Neos

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.

MobilLife demo in Torino, Winter Olympics setting

Over the last week-end we had the opportunity to engage users with some of the MobiLife project applications at the Experimenta site, where a number of Winter Olympics initiatives were ongoing. Among other things, people had a chance to experiment with the innovative group management features of a leisure-oriented service or using their own body as an interaction mean to sky on a virtual slope. And finally they had their word to say as we asked them to give some feedback.         

                                                

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?".