Science and Industry

As a worker of mobile corporation, I use mobile phone for both business (emails) and fun (chatting, surfing). I’m nowadays regularly using mobile phone while traveling in Helsinki.

So, I happened to stop by at the university today to do some things I promised to do. I sat there, close to computer, for hours and did some actual work also. Then, after few hours, I decided to left back to home. While sitting in the bus, I noticed the battery level being rather down: it seemed like it would last for the whole journey.

So, I started to think. This was obviously my mistake: I should have charged it while doing other things. But then, was it really my fault? Mobile phone is rather unnoticeable. I didn’t check the battery status during the day. I didn’t know that it was rather low.

So, even thought there’s a human error behind this all — there’s rather easy technological solutions. First, the charging procedure is rather hard. You need to plug things in and do all this manual work. It’s not easy and fun, especially if you’re mobile.

Secondly, one isn’t specially aware of the mobile phone if it’s not used. My main focus was on transscripting things, not checking the wellbeing of my phone. Should the device notice where I am and tell me that it has a low battery? Some sort of smart contextuality would be interesting.

This brings up the question that how much we want that the device effects our life. Actually, for some situation — like battery charging or profile mode choosing — I would give the device more intelligence and power. Luckily E90 has a good battery and I survived to home to continue IRC discussion with a laptop.

Now I do something I most likely should not be doing: speak of my ideas in the spirit of open innovation. So this is an idea that has been bubbling in my head for some time already. Let’s put the pink glasses on and start dreaming… What if…

I see the future being ubiquitous and extremely contextual. There will be smart devices around us to support our daily life. But what’s more important is that these smart devices will know something of their environment, they know where they are.

This feature will allow create potential in several services, not just the location based ones but wide variety like smart devices that sense what you need and offer it. But my idea actually is location based service that could be done with today’s technology.

There’s lot of research done to build political discussion forum to Internet. Actually even know I know it’s trialled in Finland at least. But let’s take this one step further: at this moment you need to be the active partner, looking for the information. And the information might be scattered to several places. But, actually – most political questions have some sort of locational meaning.

Yeap, I think we both see the same thing now: even mapping the current political debate into a map would be interesting. Just a plane old mashing up — nothing new to see here. But I take the next step: we have the contextual device that pushes these messages while you’re in the area. No need to look for the information just stay where you always are and the system will know what’s up with the community around you.

And of course, as I speak about deliberative things, there need to be discussion part also. Or it’s the most important thing. In deliberative framework it’s emphases: to get good decision you need to discuss of it. And now with discussion I mean real discussion, real arguments, and citizens & administration taking part to it. And finally there would be some sort of common understanding of the resolution and reasons why they ended up there.

I call this CODED. It’s just in (and only in) my head and evolving rapidly to different kind of concepts. What would you like to see? Why? Or do I just have an invalid hunch of the future and humans there — as usual?