Text by José Carlos Danado, Afonso Tavares and Paulo Ricca

These wise words recorded by John Lennon, back in the seventies, inspired past and present generations to fight against different barriers and limitations, and still inspire us to tear some digital walls down. As mobile devices became ubiquitous, everyone’s pockets became incredibly rich with processing power but poor on real possibilities.

Mobile world is a promise and YLabs (YDreams’ in-house R&D lab) is following its trends. In the past YDreams has developed well-known ground breaking games for mobile devices such as Undercover, Spooks, or Cristiano Ronaldo Underworld Football,. Recent YLabs projects are improving this incredible legacy by gathering ideas from the folks that matter – the users - to come up with something both useful and unique!

We are all carrying devices more powerful than the computer that took Neil Armstrong to the Moon but the most advanced possibilities available to most of us are taking blurry pictures and sharing our meal menus on twitter. Mobile device communication and processing capabilities make them the preferred tool for engaging users in an interactive experience at home, work or when on the go.

Let’s forget about our world for a moment and go back to the Stone Age, when communication was still at its dawn and strange looking scientists at CERN were exchanging hyper-linked documents. During these times, only a limited group of people had access to the information on the network. During the globalization of the internet, the access to information was opened to the world and everyone had access to information, but only a few people were actually producing content.

With the birth and expansion of Wikis, Blogs and Social Networking Websites, the users, previously only capable of accessing information, now had easy forms of creating information and expressing their ideas to the world – last year alone we witnessed a 400+% increase in the user basis. This is the state we are at, now: people can create content but only a select group of people have the power to create entire new systems that support the exchange of information.

This is where YDreams comes in and follows Lennon’s hint, empowering people with the tools needed to move forward to not only share content but create entire new systems capable of supporting everyone’s information on their most ubiquitous platform – their mobile device.

YLabs is looking for ways to empower users while being mobile. Two European consortiums, m:Ciudad and MUGGES, are presently conducting research that also involves companies and universities from Portugal, Spain, Finland, Austria, Germany, UK and France. These entities are led by Tecnalia-Robotiker and include among others Telefonica R&D and Alcatel-Lucent.
m:Ciudad seeks to provide end users with a service oriented platform and mobile tools that enable them to autonomously provide personal information through services. This concept is built on three pillars: the mobile device as the interface and service provider, the user as generator and consumer of valuable and immediate information - i.e. prosumer - and the very long tail business model.

MUGGES uses the m:Ciudad framework to compose, publish and share location aware services (mugglets). The project includes an extensive live trial with the student population at the University of Deusto. YDreams will take advantage of the principles already explored within DiWay (a in-house project fostering the creation of a location-aware platform, and consequently patents in the field, but more on DiWay in an upcoming post!) and use them to target the Galileo GNSS as a platform for location-awareness.

The availability of such platforms in practical terms means that anyone can create, host and share services on the fly; feed them with instant and meaningful information, and possibly profit from them through a new range of revenue paths. Imagine your micro blog hosted directly on your Smartphone and made available to your list of friends; or being a mountain bike addict, arriving in a new town and searching for someone with an extra bike that has a similar profile sports stats and is avid for a track buddy. The possibilities are enormous, and ultimately our main objective for both projects is to understand how people without any programming background can create a unique functional system.

Tags: aware, collaborative, devices, diway, location, m:cuidad, mobile, mugges, platform, user-generated

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 18:43 and is filed under Products & Projects, Science & Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.