posts tagged ‘mobile devices & interfaces’

It’s time to reap the context-aware harvest

21 September 2010 | Bo Begole

It's ironic that following the invention of the Personal Computer workstation and laptop computers at PARC, researchers would then turn toward making the computer disappear. To most people at the time, having a single “personal” computer was a dream, but Mark Weiser and many others envisioned that we’d soon all have more than just one personal computer in our lives... Today, context awareness isn't about devices and location - it's about people getting things done.

Tempted by location apps?

5 November 2009 | Richard Chow

Privacy should be the biggest concern for users of location-based social networking apps like Foursquare, Google Latitude, Loopt, and others. Will these companies store and analyze your location traces to figure out what ads to show you as part of their business model? You can deduce a lot about people from their locational traces: where they sleep and work and play, what stores and restaurants they like, who they spend time with, more.

Will mobile payments usher in a new era of crime?

13 October 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

With the recent news that Amazon launched a mobile payments service, I have to wonder if fraud will go through the roof. But Amazon wisely invented 1-Click payments to reduce user burden, and soon this feature will apply to mobile users. All of this is very nice and convenient for the user. Except if you're among the 8+ million users a year who lose their mobile phones. Then it becomes very nice and convenient for whoever finds your phone.

Fear mobile malware

1 September 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

Online criminals have many tools for committing fraud and theft, including phishing and, increasingly, malware. A more acute problem is mobile malware, which will pose a serious threat to mobile communications as smartphone use explodes. The inherent limitations of smartphones – power, memory, bandwidth – make most anti-virus tools unsuitable once the rate of malware instances reaches a certain threshold, because smartphones can't handle the updates that PCs currently have to. So what happens when malware authors start developing viruses for smartphones at the rate they currently do for personal computers? We may not have to wait long to find out, because mobile platforms are rich with data and are convenient payment platforms ripe for defrauding. We must find better solutions before it's too late. And we can't use current strategies to combat the problem, because the mobile context is so much more vulnerable and resource-constrained.

Reducing the password burden: Implicit Authentication

17 August 2009 | Elaine Shi

How many times a day do you enter passwords in different places AND multiple times in the same place? While passwords are the most widely used method for authenticating users to computer systems and protecting our information, they're also difficult to remember, inconvenient, poorly used, and not always secure. There are multiple ways to authenticate us (something we know, have, are) -- but why not use our habits or routines to implicitly authenticate us?

Making mobile printing easier with QR codes

5 August 2009 | Bo Begole

One of the best features of the new class of U.S. mobile smartphones is that they're finally capable of reading QR (Quick Response) codes. These codes, which already appear all over Japan and Korea, are 2D bar codes typically displayed on something -- such as a poster, webpage, magazine ad, or store window -- and captured by a phone camera. The phone decodes the image and launches the appropriate application to see the text, browse the website, send SMS, or call the number that was contained in the QR code. In all these scenarios, the phone is reading the QR code. But you can also turn this model on its head by having the phone display the code to be read by another device.

Augmented Reality: Increasing collective intelligence

23 July 2009 | Lawrence Lee

Search engines like Google have trained us to believe we can find the answer to any question. Now activity streams from Twitter, Facebook, and others are changing our expectations around information yet again. We now demand information in real-time that’s socially and contextually relevant. Contextual information transforms our interactions within our physical environment... This area of research is called Augmented Reality, and it spans a wide spectrum of applications...