James Eberhardt and the magical land of SMS

Today in Web Authoring or possibly Multimedia Pioneering, we had a guest speaker named James Eberhardt. James started his presentation with.....well I'm not sure actually because I was late. But I was only late because of my job, which required me to get up super early and proof some print material for our event on Friday, which is called French Quarter Festival btw. Incidentally, it's all that's been on my mind of late and it's even starting to seep into my dreams.

Anyway, back to the presentation.

James taught me some really basic things about cell phones that I didn't know, or didn't think enough about to realize it. Like for instance, SMS stands for Short Message Service. I never knew what it stood for, even though I text message Jeff fairly often. Also that there are three types of messages, person to person, computer to person and person to computer. Which made me think of my E-Commerce days, where we talked about Business to business, business to consumer and the very rare consumer to business.


Our speaker also talked about 2D barcoding, or QR Code or Datamartrix. It's a 2D barcode that allows for way more information than a traditional barcode, like ones cashiers scan when you purchase products, which are 1D. Once the information is in a barcode format then a barcode reader decodes the information. Apparently this is crazy big in Japan, but I can see it catching on here too. James even showed us a picture of one of these barcodes at Niagara Falls, some place I've actually been to.

How does that relate to mobile/cell phone technology? Well you can have a barcode reader on your cell phone, so when you're at Niagara Falls you can scan/capture an image of, the barcode, decode it and find out all the information available. And Johnson and Johnson is putting these barcodes on their products as well, so their employees at shipping docks/warehouses can scan the barcode and get more information and have it electronic instead of print outs all the time. Saving the environment one barcode at a time. :)

Anyway, the Falls barcode is part of the Semapedia project, which has barcodes placed around the world which decode into wikipedia pages about whatever attraction the barcode is at. Now, they don't have a huge ton of barcodes out there but they do have a map of the world which shows where they are at the moment which is kinda cool.

Quite frankly though, I would worry that someone would think it's vandalization or garbage, and the stickers would be ripped off buildings/sign posts etc. I know where I live there are graffiti artists that put stickers of their art on different things and they are ripped off. How are the uninformed, untechnological masses to know what the barcode is and what it really means?

Well the first start is to get people decoders. Here are some links to decoders for your cell phone: Kaywa Reader (Most phones including a Java Reader) or QuickMark. Plus you can also generate your own QR & Data Matrix codes on these sites.

Side bar: Captial One allows you to use your own images to create a unique credit card. Wouldn't it be cool if you used a 2D barcode as your image. Then you could create a wiki on yourself or whatever. How funny would it be if you credit card got stolen and the thief scanned the barcode and you could give them a message like, "You thief! You're screwing up my credit score!"

James also mentioned that you can make applications for cell phones with html. But if you want to get fancy, you need:

Flash CS3 professional, adobe device central
Testing device, ie. phone (Nokia is recommended)
Connection to the phone: memory stick/bluetooth/cable

But then he said, that action script 3 isn't supported, only action script 2 and they don't support flash lite 3 and that flash 8 would be best. Which I think, means that the technology we're going to use to create cell phone applications won't run on cell phones. AKA, we're too technologically advanced for the new technology we're learning. Sweet.

Another cool thing that James showed us was Adobe Device Central. Which allows you to select a phone to display your program in, and then create the program and run it and you can click on the buttons to see how they interact with the program you created. Plus you can switch between 10 different phones or more to see how the application looks in them, without buying multiple phones to test things out on. Which is very cool. James suggested going to moblie.processing.org which is about java based application development, through JAR files instead of SWF.

Mr. Eberhardt also talked about the future of cell phones. Which is multi-functional phones, which can call people, produce video, take photos, text message, play radio, play mp3s etc. He posed the question to the class is this a good thing?

Yes and No. Yes it's a good thing because you can do much more with your phone than ever before and you can reach people and information you need from nearly where ever you are. No because if you can do all your work, or a large majority from your cell phone where does work end and personal time begin? Another downside is the all in one printer syndrome. All in one or 3 in one printers came on to the scene saying that they could copy, fax, scan (staple, fold, shred too, on some models) and wouldn't it be wonderful to have a machine that took care of all your office needs? It would be. Except that those types of machines rarely work. They can do their main function of copying but everything else is flaky at best. We already have the same problems on cell phones. Sure they can play music but what type of quality do you get verses a stereo or mp3 player or James' turntable? Texting is already super slow at 10 words a minute. Images and videos taken by phones are usually horrible resolution and quality. So what happens when we have more and more applications? Good question.

To sum up: Mobile technology is immature, flash doesn't have wide spread access, java has a lot of bugs and Canadian download fees are insane. But in the future...it's going to be awesome. And it's just one more reason I should be buying an I-Touch or an I-Phone.

Oh and one last thing before we go onto the links section. James Eberhardt's home wireless network is called the batcave. I love that.

Links for Marks:

QR Code or Datamartrix.
Semapedia with their map of the world
Mobile Device Blog - came up in my research which is kinda cool
Kaywa Reader or QuickMark to decode barcodes and create them
Adobe Device Central
Mobile Processing