Giladon-line » mososo

SMS: Social Networking Tool in India

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 07:42:11 +0000

GupShup is an SMS based mobile application which attempts to bring social networking to the mobile world. It was introduced by Webaroo, who’s founder is Rakesh Mathur. People can create, manage or contribute to groups by either using the GupShup website or by sending an SMS to a local mobile phone short code. This application is centered around the creation and management of groups. Basically a group SMS feature, but one that has a short code, in a country where mobile phone usage, specifically SMS, is exploding. They claim that this service has existed in India for just over a month, and has some 10,000 members already – but is doubling in size every week. They also state that the use of this social networking service is critical in a country such as India, where most people cannot use the mainstream services such as myspace because of the difficulty to gain access to a web-enabled computer.

This sort of service ignited an interesting thought in my head. i could definitely use this short code (67673434 in India) and create an Indigi-Net group which would allow to share information regarding exchange possibilities and other local initiatives for travelers. Or what about just general travel information and recommendations. Since most people travel with mobile phones anyhow, and the cost of local messages, even when roaming, is low, this tool might have very interesting implications, specifically in India. Now I just need to go there…

Their business model incorporates ads which are attached to the group messages, and (supposedly) have some contextual relevance. Not sure how that will work – especially since SMS messages are quite short already.

SoCho – Mobile Social “Chow” App

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:52:35 +0000

SoCho is a tool that makes restaurant recommendations to hungry
users, based on their social network. With a mobile device, users can
browse restaurants, view recommendations, search by cost, or the
system can make recommendations based on who you know and what type
of food you are interested in at that time. Social networks provide
the frame work for deriving eating habits, likes, and dislikes.
Delivering food recommendations to mobile device supports their
ubiquitous nature. The ability to retrieve and create recommendations
on a mobile device is further supported by the changing nature of the
network. In other words, one of the strongest aspects of having
mobility, is the ability to see the constantly changing nature of the
recommendation system from anywhere, at anytime.

Network Background

UTF-8 J2ME Datastream Implementation

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:27:40 +0000

I’m trying to get foreign alphabet characters to show up on my mobile phone via a J2ME translation application that I’m writing.

The biggest hurdle is understanding how unicode works, and creating an http connection that reads UTF-8 bytes.

Step-by-step:

Make sure you have Arial Unicode MS font or any other unicode font.
Update properties file in phone emulator with the wanted unicode font. (as explained here: Enabling Unicode Charset on the Emulator)
Now its a good time to use a very simple code in order to test if our Unicode Emulator is working. I used this Hello World Japanese code, and the result was very exciting:
Next I created a very simple webpage with some UTF-8 encoded characters (hebrew is easiest for me). I wrote a simple http connection app, using the following bit of java code – UTF8 Http Connection. This is the result I got (hebrew text in the red box):
Tried a few different languages. Got it to work in most common charsets (at least the ones that I need for my translation application). Here is the text in Simplified Chinese Characters: (… don’t ask me why, but the text says “hi my name is gilad… Do you have some cheese?“)
Next phase is to deploy this simple app onto the Nokia N80. When I tried that I got an “Unhandled Expression” error.

Charset	Description
`US-ASCII`	Seven-bit ASCII, a.k.a. `ISO646-US`, a.k.a. the Basic Latin block of the Unicode character set
`ISO-8859-1`	ISO Latin Alphabet No. 1, a.k.a. `ISO-LATIN-1`
`UTF-8`	Eight-bit UCS Transformation Format
`UTF-16BE`	Sixteen-bit UCS Transformation Format, big-endian byte order
`UTF-16LE`	Sixteen-bit UCS Transformation Format, little-endian byte order
`UTF-16`	Sixteen-bit UCS Transformation Format, byte order identified by an optional byte-order mark

Useful functions and classes:

InputStreamReader() – An InputStreamReader is a bridge from byte streams to character streams: It reads bytes and decodes them into characters using a specified charset. Each invocation of one of an InputStreamReader’s read() methods may cause one or more bytes to be read from the underlying byte-input stream.
DataInputStream() – A data input stream lets an application read primitive Java data types from an underlying input stream in a machine-independent way. Data input streams and data output streams represent Unicode strings in a format that is a slight modification of UTF-8.

Useful Links:

Java tutorial on using unicode

MIDP Fonts

Unicode Text Editor software

Ubicomp 06 – mobile phone apps

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 19:05:20 +0000

Hitchers (Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham University)

In the Hitchers game, the streets are full of people who are trying to hitchhike their way across the city or up and down the country.

Players can:

- Summon give hitchers tasks or missions. Like: find your way home or to a given place and deliver a message/take a photo. Hitchers might also be programmed with questions to ask the players who pick them up, and might even ask them to take photos or record video on their behalf so that hitchers acquire memories as they travel.

- Pick up hitchers. Players are notified about nearby hitchers and get the opportunity to pick them up as they pass by.

- Interact with hitchers. Players can carry hitchers with them for a while and interact with them as they go, answering questions, taking photos and maybe even modifying them.

- Release hitchers again. Players can release hitchers at a new location, leaving them to wait for the next player to come along. However, the hitcher leaves them with a memory â€“ its card â€“ when it goes.

- Follow their progress and share their memories. A central web site tracks the progress of all hitchers. All players can get some background information about hitchers who are out there. Beyond this, a player who has obtained a hitcher’s card can access more information.

Location aware, using cell ID’s

When hitcher leaves, he asks a question. There is a web visualization where users can see visuals of user’s trails as well as the questions and answers.

They’re adding tasks and missions in the next iteration, using photos & text messages.

asd@cs.nott.ac.uk

Zonetag (yahoo! research Berkeley)
They are trying to aggregate metadata from users to map out cell id’s in the worldwide networks. (like CD song names, but for images uploaded through mobile phones)