The concept of the home of the future, or a ‘smart home’, has been explored since at least the early 20th century. In a smart home, the residents would be able to control everything from lighting and heating to security, audio and video systems by the touch of a button, or perhaps just by entering [...]
I’ve put together a new, short presentation on what IA is now, at the crossroads of web 1, 2, and 3.0. The emerge of social media, new levels of information and interaction, and portability raise the need for new ways of working and documenting design architecture, but the new doesn’t replace all of the old [...]
KillerStartups and several other sites featured Fidg’t, developed by the LA-based company Protohaus, as a very promising new tool last year. Fidg’t is a “social networking address book” that promised to help users to aggregate all of their social networking sites and group them into meta contacts. In other words, put all your friends from [...]
Inspired by this quite old illustration I saw on Flickr, created by Peter Forret, I wanted to create my own version of it. In my version, I added or changed a few examples, and changed the structure of the illustration a bit, but it’s still very similar to Peter’s original. I took out the title [...]
I had been thinking about writing a longer article on the wireless market in North America ever since I landed in Canada, and then last week – before I had started writing it myself – I came across this great article by Tomi T. Ahonen: Who is ahead and who is behind on mobile telecoms [...]
Without any marketing campaigns, Sulake, the creator of the social networking community/chat world Habbo Hotel, put out a mobile community called Mini Friday at the end of 2006. Mini Friday is a small mobile version of Habbo Hotel: in the beginning the user creates his own character/avatar, and then (s)he can start moving the character [...]
NetFront, possibly the most advanced microbrowser for cell phones and other small devices, is soon coming out in version 3.5, which takes great use of widgets. Sadly, my current cell phone plan here in Canada doesn’t allow to me really use anything more than standard texting, phoning and a bit of mobile web over EDGE, [...]
I had always thought that iPhone would come to Canada before it hit Europe, mainly just because Canada is closer to Apple’s home turf, and because the current iPhone is actually, in some ways, an inferior product in Europe’s advanced GSM phone market. I thought that Apple would develop a new, more advanced version of [...]
One day last week I looked at my cell phone and noticed that I’d got one new text message. It was from my operator, of course, announcing that I’d got a new message in my voicemail. In three months of living here, I’ve got used to the idea that I no longer receive text messages [...]
As at least some of you already knew, I recently moved to Toronto, Canada. For the last couple of weeks I obviously haven’t had as much time to surf through new online services as usually. However, I’ve still managed to check some, and I’ve paid attention on how few and far between many mobile services [...]
Conceptology is the personal blog of Karri Ojanen, an interaction design leader, usability consultant, creative director and digital marketing strategist. The posts cover a wide area from advertising to corporate culture, mobile technology to social media, and product design to design techniques. . Subscribe via RSS »
