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Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Yesterday I came across this terrific piece of research (pdf).

Situation: We usually see mobility as a (research) problem. So we design applications:

For accessing info “anytime, anywhere” (When we view mobility as disconnection)
For helping users to find interesting nearby restaurants (When mobility involves being “out of place” or lost)
That respond to contextual cues. For example, a mobile that sets “itself automatically to vibrate mode in a theatre”. (When we view mobility as disruption)

Proposal: Some local folk (Arianna Bassoli of LSE and Karen Martin of UCL) and some folk on the other side of the pond (Johanna Brewer and Paul Dourish of UCI and Scott Mainwaring of Intel) propose to depart from our habit of viewing mobility as a problem. By contrast, they encourage designers of mobile applications to profit from movement and space. To prove the point, they have designed undersound – a music application that consists of three parts:
“1) A mobile phone client lets both emerging musicians and audiophiles wirelessly upload their tracks at upload points inside the Underground station ticket halls.
2) This same phone application lets users download tracks from download points on the train platforms as well as from other users in proximity.
3) The phone application stores metadata from each music exchange, which the upload and download access points throughout the undersound network collect and use to drive large visualizations in the ticket halls, which reflect the music’s movement through the network.”
For example, emerging musicians can get some free publicity by uploading their latest track and by adding the date of their next gig as a note to the track.
Also, their etnographic study in the Tube is well worth reading. It reminded me of what Francine Prose once wrote: “Travelers compare notes on how best to prevent their seatmates from making casual conversation. Pervesely, it’s more likely that someone might “share” a confession with a national TV audience…”

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Mobile Music

Friday, August 17th, 2007

I was at Mobiquitous 2007 in Philadelphia last week.
Some of the papers were focused on music and its applicability to mobile devices:
Musicology: Bringing Personal Music into Shared Spaces,
Content Source Selection in Bluetooth Networks (my paper).
This is an interesting area of development and, I believe, important for the realisation of large scale market penetration of networked mobile devices.
I’m sure most of you are aware of online digital media stores, such as the iTunes Store and Napster.
Most of these stores employ Digital Rights Management (DRM) to limit the sharing and playback of the purchased tracks, though not all sites are so restrictive (Emusic).
Apparently, Apple barely makes money from their store, and use it as a driver for their iPod device range. The iPhone automatically synchronises with your computer’s media collection whenever it is connected. Ensuring you are always walking around with your most up to date data.
Other mobile device manufacturers are now trying to make use of these loyalty inducing services, Nokia making MOSH and possibly its own store. Sony Ericsson has the rather silly named m-buzz and its Playnow service. Even companies that don’t manufacture devices are focusing on the mobile music shop market, such as RoK.

This combination of digital media stores and mobile devices shows an awareness by companies about people’s usage of digital media on the go, and its attraction.
Not just to improve the user experience, but also to try and lock them in to their particular device/network provider. This is achieved not only through the inertia caused by familiarity of the particular shop, but also the format the music is supplied in. Including both the actual music encoding (WMV is Microsoft’s, RealAudio) or the DRM container (FairPlay/PlaysForSure/Helix DRM). Leading to consumers only being able to use some devices with their music collection, and equally only purchase material from shops that their device supports.

The adoption of digital music sales as an added part of the mobile device ecosystem demonstrates people are willing to pay for digital media, especially on their mobile devices.
Interestingly, the low margins on this service has caused it to often be a value added feature rather than a profitable venture in its own right.
The renegotiation of terms by Universal may lower the distribution margins even more.
The posibility of direct sales of music tracks by artists, without the labels acting as middlemen, may increase the profits for content produers and distributers, making it a viable option in future. The unpopularity of DRM, is causing new developments a such as watermarking and charging a premium for the lack of it, will hopefully stimulate the market further.

Posted in conference, industry, mobile, sharing, social networks | 1 Comment »