mTrends - mobile media lifestyle trends - m-trends.org

I included some scenario’s of collective mobile lifestyle trends in my vodafone receiver #16 contribution: Connecting cultures through music.

Here’s another (older) one that still seems to continue to grow beyond borders: Mobile Clubbing, check the website for details for next gatherings in your city.

The rules are simple:

Though I’m not a frequent clubber anymore, I like the idea of Mobile Clubbing; however I always wondered how people keep the vibe dancing all those different beats… I think I prefer Silent Disco better since clubbers can tune in to one of two DJ sets offered by the on-stage turntablists - all with headphones connected through BlueTooth.

Mobile clubbing story via Helen via Trendcatching. Mobile Clubbing photo by Willis Monroe

Barcelona has always been pretty pioneering with new technologies… The Barcelona City Council has been experimenting for a while now with mobile services and recently launched a “Barcelona Mobile” campaign to sensibly citizens and tourists on public services to be accessed from your mobile phone. (check out the video here, it’s great fun!)

Barcelona City Council offers you a new service which allows you to have all the information about the city on your mobile:

• MERCÈ 06 City Festival program (ended last week)
• What’s On: the Grec festival, your team’s match, children’s activities, the theatre, exhibitions and concerts.
• Directory: a guide to restaurants, hotels, etc.
• Barcelona city map -> exists already online and is excellent!
• How to get there: a tool how to get somehwere in Barcelona by underground, bus or just walking.
• Usefull numbers: firse service and emergency numbers

Now I’m happy all these services are becoming available on the mobile phone, in the end that’s what we all want, however I tried some of the services and the information is very poor. For example only 7 hotels were mentioned and the places I was searching for didn’t appear… well probably more time is needed to index everything. The map thing is pretty cool and advanced, connecting this to a LBS system with services is going to be peanuts later on.
The SMS service costs only 0,30 Euro/sms which is reasonable but knowing about my mobile web browsing bills from last months, I’m not attracted to use the Barcelona mobile web service a lot.

However, walking through the city and checking for (public) available WiFi acces points in Barcelona learns me there are currently a lot of these public acces points available a bit everywhere, so… Martin, isn’t this something to connect to with FON? Also, wouldn’t all these services be quicker and easier to build and be found through tools like Plazes.com once their mobile beta goes public? With a bit of promotion and marketing the best ‘plazes‘ in Barcelona can be tagged easily and become accessible through the mobile as another valuable option.

What about other cosmopolitan citizens? How are the mobile services in your city? It would be great to map some of the coolest urban mobile services…

I wrote an article on Connecting cultures through music for edition #16 of the Vodafone Receiver magazine. The main topic was ‘A Night Out’, interesting challenge and braintwister to write. This issue is covered with some excellent articles by authors like Charlie Schick, Mark Curtis, Lee Humphreys, Tim Cole, Karenza Moore, Frank Lantz, and Antony Bruno (sorry Bruno could not find your link). Definately worth a read, check out the Receiver archives too!

“This receiver issue wants to spark off some ideas about social networking the mobile way: clubbing, seeing your favourite band, sharing memories of a night out or playfully exploring the city, getting to know and experiencing, even creating, music – can mobile add to all these? And how does it affect how we get our friends together for joint action? Does it trigger emergent behaviour? Or is it the ideal means to pull it all together? What do *you* think?”

There is room for discussion on the website, needless to say it would be great to get some of your comments, thoughts and ideas on the evolution of music culture from our mobile lifestyle perspective.

The Artwork for receiver #16 is done by Zaza+Crusher, illustrations by students from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Essen, Germany).

Analysis, Announcements, Art Culture, ethnographics, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Predictions, receiver, vodafone, vodafone receiver

If you happen to be in Switzerland early February, don’t miss the LIFT06 || Life, Ideas, Futures. Together. || conference, simply about new technologies and people.

LIFT is about teaming talented observers, explorers, and builders with people whose work depends on understanding current challenges and creative solutions presented by emerging technologies. Attendees will face cutting edge business models, bold predictions, radical thinking — ideas to inject into their own part of the planet.

LIFT has a simple goal: connect people who are passionate about new applications of technology and propel their conversations into the broader world to improve life and work.

Speakers include no less then Cory Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Robert Scoble (Microsoft), Euan Semple (BBC), Bruno Giussani, Xavier Comtesse (Avenir Suisse), Régine Debatty (WMMNA), Anina, Jeffrey Huang (Harvard), Matt Jones (Nokia), Chris Lawer (OMC Group), Hugh Mac Leod (Gapingvoid), David Galipeau (UNAIDS), Aymeric Sallin (Nano Dimension), Paul Oberson (DIP), Jean-Luc Raymond (Microsoft) and a ton of other amazing people.

Nicolas Nova from pasta and vinegar is one of the organizers. I got the tip from his friend Fabien Girardin, who I met last week here in Barcelona. Great mindswapping!

They will both be present at the 3GSM Gathering of the Mobilists, some great conversation in sight. Looking forward to it!

Start Mobile just enabled the independent film Quality Of Life to promote their film via mobile art marketing.

I wrote a piece on mobile art at gotomobile.com where I’m guestwriting.

Early 2004, I read his Open Source Democracy (a free downloadable PDF under Creative Commons license), he created for the UK thinktank Demos, which led me to his participation to the groundbreaking Merchants of Cool.

You can find a good overview of his writing, interviews and articles at his website and the disinformation.com page dedicated to his work.

Don’t miss his excellent TV documentary “The Persuaders“, his behind-the-scenes look at the influence industry, and how the techniques of marketing have migrated into politics to create the “citizen consumer.” You can view the whole documentary online here.

Now his new book “Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out” is available on Amazon here and it looks like another excellent reading…

Rushkoff’s first book explicitly for a business audience contends that American enterprise is at a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with acquisitions, tactics, efficiencies, and ad campaigns, many businesses have dangerously lost touch with the process - and fun - of discovery. But those who come to understand the current moment as a renaissance, and who are willing to embrace the possibilities it offers, have an unprecedented opportunity to engage with what they do from the inside out.

To me, Douglas is one of the brightest minds out there, who sees clear within our current media and technology chaos; I’m ordering now, what are you waiting for?

Next weekend you can find me at the ArtFutura, the digital art and new media festival of reference in Spain. The festival offers a wide range of activities between October 27th and October 30th - workshops, conferences, performances, special presentations and a powerful audio-visual program. Last year, I had the chance to hear Howard Rheingold explaining his Smart Mobs.

I am specifically looking forward to the conference of Bruce Sterling: Living Objects, Sensitive Spaces about his new book “Shaping Things”.

Cyberpunk icon Bruce Sterling is without doubt one of the most important science-fiction writers in the last twenty years. He is currently “Visionary-in-Residence” at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.

His new book, Shaping Things, is a treatise on how location and wireless technologies (RFID, wireless) with online database promise to redefine completely our vision of everyday objects.

Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of “gizmos.” New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object — we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable — that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable.

Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers — and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation.

What are you waiting for?

Soon writers are gonna find out everything about their readers…

Got this one through Stuart Mudie’s -always good to read- weblog called Blethers.com. Here’s my first socialbooklist on ConnectviaBooks.

Check also the SocialBooks Lab, the book version of social bookmarking:

“Get recommendations for new books from people who share your taste in books.”

This weekend I went biking to the Forum 2004, the impressive site of the international event that was held last year in Barcelona dedicated to the principles of Cultural Diversity, World Peace and Sustainable Economic Development.

Reading and viewing the nice presentations on the archived website, you get an idea of what I’m talking here:

“The Forum site occupies an area of 320,000 square meters and has a capacity of 79,200 persons distributed as follows: 50,000 in the port esplanade and auditoriums, 26,000 in the Barcelona International Convention Center, and 3,200 in the Forum Building, which is being constructed by the Swiss architects Herzog and De Meuron.

With 68,000 square meters of surface area, the Barcelona International Convention Center (CCIB), will be the largest convention center in the south of Europe.

The main Forum space, known as “the Plaza,” will cover an area of 150,000 square meters. Once complete, it will be the second largest square in the world after Tiananmen Square in Beijing.”

It is really strange to have all this space for you alone, the square is empty, the buildings are empty, I look tiny inbetween this enormous spaces, I always think about how many trucks were needed to construct this all… I like the architecture a lot, still it feels very empty without people doing things around.

I took some pictures with my v800 mobile to give you an idea.

It reminds me of the construction of Brasilia, the futuristic city build between 1956 and 1960, designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.

“The city of Brasilia illustrates both the great expectations that its creators had for it, and the shortcomings that were unforeseen. Its existence is exciting and the lessons to be learned from it numerous.”

Tomorrow I’m gonna get a look to the live Fabchannel.Comwebcast of the Simple Minds playing in Paradiso, Amsterdam.

Fabchannel.com is great! It’s one of the best broadband streaming video concert services that I know of. Good quality live concert webcasts of great bands and artists from the Paradiso and the Melkweg in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

It reminded me of the pioneering webcasting days in the Cybertheatre in Brussels at the end of the 90s (offline now). In 1998 we organised the first live online concert of the Simple Minds to promote their album Neapolis and due to the succes a 2nd gig to launch their World Tour some months later.

For some pictures of that concert I will have to take the time and find them in my archived boxes of that period but meanwhile I could find back some traces still of those gigs.

Some pictures and apparently there is a bootleg of that night!

A pressrelease mentioning: “On the 25th February this year Simple Minds launched their website with a live gig broadcast live over the internet from the CyberTheatre in Brussels. With only a limited number of streams available 10,000 people watched live, while 500,000 queued around the virtual block waiting for an available stream. For the Q & A session that followed the band were swamped by over 4000 emailed questions, and 1.5 million people visited the site directly after the webcast.”

If any of the team CBT members reading this and still has pics from that period, please contact me. I’m still looking for my picture with Dennis Hopper =:-)