Rococo

This week, The Guardian ran an article about the CityWare project which is a pretty sizable project out of the University of Bath. The project has several goals, around understanding how people interact and move through their urban environment, but also helping shed light on opportunities and threats associated with the wireless devices that people carry with them. With regard to the latter, it's a little ironic then that the project has come under fire from privacy advocates, with regard to the fact that cityware collects data about people's movements (or more pedantically, about the movements of their Bluetooth-enabled devices) without their knowledge.

In their defense, the Cityware people say that they don't actually collect personal data about people - they're just recording the Bluetooth address of the devices, plus the Bluetooth friendly name (like SOS W350 or Sean's Mobile) if there is one.

It's the latter in particular that I think is causing the problem, although of course, hard-core privacy people would also be concerned about the ability of someone to find out my Bluetooth address and then search the Cityware data (if that were possible) to pick up my "trails" in the system.

On balance, I'm with the Cityware people on this one. Here's why: I reckon I'm "tracked" in some fashion about (wild guess) 200-500 times per day: Credit Card usage, Surveillance cameras *everywhere*, my mobile phone (by the operator), car-tolls (EZPass), Bus passes, ATM usage, and so on, and so on. OK, I know some of these are different, and in theory, they're all in different databases. So argument number one is that Cityware doesn't really add an undue overhead to what's already going on. Plus, some of these are "non optional to me" - I can't ask the store owner to switch off the CCTV while I do my business. Not a great argument I know, but it brings me to my second point: control.

Argument number two is: if you want to not be tracked by Cityware, it's easy. Switch off Bluetooth entirely (safest if you're really concerned). If that's a pain, just ensure your friendly name is set to something innocuous, as opposed to say, your name, your address, and your PIN code :-)

Argument three is: eh, don't live in Bath. Ok just kidding on that one. In fact, the software has been used in other cities also, so even if you don't live in the lovel city of Bath, you may be "at risk".

I have a little bit of sympathy for Simon Davies, of Privacy International who said this:

"For Bath University to assert that there aren't privacy implications demonstrates an astonishing disregard for consumer rights. If the technology is as safe as they claim, then all the technical specifications should be published and people should be informed when they are being tracked."

I agree a little: there are some privacy implications, but in my opinion, they're just not radically different from the environment we're immersed in every day.

Where Simon completely loses my sympathy is when he says this:

"It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control."

This is just untrue, and gives the Privacy brigade a bad name. Somewhat hyperbolic to say the least. Dr Evil will have to install Bluetooth radios within 50-100 feet of every living person in every city in order to make this "ubiquitous", and it's a little unfair to say you have no control when you can , you know, just....turn.....Bluetooth......off.

Anyway - I think the project is way cool, and is genuinely interesting research. I also think that if they force people to opt in to the project (as in, alert people every time they're going to collect a bit of info) then the experiment is affected dramatically, and it alters the data. I think this is data worth analysing, not least because it may have clues for we might better manage how and where our identities are exposed by the electronic bag of tricks we carry around.

Posted by Sean at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was at a Mobile Web 2.0 Summit recently in London. Part of the conference had a "pitch" session for startups. Each company had 10 minutes to pitch their wares to the attendees, who included VCs, Telecom Executives, Press and assorted bloggers and industry people. Dial2Do even pitched (and sang)! But that's another story...

One of the companies that pitched was called aka-aki, from Germany. They are a very interesting startup that mashes up Bluetooth, Social Networking and some other concepts into an innovative service. I asked them if they would consider doing an interview for our blog, and they kindly agreed. This area, which I'll choose to call:

proximity-and-location-based-social-networking

is heating up now, with Imity being acquired by Zyb recently, and with a few other players having emerged in the last 6-12 months. So - without further ado.......

1. Give us a brief background on the company. How did it come about - what was the inspiration? How many people are there now, and where are you based?

aka-aki evolved from the diploma project of 5 of the 8 founders at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2007. The inspiration was to bring about all the functions known from social networking on the internet to the streets. Because real life is still not happening in front of a computer. It happens on trains, in universities, in bars and clubs and airport waiting areas. So clicking people would be very useful here in real life on the streets. So we had this vision and found technologies that everyone carries in their pocket (bluetooth and mobile internet connections) to bring social networking to real life. We created aka-aki, got the best score at university for it and decided to found a company that goes on developing aka-aki and brings it to the market. Now, in summer 2008, aka-aki is a Berlin based startup with 14 people working in the office.

2. Tell us a little bit about yourselves. What's your background? What are you working on in general?

Most of the founders of aka-aki have a marketing background - they studied advertising and strategic communications. With this background they know about the important challenges for any mobile application in a still-developing market. but they also know how to face them and are now working full time in their company to make aka-aki what is called a killerapp. Of course this happens hand in hand with the IT specialist co-founders and software developers! But the fact that the founders do not come exclusively from the IT field, brings a special extremely user-focused way of thinking to the company. A lot of other companies seem to have a great technology first and then hire some marketing people to find something it could be used for. We do it the other way around.

3. Give us the elevator pitch on Aka-aki? Who's it for? What does it (basically) do? We'll go in to more detail on key features later on...

Aka-aki can be used both with a PC via the community website and a Java application on the cellphone. It offers three main features:

1. It lets you click people in reality: When someone interesting is around, the cell phone instantly shows you a photo, common interests, mutual friends and much more.

2. aka-aki automatically writes your personal diary of encounters: it saves all your encounters for future reference on the aka- aki website, so you can even make new contacts later on. It could be the end of the business card and the second chance for missed connections.

3. It lets you carry your friends in your pocket: aka-aki helps you to keep in touch with your friends on the go: text messages can be exchanged, no matter whether from the website to the mobile, from the mobile to the web or whatever. and using microblogging you can show your friends what you are up to right now and see what they are doing.

All in all it is fun on the go. And it is the first mobile community with elk. Yes, elk.

4. How long have you been working on aka-aki?

The diploma project started in fall 2006. Software development started in spring 2007. After having founded the company in summer, we started a closed beta test in late summer 2007 and opened the service to the public on April 3rd 2008.

5. What stage is it at now?

Well, right now it is still in beta. And developing. We research how the users use it, what they think and do with the features we offer them. This is a process that will not stop. As long aka-aki is used by people it will continue to change. Since the public launch we have almost 5000 people signed up and using it as of June 2008. We still consider it to be at a very early stage. And of course, there is much more to come.

6. What's it built or written in? What platforms does it support? What influenced the tools or languages you chose to write the software in?

For now the mobile interface is a Java app for mobile phones. That decision was made very early, because at the moment this is the only platform that is supported by a very large number of phones. Apps for iPhone, Blackberry and WindowsMobile will follow.

We started with Java because it is supported by the largest number of devices. We always knew that the biggest challenge for aka-aki would be to gain a critical mass of users. So we chose to make technical barriers as low as possible. That is also the reason why we chose bluetooth and not GPS.

7. Were there particular technical limitations of Bluetooth, or Java, or JSR82 or other technology that you had to address? If so - give us a little bit of background on that?

No. Even JSR82 seems to be quite widespread today. Bluetooth is limited to about 20 meters, but that is no problem for our approach of telling something about the people that are really THERE. If my GPS tells me something about somebody around the next block and whom I cannot see... well, I probably would not talk to him anyway.

But aka-aki is always open for including other technologies when they become widespread enough and if they enable new interesting features that make the user experience better.

Of course porting is always a problem that needs a lot of time and man power. But we give our best. And we also handle this by having a basic version of the service that can be used without the mobile app. That is what our pending patent is about.

8. You have a patent pending in an area that sounds pretty cool - can you elaborate on that a bit and explain it?

The patent pending technology allows us to log encounters between mobile devices without the need for software being installed on those devices. So we can include information on who met whom when into social community networks. Using this we can make the technical barriers for potential users even lower.

9. What was the biggest problem or roadblock you had to deal with in the project so far? Technology? Money? People? Location?

Well, we had no real road blocks to date. We always faced the problems when they appeared and solved them or adapted strategy.

One of the biggest problems for us are the costs for mobile data services in Germany. But this is changing right now. Though slowly.

And, as everywhere in the European IT industry, finding J2ME developers is a challenge. So, if anyone looks for a job in rocking Berlin... call us!

10. What's next? What do you hope to work on over the next 12 months?

One next big thing will be the launch of the english version to make aka-aki available for international users. Further there will be versions for other platforms.

11. Anything else I should have asked you? Anything else you'd like to say?

Sign-up! www.aka-aki.com

And finally of course, there's the mystery of the elk :-)

Posted by Sean at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)