In-car technology

The BBC CLick online site has a post titled 'In-car technology drives forward' which looks at in-car telematics, including TV screens that use GPS to show car-parking spaces:

Big city car parks are often full, so one US satellite radio station is aiming to stream information about space availability directly into the cockpit.

"There are hundreds of different parking garages spread across the United States where the garage owner has computer technology to tell them which spaces are empty or full," said David Butler of XM Satellite Radio.

"We are tapping into that information and sending it to your navigation system. The map will tell you where the parking garages are located, and how many empty spaces they have."

Latest BBC Digital Planet

This week's Digital Planet: they test-drive a new low-cost laptop for school children in the developing world. Could a new digital camera with only 1 pixel really be the future of photography? And they talk to the authors of a new report that explores the digital divide between tech-savvy students and their ignorant teachers.

Download here

CIty of Tunnels

Subtopia has a great post about a group of eighteen specialized Border Patrol agents - dubbed the “Tunnel Team” - who’ve been trained 'in confined spaces and hand-to-hand combat'. This team guards 'the storm drain tunnels and underground passageways that extend below the border city of Nogales where Arizona and Sonora, Mexico meet':

Around the clock this nocturnal crew claws its way through the foliage of one of the world’s darkest urban jungles where an immeasurable number of smugglers, bandits and courageous migrants cross paths with them every day often times without even knowing it...

...And so, welcome to the brave new world of cross-border tunnel migration and militarization – and, what could be the glimpse of a future (sub)urban world as more nation states wall off their borders from the increasing flows of global migration.

Read the original post for some interesting facts and pictures into underground immigration...

On a RFID roll with Mini

It seems that the mini car MINI has begun a pilot advertising campaign in Chicago, New York, Miami, and San Francisco whereby drivers with RFID tags can activate customised road advertising - billboards - as they drive past: according to the article 'MINI USA rolls out RFID-activated billboards ':

Users can select a custom message to be encoded on their RFID chip, and when they cruise near an overhanging MINI billboard, their particular message lights up for the world (or at least nearby motorists) to see.

Via Smartmobs

Prospero - reflecting evolving public participation

Paul B Hartzog has a new project that examines 'the community as a commons' and looks into promoting 'a sense of shared fate and shared identity'. He says that 'as mobility increases, information about how a community moves into, out of, and through its spaces (such as public commons) can be a useful source of community feedback. The project is titled Prospero:

Prospero is an infrastructure to enable public displays to reflect evolving public participation.

The objectives of the Prospero project arise from two primary motivations: one descriptive, the other normative. First, technologies that foster cooperation enhance our relationship to our surroundings. Many of these technologies incorporate user feedback in real-time.

Read more at the Prospero Blog

Looks like an interesting venture to keep an eye on!

Connecting the digital home

BBC Click has a piece called 'Connecting the digital home':

This year's CES - the world's largest consumer gadget show - boasts a wealth of new kit which aims to make it easier to access digital media around the home - and in particular on TV screens.

Ideas on what should be at the centre of it all vary, from PC-based media centres, digital video recorders or even video game consoles

Future of Transport

OpenDemocracy.Net have a series of articles on the theme of Future of transport with article titles such as:

Why Fly?

Motorway culture and its discontents

Reclaiming cities for citizens

The war against the car

Transport for the future: the view from the railway industry

Urban Mobility

Siemens Journal's January 2007 edition is titled 'Mobility and the environment', with a piece on Urban Mobility :

We live in the age of mobility. The flow of traffic is rising steadily throughout the world, moving from one metropolis to another or between suburbs and city centers. Traffic has become an important economic factor everywhere, for people come together to transact business only in places that offer the necessary mobility.

Today’s economic activity takes place in large urban centers. When megacities expand, they need to also make continuous improvements to the infrastructure. However, even the widest urban highways, with their tunnels and bridges, are not enough, for the number of private cars is increasing steadily worldwide.

It also discusses the negative consequences of mobility. 'Less is more' also discusses recent hybrid car designs.

Participatory immersive technologies

Here's a useful post from Smartmobs on the recent Metaverse material and presentations:

The video of the presentation of (futurist, writer, blogger, co-founder of worldchanging.com) Jamais Cascio on the Metaverse at Stanford on November 27 is available for viewing at Blip.tv. It’s a roughly 90-minute discussion of different scenarios of how new participatory immersive technologies could emerge.

Based on his work for the Metaverse Roadmap Overview, Jamais looked both at the underlying technologies of the Metaverse and at the social, cultural and economic impacts it could have.

And here is a video recording of Mike Liebhold speaking at Stanford Metaverse on November 8th 2007. Mike speaks about the Geospatial Web, Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality and how they all fold together.

The video of the presentation of (futurist, writer, blogger, co-founder of worldchanging.com) Jamais Cascio on the Metaverse at Stanford on November 27 is available for viewing at Blip.tv. It’s a roughly 90-minute discussion of different scenarios of how new participatory immersive technologies could emerge.

Read original post - 'Participatory immersive technologies'
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Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency

The CAFE Foundation (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency)have been selected by NASA to host the great Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) Challenge.

The Personal Air Vehicle Centennial Challenge (PAV CC)is a $250,000 annual flight competition for small aircraft. Some key features of PAVs are:


* 200 mph “car” that flies above gridlock without traffic delays
* Quiet, safe, comfortable and reliable
* Able to be flown by anyone with a driver's license
* As affordable as travel by car or airliner
* Near all-weather, on-demand travel enabled by synthetic vision
* Highly fuel efficient and able to use alternative fuels
* Up to 800 mile range
* Walk to grandma’s from small residential airfields

A move towards individualised flying-cars??

Tracking 2000 year old trails

In post Satellites unveil 2,000-year-old trails it tells of how satellite technology has been used to track ancient movements and footpaths. Quite an astonishing glimpse into history:

Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder) and at NASA have used satellites to track the movements of people living in the Arenal region of Costa Rica more than 2,000 years ago. They've also used video-game software to virtually 'fly' above the footpaths taken by Central Americans between small villages and cemeteries. It's a fascinating story because Arenal Volcano is still very active and that the people who lived there didn't disappear as highly structured societies like the Maya and Aztec. And people living today in the Arenal region are certainly friendlier than your neighbors.

This research has been led by CU-Boulder Professor Payson Sheets, of the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS) and who's focused on "Investigating The Origins of Monumentality in Ancient Costa Rica."

Via Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends

MI5 e-mail alert signup shambles

Recently it was reported that MI5 to send e-mail terror alerts saying that

People will be able to register on the MI5 website to receive updates when the threat level changes...The Home Office says it is part of a long-planned programme of reaching out to the public and keeping it better informed about the terrorist threat.

Plans to extend the service to sending text messages to mobile phones are also being considered.'

However, what is not being so widely reported is what such a shambles it has been! Not only the mess - but also importantly All email subscription web forms sent to the USA, without encryption

What a shambles over the heavily hyped "MI5 e-mail alert system", which failed to be available on Tuesday morning, as was implied in the media, but which has appeared on Tuesday evening, with all the appearance of a rushed job !

Spyblog notes that:

Astonishingly, MI5, the Security Service, part of whose remit is supposed to be giving protection advice against electronic attacks over the internet, is sending all our personal details (forename, surname and email address) unencrypted to commercial third party e-mail marketing and tracking companies which are physically and legally in the jurisdiction of the United States of America, and is even not bothering to make use of the SSL / TLS encrypted web forms and processing scripts which are already available to them.

Should the use of mobile technologies be allowed into state hands?? One wonders...

New UK police force tracks the mobile ones

BBCNews writes in 'New CCTV unit tackles UK crime'how a new police unit has been set up to specifically deal with the way that CCTV footage is processed for prosecution:

'The eventual aim is to turn the gathering of video evidence into a third forensic specialism alongside DNA analysis and fingerprinting. There are 4.2 million cameras in the UK but until now there has been no dedicated police unit to deal with the collection and dissemination of CCTV evidence.

If the new Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido), based at Southwark Police Station, is judged to be a success it could soon lead to the development of specialist CCTV units across the country.'

Do we really want more of Viido? I'd rather have more Fido please...

Hunting for the Face

NewScientistTech writes about how Face-hunting software will scour web for targets:

'A search engine that uses sophisticated facial recognition to allow users to identify and find people in online images will launch next month. But civil liberties groups say the biometric-style tool could compromise the privacy of anyone who has their picture online.

Search engine Polar Rose reconstructs the 3D shape of a person's face and then combines that with characteristics of their features to generate a unique "face print". This can then be used to search other photos for a match.'

Of course, such software flags important privacy concerns:

'Although this sounds like a great idea, I would not like to be searchable in this way, or so easily tracked without my consent... is similar to the kind of biometric database some governments wish to use'

Via Smartmobs

Sync in-car computer system

Bill Gates of Microsoft has unveiled a new in-car computer system which will connect to other gadgets and could turn millions of cars into hi-tech computers on wheels. Gates announced in usual high profile style in Las Vegas recently about a deal with car manufacturer Ford. With this deal Microsoft hopes to revolutionize the way people interact with their vehicles:

'Mr Gates told a crowd of experts at the huge Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas how better use of communication technologies could change the way we travel. "It's got to be simple, with safe ways to get the driver involved," he said. "We've been investing in this for some time."

The system, called Sync, will integrate the car directly with the gadgets carried in the pockets of passengers. Cars will automatically connect to music players and mobile phones, allowing the driver to control them using their voice. By talking to the system, travellers will even be able to send text messages - or listen to ones that they have received as the computer reads them out loud.'

Read at Guardian Online

Read more at 'Ford-Microsoft software unveiled' on BBC Online

BBC Digital Planet January 9 2007

In this week's Digital Planet:radio producers in Sierra Leone talk about a new piece of open source software that turns their laptops into radio stations.

Also - a preview of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and Jonathan Kent meets the Asian game designers intent on catering for the gamers on their own doorstep.

Download here

RFID coming to scooters!

It seems that RFID is getting everywhere recently. Now it is reported that Italian scooters and baby nappies (diapers)could soon be embedded with RFID tags tracking their whereabouts. CNet News reports that

'IBM plans to announce Wednesday that it has won two new customers for its radio frequency identification tracking software--an Italian subsidiary of Honda Motor and packaging maker Pliant.

Honda Italia Industriale, which sold 12.7 million scooters last year, plans to use RFID chips and IBM software to track motorcycle parts and tools circulating within its manufacturing plant in Atessa, Italy.

Pliant, based in Schaumburg, Ill., will sell a new RFID-embedded plastic wrap to consumer-goods companies that want to detect any tampering of their products in transit from manufacturer to distributor. Pliant is using IBM's software to keep track of RFID-marked cargo--everything from cereal boxes to diapers--in the warehouse.'

At least babies riding scooters can be tracked down!

Mobile travels through Kenya

This BBC post 'From Matatu to the Masai via mobile' describes how reporter Paul Mason traveled through Kenya using a map of the country's mobile phone networks as his guide:

'With one in three adults carrying a cellphone in Kenya, mobile telephony is having an economic and social impact whose is hard to grasp if you are used to living in a country with good roads, democracy and the internet. In five years the number of mobiles in Kenya has grown from one million to 6.5 million - while the number of landlines remains at about 300,000, mostly in government offices...

...Soon you will even be able to pay for a trip by Matutu by mobile phone. To find out how I zipped across Mombasa to the offices of Safaricom, one of the two network providers in Kenya, part owned by Vodafone. It let me film the launch of a project called M-Pesa - and, read my lips, I said "launch" not "trial".'

Every Step You Take

Reader James Smith alerted me to this documentary on CCTV Britain called Every Step You Take - their website has a video trailer. I quote:

'About the documentary:

With an estimated four million surveillance cameras, Britain is by far the most-watched nation on earth. How could this come about in George Orwell’s mother country? Why haven’t other nations copied the schemes if they really are as successful as the Home Office and the police are saying? Is there a real effect in crime reduction or has CCTV only been introduced for the people’s ‘peace of mind’? Are there any vested interests in the proliferation of CCTV?'

Thanks for the tip James!

Mobile Again!

New Mobilities has been void of posts recently, over the New Year there were various physical mobilities taking place. Now it's back to posting!

Lets start with some call for papers:

1) RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2007 28th – 31st August 2007, at the Royal Geographical Society with IBG, London.

The political geographies of the Mediterranean: conflicts and boundaries

Historically a source of cultural and economic dynamism, the circulation of people, objects, ideas and ways of life across the Mediterranean has taken a new edge with current global geopolitical and geo-economic processes. In the midst of greater connectivity and fluidity of exchanges and ongoing processes of de- and re-territorialization, the Mediterranean re-emerges as a hotspot for international conflicts. Analysts predict a deterioration of political stability in the region in the coming decades due to, inter alia, acute environmental degradation, scarcity of fossil fuels, and growing structural economic and demographic disjunctures between Europe, the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Political, cultural and environmental conflicts and instabilities often underpin processes of place and region making and yet little is know about the relationship between the conflictive nature of the Mediterranean and emerging socio-spatialities both at the micro and macro levels.
This session explores emerging socio-spatialities within the increasingly transnational, instable and unsustainable nature of social, political, economic and environmental life of the region. We particularly encourage papers that go beyond predominant ways of conceiving social relations as occurring in self-enclosed territories (e.g. nation-state) and are sensitive to the complex and contingent processes of de- and re-territorialization, de- and re-scaling and continual openness and bordering of social, environmental, political and economic life (e.g. the EU, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, Euro-regions such as the Latin Arc).
Topics of interest for this session include though are not restricted to the following: refugee and detention camps, colonised territories, large scale ethnocidal violence, ethnic, religious or political conflicts verging on low intensity warfare, urban riots, conflict in cities, border controls, migration, trade routes, terrorism, water conflicts, environmental refugees, stressed environments, leisure landscapes and social segregation, global and regional inequalities, the EU, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, Euro-regions, networks of cities.
Keywords: Mediterranean, Sustainability, Conflict, Socio-spatialities.
If you would like to present a paper in this session, please send a title and an abstract (of no more than 200 words) to either Ramon Ribera-Fumaz r.ribera-fumaz@lancaster.ac.uk or to Javier Caletrío Garcerá j.caletrio@lancaster.ac.uk by 26th of January 2007.

2) Mobile Communication: Bringing Us Together or Tearing Us Apart?

International Communications Association Pre-conference Workshop #4

There has been much attention paid to the state of social cohesion during the past decade. Robert Putnam has helped us to focus on social capital and its status. Analysis in Europe and in Asia has looked into the interaction between ICTs (usually the Internet) and the state of socialization, and now McPherson has delivered an analysis on social isolation in the US. While it is possible to comment on the studies, the general message seems to be that we are growing apart rather than closer together. Or are we?

It is interesting to note that several studies focusing on mobile communication point at a different phenomena. Taking a clue from Licoppe’s “connected presence” and Katz & Aakhus’ perpetual contact, there is the sense that the threshold for interaction in the group – or the clique or the gang or the family – has never been lower. Among others, recent studies by Ishii and by Miyata in Japan, Lee in Korea, Reid and Reid in the UK, Banjo et al in the US and Ling et al in the broader European scene indicate that the groups who use mobile communication may indeed be more cohesive.
So what is it? Is it more, or less cohesion? Is the general trend towards individualization while the peer group is becoming more tightly intertwined? This is the theme that we wish to examine. While a portion of the program h as been arranged in advance, we are also seeking proposals from both qualitative and quantitative research projects that examine this question. Proposal abstracts are due by January 29, 2007 to mtrau@umich.edu, and the final program will be assembled by February 23, 2007. Final papers are due by May 1. The program will accommodate up to 10 panel sessions, with discussants, depending upon the number and quality of proposals submitted.
The pre-conference is a joint effort by the University of Michigan Department of Communication Studies, Temple University, Microsoft Research and Telenor Research. It will be held at the San Francisco Hilton, the conference hotel, starting with a plenary session on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 23. There will be panels on Wednesday afternoon, followed by a reception. And there will be parallel sessions on Thursday, May 24, before and after a luncheon.

Cost: ICA Members: $40.00 USD
ICA Student members: $20.00 USD
Non-member price: $75.00
(Includes refreshments, lunch and reception)