Mobile Monday Barcelona

Location-Based Services

2 Comments Published November 27th, 2007 in MobileMonday, MobileMonday Barcelona, MobileMonday Spain, Mobile Startups, Mobile 2.0

Image © SENSEable city lab MIT - wikicity rome

The next MobileMonday Barcelona event on December 3 covers Location-Based Services. Since Nokia introduced the Nseries N95 with built in GPS, Location-Based Services are becoming exciting again. Google Maps API and flickr’s geotagged photo function show we’re heading to really interesting services build on the location of the user. Next Monday, we’ll have a closer look on what’s in the labs and coming in this area.

Speakers this time include Fabien Girardin - who will present WikiCity a MIT affiliated project that features innovative ways to understand and communicate the dynamics of the city; Börkur Sigurbjörnsson - who will talk about two research prototypes from Yahoo! Research Berkeley: ZoneTag and TagMaps; Andres Ribera of Spanish startup Hipoqih, a Google Maps mashup that aims to create a mobile social network with GPS geolocation and Ilja Goossens, of yoMedia (Netherlands), who will talk about their video content delivery platform linked to outdoor advertising. Don’t hesitate to register and/or confirm your presence for this event, only 150 seats available.

Speakers:

Fabien Girardin - Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Digital Communication in the Interactive Technologies Group (Department of Informmation and Communication Technologies) at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.

Fabien is also affiliated with the Senseable City Lab (Department of Urban Studies and Planning) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA. His current investigation explores the integration of ubiquitous technologies in the everyday urban environments. More specifically, he studies the design of location-aware applications that take into account the limitations of technologies. In his talk he will present WikiCity a project that features innovative ways to understand and communicate the dynamics of the city. This work draws implications the design of future location-based services.

Andres Ribera, CEO of Hipoqih (Spain)

hipoqih.com is a web 2.0 project and Google Maps mashup that aims to create a mobile social network with GPS geolocation. Its killer app is “Follow me”. It’s a web-based program that provides the ability to quickly share your position and where you are going. hipoqih.com uses positioning systems like GPS that allows to record geolocated alerts and to receive them in mobile terminals. The hipoqih.com plugins are free and available for PDA with Windows Mobile, Smartphone and PC with Windows XP, but will soon branch out and include Nokia N95, and GNU-Linux. You can read their User Guide at http://www.hipoqih.com/downloads/hipoqih.User_guide_v0.2.pdf.

Börkur Sigurbjörnsson, researcher at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona

Börkur’s research areas are Search Technologies and Media Experiences. Börkur received his PhD from the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam in 2006. He will talk about two research prototypes from Yahoo! Research Berkeley: ZoneTag and TagMaps. Zonetag is a tool for uploading photos from moblie phones to Flickr. It can tag the photos with the location in which they were taken and suggest additional tags for the photos. TagMaps is a toolkit to visualize tags geographically on a map. I will present a prototype where TagsMaps are used to geographically browse ZoneTag photos, and other geotagged photos.

Ilja Goossens, co-Founder yoMedia (Netherlands)

yoMedia provides a platform that enables clients and consumers to easily aggregate content and to automatically convert and distribute video, audio and images to multiple platforms with a strong focus on mobile devices. The company’s focus is on how to integrate mobile devices and services into the total media mix that covers platforms like TV, outdoor advertising, internet and of course mobile phones. Ilja worked as a lead Flash Developer and Interaction Designer at Endemol Interactive, where he was responsible for projects like the online game engine for ‘Deal or no Deal’ and the mobile version of ‘Fear Factor’. He combines his creative skills with an entrepreneurial spirit to build innovative and successful products with a focus on upcoming, international markets.

Networking
As usual, a networking party will follow the conference where participants will enjoy a glass of cava while sharing experiences about life and work. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence for this event at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe/ to reserve one of the 150 seats available. Book now to avoid being left out!

19h00 Registration and Pre-Networking
19h30 Location-Based Services speaker sessions & discussion
20h45 Cocktail and Networking Party
21h30 End

Venue: Auditorium University of Pompeu Fabra - França Building (Edifici França), Passeig de Circumval·lació, 8 - Barcelona 08003

Location and Directions here at Google Maps.

MobileMonday is a community of mobile professionals organised around local networking events in almost 40 cities around the world. This open community promotes the mobile industry and fosters cooperation and networking among industry people and their companies by providing opportunities for personal and virtual contacts.

MobileMonday Barcelona is organised by Rudy De Waele, Carles Ferreiro and Barcelona Media.

Our Partners
Our thanks to our partners Telefónica Movistar, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, MyStrands and Agora 22@ for their invaluable support.

Andres Ribera, Börkur Sigurbjörnsson, cities, city, Fabien Girardin, flickr, geotagging, google, googlemaps, Hipoqih, ilja goossens, lbs, location, location based, maps, mit, mobile 2.0, Mobile Startups, mobilemonday, MobileMonday Spain, research, Senseable City, TagMaps, WikiCity, yahoo, yomedia, ZoneTag

Mobile Social Networks

9 Comments Published November 24th, 2006 in MobileMonday, MobileMonday Barcelona, MobileMonday Spain, Mobile Social Networks

Mobile Communities, MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software), Mobile User-Generated Content, Mobile IM & Chat, Moblogging, Mobile Friend Finders, Ping your Buddies, … We have heard a lot of these rather new terminologies the last months now. MySpace, YouTube are the obvious web-based examples going mobile soon; and the big companies have been moving in this mobile space lately: Google bought Dodgeball, Microsoft’s Zune has social network capabilities build-in, adding geo-location to this dimension now is obvious to build the next-generation mobile killer apps but what is their current state? Do they have many users? What do they learn form them? How people use the software? When? Where? Is it really useful for mobile users right now? Do the companies behind make money yet? What are the new business models in this field?

MobileMonday Barcelona invites, for our next event on December 4, some of the most interesting European players in this field so if you want to learn more about this topic and hear it from the experts, please register ASAP, this topic promises to be a quick seat-filler.

Date: Monday, December 4, 2006

Topic: Mobile Social Networks

Speakers:

Felix Petersen - Plazes (Germany)
Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free. Plazes is a social location directory with more than 100,000 users that can tag locations to find other users or related places nearby. The service has gathered a lot of media attention on a global scale and is since long the darling of the super-geeks.

Alex Kummerman - Clicmobile (France) presenting areyouhere.net and yootribe.com ( with Swithmod )
Alex has been at the forefront of multimedia development. He now brings over 13 years of mobile telecommunication expertise and successful management to Clicmobile, his third start-up. Alex is also a commentator on the developing Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo) industry. He continues to advise people on LBS-MoSoSo as an editor on the LBS-MOSOSO blog. Alex is now launching a platform for connected communities providing tools for both the PC and the mobile worlds. Clicmobile is a Geneva based start-up company with an operational subsidiary in Paris. Clicmobile provides the open media world with tools to build and run connected communities.

Alberto Benbunan Garzón - Mobile Dreams Factory (Spain)
Alberto Benbunan Garzón, founder and Business Development Director of Mobile Dreams Factory will talk about their social networking and dating platform called Moviligo, their challenges, opportunities and future applications in this area. Moviligo is a mobile dating portal. With just the mobile phone the user can send messages, flirt or chat.

The sessions will be moderated by Fabien Girardin from 7.5th Floor blog who is currently finishing his Ph.D. thesis on collaboration in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments, expect some vivid discussions!

As usual, a networking party will follow the conference where participants will enjoy a glass of cava while sharing experiences about life and work. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe/ to reserve one of the 150 seats available. Book early to avoid being left out!