momoboston & Nokia Research Center Cambridge Meeting recap
February 9th, 2008 by scottjanousek
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...A recent Mobile Monday Boston …
 |
 |
I attended Mobile Monday Boston earlier this week at NRCC. Just now getting around to posting about it in a bit more detail now that I have access to a full sized keyboard within not so crapped quarters!
Live Mobile Blogging attempts foiled
My initial plans to live blog the event using qik were met by a service not available message.
Then, likewise, my efforts to record via flixwagon apparently were foiled by another (potential user) error (I only managed to record about 1 minute of actual video after viewing what was uploaded post event … this may be a bug, as it is an alpha).
But not much was lost … as I didn’t have a clear shot from which to capture … annyways, so it’d be audio only for the most part!
You see, the event was packed with about 60 or so from the Boston mobile community (it was deemed a “SOLD OUT” event, even though it was technically FREE).
Alessandro posted some photos on flickr BTW.
The Research and Presentations
There were four presentation topics at this event (all of them ongoing R&D at Nokia in the Cambridge, MA office):
1. Linux Research Phone Platform derived from Ubuntu & Debian (Brian Avery)
2. ConnectingMe Sematic Web Project (Deepali Khushraj)
3. Virpi Virtual Personal Assistant – conversational natural language dialog (Mark Adler)
4. MyNet Private Personal Networks and Device Clusters (Paul Wisner)
#2 and #4 were of particular and practical interest to me. MyNet looked like a great idea to me, even though questions about security were raised. #3 was interesting as well, which was all about natural language processing on devices such as the N810 tablet. #1 I couldn’t quite get into … perhaps I’ve drifted too far from being a Linux geek …
#4 … the idea of Nokia’s Mynet project is to build your own personal area network (PAN) of devices in which to sync and otherwise communicate. PANs can also communicate with each other; a mobile network of devices, if you will. Here is how they describe the endeavor:
“The MyNet Project is a collaboration between the Nokia Pervasive Computing Group and the MIT UIA team (UIA=User Information Architecture). It is clear that personal devices such as mobile phones, digital music players, personal digital assistants, console gaming systems, and digital cameras have become commonplace in the lives of ordinary people. We believe that as these intelligent and networking capable devices proliferate – security, ease of use and peer-to-peer connectivity will become increasingly important.
For example: if Alice meets Bob in a coffee shop, she should easily be able to share with him information or services located on any of her personal devices. These may be devices she carries with her or devices she owns but are located somewhere else, such as her home. Once Bob has been given access, he should be able to connect to Aliceld be able to impersonate Bob later, however, in order to gain access to the resources Alice choose to share with Bob.”
I particularly thought the idea of bumping 2 or more devices together, or utilizing RFID and other NFC (near field communication) was an interesting idea in terms of distributing content and information virally (barring Security implications that may arise). Also, Rob Toole (a Flash/Flex evangelist at Fidelity) reminded me of the potentials of using this as an opt in solution for stores (similar to bluetooth casting that goes on within some of the world).
Summary
Hopefully, we’ll see some of these research make it out onto the Nokia labs soon, and perhaps even into products later this year (will see).
Anyways, it was a different change of pace to attend an event where research was the primary focus. As one who has worked in this academic type atmosphere in the past, I was very jealous of the projects they are working on!
Oh well, at least I lived vicariously through their presentations … back to my own ongoing mobile projects.