Jason Rosado

This iSlate hysteria is ridiculous… The Execs at Apple must be laughing at all the free press and marketing they’re getting. They haven’t said one word about a tablet computer… not even an official hint that it’s possible and yet the internets, not just blogs but major financial reporting media are treating it as a fait accompli…

For their sake, I sure hope it’s coming because if not Apple stock takes a deeeeep nose dive (good time to buy). Actually, I take that back – $10 says that Apple stock ends low on the day of the announcement since there’s no way Apple will satisfy everyone with the first version of the iSlate.

So a good question may be what will it lack that it should already have?

For our Future of Television Final Project, we submitted a video to illustrate the user journey and benefits provided by the concept.  JoynTV is a multi-platform video content and gaming experience.

[Future of Television] JoynTV Final Presentation from Jason Rosado on Vimeo.

Please feel free to comment and let us know your feedback!

For my Social Activism Using Mobile Technology class, Nathan Freitas asked us to devise a future scenario of social activism.  Here is my submission:

My name is Raul Acosta Coutinho Jimenez. I am 64 years old.  I am originally from Salvador Da Bahia, Brasil.

I now live in Havana, Cuba with my wife in a Bed and Breakfast in a recently renovated townhouse that sleeps 6 comfortably with a garden, an in-ground pool and outdoor cinema.

My son also makes his home in this household and he is the reason for our current lifestyle.  When he isn’t home, we offer his room and 2 others in our townhouse to medical tourists arriving from the United States.

Back in 2011, my son Andres developed an iPhone app that sold millions of downloads through the iPhone store.   The app was influential all over the world, and also led to the dramatic opening of the Cuban society and economy for foreigners (and capitalists).

The app was essentially a Sims type video game that in a fun, yet effective, way simulated the experiences of the average Cuban citizen. The app takes advantage of a decision in 2011 that was made by the Cuban government after a series of hurricanes devastated the island.

The Cuban government, urged on by its struggling citizens after the hurricanes, relented to some of the pressures of its American antagonists. As a result, a summit between Presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama established an exchange of American meteorology and mobile communications technology for access to the benefits of the world reknown doctors in the Cuban healthcare system.  This exchange provided the Cuban government with radar, video and telecommunications technology that blanketed our island in hopes of knowing when the next tropical depression would occur, where it would hit hardest and how to prepare for it.  The exchange also provided the American citizen free and easy access to our island (without consequence) in order to access our public healthcare system.  The necessity for this summit was urged on by the dramatic failure of the US healthcare reform legislation of 2009.  In 2016, there are 60 million without access to healthcare, but now 2 million US citizens come to our island monthly for their healthcare needs.

When the island was devastated by hurricanes in 2011, the iPhone Sims Cuba video game adjusted its game environment to reflect the signs of the times.  As a result, the millions of people who played the Sims Cuba video game for fun, then realized the devastation to the virtual community equaled that of the real community.  As a result, hundred of virtual donations poured through the application from virtual citizens of the world to their virtual Cuban counterparts.  A portion of the proceeds from the app went to a foundation established by the United Nations.  These foundations, flush with cash, provided the average Cuban with the critical resources necessary for a better life.  As a result, the average Cuban felt compelled to push their government representatives for more resources and more open-ness in their society.

And that is how and why I’m here.  My son decided to buy a home for us here, since he spent so much time here for business and diplomacy.  Now that Cuba is more of an open and “capitalist” society, we can manage our Bed and Breakfast business through our own iPhone app.  As they say, “Que Viva Cuba!”  “Long live Cuba!”

New phone concept that moves beyond the popular touch screen interface onto other locations such as the back and sides of the phone.  Brilliant!

Synaptics 3D Smartphone Can Be Squeezed, Tilted – PC World.

Here’s our Final group presentation for Future of the Infrastructure with Art Kleiner at ITP. Our group focused on a future scenario with a focus on the average life experiences living and leveraging ubiquitous sensor networks, namely in the form of mobile devices. We decided to avoid (as much as possible) the sinister “1984″ approach, and instead focused on “positive” perceptions of the future in 2016, as we saw it…

I’ll post the actual video when it becomes available since the presentation only tells half the story. The spoken portions add more personal experiences.

The following is our homework submission for the Future of Television blog:

This week’s blog post assignment has us focusing on APIs and how they relate to the television watching experience. In doing some last minute research (“we had to do a blog post this week, too?!?”), Team Melo is happy to share some thoughts on the topic. A quick Google search netted this article which highlights some of the better APIs out there.

We were then happy to come across CoverPop, which is based on the YouTube API which was highlighted in the above referenced article as one of the better (if not the best) available APIs. CoverPop takes images from the most popular YouTube videos of particular genres and literally brings them all together in a digital collage. A click on the image will explode the image larger on the screen, and double click will bring the user to the actual video on YouTube.

This interface speaks to traditional methods of navigating through different physical photos (like back in the old days) and finding some that catch your eye. As a lean-forward digital experience this is certainly different and worthy of exploring, especially in light of upcoming innovation such as surface computing

Also on that vein, is an interesting mobile site by some guy named Tom Robinson that leverages mobile phone touch screen interfaces and the same kind of navigation shown in CoverPop. Check it out on your iPhone or Android.

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?