Between Brackets

Don’t forget to register for the Appsmarathon in Brussels next Monday September 27.

On Monday June 7 Mobile Monday Brussels is at it again with a session on Machine 2 Machine communications.

Read more and subscribe on the Mobile Monday Brussels website.

An interesting recent announcement (via mocoNews.net) is the idea that you can swap Foursquare check-in points for paid content of the Financial Times. Foursquare did already have various specials based on check-ins, being mayor etc., but this deal swaps on-line “currency” for on-line digital content, which is a completely virtual trade.

Last week (or was it the week before that?) I got an update alert for Nokia Maps. Just in time as my trial days for the Nokia Maps version pre-installed on my N86 MP8 were almost counted.

I had to free some space on my c: drive (did you know your Nokia S60 has c:, d: etc drives? I did but it still feels bizar to read that in an error message intended for the end-user) which wasn’t as easy as expected. But of course eventually it succeeded.

It is quite stunning what you get for free:

• The user interface is slick and smooth.
• There’re built-in Lonely Planet guides, as well as
• Michelin Restaurant guides.
• Several views (2d, 3d…)

Hard times ahead for Garmin, TomTom and the likes…

Even though the questions “what is it”, and “what’s mobile about it” didn’t get answered, there were a number of interesting insights.

DIY metering

It becomes incredibly easy to capture data and publish it to the web or process it otherwise. Martijn Pannevis made a gauge that showed the ‘balance’ of votes of people. The more people tweeted the hash code #iphone, the more the gauge went to the left, the more they sent a hash code in favor of Android the more the needle moved back to the right.

All he’d needed to achieve this was buy a little box at http://iobridge.com. Set up an account. And do a little web programming. Sounds easy enough to me

Booreiland

Menno huisman (Co-founder of Booreiland) had a number of interesting examples that will be available in the form of his presentation online on MoMo’s website soon.

David Orban – WideTag

The IPv6 protocol has an address for every billion (or so) atoms. This means that every non-nanite machine can have an address.

Now, if every machine that surrounds us starts shouting its state (power consumption, oil-level, heart-beat etc) to the internet we (humans) won’t be able to listen to them anymore, there will be too much data for us to process. So we’ll need to automate the processing and analysis of all this data (this is in fact already happening a few years be it on a small scale compared to what is coming). Machines will need to process and analyze their own data and the data that other machines feed them. Machines must become autonomous (unless for some reason we don’t want this -think Dave, or think Terminator). A good example being the vacuum cleaner that independently finds its way back to the charger when its battery is almost empty.

The internet of living things: opensource genetics

The highlight of the evening was the speech from Andrew Hessel about the internet of living things. A passionate speech about how genetics are becoming digital.

Summarized:

the price of determining the DNA sequences is dropping dramatically, the price of (re-)sequencing DNA is also dropping fast. This means that what is currently the playing field of a few smart people that happen to have a lot of money to spend (universities, big corporations), will become a gigantic industry in which a much larger number of smart people (needing only a fraction of the currently required budgets) will be able to create all new kinds of DNA.

It’s as if the bacteria took 4 billion years to create us, so we can re-create them. And we thought we were intelligent

Watch the video it’s really interesting.

Google announces yet another mobile search feature (currently US only) that allows you to consult nearby stores for product availability. It’s not only to find out if they sell the product you’re looking for but also showing whether or not it is in stock now. That allows you to decide to go to that store right away and pick up the product. Very convenient indeed.

Also interesting is that stores need to participate in the Google program tying them further to Google.

40+ people gathered last Monday to talk about publishing and marketing on the mobile platform.

Some interesting figures and facts were given by the speakers:

• The iPhone app from the De Standaard didn’t cannibalize the site, it added to the traffic (something that a Le Monde speaker also mentioned on a IFRA talk in Amsterdam)
• From an Orange study: using the classic internet and mobile internet channels combined to create brand awareness is the way to go. Brands can benefit greatly from the combination.§
• I’m not sure who said it, but apparently younger people tend to buy Android based phones (instead of an iPhone)

more to be found her: http://www.mobilemonday.be/event/publishing-and-marketing

Next week Monday March 1st it is Mobile Monday Brussels time again.

The theme for this evening is Publishing and Marketing, a joint networking event between IAB and Mobile Monday Brussels.

You can find program details and register here, make sure you’re there.

No, it’s not George Clooney’s own vanity website It’s a site that’s about sharing your medical data with other patients like you.

In the traditional healthcare system: you feel sick, you go to the doctor, she prescribes you some drugs, you go to the drugstore, you take your pills, and you -hopefully- get better.

PatientsLikeMe.com works around the notion that getting yourself involved in the process of listening to your body and symptoms, thinking about how and what you feel, makes you more conscious about your illness. Recording your medical data and sharing it with others, makes it possible to have a better view on your symptoms to yourself, others and doctors. Instead of going to the doctor and having a fuzzy description of what you feel, you can give the doctor a detailed description of what you have been feeling over many days, weeks or months.

The internet makes it possible to create bigger communities of patients suffering from the same disease than in the physical world. Often the small communities on peoplelikeme, are even bigger than the groups of patients that were followed during the clinical trials of drugs that treat their diseases.

People record all kinds of daily habits: what did I eat today? How do I feel today? …? And because they record it regularly, they have a lot of information when they go to the doctor.

Business plan? Peoplelikeme works together with pharmaceutical companies.

There’s many reasons why an organization could delay investing in their mobile presence. Compared to the internet 10 years ago, one can argue that penetration of mobile internet is still relatively low, so there’s still not that much people that would come by on your site.

Except that, different from the early internet days, there’s other forces at work this time: Facebook Mobile: 100 Million and Growing

Now that’s 1 in 4 accessing Facebook via mobile. And what happens if those people try to link through to your brand via a Facebook fan page, a friend’s link, or anything ?

Maybe it is time to re-consider the urgency of your brand’s mobile internet presence.