Mobility = Wireless++

By Mark Ollila

After living in Sweden for close to five years, I thought I understood this basic premise of what is wireless? I just recently visited Australia to see some friends that were getting married. They are in the IT sector, in the IT capital of Australia. As is the case at weddings, conversation about how you met the bride, the groom, where you come from, where you work, how much you earn pursued.

Luckily for me, I managed to keep the conversation around my horrible Ericsson R380, (as a Nokia lover, I still had to buy the Ericsson R380, and now love the fact that I can demonstrate bad user interface design issues to many people about the phone – especially my Symbian friend. Note though, I have software versions of R1A06 and R1A07 for the phone and organiser, (December release)). As the conversation continued, I discovered how limited the knowledge of wireless was to my fellow IT workers in Australia. Yes, SMS was known but it was the sort of peripheral knowledge that is so ambient here in Scandinavia that was lacking. How GSM works, the concept of base stations, where it works, what sort of phones are needed in the USA and so forth. Also, phone etiquette seemed to be lacking there, which was emphasised by a mobile going off during the wedding – and Alas, the brides’ sister does answer it. Anyway, the buzzwords that are so common here, dual band, tri band, SMS, WAP, ring tones, the feeling of connectedness with your phone was unknown. Luckily, a sixteen-year (the nephew to the bride) described the pleasures of playing Snake. Ahh, some things are the same. Another nephew, this time eight years old asked to borrow my Ericsson R380 so he could play some games. Hmmm, luckily the taxi came.

On the way home, getting ready for a flight west to Los Angeles, it became aware to me that the wireless engineering capacity of the whole world is centred around Scandinavia. So what’s so new about that? Well, let me rephrase that statement. Fifty percent of the world’s wireless engineering capacity is in Sweden, twenty percent is in Finland. Between the two countries, we have 70% of the whole worlds wireless engineering capacity. This has an undue effect on the general population, countries that are highly educated and connected at the wired and wireless sector.

Looking at Sweden, we see that she has a wonderful opportunity to take things further. Currently there is a lot clustering occurring with many international wireless centres in the region. This has a great influence on what will be available to the future generation of people, in society and in the workforce. As mentioned, we also have a country that has a well developed social system, a population that is highly educated, and most importantly in this example, a reasonably connected infrastructure to peoples works and home in the form of Internet connectivity.Given that we have a strong technology infrastructure, we now have the opportunity to do something that many countries, let alone research labs and companies can afford to do, and that is study people. We now have the opportunity, given the penetration of devices, the accessibility to the wired/wireless net, that we can study people, design solutions around their needs, and then study them again. This would complement the huge engineering capacity that we have with concrete usability/design solutions that can be rolled out to various sectors. Now given this, let’s have a look at what wireless is.

Wireless is a hot word, it is a hot topic, and it also means a lot of different things to different people. People think wireless is GSM or GPRS or Bluetooth or even WAP. I hate the word wireless, so let’s kill it, or at least improve it. Let’s look at the word mobile. Mobile entails - the ability to move, a form of mobility. It also entails the word mobile - which people associate with mobile phones, PDA's etc. Most people think that the revolution is around wireless, I tend to think it is around the concept of been mobile – as a human, and through mobile devices, I have the ability to communicate in whatever means possible. When we look at the mobile (phone), connectivity is one of the issues that a consumer looks at. It is often the case that an operator is not required to give the consumer the ability of been wireless (or mobile), in that you can achieve that through Bluetooth (without an operator), Infrared (without an operator), wireless LAN (without an operator). In other words, the issue of connectivity can be defined as operator (traditional) controlled, or non-traditional operator. This way of thinking can also be applied to the concept of location/position-based services. What is a location? What is position based?

Generally people think that position based services for wireless involves some GPS or operator derived position based method over the mobile phone. But let's give an example of something else. Consider going to an ice hockey game, it is at a location – it is at a known location, and something that an operator need not know about. Why should the operator care about you been at the ice hockey? So you could pay more bills over the mobile, that the operator could tell you that you are at the Globen? What is interesting, is, if at this location, real location based services were provided - for instance, simple PDA's (infrared based) or Wireless LAN devices could connect to a location based server (in this case, a server at Globen), that would allow things such as massive micro transaction betting to take place – in real time between the fans at the game. So a spectator can arrive to the game, and participate in location based betting, or communication (with fans of both teams). In that case, we are looking at collaborative gaming, single and collaborative gambling, and mass communication. And all of this happening without having to go over an operators network. On the other hand, the operator needs to find mechanisms to capitalise on opportunities like this. How can they do this? For starters, they need to talk to some of the wireless centres that have started up, and secondly talk to a research lab that specialises in the usability aspect with people and mobility. No use in rolling out technology for technologies sake if you do not have an understanding of how people will react, and then use it, if at all.

To sum up, wireless is not much, other than communication without wires. Mobility, the act of been in motion, is the essence of which is personal communication adds much more creativity and social responsibility to the game. Hence Mobility = Wireless++