Google’s Grand Central providing phone numbers and voice mail service to the homeless:

“When you lose your home, you lose more than your house,” said Google’s spokesman. “You lose a permanent way of staying in touch with family members, employers, and social service providers. Being able to give a phone number to people and access voicemail can be a very powerful thing in sustaining quality of life.” [via CNET, “Google expands free phone number and voicemail project”]

Grand Central has always looked like a good service. Now it looks even better.

The whole question of using a married name versus retaining one’s “maiden” name is really interesting. There are so many levels of practical and political and emotional and interpretational meaning to a name that there may be no way to disentangle them from one another. The classic “practical” reason for retaining a maiden name would be career recognition: making yourself easy to find, and building on previous reputation, rather than starting over with a new name.

I’ve noticed that the “practical” reason has widened its net… if you want to be found by old friends on Facebook or any other social networking site (or via a Google search, for that matter), you can’t be found if the searcher doesn’t even know your name. Which provides a new incentive for retaining your maiden name, even if only for your online identity.

Identity, indeed. Quite literally.

It will be interesting to watch and to see if this apolitical influence has greater ramifications or impact than simply seeing two last names in social network profiles. Will there be a change in how women perceive their identities as conjoined or distinct from their husbands’? Will there be an increase or decrease in feminist affiliations? In respect for women and their identities as such?

Or will it be another meaningless blip in electronic evolution, made insignificant by progress in tracking and maintaining contacts and relationships online?

If operator hardware sales behavior started to threaten a device manufacturer’s own revenue stream, would the manufacturer continue to be cautious about not offending carrier sensibilities? Or would they throw the first punch by offering service themselves?

It’s not so farfetched, is it?

Related and perhaps illuminating business cases:

• Helio / SK Telecom
• Vertu / Nokia / Ovi / Nokia-Siemens Network
• iPhone / iTouch / iTunes /.Mac
• Google / Android / YouTube / Flickr

Finnish vendor Nokia announced an extension of its mobile music platform on Tuesday, with the unveiling of a subscription service that allows users to keep their music.

At its annual investor day in the Netherlands, Nokia announced its ‘Comes With Music’ platform, that enables people to buy a Nokia device with a year of unlimited access to millions of tracks.

Once the year is complete, customers can keep all their music without having to worry about it disappearing when their subscription is over. [see telecoms.com for the full story]

This is very similar to Nokia’s purchase and inclusion of mapping software on high-end devices (something we discussed in the Mobile Marketing panel at the MoMo Summit). The buzz is that “it’s all about content” — that future revenues are going to be driven primarily by content.

Take a look at how Apple’s iTunes fits into its strategy: revenues are huge at 36%, but the importance is in the content’s role in driving sales of the iPod and computer hardware lines. That lesson hasn’t been lost on others. Think Amazon and Kindle, Nokia and Ovi, Sony and their upcoming revamped music store.

But is the buzz true as a trend?

What do these activities say about company strategy? Where are these players expecting their future revenues growth to come from?

1. Hardware sales? The device is the money maker, with higher prices/differentiation justified by including free content — sales of devices driven by consumer desire for the “free” (or premium) content included; or
2. Content sales? The hardware is a one-off sale, but the ongoing revenues from online content and subscription sales are the real money-maker; or
3. Something else entirely?

It’s clear that the future of computing in general — the big future — is in mobile. Desktop computers, home media centers, and laptops will be nice CE moneymaking appliances, like microwaves and large-screen TVs. Sure, they’re more necessary than luxuries like designer espresso machines, but you can live without them, for example, if you are struggling to pay off student loans.

Mobiles will be like refrigerators or washing machines. You just can’t manage without them. That’s already true now, but at the moment it’s more of a psychological need to not miss anything. As mobile email improves, flat data plans roll out, web browsing becomes usable, phone memory grows to accommodate video and audio entertainment realistically, downloading becomes easier rather than sideloading… as those things happen, the mobile device will be completely embedded as the primary computing device in fact, not just in theory. As the N95 ads say, “it’s what the computer has become” and it’s true (but not of the N95, I’m afraid).

The “content driving sales of content” model: Amazon’s Kindle appears to seek its profits not on device sales, but on opening the market to ebook sales. Is this how they intend to compete with Google’s devaluing of books… by making books affordable through non-printing? Cutting out of the loop the paper, the printing, the ink, the distributor, the store? Making it palatable by including the cellular connection? (Worthy of note: O’Reilly Radar)

The “content driving sales of hardware” model: This appears to be Nokia’s: rolling the cost of the content into the hardware, and keeping the content free by owning it themselves and amortizing the cost over tens of millions of hardware units.

The “content driving sales of advertising” model: Google. The evolution of the tried-and-true broadcast television model. It certainly works for Google. Will we see the day when Google struggles to maintain its advertising value as broadcast networks have? Surely a company is incubating somewhere that will eventually grow to challenge Google’s dominance… then what?

The “hardware driving sales of hardware AND content” model: Although you might argue that people purchase iPods because they want to use iTunes Music Store for price and ease of use… I wouldn’t buy that argument. I would believe that after the hardware sale, the content is a huge follow-on market.

If Nokia is trying to emulate Apple’s model, why are they including all this free content? It erodes the follow-on possibilities. On the other hand, follow-on content sales for mobile devices have been anemic all along (ringtones, music, video, mapping, whatever). So… is Nokia taking for granted that follow-on sales are not that valuable for some reason on this platform? Or are they betting that by getting people to use the content, later on (say, in two years) they’ll be unwilling to give it up, and will pay for subscriptions, and that that will be worthwhile?

I’m not a believer in educating the market. You see, once people become accustomed to not paying for content (eg, television programming), it’s hard to get them to pay for that same delivery later on. What you CAN get people to pay for is previously free content in a more convenient delivery (think buying a song via iTunes for “only” $0.99 rather than hassling to load a CD that’s down in the basement).

What do these models all have in common? With the exception possibly of Apple’s hardware business*, everyone is trying to figure out how to harness desire for content as a driver for sales of whatever it is they sell. Or how to change what they sell in order to make it driveable by content desire.

Why does content desire matter so much? Content is what you experience when you use the device. It is what brings you back again and again to use the device — you want to talk to someone, you reach for the phone. You want to hear a song — you reach for the iPod. You want to watch a movie — you reach for the TV remote. Only now, you can just reach for the mobile phone to do any of those things. It’s the mobile-able content that matters most, because it’s wherever you are.

* You could make a decent case that Apple’s “hardware” sales are actually sales of experience: combined hardware and operating system. Consumers pay more for Apple’s products not because they are beautiful, although they are, but because they want the usable, beautiful, stable operating system and applications. Which are themselves content, in a way.

Right on. CNet’s One More Thing blog, inspired by the Verizon Wireless announcement that it would be opening its network to compatible, non-Verizon branded handset devices, analyzes the importance of open cellular networks, wherein consumers buy their devices outright from whichever retailer they prefer rather than receiving subsidized handsets.

Key points:

1. “This might make for more expensive phones up front, but it could also give phone makers the opportunity to come up with more innovative devices without having to get approval from Verizon for every last piece of software.”

2. ” ‘The provider of the device will determine the OS, distribution system, and whether to include Java applications. It is not ours to make that determination, that is up to the provider,’ said John Stratton, Verizon’s chief marketing officer.”

3. “…we’re going to want to do more than whatever a certain company’s executives decide is appropriate for us to do…”

4. “The dozens of companies gearing up to build phones based on Google’s Android software will have a huge network to design for in the U.S. And application developers will have 63 million potential new customers.”

All that said, I’m not convinced that Verizon’s announcement of this week heralds the fall of the cellular Iron Curtain. It would be nice if it did, though.

Somehow, I just had the opportunity of trying the new Google Alerts service today. Stupendous, whether by email or on your iGoogle homepage! From the site:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• • monitoring a developing news story

  • keeping current on a competitor or industry

  • getting the latest on a celebrity or event
  • keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

This is not to say that I don’t find Google’s ability to convince me to give them information about myself creepy…

An informed post on Google Phone’s Android Community blog, summarizing my MEX article, published earlier this week. (Android is Google’s recently announced new open-source platform).

[Note that Power2B is a technology company, not an interface design company. We study interface needs and future trends, and then innovate to enable those dreams to become reality.]

“As the many thousands of people who have Google as their homepage already know, search can be as simple as a box on a page.  Mobile search, however, requires something of a paradigm shift; no matter how glossy the UI, tactile the interface or clever the design, emulating desktop search on a cellphone is a frustrating, scroll-heavy experience.  Sarah…, of interface design company Power2B, discusses the demands for a semantically-linked, three-dimensional mobile search environment in an article for MEX today, resolving in what she calls “mesh connectivity vs. linearity” — where search navigation is guided one step at a time through a series of clarifying options.”

While I do link to YouTube videos, or sites that embed them, I do not embed them directly in my blog. Why not? YouTube uses the end of each video to promote links other videos and advertisements, and does not give me any control over what is displayed there.

Same goes for Google Ads, by the way. I’d rather have no advertising at all than find myself advertising products or services I don’t believe in, don’t support, or am offended by.

I was on one site (the homepage of a Jewish organization), and was sad to see Google Ads for missionary messianic Christian cults showing up in the sidebar. Cults are savvy enough to choose keywords that will show up in searches for Jewish content. On another occasion, a religious venture capitalist was unwittingly posting links to pornographic videos (the links being embedded in the closing frame of a humorous YouTube video); I wonder how many people activated one of those links intending to navigate to the main page of the humorous video?

Surely the site owners in both of these cases were not aware of what was creeping through the cracks, but that isn’t good enough. Not for me.

Many people will say, “Who cares? It’s just advertising. You don’t even know what’s going on. Maybe the ads are fine.” Sorry; I do know. I do care. I believe I need to take responsibility.

You can find a presentation of my thoughts on using patterns in nature to inform interaction models in today’s issue of the MEX Newsletter (the PDF version is posted here). Many thanks to Marek Pawlowski of PMN for the invitation to contribute to MEX’s ongoing user experience education. Preliminary work on this theme was first presented at MobileMonday Helsinki in June 2007.

Sarah is co-founder and director of research and development at Power2B. In this special article for the MEX newsletter ‘Search Patterns in Nature: Informing Computer Search Interfaces’, she discusses how natural phenomena provide a blueprint for a more efficient mobile search mechanism. The technique utilises an ‘always forward’ methodology, combining semantic information with a new method of presenting and navigating results to reduce cognitive load and help users reach their desired result more quickly.

Note dated May 30, 2007:

“My gosh, there is so much going on in Search this week as to not be even funny.

“BTW, note that not only does Quintura offer search for kids, but ‘Coming soon Quintura for Women…’ Can you imagine what’s going to happen when Quintura for Men hits the web?!”

However, upon revisiting the site today, I see no sign of “Quintura for Women” (although the kids’ link is still up). What a pity. It would have been so much fun to see how the tag clouds formed.

I’ve been fascinated by tag clouds, and the utility they offer by presenting multiple levels of information in an integrated and intuitively navigated way. Why are tag clouds “acceptable” and used in some contexts, and not in others? Why do I feel that a desktop-viewed Quintura-like presentation is less likely to find uptake than the tag cloud in the right column of this blog? When are tag clouds appreciated, when avoided? Which factors have the most influence: type of information? UI context? interaction means? search context?

By that last suggestion (”search context”) I mean to ask, Does it matter what kind of search I am performing? For example, when I use a tag cloud to find a post in a blog archive, there is a limited amount of data being shown to me, but that data probably includes what I need to know (what tags are available + how many of them there are, or how popular they are). The tags do not tell me anything about the chronology of the blog postings, the authors of the posts, the server location where the posts are stored, or even very much about the content of the posts. But that’s OK for the purpose at hand.

On the other hand, when I do a search on my desktop (or laptop) computer, it’s already hard enough for the search engine to figure out what I’m actually asking. (Does “rice history” request information about the history of grain, politics, or a university?) Presenting the results with a little bit of contextual content allows me (the user) to sort relevance for myself, based on the actual data. Presenting results in a tag cloud makes it harder to embed that content, making it less relevant for my use case.

On the other other hand (think Thai goddesses here), embedding the contextual data within the tag itself would partially offset the limitations of the tag cloud. Even better, embedding the path to the data and its related data would provide a means of searching within the tag cloud image itself. Enter semantic visualization.

Semantic tagging (of whichever type) describes the links and connections between different “nodes” of data. Semantic tagging has been primarily focused on providing the ability to computers to search large amounts of data intelligently — meaning, with “understanding” of the relationships within the data. However, a user interface that organizes information based on semantic links provides an opportunity for the searcher to navigate through enormous amounts of data very rapidly, according to whichever connections are meaningful to him or her at that moment. It allows for new connections, new relationships, and new meanings to be elicited through visualization of data connections. In fact, I’m not sure whether the semantic web will turn out to be more important for automated search or for human navigation of the results.

Those Quintura tag clouds are not, strictly speaking, tag clouds. They just appear to be so at first glance. They are tags leading into semantic groupings of information nodes. [I just love the way they present the visual mapping. There is something so alive about it. Which is why my husband bought me the Visual Thesaurus from Thinkmap. Not because I use a thesaurus all that much, but because I love to play around with it, and to create interesting collections of words. (Stop snickering.)]

Which brings me back around to some exploratory work I did this summer on mobile search UI. You can take a look at the early work as presented at the MobileMonday in Helsinki here.