Mobup. Finally.

Those among you, my loyal readers, who have already given a listen to the podcasted interview on Mobup published by the Podcast Network already know that Mobup - as a DnD pet project - was born specifically to satisfy my own needs on moblogging.

At the time I was an happy (and pretty ignorant on Java for mobiles different implementations) owner of a Sonyericsson T610 cameraphone which - due to a major outage - was later substituted with an old P800 phone.

None of them could however run Mobup due to the impossibility for the J2ME multimedia APIs to control the camera (this is a frequent - yet hopefully slowly disappearing - problem among cell phones), there were nothing we could do to have Mobup running on my devices. The whole world (well, nearly is talking about and taking advantage of an app I invented and I was stuck to the pre-history of moblogging.

Till yesterday.

I eventually decided a small investment in a Nokia 6670 cameraphone which comes equipped with a 1Megapixel camera, 64 MB of available space and various other wonderful capabilities for a prices that is comfortably lower than 250€ which makes now possible for me to moblog using Mobup and to have a personal and direct feedback on the application itself (till today I was forced to use Vincenzo’s device or to rely on our beta testers feedback).

In the coming days I’ll probably have the opportunity to do some serious moblogging also here on Yellowline, and this is one of the things I love more on Mobup: to be (mostly) blogging-platform independent and - doing all the blog posting server side once published on Flickr, it costs absolutely nothing.

Mobup Interview on the Mobile Media Show

I’ve had the pleasure to be interviewed (via Skype) by Keren Flavell for a podcast on Mobup to be published in the current number of the Mobile Media Show, one of the blogs under The Podcast Network.

We spoke about the philosophy behind Mobup and our future plans (which include, by the way, the support for video), you’ll know how and why the Mobup project was born and how I think vertical mobile devices could help solving the digital divide in developing Countries better than the mass adoption of computers.

You can find the podcast in MP3 format (24mins / 5.6MB) published here.

Wired Mag interviews me on Eyetracking

It’s been an incredible (and tough I’d say) starting of week: I had a lot of works at home to make it a little bit more secure against intrusions (and I’m not speaking about hackers ).

But I also have been so lucky to have a long chat with Frank Rose, contributing editor at Wired Magazine about the Eye Tracking research projects I’m currenlty working on, stressing those on remote control for Television/Video content: they’re both based on a remote usage of eyetracker in order to interact with the content on the video. In one of those the user can unconsciously rotate the real 3d scene selecting the character/object she preferes.

My opinion is that existing TV remote controls are unusable when the user needs a deeper interaction with the filmed scenes since she has to look down at the remote to find the buttons that need to be presses, while - using eye tracking technology - she could easily watch at the screen and select what she likes/needs without looking somewhere else.

It was a deep 40mins chat that I won’t be able to summarize here, I’ll just wait for Frank’s piece being published.

aDAMS: l’eye tracking per la prevenzione del colpo di sonno

Innovative uses of Eyetracking technology

I’ve nearly finished to prepare the slides for my talk at the Innovation Expo in Milan this Thursday 16th (more details on time/location here): I’ll introduce aDAMS (anti-Drowsiness Alert Management System), an eye-tracker based system which continuously scans the driver’s eyes to evaluate her attention leve and properly activate a scalable alert.

After receiving the data we elaborate a series of analyses based on position of the eyes (mapping on the correspondent street target), size of the pupil, frequency of saccades, blinking activity, etc. etc.; the system also has networking capabilities in order to propagate the alarm. Being base on eye tracking means we’re using infrared light, thus being independent from light condition and being the HCI interaction absolutely natural, with no side effects to the driver.

I know there’s a bunch of other anti-drowsiness systems based on the use of similar technologies, but I pretty sure our systems outstands all the competitor.

Interested in? Curious? Drop me an email or come for a chat on Thursday.

Update: the slides (Italian only) are online

Clicktracking VS Eyetracking

It’s a while since I’ve noticed a Web 2.0 application called Crazy Egg which will show you (for free!) were the users clicked on your page using eye tracking analysis derived graphics such as heatmaps and some brand new visualizations for the overlays (colophon: my employer sells eyetracking services).

Let’s take a deep breath and try to understand whether or not this amount of data could be useful “to improve the effectiveness of your web site”.

I’d say that if you’re a part-time blogger or run a small ezine this kind of data could be of some utility to you, but if you’re a serious web application developer/designer or want to test the usability of your company /client site interface well, this kind or data are more or less garbage.

I strongly disagree with what is being said by Nick in the Weareseencreative post on the subject : you should really care what your users are looking at, otherwise you won’t be able to understand (and thus fix) why they aren’t clicking on a particular link or button (BTW Nick, the Tobii eyetracking suite we’re use tracks also the users’ clicks).

Moreover the users’ interactions with a site/interfaces cannot and shouldn’t be summarized to just the clicks, there a lot more: the images, the texts and the page designs which actively participate in designing the user experience.
The click is just the final step of a longer decision path thus showing where the user clicked definitely doesn’t explain WHY she clicked: I think that the most significative quote I can place here is that what really impressed me when I first approached eyetracking technology is that the mouse pointer is completely STOPPED during the whole decisional process; out of sight, I’d say).
And I think that is really important to designers and developers to understand WHAT the user looked at before clicking and WHY they looked at or interacted in a given way (and this is simply impossible with a mousetracking machine).

I don’t want to be misunderstood: my opinion is that Crazy Egg could really help to improve the overall usability of small and simple sites showing their creators what is clicked in a graphical way (a more complexe alternative could be a deeper stats/logs analysis, and my friend Lou could say more on this) but once compared to Eyetracking technology, its benefits simply disappear.

Ubiquities

Today we officially started a Flickr Group to showcase Simone’s technique to generate ubiquitous presence of the same person in a single shot, we called it Ubiquities.

The shooting tecnique comes directly from the Transparent Screen technique, but it’s applied over and over to obtain multiple occurencies of the same subject in different positions. As Simone says it’s easy to be applied indoor, since nothing in the background changes. We should experiment something outdoor.

It was real fun posing for a multiple me-while-working shot and to effectively pose for a multi-multiperson shot with both Paolo and Simone: we used post-its on the floor to map the feet positions and test lights and shadows. I’ll try the same technique at home to portray baby Francesca.

If interested you’ll find a brief tutorial here, and the Group photo pool here. The group is public, join in!

Eyetracking and forms. Again.

Ok. I’m back again with a new lab setup for my next UXmatters article on eyetracking. This is going to be number 2 on 3 on forms usability, I’m going to evaluate the best possible form label placement.

As I already said in my previous article,

Forms are the primary—often the only—way users have of sending data to Web sites.

that’s why we (me and Pabini, the UXmatters founder and Editor in Chief) think that eyetracking tests (and reports) on forms could be so useful.

I’m going to use Luke Wroblewski’s  article on Web application form design as a starting point for my Eyetracking lab setup and task prep. I’ve been in touch with Luke (thankyou very much) during the last few days in order to have the test pages and the tasks fine tuned by the article author; I’ll start tomorrow with the forms design and have the eye tracking lab prepared by Magda Giacintucci from CT|IMR.

On TED and eTech conferences

I had a pretty free from urgent tasks morning, so I decided to go through the highly granular report on the TED conference by Bruno Giussani. I met Bruno during the LIFT days in Geneve and I know how well he can blog about live events he’s attending to, that’s why I’ve chosen him as primary source of information on the TED conference (BTW he’s also the producer of TED Global).

It took quite a lot to go through all his TED posts and to follow interesting links, it’s was really tought not to use them as starting points for a broader navigation. And Mike Lee’s Flickr photos was useful to give me a broader scenario awareness of the conference (as for the written report I’ve chosen to restrict my navigation just to one user in order to save time).

Now it’s time for the eTech and I’m missing it this year too (job and personal stuff are keeping me strictly bound to Italy), I consider my self fortunate to have a couple of friends there, I’m really looking forward to their reports.

Trofie and pesto alla genovese for the bloggers

I think this is one of the first experiments of this kind in Italy; It’s indeed the first I participate in: a gourmet gift for Italian bloggers consisting in 500gr of Trofie pasta and a small jar of pesto alla genovese.

(note: my RSS subscribers might have already read this coming out from the Flickr feed, I apologize with them)

This package is part of an interesting marketing campaign organized by the Italian typical food maker “San Lorenzo” focused on the blogosphera word of mouth power: they’re sending some packages to the italian bloggers that make request of (and, as a side note, without any explicit request of advertising via their blogs).

My personal opinion is that this is a cuttin edge guerrilla marketing tecnique for the Italian Market, were everything in the digital marketing arena is stuck at the 468×60 gif animated banner (more or less, I’d say )

After a little bit of research and link following I found that one of the heads behind this lovely initiative is Antonio Tombolini, one of the brightest Italian new technology entrepreneurs (he was the man behind the Esperya firm).

Even if I see a nearly complete frozen innovation market in Italy, something is slowly moving. And whether you’d want to test the effectivness of this campaign just take a look at the list of blogs that featured the product.

Update: the initiative has been upgraded to “permanent edition“. If you have a nearly 6 months old blog, subscribe to receive the free pack on your blog half year birthday. (I’d say this decision is kinda brave since most of such young blogs in Italy could be far from being well-known).