see a puffin eat a fish

Today I attended the Mobile Bar Camp NYC, a gathering of mobile developers and evangelists, to talk about the future of mobile and catch up. There was a similar event last spring but I missed it as I had just graduated and was rushing to get going on my road trip out to Redmond. I’ve been out of the mobile world, getting a taste of Rails and Flex, but it’s a matter of time before I get back into it so it was cool to come by and see where things are headed.

I’ve also been told that the dormant WayMarkr got a mention on the s60 applications blog.

The BarCamp was sponsored by Nokia in association with RG/A. Outside of all the tiny lettering on the Bar Camp tshirts and the plethora of N95 boxes, you wouldn’t know Nokia was involved. ITPers, especially my class (’07) practically took over the event with our own Andy Maskin helping to put the thing together. So yeah, good to see everyone and interesting to see Sean Owen talk about his work with semacode decoding software for Android.

And get this, I WON an N95 with my group during a half-bakery make up a compelling business plan from these keywords in 15 minutes competition. An N95! With the GPS, accelerometer, the works! I’ve got all my applications running on it and have managed to tether it as a bluetooth modem for my powerbook (it’s saying 3G!). Next i’m going to go outside and see how the GPS behaves. I’ve never had the pleasure of owning a device with integrated GPS, this is going to be awesome. I might have to start writing Python again.

Also, Andy froze a cell phone in a block of ice.

The first day of Where 2.0 is over, with Google announcing their new streetview perspective and Garmin announcing that they are opening up their API to third parties allowing anyone to build upon their web services. This should be a big boon for people who find their GPS to be indispensable for athletic training. The present state of the art required a certain level of geekery to get data off and on your Garmin. Now you’ll be able to plug it in and pull/push data immediately to/from a social web site. Maybe i’ll even start using mine? All I need is a nicer memory card.

The Google street view on the other is fairly incredible and a little brave new world-ish, kind of like everything Google does these days. I was able to look through my window in Brooklyn and also see that cars were on the opposite side of the street. It was street cleaning when the photos were taken.

One other project i’d like to highlight is Quakr which builds an immersive world out of user generated, geocoded Flickr photos. You can imagine a day when you’ll be able to navigate through a simulated world curated by your friends’ content. Well maybe that happens now, but only conceptually. This project attempts to realize that vision.

In other news, WayMarkr was shown at the Where Faire and Dennis Crowley also perfected his white boy, drunk, ollying off benches technique I have coined dork-our. Hope the phrase takes off.

Allison Woodruff from Intel Research Berkeley came to ITP this past friday to give a fascinating talk on observant Jews and home automation. Intel ran a small study with home visits and interviews to see how automation technology helps Jewish people recede from the overwhelming everyday on the Sabbath. I’ve never been a fan of using technology to get away from technology but her case studies were very convincing. Turns out Jewish people, out of necessity, are at the forefront of smart home technology. You hear about Bill Gate’s microwave knowing your preferences but you rarely see those kinds of mechanisms outside of the lab. Allison interview one woman who had been using X10 technology since 1985!

Her subjects had no problem using technology to get away from the distraction of technology. Motion detectors aren’t allowed, that’s work, but setting up automation before the sabbath is allowed. In the same way the sun rose on the sabbath though g-d wasn’t doing any work, so the X10 system turns on the oven.

Before coming into the talk I aligned myself with the knee jerk reaction, that using automation is a way to get around prescribed rituals, but I came away with a new respect for why home automation has a place within religion. It’s not that it’s necessary for these people, the sabbath is what’s necessary. It’s just a nice to have. But what’s more, the lights turning on/off automatically is a reminder of what the sabbath is about. The subjects consistently anthropomorphize the automation systems calling them caretaker, mother, g-d, Mr. Hershel (the guy who installed the system), but it was always an other, a presence to remind them of the holiness of the day.

A whole culture has sprung up around the automation system. When the lights in the dining room would dim, one subject would tell her guests to stay around for five minutes and they would turn back on. She just set it up that way in case she wanted her guests to leave.