archive for the ‘social, mobile, & ubiquitous computing’ category

Heads Up, Hands On

22 October 2012 | Editor, on behalf of guest contributor

By Nicole Daphne Tricoukes, Senior Maverick in charge of the Motorola HC1 Headset Computer program

What does it take to bring an innovative idea to life?

Well, first a great idea. Then, it requires a proven framework and resources to help champion it through the development process. And sometimes, external expertise helps turn the concept into an actionable, revenue-generating opportunity.

Our idea? To redefine hands-free mobility and change how people interact with their mobile computers by creating a new category of device. One that is lightweight, stylish and intelligently allows users to access and view business-critical documents and complex schematics with just a simple voice command or turn of the head; or to quickly and simply collaborate with remote team members. No hands, laptop or fixed mobile workstation required.

That’s the power of the new HC1 headset computer from Motorola Solutions. This exciting new mobile computing concept delivers true ...

PARC Innovations Update (2011 #3)

21 June 2011 | Editor

[e-newsletter archive ~April-May 2011] the context issue: devices and content everywhere

Languages and social network behaviors: Top 10 languages on Twitter

26 April 2011 | Lichan Hong

There's a tendency on the part of designers, researchers, and others to assume that English-language users' behaviors in social networks generalize to that of other language users. But in a recent study where we examined 62 million tweets collected over a four-week period, we found significant differences in how people of different language backgrounds used features such as URLs, hashtags, mentions, replies, and retweets. But first: how did we examine this large-scale data set?

Ubiquitous Computing: For business

19 April 2011 | Bo Begole

There’s a big gap in publications about technology business. There are technical books that explain the low-level details of technologies, how they work, and how to piece them together. There are vision books that describe how the world will change dramatically and inspire us to think beyond what we see today. Then there are business books that explain how to manage and operate technology companies. While such books provide comprehensive and complete explorations within their genre, they tend to gloss over the important aspects of the other genres. Technical books leave business readers wondering why a capability matters, business books lack technical novelty, and vision books leave us all wondering, “Um…okay. Now what?” With Ubiquitous Computing for Business, I try to bridge these gaps by describing a set of innovation case studies around ubiquitous computing and the business implications thereof...

ASC blog deprecated (moved to parc.com)

28 March 2011 | ASC authors archive (Ed Chi)

This entry serves as a marker that the ASC Team blog is no longer active. From now on, PARC's social computing researchers will blog at: http://blogs.parc.com/blog/topics/social-computing/ Ed H. Chi has left PARC and became a Research Scientist ...

Finding inbox meaning in a time of overload

4 February 2011 | Victoria Bellotti

[contributed post to Inbox Love, produced by 500 Startups] Email is, for many knowledge workers, a habitat: the place where they spend most of their working day online. Indeed it can be thought of as knowledge work’s Grand Central Station as far as information distribution and workflow are concerned. A major part of knowledge worker information overload is trying to manage the influx of email content in terms of prioritizing obligations communicated via email and making sure they can always locate the resources they need within all the content in their inbox. In order to handle the demands being placed upon it, email needs to be far better integrated with its users’ content, communication streams, and productivity tools, and come pre-armed with powerful features to support things like content organization, project planning, workflow, content retrieval, analytics and so on...

"Location" Field in Twitter User Profiles (and an interesting fact about Justin Bieber)

18 January 2011 | ASC authors archive (Ed Chi)

Interest in geographic information has intensified in the last year or two. One of the ways in which people obtain geolocation data is the decoding of the "Location" field during account sign-up. Many researchers have used this field for analysis of w...

CCN now supports Android

4 November 2010 | Jim Thornton

Yesterday's network architecture simply does NOT suit today's proliferation of multimedia, data, and mobility in a broadly connected world.

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.

Revamping WikiDashboard

3 September 2010 | ASC authors archive (Ed Chi)

I released WikiDashboard almost three years ago. Believe it or not, the server for WikiDashboard has been running under my desk for three full years (the photo shows the actual server). It was launched in a rush to meet a deadline for an academic pape...