mohit.santram

iPod Photo

http://www.apple.com/ipodphoto/

I’ve been thinking about the iPod photo for the past few months, and wondering when Apple will release a version with bluetooth. In fact why stop there? Where’s the iPod with a built in camera, phone, and bluetooth? surely if they can reduce the size of the hard drive and components, as evidenced by the slimmer iPods and new Mac Mini, then they can incorporate all the components of an iPod, camera, bluetooth and more into a reasonable size.

…maybe i’m just tired of carrying my phone, camera, and iPod.

i love powerpoint

david byrne is speaking at NYU this week. they apparently are out of tickets, though i’m planning on going to see the event anyway. I hope they open another seating hall like they did in the fall for noam chomsky.

David Byrne to Deliver Marshall McLuhan Lecture at NYU On

Wednesday, Feb 23, 2005

New York University will host this year’s Marshall McLuhan Lecture for the first time, featuring David Byrne, visual artist and musician, formerly of the group Talking Heads. The Marshall McLuhan Lecture celebrates the intellectual legacy of the Canadian media guru and scholar who declared “the medium is the message.” A visionary himself, Byrne will deliver “I Love PowerPoint,” homage to the medium as a visual art form and creative tool.

The Marshall McLuhan Lecture is presented by NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Culture and Communication, the Canadian Consulate General, and the McLuhan family. The event will take place Wednesday, March 2, at 6:30 p.m. at NYU’s Kimmel Center, Eisner and Lubin Auditorium, 60 Washington Square South between Thompson Street and LaGuardia Place. The event is free and open to the public; RSVPs are required by calling 212.596.1660. Better known as the co-founder of the group Talking Heads, Byrne has been creating visual art for more than 25 years and has exhibited at the Pace/McGill Gallery in New York City. Byrne has been described as having the ability to elevate “the mundane to the level of art, creating icons out of everyday materials to find the sacred in the profane.” Previous McLuhan lecturers include prize-winning Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis P. Lapham, author Tom Wolfe, feminist academic and author Camille Paglia, former California Governor Jerry Brown, and high-tech inventor and thinker Alan Kay.

Media interested in attending the 2005 Marshall McLuhan Lecture should contact Kristin Wallace of Todomundo, Ltd. at todomundo@attglobal.net or 212-255-2408.

Street Othello - Big Games

02.14.05

Ideas in Development:

1) Street Othello
* the premise behind this game is to move othello to a five street by five street grid.
* there will be at least four teams of four people equipped with cameraphones. each team will be assigned a color:: red, yellow, green, blue. we can have more teams as 3, 4, 5, or 6 teams would be optimal.
* each game will last 30 miniutes
* based on a grid of 25 square blocks, each team will set out to compete against other teams by capturing the most squares as possible.
* to capture a square, all four members of a team must moblog a picture of the square’s street signs. once each individual from the team has submitted one unique picture of a corner and the square is completed, the team will be awarded the square.
* teams will need to be quick on their feet, with moblogging, and work well with their teammates to capture the most squares in 30 minutes.
* once a square has been captured, that team will be awarded a point. the team with the most squares, points will win.
* two teams can compete for the same square, but whichever team submits all four pictures from all for individuals first will win the square.
* there will be people at home base sending out alerts and scores to all of the team members every minute, two minutes, or as needed throughout the game. pictures of the game board will also be mailed out to people’s phones and posted on the website in real time.
* players will sign up over the web, but will compete in real time.

Future Enhancements
* in version two, teams will be able to reverse an already captured square to their color if they claim a new square which is sandwiched by a square of their own color. this happens in othello.

Why Street Othello?
* the beauty of this game is that it transposes an easy to understand game onto an urban playing field.
* the game can be set up easily, and quickly as all people need to enter is a team of four people with mms capable cell phones.
* this game builds relationships and competetion between quick thinking, strategic people.

Barriers to Entry
* there is a high transaction cost associated with playing this game. people will have to send and receive many pictures, text messages, phone calls, and mms messages.

-mo

UbiqMob: Assignment Number 5

Blog it up about a mobile application that gets more interesting as more people get involved (think: dating, games, social software). Start thinking about what you want to build for your midterm project.

…

UbiqMob: Assignment Number 4

HopStop

+ how does the app know your location? (do you need to tell it, or does it just “know”?)
you have to enter it either on their site ala’ a mapquest interface or email it to a email address. when you create an account, the system will send you a text message asking you to save the email address to your address book. you can email it as well to find directions. the site will return subway, bus, and walking directions to a specified location.

+ what does the app use as a basis for location (address? intersection? zip code? landmark?)
address/zipcode, intersection, or popular place.

+ what technology does your phone need in order to play? (bluetooth? GPS?)
email/mms from a mobile phone or email account or visiting their website.

+ what does the app do with this location? what services can it provide?
the app will return to you directions from point a to point b. as well as giving you directions on their site, you can get it on your phone. they also offer maps from which to you find directions to or from. you can specify subway or bus only. a little bit of walking is assumed and required.

+ does this app expose YOUR location to other users? does this put your privacy at risk?
i did see the coordinates passed in the query string, but i’m not sure about from a mobile phone. if someone were to intercept your text message then yes.

+ and as always, how can you expand on this app or make the experience / interface better?
better directions. more information about nearby places, sites, attractions. etc.

UbiqMob: Assignment Number 3

Describe any camera phone application. Find an example of a camera phone game, a group camera phone moblog, a UPC / barcode lookup service, etc. (Don’t be afraid to write about things that are available outside the US!). Tell us about what the product does, the user experience and what you could do to improve that experience.

Paperclick: http://paperclick.com/faq.jsp
Paperclick is UPC/EAN barcode reader application/website. The company claims that the application will only run on a few Nokia phones. Still Paperclick is a relatively easy system which maps barcodes to distinct information on the web. The application needs to be explained better, even after a reading or two, I still had to think about what the authors(s) were trying to describe. i think john geraci’s Grafedia or mel camero’s projects are more practical and ultimately more userful to me. it would also help to see more examples of how people are using this service to improve their lives.

(This following is quoted direct from their site:)
“How Does PaperClick Work?

The PaperClick system consists of two basic components: PaperClick Device Software and the PaperClick Resolution Service.

The PaperClick Device Software is a small program that an end user installs on his or her cell phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or personal computer. This software is responsible for helping the user’s web browser display the content associated with a machine readable identifier.

The PaperClick Resolution Service is software that runs on a server on the Internet. It manages the relationships between individual identifiers and their associated web pages. We call these relationships “mappings.” When a user reads an identifier with the device software, the server is responsible determining what web page the identifier’s owner wanted displayed and returning it to the user’s web browser.

The following diagram shows a simplified version of how PaperClick works:

The steps in the process are:

1. The PaperClick Device Software reads the identifier (a barcode in this case).
2. It creates a web address referring to the PaperClick Resolution Service, and gives this to the browser.
3. The browser uses that web address to send the request to the Resolution Service.
4. The Resolution Service takes the identifier out of the web address it receives, and looks it up in its database of mappings.
5. The database returns the web page associated with the identifier.
6. The Resolution Service returns the destination web page information to the browser.
7. The browser then contacts the correct web site to obtain the specified page.
8. The web site returns the content to the browser so that the user can see it.

All the interaction between the Device Software, the browser and the Resolution Service is completely transparent to the customer. From their point of view, it’s “click on a barcode, see a web page.””

UbiqMob: Assignment Number 2

Describe any text-messaging application you’ve had an experience with.
A few years back I had signed up for Major League Baseball email alerts from Yahoo! Sports. Now they are offering text messaging alerts.

http://beta.alerts.yahoo.com/config/edit_notification?.t=p&.hier=MLB&.mcb=&.done=http%3a//mobile.yahoo.com/%3f.up=1

Tell us about what the product does, the user experience and what you could do to improve that experience.
The product did a simple thing. it would email you the final game score and basic stats for a specific baseball team’s games. I chose to recieve alerts for the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees. Since I recieved these alerts in my yahoo email account, I was able to view these emails from my Sprint cellphone. Using their wirless web, I was able to connect to Yahoo! and check my email and see the scores of a game if I was unablet to watch, listen, or read the scores.

The problem with the service then and now is that you could not track a specific player. If I wanted to know the specific stats of a player during the season, I would have to look it up online or read it in a newspaper. I always thought that this infomation would be useful to baseball enthusiasts, statisticians, and fantasy baseball players. Just like one could select a tean, it would be easy to select a player and receive txt alerts if one was unable to watch, view hightlights, etc etc…

UbiqMob: Assignment Number 1

Why did you take this class?
Hi my name is Mohit SantRam and I’m a second year student at ITP. I’ve worked on a few cellphone applications, most notably Bickr and Socialight. Aside from loving my digital camera, i LOVE my cameraphone. i’m addicted to flickr and I want to improve my cellphone development skills. I took cellphonia last semester and though the class was a bust, i picked up a lot of ideas that i’d like to continue developing in this class.

What type of projects do you want to work on?
i love mobbloging and the social effects of sharing photos on the fly. as cellphones become more and more advanced the development space will become imporant. i’m taking big games this semester and i would like to incorporate cell apps into project ideas. i am also improving bickr and the strength of the bickr experience.

What skills (technical / design) do you have?
html, php, mysql, web, design, etc. etc…

What type of phone / provider do you have?
i have a nokia 6630 and i use t-mobile. yay.

Tell us about your favorite use of mobile phones (outside text’ing friends and calling your parents).
I love being able to take pictures anytime I want or when the moment strikes me. When I got my digital camera, I swore I would never go to a photo development place, unless I was getting a print made. Nearly four years later, I never looked back, until I got my cameraphone. Now my digital camera is collecting dust. Who wants to carry three devices when they can carry one? Where’s my tri-corder?

Cron Jobs

Q: How do i set up a cron job?
A: Do this:

1. Log into stage / dreamhost / etc.
2. Type “crontab -e” to see the crons you have running
3. Enter the follow, to get a script that runs every second:

EVERY MINUTE (that’s as low as you can go… for now)
*/1 * * * * /home/ms1065/public_html/cgi-bin/pop_me.pl

EVERY HOUR
* */1 * * * /home/ms1065/public_html/cgi-bin/pop_me.pl

EVERY TUESDAY @ 12p
* */12 * * 2 /home/ms1065/public_html/cgi-bin/pop_me.pl

Big Games

So far in Big Games we’ve been discussing what actually makes a big game. I think its best to think of a big game as something that can be scaled up with adding a few dimensions. I’ve been thinking a lot about big ideas though they need to be refined. As an example I always think about the interpersonal dymanics that we see in The Amazing Race and to some degree, Survivor. PacManhattan was successful last year, though their high tech solution was just not doable at the time.

UbiMobiComp

i’ve been playing with emailing and texting my phone. i use t-mobile and the unlimited text messaging feature on the plan. i also have the $2.99 mms feature, but i’m going to upgrade it to the better plan. for twenty bucks, you are supposed to get an unlimited data connection. i don’t know if you get unlimited text and photo messages with it. i have to find out.

my phone address is 9177016051@tmomail.net below is a provider table that dennis gave us.

+—-+————————–+—————————-+——–+
| id | provider | host | status |
+—-+————————–+—————————-+——–+
| 3 | AT&T | mobile.att.net | 0 |
| 34 | AT&T | mmode.com | 1 |
| 41 | AT&T | email.mobile.att.net | 0 |
| 51 | AT&T | attwireless.net | 0 |
| 44 | AT&T (Blackberry) | attwireless.blackberry.net | 1 |
| 7 | Cingular | mobile.mycingular.com | 1 |
| 39 | Cingular | mycingular.com | 0 |
| 43 | Cingular | mms.mycingular.com | 0 |
| 47 | Cingular | mobile.mycingular.net | 0 |
| 8 | Cingular (Blackberry) | mycingular.blackberry.net | 1 |
| 14 | Nextel | messaging.nextel.com | 1 |
| 46 | Nextel (Blackberry) | nextel.blackberry.net | 1 |
| 21 | Sprint PCS | messaging.sprintpcs.com | 1 |
| 37 | Sprint PCS | sprintpcs.com | 0 |
| 27 | T-Mobile | tmomail.net | 1 |
| 35 | T-Mobile (Blackberry) | tmo.blackberry.net | 1 |
| 33 | T-Mobile (Sidekick) | tmail.com | 1 |
| 36 | Verizon Photo | vzwpix.com | 0 |
| 26 | Verizon Wireless | vtext.com | 1 |
| 28 | Virgin Mobile | vmobl.com | 1 |
| 29 | VoiceStream | voicestream.net | 1 |
+—-+————————–+—————————-+——–+

ITP Welcome

I began attending the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University: http://itp.nyu.edu. I have moved most of my entries from MovaableType into my WordPress located here. Not everything is here, but you are welcome to see the rest here: http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/~ms1065.

Hello world!

Welcome to my blog. I’m transitioning my blog from Moveable Type. MT was great but a real pain to set up. WordPress, on the other hand, was a breeze! I wish I had transitioned over sooner! I’m going to import my old blog, and improve it along the way.