Neos

Massimo Pettiti enters Neos as CIO

Massimo Pettiti, former Head of Innovation at H3G - Tre Italia, enters Neos as Chief Innovation Officer to develop innovative services in the mobile and wireless domain.

Neos partners with GS1

Neos demonstrates the reality of mobile commerce for businesses and consumers with the integration of 1D and 2D barcodes and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags with iPhones and smartphones

Neos discusses advances in ubiquitous computing at the Osservatorio BelTel round table

Neos discusses the ubiquitous computing vision and its implementation in mobc3 with a number of experts in the round table Calm Technologies: una tecnologia di servizio e supporto agli utenti organized by the Osservatorio BelTel

The MobiLife book goes on print

Based on the cooperative research effort to which Neos participated in 2005-2007 and co-authored by Neos professionals Dario Melpignano, Luca Galli and Rinaldo Nani, the MobiLife book, published by Wiley, describes the architectural framework, the results and the conclusions of practical work during 2.5 years. It includes a defined service architecture/infrastructure with interoperable components on user interaction, context-awareness, privacy & trust, personalization, and services support; definitions of key enabling technologies; reference applications for a number of innovative applications/service concepts; and qualitative evaluations and field studies with more than 250 end-users in Italy and Finland. The architecture and technology solutions have been validated both in technical and non-technical dimensions. It  includes marketplace analysis with validations by more than 20 key experts in Finland, The Netherlands, U.K, Italy and Germany; and pioneering legal/regulatory analysis of the challenges related to new advanced application/service solutions with remarks on, e.g., personalization and Digital Rights Management.

Living lab-style mobile services in Hasselt

The involvement of over 700 people living in Hasselt - with many more to come - in a stable experimentation of mobile applications and services has been indeed one of the most interesting examples of what can be achieved according to the "open innovation" model championed by the Living Lab movement. The Hasselt i-City case and others have been discussed at the Living Labs Open Innovation Community and European Network of Living Labs Event, which just took place in the Belgian city. We joined the meeting both because of our interest in participatory design approaches and as members and promoters of the Milano Living Lab interest group. The meeting hosted also the launch of the call for a second wave of Living Labs.

MobiLife successfully concluded

After more than two years of intense work, last week Neos joined the final Helsinki meeting of MobiLife, one of the most relevant European collaborative R&D projects on mobile applications and services - find here a page listing all the project results.

We are very proud and happy for having taken part in this effort, in which we contributed mostly to:

• Scenarios and user studies (see e.g. scenarios and guidelines public version and final service and application evaluation)
• Marketplace analysis and business modelling (including e.g. the initial market overview, the design of a set of business models and a final market and socio-economics analysis)
• Group management and coordination technologies, as represented especially with the Group Display Widgets and the Time Gems application (see e.g. the final report on the groups work area)
• Context-awareness technologies, with a strong focus on personal context and personal health through the HeartPod application (find again e.g. the final report on the context work area).

Neos is actively working on the commercial exploitation of the project results and look forward to continue as well the R&D work in these fields. As for now, it is time to express our big thanks to Nokia Research as project coordinator and all the other partners: Alcatel, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, NEC, Siemens, DoCoMo Communications Laboratories Europe, Elisa Corporation, Fraunhofer FOKUS, University of Helsinki, Universität Kassel, The University of Surrey, Telematica Instituut, UNIS, Suunto, BellStream, Helsinki University of Technology, Telecom Italia Lab.

Context and content, Neos at the ITU Mainz event

The emergence of "context as content" - with its business and regulatory challenges - has been the topic of the presentation given by Luca Galli at the ITU Mainz workshop on "The Regulatory Environment for Future Mobile Multimedia Services", hosted by the Germany Federal Network agency ("Bundesnetzagentur", see the nice nameplate with the imperial eagle). Some 60 experts participated in the workshop, representing a range of regulatory and policy-making agencies, mobile operators, service providers, academic institutions, private firms, and others.

Luca talked about a number of application and services developed in the MobiLife project. The main idea was about discussing how "context" and context-based solutions can be seen in the people's perspective by means of some simple questions like “What are you doing?” (to represent one's place and situation) or “How do you feel?” (talking about one's physical conditions) or “Would you like to join us?” (referring to possible social settings).

Business modelling and regulatory challenges have then been pointed out, touching issues like value networks evolution, content adaptation and copyright violation, privacy and trust changing attitudes, among others.

As a sidenote, we did enjoy also the "national party" feeling that was so high in Mainz - and all around Germany - for the World Cup (even at the airport... have a look at the dudes playing in one of the Flughafen Frankfurt public lounges).

Mobile applications from business model perspective

Neos and other MobiLife partners have analyzed the service architectures enabling advanced mobile applications from a business model perspective; results are reported in a paper presented at the 15th meeting of Wireless World Research Forum in Paris.

Download wwrf15_wg2_service_architecture_enabling_advanced_mobile_applications_
from_business_model_perspective.pdf

Broadband effect in Europe

IAB Italia web site links a presentation from Nielsen NetRatings on the "broadband effect"; very interesting takes about how broadband transforms people usage of the Internet and affects advertisers and publishers businesses.

Neos joins Nexway panel in Leuven: "Is the user still in control"

Neos participates to the Nexway project workshop on socio-economics. A stated in the title, the workshop investigates these issues against future develoipments in wireless services: "In pursuit of future Wireless services, the Socio-Economic aspects" (Download nexway_ws_on_socioeconomics_final_programme.pdf). The workshop concludes with a discussion (in which we are among the panelists) on a key question: "Is the user still in control?".