Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Precious is a German design consultancy for strategic design and visual languages. In their early years, they were involved in website and desktop software design. Today, they specialize in smartphone apps, prototypes for TV interfaces, and applications for tablet devices. Here, we’ve invited them to share what they’ve learned about interactivity within this emerging ecosystem of screens.

precious: Working with all of those devices was interesting and challenging, not just because of the diverse number of screen sizes and input methods, but because, through user research, we learned about how different the contexts are in which these gadgets are used.

1. The Pop Up City – Getting Closer…

“Recent research has amounted more than 6,000 location-based apps to be currently available for the iPhone alone. Here [Jeroen] would like to draw your attention to two new kids on the block that offer a new take on physical proximity: Ditto and Yobongo.”

1. Too Lazy To Count Calories? Now You Can Just Take A Picture Of Your Meal

“While the company chalks it up to ‘magic’, we’re assuming they’ve got a handful of people (be it through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or a room full of dudes promised free Internet in exchange for calorie counting) breaking down the meal in your picture item by item. Snap a shot of a chicken salad? They punch in some chicken, some lettuce, maybe some dressing — and bam, they’ve got a rough estimate.”

This article was originally published at DMNews, where we contribute content

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C. Clarke once said. With recent developments in mobile computing, his analogy is increasingly relevant. Sensor-enabled apps like Color have implications on a broad scale.

1. Google Ditches Barcodes for NFC

“Google is moving away from barcodes and towards NFC (near field communication) if a pair of stories about the search company are tied together. Yesterday, news broke out about Google’s decision to officially end support for the use of QR codes, the 2D barcodes readable by camera-equipped mobile phones, in its business listings service Google Places.”

Television, as we know it, is dying. According to the Wall Street Journal, the average age of prime-time viewers hit 50 this year. Kids would rather play Xbox or watch Hulu. Fortunately, television still has something going for it, and we’re not talking about iPad apps or mobile streaming. Rather, we’d like to discuss the emergence of a new hybrid medium.

1. SXSW 2011: The internet is over

“We’ve been hearing about this moment in digital history since at least 1988, when the Xerox technologist Mark Weiser coined the term’ubiquitous computing’, referring to the point at which devices and systems would become so numerous and pervasive that ‘technology recedes into the background of our lives’.”