Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

It's just not Friday without our staff's stellar finds from the week.

Samantha

Hologram Mobile Phone Screens
Sure the iPhone’s touchscreen is cool now, but just wait until Mac Funamizu’s design for the next big thing in mobile interfaces becomes a reality. Then you might as well be holding a Zack Morris phone. As part of a “design the mobile phone of 2020” contest, Funamizu submitted the Trou Hologram Mobile Phone complete with a 3D hologram display. It’s just a design at the moment, but advances in holographic technology mean it might not be long before you see that inappropriate picture your friend sent popping out at you.

Reming

Paperless Post
Throwing a party and yet again feel like you’re sacrificing style for the good of being green? Check out Paperless Post, the new online stationery that was featured in the New York Times’ Style Section. Forget the old days of tacky evites with lame graphics; these evites look like Martha Stewart herself was your party planner. And sources say Zac Posen, Diane Von Furstenberg and Condoleezza Rice have jumped on board for some of their events. So why shouldn’t you?

Laura

Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap App
Here lies a textbook case of a brand extending its utility to mobile in a way that’s effective and simple. I love when that happens! Sherwin-Williams is a paint retailer. Colors often trip our respective inspiration sensors while we’re out and about – a flower here, a dress there. This app matches the color of a photographed object with a Sherwin-Williams paint. Simply brilliant. I look forward to finally being able to paint my kitchen “Financial Times salmon.”

David

Smaller than a laptop, faster than a netbook
The Timeline 3810T, the latest portable computer from Acer, is a cross between a laptop and a netbook. I like the laptop-sized 13.3-inch screen, Intel’s more powerful dual-core ULV (ultra-low voltage processor) chip, and the 3.5-pound package, making the Timeline about half a pound heavier than a typical netbook and 2 pounds lighter than a laptop. It doesn’t have a DVD drive, but its processor handles streaming video quite well, unlike those in netbooks. It’s a feature that has kept me from joining the netbook craze, since I love catching up on Chuck episodes on NBC.com. The Timeline is also a cut above netbooks in terms of how it handles videoconferencing – another necessity for me since I use Skype for international video calls. The Timeline’s price is competitive, though still a bit steep for me – it’ll cost between $699 to $899 depending on which screen size you opt for. Still, it’s great to see a new laptop category that can cater to those who love the netbook’s size but could use a little bit more power. Check out Peter Svensson’s review here.

Jeremy

Google Wave
Email is practically ubiquitous to our digital lifestyles, but it’s shocking to realize the technology is actually over 40 years old. Enter Google Wave, a surprising new web-based application now in early development phase. Unlike email, Google Wave is meant to facilitate and streamline group communication. Instead of displaying replies and interactions in linear format, communication is centralized “in waves” where conversation, media and information is free to come in ebbs and flows – users can instant message, email, automatically add links, collaboratively edit documents and reply to messages all in real time. The concept seems a bit mundane, doesn’t it? In truth, the excitement around Google Wave is less about creating a new communication tool than its ability to aggregate a variety of information and make it collaborative in real time. And that's something that will be increasingly important as we try to manage the deluge of information on the web.

Valerie

Yubz
Of course we now use “handset” to refer to the entire mobile phone, but the Yubz handset accessory for mobile phones takes me back to the time when a handset was just that. I miss the hours I could once devote to dissecting the latest “news” with my girlfriends on my family’s old turquoise standard issue AT&T model. However, I have to admit that I don’t miss the cramp in my shoulders that followed holding the handset during those long chat sessions.

Allison

Hunch.com
I often suffer from paralyzing indecision, so I was intrigued by this new website’s tagline: “Hunch helps you make decisions and gets smarter the more you use it.” In ten questions, it will help you decide anything from what to order at Shake Shack to whether you should consider a short sale to sell a home. While it would seem to leave little room for personal tastes, Hunch is like a recommendation engine that “learns” from your answers. So while I won’t be getting the Chinese food it told me to get for lunch, I can teach it not to suggest that next time. The site is simply designed: You just enter a term into a search bar then go through a multiple choice decision tree. Pretty interesting example of prescriptive software, and definitely something that would be perfect for mobile.

Michael

“Jumping picture” contest winner
STA Travel recently launched a viral campaign seeking the best “jumping picture.” Contenders submitted their photos via STA’s Facebook page and staff announced the winners in a video. Nice personal touch. The winner received a round-trip ticket to Australia. Who won you ask? One of my good-for-nothing friends.

• Industry Pitching Cellphones as a Teaching Tool [New York Times] - CTIA is making the case for cellphones in the classroom and, you know, it makes sense. By pitching them as a viable educational tool due to their inexpensiveness (relative to laptops) and convenience, they're also tagging a trend that's been sweeping developing countries like India and Brazil, where mobile users have essentially skipped computers and gone straight to handsets.
• Surgeons send 'tweets' from operating room [CNN] - We mentioned surgery tweeting awhile back and it happened again the other day. Let's just hope no one @'s your surgeon that hilarious kitten video during your appendectomy.
• Shazam Seeing 1M Song Tags a Day [Media Bistro] - Shazam seems to be a hit for Apple's App store, generating about one million song tags a day. It is not to be confused with its semantic cousin, Kazaam, which did not generate millions of anything.
• Microsoft targets its own smartphone store [Financial Times] - Microsoft is hoping to borrow some application thunder from Apple and Android by putting out the news that a Windows Mobile storefront is brewing.
• Mobile Web Becoming a Necessity [Media Bistro] - Mobile data plans are a necessity. If you're on this site, you probably already know that. However, in a recent survey by Nielsen, for Tellabs, they found that 71 percent of those surveyed agreed. Internet is the most popular reason (duh), followed by e-mail and messaging. :D
• Implementation of Universal Phone Chargers [Mobile Burn] - Universal phone chargers! It may seem minor, but if you've ever been to a friend's house and found your phone gasping for air and about to go under - only to discover that your friend doesn't have a charger to fit your set - then you know why this is hot.
• Twitter Triumphant [Mobility Site] - In this great piece by Zealot, Twitter is positioned as the horse on which to pin our colors in the race towards actually connecting the world via web. It's not that it's doing anything essentially new, it's simply doing it in a unique, easy and engaging way. It requires only a matter of seconds to drop into someone else's world and, in turn, bring them into ours.
• The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives [New York Times] - As John Markoff points out in this piece, social map applications are quickly turning us into Sims-esque characters on a grid, with flashing green lights above our heads.