Mobile-related technologies for the past week, in 3 (or almost) words: Audio News, Spy, What And Not Who

1. 1
THE WEEK IN 3 WORDS

2. 2
WEEK #24

3. AUDIO NEWS
3

4. 4
How to make young people more interesting in worlds news and not
only in their social network news? This is the question that Clippet, a
UK-based company, asked itself.
And it came with a rather clever solution. Not a revolution,
far from it, but an intelligent approach of how to format
news so that busy kids can still get informed: audio
snippets. News are encoded into a less than 60 seconds
audio clip and are consumable on the go, without disrupting
other activities, such as browsing social networks… Great,
huh?
Of course, it does not solve the issue of not getting all pieces of
information related to an event to really understand it: this is the user’s
responsibility. But if it just make young people aware of the world
around them, it’s already a bold move!

5. SPY
5

6. 6
Internet of Things introduces the following paradigm: any object can be
connected to the Internet, so that it can communicate with other objects
on a 2-ways basis: send and receive information.
It draws a world of infinite possibilities, where still objects
become connected and start sharing data together, for
automation, security, more comfortable and better life. But it
also opens the door to spy and hacking… Using Shodan, a search
engine that actually looks for connected devices, it is possible to get
remote access to a connected device. Remotely sending printing jobs
can be fun, but remotely controlling a surveillance camera may be
pretty harmful in terms of privacy.
Connected devices vendors should be vigilant to prevent facing the
issue of end-users being spied or hacked, because this would very
likely chill the market.

7. WHAT AND NOT WHO
7

8. 8
What if the most important part of a social network was what was
shared and not who shared it?
This is the promise of OnStaged, which focuses on
the content being posted more than on the author.
Actually, users are invited to give their point of view
(like or dislike) for a content before they can actually
discover who posted the content. This is to make sure
(according to the application authors) that a content is
not seen only because its author is famous.
This is a bit more than yet another social application, because it
tries to modify the social network paradigm by focusing on
content rather that on people.