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Would I need an ordinary guide as well? Honestly, no. But I would like to have all my travel information available in the form of an audio download and accessible on my car DVD-player or my Mp3 rather than accessible in a written form. This would enable me to listen to the introductory stuff, while travelling on the underground, in my car or relaxing at my hotel. After surfing around on the Internet, it seems as if this option is not fully available. The large publishers are naturally scared of being hit by the same blitz as the music business. The prediction is however pretty easy. It is only a matter of time.

New Augmented Space and its Memory The concepts of place, proximity and distance are going to be substantially rewritten by the locative media evolutions.

But some say the flood of information becoming available through mobile phones and other means is not always such a good thing. "I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information," said Danah Boyd, who researches social media at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "An increased flow of information should not be confused with a deeper bond." Boyd stressed that this also applied to other social media that gather large amounts of personal information, like blogs or digital photo accounts. "The situation these technologies create is similar to what happens with Angelina Jolie or another celebrity," Boyd said. "Just because I know a lot about a person does not mean they will help me on a tough day." An added risk for the location-announcing services is that people might find themselves unable to break away from following friends or old lovers, Boyd added. "The problem is that people really, really love stalking," Boyd said. "When you have just ended a relationship, it is not necessarily healthy to follow the exact location of your ex- lover minute-by-minute on your phone."

Editor's note: Julian Bleecker heads the Mobile Media Lab (MML), a near-future think tank and research and development lab at the University of Southern California. In today's article, Julian describes a design approach for location-based services utilized in many of the projects under way at MML. At O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference later this month, Julian will be taking part in a panel discussion on the secrets behind good social mobile applications and the obstacles they face in the real world.

Las llamadas tecnologías de proximidad -Near Field Communication (NFC), RFID, Bluetooth, Wibree, etc- están llamadas a jugar un papel fundamental en Internet Móvil. Muchas compañías ya están usándolas con fines publicitarios y existen muchas empresas especializadas en explotarlas para ofrecer campañas de marketing de proximidad a grandes marcas que están interesadas en desarrollar innovadoras formas de comunicación con sus clientes.

Both groups had the classic problem of notification -- getting a user to tune in requires interrupting their current activity, not something users have been known to relish. Billions were spent on Web School applications that assumed users would bookmark for a return visit, or would happily accept email alerts, but despite a few well-publicized successes like Schwab.com and eBay, users have mostly refused to "check back often."

We constantly rely on the cognitive capabilities of individuals in software design -- we assume a user can associate the mouse with the cursor, or that icons will be informative. We rarely rely on the cognitive capabilities of groups, however, though we rely on those capabilities in the real world all the time.

The suggestion about general web accessibility for the CoDeck interface came in the form of a rhetorical question -- "Why not make it as broadly accessible as possible?" In the Web School, of course, the answer is "No reason", since more users are always A Good Thing, but for CoDeck there were several good reasons for not simply turning their project into a Web video app. First, the physicalization of the interface, using the gutted BetaMax deck, provides a communal affordance that it is impossible to replicate over the web. Second, since CoDeck serves a tight community, the density of communication among ITP video makers would be diluted by general accessibility. Third, having the video deck in the lounge makes it self-policing; the cohesion of the community keeps it largely free from abuse, whereas a generally accessible and password-free "upload and critique" video site would become a cesspool of porn within hours. Finally, serving a local community maximizes use of free bandwidth on the local network, enabling features that would saddle a public system with crippling costs.