Archive for September, 2008

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Good nights sleep with the help of sensor technologies

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

One of my colleagues asked me to write a quick review on Happy Wake Up-application. It’s idea is to check out when at you’re best to be waken up and then wake at that moment. It uses recorder to listen how you behave 20 minutes before you’re planed time and if you sound not-so-deep-sleeping then you’re waken up at that moment. In every case the clock phone will wake you at goven time.

The application is rather easy to use. Sadly, the alarm time is set in the S60 clock and then start up the application. I would have liked to see these both integrated together — especially as I tent to forget to start the application. And it’s rather expensive also; full licence costs something like 50 € in Finland; I don’t pay for regular desktop programs that much (as I use Ubuntu).

The important thing is if it works. I’ve been testing this for few times and it’s woken me up while I’ve been turning in my bed; something like 10 minutes before actual time. So, it works – it wakes me up while I’m doing something more like day dreaming. So, yes: one could say it works rather well. But — I was so tired in the morning and my clock alarms me so early that I just continued sleeping after waking up… My boss thanked me for linking this to him — he has more regular life rhythm at the moment and might be more in the target group.

To broader this discussion more (and make it sound less like an ad which this is not) I could say some words of sensors that mobile phones provide. I’m not the lead researcher in this, but still I see this power: as mobile phone is more daily tool it allows us to use these smart sensors in a new innovative way.

Like the application presented: as mobile phone slowly replaces alarm clocks it becomes possible to use these sensors creates new capabilities to every day life. Really powerful and using the technology that devices has allready is also intresting. As a pointer, there is a project called SensorPlanet.

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Social media is dead, long live social media!

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

I had an interesting discussion with Micki Krimmel in Nokia Open Lab 2008-event. While having workshop of the next steps of social media our group started to speak about data interoperability and other things we saw important. Micki just commented that discussion that those things might be important to us “pioneers1” but real people, the ordinary Joes and Janes just use the tools for communications.

I like this mark and think it’s really important one: maybe for the younger (even younger than me) generation there’s not the history of web as we have it: I had my first website out when I was at elementary school and I see the huge difference with the way I write content here: I started with Notepad and now I just write the content without <html>’s and <a href’s. But the fact was that the content hasn’t changed so much: it’s still information of me and some links to other sites and persons.

So, what’s the most interesting thing that Micki pointed out: our chose of wording; social media, might even cause harm. As a political scientist student I know that terms are a way to use power. I’ve also see some people in the academic field defining what social media is and what they refer with that term. But what ordinary people think when we ask about Facebook or Flickr? Do they think that’s something totally different — or do they just see it as a cool and cheap way to communicate. So, as some of us want a special term to this, the question remains if that is a good word for what we do or should the term evolute to show how social media is becoming every day thing2.

Just to elaborate this more: someone asked “What is antisocial media?” while we discussed this. That is a good question — is there any media that is antisocial?

  1. actually, I don’t feel that pioneer in this area; I’ve been blogging for two years now and it became mainstream way before [↩]
  2. This sentence is based on the assumtion that social media is pushing itself to the live of younger generations and thus they see nothing special in there, they just use the best tools available. This sounds like I need more understanding in this… [↩]

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Government 2.0 and Beyond

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

This topic has been in the line for some time and now it’s actually the time to say something of it. First, a bit of background: the World Bank works in several topics, one of them being e-governance services. I got mail form colleague that I might be intrested to join the session in July and they had real good topics that time.

The question is that what is the next step of governmental services in this forward going society. Actually this is the first thing that usually gets me worried: sometimes we push some values and assumptions so much that we don’t stop to think enough if they are needed by the users. In our case the user, citizen, needs some things but…  I’ve experienced some e-governance works in Finland that were done — actually rather well — but still haven’t flight so well. But during the online discussion I got the image that e-governance services are (thought to) provide transparency in the governance and this transparency is something that’s needed. As I don’t know the local environment of developing countries, I just need to believe.

But then to actual content of the session, which I think is relevant to most developed countries also. Mr. Randeep Sudan spoke many wise words about data interoperability and ability to mash data up. Clear, these services are getting more and more popular in internet services so they should enter the governmental services also. Actually, ability to mash up governance data sounds like a good place to have new innovative services.

As I have my background, I like the mentions of contextual as being one of those things that may allow new ways to interact between citizens and government. What if instead of pulling information of decisions you would get them pushed towards you? Or how could mashing things up with contextual data modify your daily interaction with society? I see hge potential but also huge risks here — and I actually might start working with these kind of questions if Tekes provides some funding for a project. Mr. Sudan also notified how important the mobile services are; this is rather clear as for developing countries — mobile device is de facto internet device.

Mr. Anthony Williams continues with the theme of data interoperability. He used interesting term “broadcast model of politics” — governments should be able to share the information as well as they could and this would generate transparency. This would also help with the changing technical environments, as governmental organizations usually aren’t in the cutting edge of ICT. But then there’s some down sides also: what about privacy? How should we position the privacy against freedom of information? And more — what kind of solution do we need to secure everyones private information. For the latter, we see that even big countries like the Great Britain has a some room for improvement — so is there any way to do this right in the first place?

As always, a bit more questions arise:

  • Digital dive and the solutions for that?
  • Who develops and maintains these services?
  • And how to take care, using Mr. Williams terms: the end result is “gitizen centric goverment” and not just a bunch of services no-one uses?

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