directly from my phone.
OkCupid, an online dating site, has just released some trending data around profile photos, devices and camera types (must be a slow news day).
They found that iPhone owners had more sexual partners than Android and Blackberry users.
When this graph was charted in Excel, they found iPhone owners consistently had more sexual partners throughout the age ranges, although Blackberry users in their early 20s came quite close.
I’m not quite sure what this says about Android users. Or even iPhone users – you never know, these stats might say that iPhone owners are a bunch of liars.
I’m really excited that Ignite Seattle is on tomorrow night at the King Cat Theatre.
Ignite first began in Seattle in 2006. My brother Steve brought it to Sydney” last year and I helped out at the first 4 of them. I moved to Seattle right before the fifth one, so I’m really excited to help out at the mothership event, so to speak.
Topics tomorrow include:
FrankCatalano) How Science Is Destroying My Childhood
* Lisa Bronwyn (junefontaine) Finding Your Nietzsche
* Tom Music (tommusic) Lymphomartini: Immutiny on the Bountypinch/zoom will be helping stream the event, and I’ll be on the door so stop and say Hi if you see us. You can also follow our updates on Twitter.
A few years ago I was lucky enough to catch Mark Pesce do the closing keynote for Web Directions South in Sydney.
It was one of those life-changing talks that had me glued to the edge of my seat in awe, and then inspired me to actually make a difference in the world. I think about that keynote often as it was one of the best talks I’ve ever seen.
Seeing as it’s a grey rainy Friday afternoon in Seattle, I thought I’d post my favourite piece of his speech as I’m feeling the need to be inspired. Please go and read the whole thing as the whole talk was mind-blowing, but this is the part that inspired me to work in mobile and drives me in my work on a daily basis.
bq We begin on the shores of the Indian Ocean, in the south Indian state of Kerala. For at least a thousand years the fishermen of Kerala have sailed their sturdy dhows to sea, lowered their nets, prayed to their gods, and—if their prayers were heard—hauled in a bountiful catch. Fully laden, the fishermen set their sails to shore, to any one of the many fishing villages and fish markets which dot the Kerala coast.
The selection of a port is done more or less at random, so throughout all these thousand years too many boats pulled into one port, leaving the markets oversupplied, and the fisherman selling their catch at a loss, while another market, just a few kilometers away, has no fish for sale at any price.
This kept the fishermen poor, and the markets consistently either oversupplied or undersupplied.
From 1997 through 2001, as India’s rush to industrialization gathered momentum, several of India’s mobile telecoms firms strung the Kerala coast with GSM towers. GSM is a radio signal, and travels in line-of-sight, which means that, out at sea, the signal can reach 25 kilometers, the point where the curvature of the Earth blocks the view of the shore.
GSM handsets cost a month’s wages for a Kerala fishermen—imagine if a handset here cost four or five thousand dollars. (Even my Nokia N95 didn’t cost that much.) Yet, some wealthy fisherman, somewhere in Kerala, bought a GSM handset and took it to sea. At some point during a fishing voyage that fisherman had some communication with the mainland—perhaps a trivial family matter. But, in the course of that communication, he learned of a village going wanting for fish, at any price. So he made for that port and sold his catch at a tidy profit that day. The next day, perhaps, he called into shore, talking to fish sellers to the various ports, and learned which market needed fish the most—and was willing to pay for it. So it began.
Fishermen form a tight-knit community; while they might be secretive about their favorite spots to fish, they all trade technique with one another, and—within a very short period of time—all the other Kerala fishermen had learned of the power of the GSM handset, and each of them brought their own handset to sea, made calls to the markets, and sold their catch for a tidy profit. Today, the fish markets in Kerala are only rarely oversupplied with fish, and are almost never undersupplied. The network of fish sellers and fishermen have created their own bourse, a marketplace which grows organically out of an emergent web of SMS and voice calls which distribute the catch efficiently across the market. The customers are happy—there’s always fish for sale. The fish sellers are happy—they always have fish to sell, and at a good price. And the fisherman are happy—and earning so much more, these days, that a GSM handset pays for itself in two months’ time.
None of this was predicted. None of this was expected. None of this was anything but shocking to the legion of economists who are now studying this unprecedented phenomenon. To our Western eyes this doesn’t even make much sense. We think of mobile phones as a bit of bling, a technological googaw that makes our lives a bit easier—something that removes the friction from our social interactions. In the age of the mobile, you’re never late, just delayed. You can always call to say you’re sorry. (Or text to say you’ve broken up.) While they can be useful in our economic lives, they’re hardly necessary—and, given that the boss can now reach you 24 hours a day, wherever you are on Earth—they’re often more of a pain in the arse than a blessing. But at the end of the day they’re extraneous. Nice, but non-essential.
Study after study is confirming something that many were already beginning to suspect: the very poorest people on Earth—the five billion of us who earn less than a few thousand dollars a year—can benefit enormously from pervasive wireless communications. It seems counterintuitive—why would a subsistence farmer in Kenya need a mobile phone?As it turns out, that farmer—and farmers in Nigeria, and Bangladesh and Peru—will phone ahead to the markets, and learn where their produce will bring the best price. Left to their own devices, human beings with things to trade will create their own markets. When mobile communications enter the mix, their ability to trade effectively increases enormously.
Those who serve the poor—microfinance institutions like Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank—have real experience of the power of mobiles to help the poor. So many of Grameen Bank’s loans went to finance mobile handsets that they recently founded their own telecoms firm—Grameen Phone—to provide services to the poor. None of this is charity work—all of these are profit-making enterprises; but it turns out that helping the poor to communicate is one of the most effective ways to help them to improve their economic effectiveness.
That, too, wasn’t predicted by anyone. After all, don’t the poor need schools, clean water, inoculations and transparent governments?Yes, certainly they need all these things, but they also need the tools that let them help themselves. Near as anyone can tell, a mobile handset pretty much tops that list of tools. And although this singular discovery is nearly unknown in the Western world, the poor of the world know it—because they’ve been snapping up mobiles in unprecedented and unexpected numbers.
Read the rest here, and have a good weekend.