Apple iOS5 location-based reminders for Just in Time/Place task assignment

RemindersApple introduced a new feature in the new iOS 5 that could open several opportunities for developers. As described by Apple here:

A better way to do to-dos.

Next time you think to yourself, “Don’t forget to...”, just pull out your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and jot it down. Reminders lets you organise your life in to-do lists — complete with deadlines and locations. Say you need to remember to pick up milk during your next shopping trip. Since Reminders can be location based, you’ll get an alert as soon as you pull into the supermarket car park. Reminders also works with iCal, Outlook and iCloud, so changes you make update automatically on all your devices and calendars.

I have explored location-based reminders in one of my works on Kinetic User Interafaces. I instantiated this type of reminders to a shopping-list (UbiShop) scenario where a shared shopping-list is used to send reminders to people when they are located in a place where items in the list can be purchased (e.g. near a grocery store).

This not the only application of location-based reminders as it is applicable to several other situations. I called this "just-in-time/just-in-place" task assignment. You can find here a research article on this subject.

If Apple will provide API to manage location-based reminders within the OS for developers, what I have conceived can become a true reality. I am very excited about that and willing to dive into it.

You can watch below a video made by some of my students who implemented a prototype of Just-in-Time/Place reminders for the UbiShop scenario.

Usability is not just about flashy animations...

I was browsing the IKEA web site in order to find a suitable carpet for my living room. For this task you need two basic information:

1. the size of the carpet
2. the picture of the carpet's texture

Typically, the previews show the carpet's texture but in the IKEA's web site they do not include the size that it is shown when clicking on the item's preview.

This is a very simple case of usability issue that can be easily solved. It is not about the appearance of the web site but just about what information is relevant and useful for navigating the site.

If the web site is an e-commerce portal, then this issues can result into a loss of revenue due to the increasing customer's abandon rate (i.e. the user visit the site, tries to make a purchase, but the task is boring or too difficult, or just it does not find the necessary information to make the purchase).

If you want to check whether your site have usability problem you can ask help to a usability consulting company such as SimpleUI with which I am currently collaborating.

FaceBook will kick me out...

Yeah,

it's true... I've been warned to stop "spamming"!

Well I don't consider myself a spammer... I was just exchanging a few messages with a colleague... maybe too fast for the FaceBook standars and that's what poped up on the screen:



I don't know what to think, actually... I will tell you, later! I don't want to spam you too much!

Context-unawareness...

I uninstalled the Yahoo! toolbar from Firefox. Don't you notice something strange?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Who reads my blog from Bomba?

Dear readers,

using Google Analytics, I spotted that somebody was reading my blog from a small town in my home region, Bomba.

I would like to know who is this person (maybe we already met few years ago), and if this person reads my blog again, I ask him/her to contact me as soon as possible.

Thank you!!

    Vic

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Slowing down de web...

Thanks to Google Analytics, the web is slowing down...


When you click on a link and the web page doesn't load fast, or does not finish to load, then look at the bottom of your browser (you must activate the Status Bar) and you will find:





While very useful, this service could cause undesired slowdown in loading pages. Worse enough, if you put the script at the beginning of the page, the page won't load until Google Analytics has recorded the information.

So please, put it at the end of the page! :-)

The future of television or the television of future?

This is a serious subject. What is the future of the television? I don't think it's Joost or YouTube. I think that TV has some distinguishing features that are still absent in Web surrogates. Video content does not equal television. Much in a way for which Radio survived TV, TV will survive Web video, unless something really new will be proposed. I believe that Kyte.tv is in the right direction. We'll see...

By the way, stay tuned at my channel on Kyte.tv.

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uMove and Kinetic User Interfaces

It's my pleasure to announce that my research project on Kinetic User Interfaces will be funded by the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research.

uMove

This project is about an emerging paradigm in User Interfaces which is based on motion-awareness in physical space. By moving, people and objects can interact with computer systems. It is a way of taking the computer "off the desktop" as prospected by the Mark Weiser's vision of Ubiquitous Computing.

Nabaztag/tag

We just adopted one Nabaztag/tag!

His name is "Petrica" and you can see him between me and Violeta:


Nabaztag is a very basic social robot. It is only able to move the ears and display some lights on the body. However, it has nice communication skills since it is able to recognize speech and stream audio over the network. Moreover, the last version is capable to detect RFID tags (but this option is still not fully supported on-line).

The main purpose of Nabaztag is to foster social relationships. In fact, after registering it in the website, you start receiving podcast (called Nabcasts) from other rabbits. You can find other rabbit owners in a public directory and start sharing nabcasts or other things... Very nice!!

Adopt your Nabaztag and join Petrica in the NabWorld!