Glowrich on New Media

The mobile phone as a information carrier and transferrer

September 28, 2009 – 22:18

When the mobile phone was invented, not more than 40 years ago, it was just meant as a normal telephone which you could take with you. No color displays, no funky lights and most importantly no options like contactlist, alarm, texting or taking pictures. Being able to communicate wherever you are was, and still is, a revolution in itself.
But more and more features were added, and not without success. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how one was able to make good use of a mobile phone without a calendar, calculator, SMS, email or even a contactlist. It’s almost impossible to buy a new phone without camera, music-capabilities or internet functionalities. Try buying a phone without a game (or 5..) installed on it or without polyphonic/mp3 bells and whistles, it can’t be done!
All these functions and options have basically in common that they are information or supporting the transfer of information. Okay, so what? What’s the point to this telephone as information-station observation?

The era we live in is called the information age. In this age creating information, and transferring it, are the most important thing we do in our (working) lives, compared to previous era’s. In the industrial age we weren’t producing information but tangible things. I don’t want to go into all the differences between those era’s, I just want to draw the background of why mobile phones are in such a central place of our lives. Transferring information is in a telephones’ DNA, it is its reason of existence.
So to answer my own question, what is so important about mobile phones as transferring information machines? It means that every type of information, because when it is digital it is all the same anyway, can be transferred. Everything that is in its essence information will someday be transferred by your mobile phone, because that’s the thing you have on you wherever you are.
So let’s make a short list of what kinds of information already are being transferred or carried by your phone:

Voice (created and transferred)
(short) Texts (created and transferred)
E-mail (transferred and created)
Websites (transferred)
Videos (created and transferred)
(online) Radio (transferred)
Music (carried but also transferred by Bluetooth for example)
(GPS) Location (created and now also transferred to internet services)
Calendar (created and transferred to for example Google Calendar)

And now a very short list of what is still to come and is worked on by numerous companies to get it working flawlessly.

Key/authentication (When will the keys or passports be obsolete?)
Money (it is a good time to sell wallet-factory stocks)

These two are not as easily implemented as other options because they are much more vulnerable, that’s why it takes longer. Rabobank already gave mobile payments a go, but not very successfully yet. I have never seen anyone using it, and I’ve only tried it once for the fun of it. I know South-Korea is miles ahead in this department, but my Korean lacks any identifiable Korean.

I’m really wondering what kinds of information I’ve left out in either one of the lists, but especially the last one of course.

Update 28-09-2009 I’ve wrote this post about a year ago. One of the most spectacular things I’ve seen on a mobile telephone yet is Augmented Reality: Layar. It’s no fantasy, it’s actually working. Can’t believe how fast mobile technology develops.

Posted in mobile | 1 Comment »

LinkedIn tip – The most important group message

September 27, 2009 – 20:54

Social Media is all about engaging with your (potential) crowd, I’m going to show one very good way to engage with people who join your LinkedIn-group.

On your website you create useful content and whenever somebody finishes consuming it, you want to be as helpful as you can be to get him/her to read more of your content. Actually, when somebody clicks to the next article or to any other feature on your site, you want to whisper in his ear: “Yes, very good choice. Keep going”. Of course this might annoying every mouse-click but is essentially what you’re doing with good (interaction) design. Every time the user clicks he gets either satisfied, surprised or disappointed.

The moment you’ve been waiting for

I’m working a lot with LinkedIn lately and I even after a few weeks of heavy usage I still find out ways to really take LinkedIn to the next level. One of the most striking examples are automatic responses to activity in a group you are manager of. This is exactly the “Yes, very good choice. Keep going”-moment you’ve been waiting for. The person who joins actually expects a response and you can easily satisfy him by the default “Congratulations! You have been approved to join the group xxxx” or you can write something yourself. Something way better. Something that might trigger a newborn member to participate.

How do you do this?

You need to go to the group you are manager of and select the Manage-tab

After clicking on that tab you see a menu on the right-hand side, click on ‘Manage Templates’.

There are 4 templates, from which the ‘Welcome Message’ is the most important by far.

Click on and get creative with the message you want you newly joined group-member to read.

Now what?

You can figure out the message I created by becoming member of the ‘NGN’ group on LinkedIn.

What hidden features have you found on LinkedIn?

Posted in media | 1 Comment »

My masterthesis on Online Participation

September 30, 2008 – 18:40

Only a bit more than a month ago I finished my masterthesis on Online Participation which got rewarded with a 7,5/10 (which is just below ‘good’). I studied ‘New media and digital culture‘ at the Utrecht University (The Netherlands). I attached my thesis below, for you to read :-)

scriptie-melle-gloerich-online-participatie

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Why Rabobanks paying via mobile phone will fail at first

June 26, 2008 – 12:40

Rabobank just introduced transferring money via mobile phones, something which hasn’t been possible in The Netherlands, at least to my knowledge. This seems in line with Rabobank making alliances with mobile phone providers, content providers and service providers. I think it’s good that Rabobank starts to roll out new ways of paying but it seems that they haven’t really gone through a lot usability tests. Maybe the ‘perpetual beta’ has entered the impenetrable citadel of banking, who knows, but it’s more likely they think this is a proper 1.0 version.

Steps you have to take to pay

Open a mobile wallet
Transfer money from your regular account to this wallet

After this you can either buy something in a (online) shop or pay friends for that last round of beers with “just one sms” (text message). This is not true in most cases, the only way to pay via just one sms already existed and you first needed to type in your account number and password ON A WEBSITE. So that’s not mobile at all unless you use your mobile phone for surfing the web. If you’re not using your mobile phone for that, it takes 2 text messages.

Send a text message to 6689 and add the phonenumber of your friend, the amount of money and a personal message
Receive a confirmation message with a codeword
Reply to this message the codeword within 10 minutes

A similar procedure need to be gone through if you want to pay in a shop, although the explanation on the website is a little ambiguous about the productcode.

Send a text message to 6689 and add the phonenumber of the shop, the productcode of the product you want to buy.
You receive a confirmation message with a productdescription, the price and a codeword
Reply to this message the codeword (within 10 minutes?)

Although it seems quite easy, how do you type in the phonenumber of your friend? I don’t know those 10 numbers. Some (read: all) phone companies recognized this problem and implemented a contactlist about 15 years ago on all of their phones. But how do I make use of that contactlist? Most phones don’t have a cut&paste functionality.

Hassles

Ok, so you’ve found out how to pay and you’re okay to pay your mobile phone provider for the text messages on top of this. You seem to enjoy paying in this new, cool way and show it off to your friends. But what’s that, you’re maxed out? Yes indeed, you have to fill up your wallet again and again, it only able to hold 150 euro’s. Seems fine for paying friends and drinks but who actually starts using it will find out this is a ridiculous limit. You don’t want to charge every couple of days, you don’t need to do that with your normal electronic payments, so why now?
This is only a minor hassle compared to the hassle somebody on the receiving side has to go through. Imagine that you receive a text message saying that you received 10 euro’s from a phone number on your ‘mobile wallet’ of which you have never heard. Hopefully the sender put in their name in the personal message, otherwise you have to work your way down your contactlist looking for that number to know who sent you money. But who puts in their name in text messages to friends? They recognize who’s message it is because their phone tells them, so lots of people will forget to say who they are.
Now you finally know who you got the text message from you need to sign up to Rabobanks SMS mobile paying site to actually collect the money. Can I show my phone to somebody at a Rabobank and will they give me my money? I don’t think so. What happens to the money when nobody collects it isn’t clear: does Rabobank keep it, is it put back in the payers ‘mobile wallet’, is Rabobank going to look for me to give me the money somebody actually gave to me?
Rabobank has to sort out these usability issues before I start to use it, and I like to think of myself as an early adopter.

Posted in mobile | 8 Comments »