Group items tagged

This study discusses several central roles that the Internet and mobile phones play in college students' daily lives. Focus group interviews at a U.S. and a Norwegian university generated a wide variety of concerns and experiences. Three themes stand out - social connectivity, multitasking, and social control. The informants were seemingly involved in constant conversations with their friends and families. Also, there was a high degree of multi-tasking, involving several activities or media at the same time. E-mail and instant messaging supported near-continuous contact. Their constant multi-tasking could reflect a feeling that they need to be busy, but also an acquired proficiency to handle multiple simultaneous media tasks. For many of our interviewees the mobile phone was used for daily conversations and text messages as much as could be afforded. New media seem to be an integrated part of these people's lives. The thought of being without their mobile phones created feelings of anxiety for some, and their use of these media for maintaining connectivity constituted some new forms of control, even of themselves.

The SoMo experience begins with tools like GPS that can identify where we are and where we are going in real time. GPS is further enhanced through the marking of actual physical locations -- geotagging. Geotagging can include everything from "soundprints" to video markers, and the tagging of locally relevant reviews and news. GeoGraffiti, for example, allows mobile phone users to record a message tied to a specific place that is later retrievable by anyone who finds themselves near the same location. Geotaggers can leave a virtual "Kilgore was here" tag at any place, freezing in time and making publicly available their location-specific activities, interactions and thoughts. Mobile social networking is also coming on strong with applications like Foursquare and Britekite. Mobile phone users can discover each other, both friends and strangers, via profiles they make available at a particular location. Such applications are good for networking on the fly and immediately finding out if your friends are nearby at a given time.

Instead of a contactless payment sticker for your mobile phone, why not just skin the entire phone? That's the reasoning behind Phoolah the product that that Mobile Payment Skins, a Knoxville, Tenn.-based provider of mobile contactless payment service solutions that is launching this fall. The name comes from a combination of payment card, personalized skin and mobile phone. When a card holder receives his personalized vinyl skin embedded with a contactless payment chip linked to a prepaid debit card, he peels it from its backing and wraps it about his phone.