Jason Rosado

I’m focusing my research for the Future of the Infrastructure final paper on future interfaces and forms of transaction execution. This will focus on multi-touch, touch screen, and other next generation application/devices that will facilitate simple and fast transactions of multiple formats (commerce/philanthropy and communication).

This particular video illustrates a few next generation devices developed by the Microsoft Research lab.

Microsoft Research unveils five mice prototypes from Ars Technica on Vimeo.

This particular video illustrates a contrary approach to touch-based interfaces that speaks to the ergonomics of the now-traditional consensus on touch screen design, from 10/GUI

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Update: Only a couple of days after I posted these comments, Apple introduced their new Magic Mouse, which directly addresses the above innovations highlighted by Microsoft (talk about Cola Wars!).  Here’s a quick video on the topic.  More to come later…

Here’s another new link about research from the folks at MIT Media Lab

For our Future of Television homework, we were asked to elaborate on our earlier design concepts. User Cases (or Personas) are examples of the type of users/audience that would benefit from the concept. User Journeys actually speak to the step by step process of utilizing the product concept. Here’s our submission:

For our Mobile Activism class, we were asked to complete our own version of this strategic paradigm. I decided to respond with Givkwik in mind. The phrases in italics reflect the paradigm. The regularly formatted phrases are my responses.

Strategy

Develop a strategy to affect an existing regime. A regime can represent a corporation, government, a specific issue, social prejudice, or any existing state of mind or structure in society that can be targeted for change. A long term strategy is necessary to keep focus on the goal.

Existing regime:
• The process for learning about the millions of charitable organizations in the world is decentralized • The ability to donate to charitable organizations is burdensome, excessively administrative and dissuasive to the donor
• The infrastructure for fundraising small amounts of money from large amounts of people is challenged
- Credit card and other transaction fees are prohibitive for small values
- Charity reach and resources are limited to go after smaller donors

Strategy:
• Utilize mobile technology to address the existing regime
-  Aggregate charity information and make it available on a mobile device
-  Allow small value donations by achieving large scale distribution of client applications to mobile devices that facilitate micro-donations

Opportunities
Opportunities present themselves over time through the effort to affect change on an issue. They can be expected or unexpected. Your effort should be positioned to take advantage of them as they emerge.

• Expansion in cause marketing campaigns
• iTunes/iPhone App Store facilitates micro-payment purchases and has increasingly global reach
• Other platform App Stores looking to mimic Apple’s success
• Global adoption of mobile phones
• Increased use of mobile phones for tasks other than talking/texting
• Increased use of mobile phones for banking and payment tasks

Tactics
Short-term actions implemented to take advantage of opportunities. They can be of varying length and intensity, but must be aligned with your overall strategy. Multiple tactics can be used at once.

• Develop mobile apps that allow for a user to quickly and easily navigate through a variety of charities and initiate a payment/donation
- iPhone
- Blackberry
- Google Android
- SMS
• Work with existing charities to develop applications on their behalf for mobile devices
• Work with Financial Institutions and Credit Card companies to reduce their inter-change rates and transaction fees for donations
• Work with Mobile Hardware vendors and Cell Phone carriers to reduce their Premium SMS fees
• Work with Mobile Hardware vendors and Cell Phone carriers to make micro-donation apps part of the native install on the devices

Team Melo

For our post regarding Social Television experiences, a quick Googling on the topic netted this morsel of information about Hulu’s plans to integrate with Facebook, so that groups of users can watch content at the same time and comment/socialize on the content. Both the video and the Facebook feeds are presented on the screen at the same time. The post mentions how this is similar to what CNN did with the Obama Inauguration.

Hulu + Facebook

Check out the Hulu + Facebook app here. Team Melo finds this approach to be more “practical” than futuristic, since it leverages the existing infrastructure in place today. That’s not to say, however, that it’s the best approach, but it seems to make sense for the time being.

Not only is the above article worthy of reviewing, but also some of the reader comments also introduce other concepts such as this which speaks to Twitter and how it generates Spoiler Alerts for viewers who haven’t seen a particular show when it originally airs.

This concept seems to make Twitter equal parts socially conducive and counterproductive. Some times we use Twitter and Facebook to get up-to-date information on popular culture events, such as the trials and tribulations in the most recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy or other popular content.

But in our increasingly multi-tasking and on-demand society, the ability to see updates from friends while the show is airing when you’re not intending to watch it at that time but rather later, makes these kinds of applications counter-productive for the users.

Perhaps someone might devise some form of spoiler blocking utility that finds the references to the most recent episode and hides them from your Facebook/Twitter feed until you’re ready to view them?

Team ‘Melo’s Week 4 Presentation – Joyn.TV

The objective for our Future of Television homework due this week was to conduct market research that supports our initial design concepts.  We created an online survey on Survey Monkey, conducted video interviews and did research on the web.  The result is our presentation below and fine-tuning of our initial concept, now entitled “Joyn.TV”