M&S Using Datamatrix 2D Bar Codes

Alex Dutton and I are on our way to see the guys in Bristol who are
part of the JISC funded Rapid Innovation project “Mobile Campus
Assistant” (link to follow).

En route we noticed that Marks and Spencer have started putting 2D
barcides on some of their products to provide bits of information to
their customers.

Although there isn’t all that much useful on there at the moment, I
think it has potential to deliver some interesting ideas in the
future. I would be quite interested to see what kind of take up M&S
have from this.

My personal incling is that there may well be a large response
initially as they publish these codes on their products but unless
they can deliver some compelling content the trend will die down.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Datamatrix (2D Barcode) for m.ox.ac.uk

Points your Datamatrix readers at this! :) (Link is due to be live on the
5th October).

Posted via email from Mobile Oxford

Talking at the Open University Library Seminar

Yesterday Sebastian and I spoke at the Open University library seminar
regarding OxPoints and the upcoming Mobile Oxford (m.ox.ac.uk – coming
soon) website for mobile devices.

Slides below!

Download now or preview on posterous

intro.pdf (1664 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

geo.pdf (637 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

Erewhon – Open University Library Seminar 24th September.pdf (4510 KB)

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QR (2D Barcode) for m.ox.ac.uk

Points your QR Code readers at this! :) (Link is due to be live on the
5th October).

Posted via email from Mobile Oxford

Microsoft’s Sense Cam [via Techcrunch]

A device that you wear around your neck, photographs, geo-locates,
auto-tags and then automatically uploads your life to the cloud?
That’s what Microsoft Research at Cambridge came up with some time ago
with the “Sensecam”. Techcrunch makes a good point in saying that
although the concept of wearing such a device may seem rather horrific
to many people today, people of yesteryear would have been
uncomfortable making their personal photo albums available for the
world to see as we do with places such as Facebook and Flickr.
 
I think the concept is certainly pertinent and now is almost
inevitable, as a serious photographer I carry a GPS logger with me
whenever I go taking photographs and whenever I travel great distances
I like to keep a log of where I went for future reference. I would
quite like this information available to my ancestors to come too, so
a device like the sense cam would only make recording it easier.
 
Of course recording every minute of your day would certainly involve
storing a lot of pointless data, so you would need tools to help sift
through the data. One of the features the Sensecam concept
incorporated was that of ambient sensors to trigger recording only
when significant events happened, e.g. a change in lighting,
temperature or movement.
 
[Via TechCrunch]

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Interview about the Erewhon project at the JISC Rapid Innovation conference

I’m currently at the Rapid Innovation conference in Manchester, talking about the Erewhon project and forging links with others approaching similar problems.
Highlights so far include:

• Jasper Tredgold from the University of Bristol was great to talk to about their upcoming Mobile Campus Assistant
• Peter Pratt from the University of Edinburgh talked about Walking Through Time, which uses Google Maps on a mobile device to display historical maps for the local area
• Simon Harper from the University of Manchester represented Structural which, to quote, ‘is a user agent extension which can make sense of the implicit structural layout of a web page and adapt it into a format suitable for a mobile device’

Other interesting links include:

• Enabling Remote Activities – using Asterisk for VoIP in the field.
• Wookie – The Apache-incubated platform for widgets, implementing the W3C spec.

To round off the post, there’s an interview for the conference available at IE Demonstrator.

More analysis and information to follow!