Job: Fanhattan OpenGL Software Developer Opportunity

Via regular dgl collaborator Vidya Setlur. 

Forwarded message:

From: Jen Burns <jen@questgroups.com>
Date: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:39:23 PM
Subject: Fanhattan OpenGL Software Developer Opportunity...

Hope all is well. I wanted to reach out to you in regards to an opportunity I'm working on with Fanhattan located in San Jose. A company led by a team of experienced executives, designers, and engineers from TiVo, Netflix, Vudu, Disney, MTV, the VP of Engineering and he is currently looking for a solid OpenGL Software Developer. The company is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms including NEA, Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital, LA angel investor Jarl Mohn, and independent investors from the entertainment and technology industries. Please let me know if this is something you would be interested in. I have included the job req below.

OpenGL Software Developer

Description

Fanhattan is a service that inspires you to discover all the world's entertainment. Launched at All Things
Digital in June 2011, Fanhattan brings a new approach to entertainment discovery by helping you browse all the world's movies and TV shows with a simple and elegant user experience – in the living room, on the web, and on the go. The service encourages exploration by combining movies and TV shows with an expansive world of related content, visual assets, and information pulled from the web that bring entertainment to life. Finally, Fanhattan gives you the most comprehensive set of options on where to find the entertainment you want across the top digital media providers - Netflix, Hulu Plus, iTunes, VUDU, and ABC. The Fanhattan iPad app is now live in the App Store. Expect more platforms soon, and join us now to play a pivotal role as we evolve and grow the Fanhattan service. For more information,! you can check out our website (http://fanhattan.com) and our press: http://www.delicious.com/fanhattan .

The software developer will be part of a team building the OpenGL graphics engine for content rich consumer applications on mobile platforms. Develop, test, and release new features as well as maintain existing ones in a fast-moving agile test-driven development environment.

Required Skills
• Object-oriented programming skills
• Experience in using OpenGL ES in Android with 3D animations
• Experience in threading
• Experience in performance analysis and optimization
• Knowledge of OpenGL language and shading-techniques
• Knowledge of computer architecture and operating systems
• Knowledge of data structures

Personal Attributes
• Highly self-motivated and directed
• Adapting to new technologies quickly as needed
• ! Keen attention to detail

Education
Degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related fields

Jen Burns|  Technical Recruiter | Quest Groups

Engineering, Product, Development, Leadership
Tel: 650.328.4100 x123 | Cell: 650.296.5876

Jen@questgroups.com

 

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Spotted: optimization of touchscreen keyboards -- still hard to beat qwerty

Familiarity of new layouts may be a bad thing: an uncanny valley for text entry?

Multidimensional pareto optimization of touchscreen keyboards for speed, familiarity and improved spell checking

Mark Dunlop, John Levine

This paper presents a new optimization technique for keyboard layouts based on Pareto front optimization. We used this multifactorial technique to create two new touchscreen phone keyboard layouts based on three design metrics: minimizing finger travel distance in order to maximize text entry speed, a new metric to maximize the quality of spell correction by reducing tap ambiguity, and maximizing familiarity through a similarity function with the standard Qwerty layout. The paper describes the optimization process and resulting layouts for a standard trapezoid shaped keyboard and a more rectangular layout. Fitts' law modelling shows a predicted 11% improvement in entry speed without taking into account the significantly improved error correction potential and the subsequent effect on speed.

Spotted: crowd sourced study of typing on soft keyboards

Visual feedback reduces error, but slows speeds. 

Observational and experimental investigation of typing behaviour using virtual keyboards for mobile devices

Niels Henze, Enrico Rukzio, Susanne Boll

With the rise of current smartphones, virtual keyboards for touchscreens became the dominant mobile text entry technique. We developed a typing game that records how users touch on the standard Android keyboard to investigate users' typing behaviour. 47,770,625 keystrokes from 72,945 installations have been collected by publishing the game. By visualizing the touch distribution we identified a systematic skew and derived a function that compensates this skew by shifting touch events. By updating the game we conduct an experiment that investigates the effect of shifting touch events, changing the keys' labels, and visualizing the touched position. Results based on 6,603,659 keystrokes and 13,013 installations show that visualizing the touched positions using a simple dot decreases the error rate of the Android keyboard by 18.3% but also decreases the speed by 5.2% with no positive effect on learnability.

Spotted: Trajectory-aware mobile search


Trajectory-aware mobile search

Shahriyar Amini, A.J. Brush, John Krumm, Jaime Teevan, Amy Karlson
Most location-aware mobile applications only make use of the user's current location, but there is an opportunity for them to infer the user's future locations. We present Trajectory-Aware Search (TAS), a mobile local search application that predicts the user's destination in real-time based on location data from the current trip and shows search results near the predicted location. TAS demonstrates the feasibility of destination prediction in an interactive mobile application. Our user study of TAS shows using predicted destinations to help select search results positively augments the local search experience.

Spotted: Using mobile phones to support reducing power use


Using mobile phones to support sustainability: a field study of residential electricity consumption

Jesper Kjeldskov, Mikael B. Skov, Jeni Paay, Rahuvaran Pathmanathan

Recent focus on sustainability has made consumers more aware of our joint responsibility for conserving energy resources such as electricity. However, reducing electricity use can be difficult with only a meter and a monthly or annual electricity bill. With the emergence of new power meters units, information on electricity consumption is now available digitally and wirelessly. This enables the design and deployment of a new class of persuasive systems giving consumers insight into their use of energy resources and means for reducing it. In this paper, we explore the design and use of one such system, Power Advisor, promoting electricity conservation through tailored information on a mobile phone or tablet.

Spotted: using mobiles to capture and share what you toss

Hmm... Is this gamification or shamification? 

"We've bin watching you": designing for reflection and social persuasion to promote sustainable lifestyles

Anja Thieme, Rob Comber, Julia Miebach, Jack Weeden, Nicole Kraemer, Shaun Lawson, Patrick Olivier

BinCam is a social persuasive system to motivate reflection and behavioral change in the food waste and recycling habits of young adults. The system replaces an existing kitchen refuse bin and automatically logs disposed of items through digital images captured by a smart phone installed on the underside of the bin lid. Captured images are uploaded to a BinCam application on Facebook where they can be explored by all users of the BinCam system. Engagement with BinCam is designed to fit into the existing structure of users' everyday life, with the intention that reflection on waste and recycling becomes a playful and shared group activity.

Project: Retrospective

Retrospective Icon/Logo




Retrospective gives you a window to the past. Match the photographer’s position and see exactly what the camera captured years ago. Overlay the original picture with the current view to explore the past in a unique way. Share time travel through photography on Facebook and Twitter.

Other Links

Project: CitySeek: Raleigh





CitySeek: Raleigh is a game that allows families to explore interesting sites in Raleigh. Users choose a seeker, which corresponds to an interest or theme such as art, museums, nature, music, etc. Each seeker has a list of locations in Raleigh that are related to their particular theme. When the users visit each these locations they play a game that is usually similar to a scavenger hunt, and receive items and badges for their seeker for completing each location.

Project: Raleigh Retold


Welcome to Raleigh Retold: embracing Raleigh's untold history through multimedia.

With this interactive application, you can capture Raleigh's history through YOUR perspective with your phone's video camera, then publish and share your stories with this interactive social app. You can then view stories nearby you on an interactive map, and easily click through to view the associated multimedia. A small selection of demonstration videos are currently available. Support for additional multimedia inputs, including audio, text, and still image photography are coming soon.

Find: NCSU iPhone app offers tick essentials


NCSU iPhone app offers tick essentials

A team at N.C. State University has developed a free iPhone app called TickID, a field guide to the most commonly encountered ticks and tick diseases, including instructions for removing…

Find: 100,000 apps now available in the Windows Phone Marketplace

Windows phone has some momentum now. 

100,000 apps now available in the Windows Phone Marketplace

via d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net

Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace has now hit 100,000 applications. After reaching 50,000 apps in late December, the Marketplace has doubled in size in six months to reach a new milestone for Microsoft's mobile operating system. The software giant revealed the news during its Windows Phone Summit today in San Francisco.

Questions still remain on the availability of big name Windows Phone apps and quality over quantity, but Microsoft is clearly attracting more and more developers to its mobile platform. Alongside the milestone announcement, Microsoft also revealed that Draw Something and Word with Friends, are coming to Windows Phone devices soon.

Find: First BlackBerry 10 device won't have a hardware keyboard

Bad idea. Rim is text. It should champion the keyboard, not join the crowd abandoning it. 

First BlackBerry 10 device won't have a hardware keyboard

via cdn2.sbnation.com

We've suspected it ever since we revealed the keyboard-free BlackBerry London, but a RIM spokesperson has now confirmed that the first device to run BlackBerry 10 will not have a hardware keyboard. Of course, RIM knows that text input is extremely important to its users, and the company did well to focus on its software keyboard in the new operating system. We had an opportunity to test the keyboard on an alpha version of the OS, and while it's certainly not a replacement for a true keyboard, it's one of the better ones that we've seen thanks to its predictive text system. While the news that RIM will be foregoing a traditional keyboard with its first BB10 device may not be surprising, what's more interesting is that the spokesperson...

Find: Google Play letting app developers publicly reply to user reviews

Good idea. 

Google Play letting app developers publicly reply to user reviews

Android doll mascot logo

Typically, user reviews in mobile app stores are a one-way conversation, which can be frustrating for user and developer alike: devs can't explain that they're working on a particular fix or feature, tell the user when they're wrong (gently, of course), or ask for clarification without taking the conversation offline and out of the public view. Google is changing that today in Android's Google Play store, giving its hand-selected "Top Developers" (indicated with a blue badge) the ability to "gather additional information, provide guidance, and — perhaps most importantly — let users know when their feature requests have been implemented" with public replies in response to reviews that have been posted on their apps' product pages....

Android 4.1 is Jelly Bean

It's official. 

Android 4.1 is Jelly Bean and coming soon, Play Store confirms

google jelly beans

The Google Play Store listing for the Galaxy Nexus has confirmed that the next upgrade to Android will indeed be version 4.1 and be codenamed Jelly Bean. You can check out the little blurb of information below on the Play Store website if you're in the US right now, plus there's an image showing a couple of visual tweaks to the UI: a slightly altered search bar and a new background image. Admittedly, it's all very low-res and tells us little of substance, but we'll take all we can get until we can savor the full Jelly Bean experience. Which, judging by this mildly premature update to the Play Store, should be a lock for Google I/O next week.

Press: Students in Mobile App Design Course Win at CityCamp Raleigh


Our story as told by NCSU's Computer Science department.

CSC News

June 20, 2012

Students in Mobile App Design Course Win at CityCamp Raleigh

NC State professors Ben Watson from the Computer Science Department and Patrick Fitzgerald from the Department of Art and Design know that students learn more when they apply their new skills with real clients.  So, they sent students in this summer’s interdisciplinary Mobile App Design course to CityCamp Raleigh.  The students exceeded all expectations with one team, R Greenway, taking home the top prize and $5,000!
CityCamp Raleigh, held this year on June 1-3, is three days of open sourced talks, workshops, and hands-on problem solving, to re-imagine the way the web, applications, technology, and participation will shape the future of Raleigh.  CityCamp brings together citizens, city government and businesses together to openly innovate and improve our quality of life through technology.  All eight members of the Raleigh city council and Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane dropped by for portions of the event.
At CityCamp, participants think up ways technology can be used to improve local government.  R Greenway developed a greenway mobile application that allows people to know where they are on the greenway and how to connect to other trails.  The second place team, RaleighRetold, built a prototype that allows users to tell the story of their neighborhood by collecting audio, video and other multimedia.
R Greenway beat out nine other teams to take home the top prize.  Several students in the computer science department participated in the event:  Master’s student Deepali Rai (R Greenway), senior William Dobbins (RaleighRetold, the second place team), Master’s student Leonel Galan (LookingBack on Raleigh), senior Timothy Kinlaw (CitySeek Raleigh), and Master’s student Jeffrey Vohlers (CitySeek Raleigh).
For more information on CityCamp Raleigh, click here.
 ~coates~ 

Announcements: pencasts for last two crits are up

Folks,

I've put up the pencasts for the last two crits for our class (only) to access here. They should be a help on the home stretch.

These include Allscripts' visit.

Best,

Ben

Assignment: detail on submitting main project

Hey folks,

Just a reminder that you can find a description of exactly what we're looking for in your main project here.

In particular don't forget the project post.

Best,

Ben

Competition: Lean Investments

From the sound of things you may be giving up some IP rights if you enter this one.

Huawei promises first Windows Phone 8 device by year's end


Huawei promises first Windows Phone 8 device by year's end, in Europe, China, and the US

via cdn3.sbnation.com

Microsoft named four hardware partners for Windows Phone 8 devices — Nokia, Samsung, Huawei, and HTC — and surprisingly, Huawei just became the first partner to tell us when to expect a Windows Phone 8 smartphone in the United States. "2012 is building up to be a great year for Huawei. Now, we are poised to end the year with a big bang – with the introduction of our first smartphone running on the Windows Phone platform," said the company in a press release (bolding ours).

While Huawei typically builds devices primarily for its home market, the OEM also says that won't be the case this time around, as the so-called "Huawei Ascend with Windows Phone 8" is slated to arrive in Europe, China and the US first, before it spreads to other...

Find: Microsoft's Surface event video

Watch this: Microsoft's Surface event video now live

Steve Ballmer Microsoft Surface

Microsoft announced one of its more significant hardware products today, a Surface tablet running on Windows 8 or Windows RT. Although the company did not release pricing or availability information, consumers will be able to pick between an ARM-powered or Intel-based Microsoft Surface with varying specifications. If you followed our live blog, but wanted to see Steve Ballmer's excitement over Microsoft's latest gear then you'll want to check out the full video from the company's event, embedded below. Highlights include demonstrations of the built-in kickstand, pen functionality, and Touch or Type covers.

And if you just want to see Microsoft's slick, dubstep-infused intro video to the new tablets, we've got that for you below as...

Find: BlackBerry 10 keyboard hands-on

Sounds a lot like the swype, except that the suggestions appear directly over the keys. 

BlackBerry 10 keyboard hands-on (video)

Gallery Photo:

When RIM trotted out BlackBerry 10 for its official unveil last month we were left with frustratingly little to evaluate. We did get to spend some time with the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device, but it was essentially just a shrunken down PlayBook, and it didn't feature many of the new features that RIM teased us with. Thankfully, today at BlackBerry 10 Jam here in New York we've had the opportunity to use one of the most anticipated new features in BlackBerry 10 — a redesigned capacitive keyboard with predictive text recommendations.

Find: With the Surface, Microsoft just started writing its next chapter

Josh thinks it a good move.

With the Surface, Microsoft just started writing its next chapter

Microsoft Surface event

I first met Steven Bathiche when I took a trip to Microsoft's campus to check out what the company had been doing in the research and development department. Microsoft PR had sworn to me that I would be blown away by the "cool things" the company was doing, and I wanted to see for myself (you can watch the results here, here, and here).

Stevie's lab was located in a dark corner of one of the many, large buildings within the company's Seattle sprawl. The second I walked inside, it was clear the work happening inside was safely in the realm of mad science. Bathiche showed me a project he's been working on for some time which would allow you to create a virtual window from one room to another, utilizing a variety of display, motion sensing,...

Find: A first look at Microsoft's new Surface tablet

Sounds like a winner. 

A first look at Microsoft's new Surface tablet




Not actually a Surface.

Microsoft has unveiled Surface: a pair of tablet PCs and a pair of covers-cum-keyboards, designed for, and designed around, its Windows 8 operating system.

Microsoft's intent with the Surface tablets is to create hardware that puts the software front and center, to provide the hardware necessary to allow Windows 8's strengths to really come to the foreground. At the launch event, however, the software took the back seat. This was all about the hardware and with good reason.

The Surface tablets are smart, good-looking, carefully considered, well-built, slick pieces of kit, and there's nothing even close on the market today. Of course, they're not on the market today either, but unless the PC OEMs inject a serious dose of quality in their build and design processes, the Surface units will stand alone when they eventually go on sale.

Find: Create iPad Apps Intro

Media_httplebass3amaz_eozab

A nice intro to iPad development.

Find: Prepaid mobile phone use surges in US

Us prepaid at 25% of market. Well above 75% elsewhere.

Die, contracts! Prepaid mobile phone use surges




For the first time in the American mobile industry, contract customers have fallen.
Whether we like it or not, my wife and I recently became statistics. About eight weeks ago, we moved back to California after spending two years in Germany. We had a suspended T-Mobile USA contract while we were away and were likely going to re-activate it on our unlocked iPhones upon our return. But knowing that we’d only get EDGE speeds on our phones back in the US, it didn’t seem worth it to pay well north of $100 for two phones per month.
So we made the jump—becoming two more of the many Americans who have recently made the switch from postpaid to prepaid.
New industry data released in May shows American mobile phone operators have been hit with the first-ever net decline in contract (“postpaid”) subscriptions, a loss of 52,000 subscribers. And the number of non-contract ("prepaid") mobile customers has reached record levels—now accounting for about 25 percent of all mobile phone users in America.

Find: ABI -- apple and Samsung have 90% of the market

Htc and Nokia lose big, rim does ok. 

Samsung ships 43 million smartphones in Q1, dwarfs HTC and Motorola

Samsung and Apple are solidifying their positions as the number one and two smartphone vendors on the planet, according to a report from ABI Research. The two companies shipped 78 million handsets in the first quarter of the year, or 55 percent of the total, as big names like HTC, Motorola, Nokia, and RIM continue to backslide.

Apple shipped 35 million handsets in Q1 while Samsung shipped 43 million, powered by popular models like the Galaxy S II. The two companies also captured 90 percent of the market's global profits, according to ABI, and Samsung alone captured 29.7 percent of the total shipments.

Surprisingly, some of their gains come at the expense of two other big names: HTC and Motorola. Motorola slipped only a bit, from 5.4 million handsets in Q4 2011 to 5.1 million in Q1 2012. Michael Morgan, ABI's senior analyst for mobile devices, told Ars that the drop was "likely due to seasonality." Motorola had a handful of handset launches spanning last fall, including the Droid Razr (which was launched globally as the Motorola Razr), Photon 4G, and the Droid Bionic.

Find: AT&T splits phones into work and personal partitions, on any carrier

Good idea. This is definitely coming down the pipe. Not good for rim. 

AT&T splits phones into work and personal partitions, on any carrier




AT&T's Toggle lets users switch between the work and personal parts of their smartphones.

AT&T
AT&T says it has the answer for corporations that want to let employees access work applications from personal phones without becoming a security threat. A new virtualization-style technology that works on both Android and iPhones creates a work container that is isolated from an employee's personal applications and data, letting IT shops manage just the portion of the phone related to work.
This isn't a new idea. ARM is talking about adding virtualization into the smartphone chip layer. VMware has been promising to virtualize smartphones for some time. What is notable about AT&T's technology is its flexibility. VMware's technology hasn't hit end users yet, largely because it must be pre-installed by phone manufacturers, limiting it to carriers and device makers that want to install it on their hardware.
AT&T's "Toggle" technology, meanwhile, works with any Android device from versions 2.2 to 3.x, as well as iPhones, and can be installed after a user buys it. Moreover, the technology is somewhat separate from AT&T's cellular division and can be used with any carrier.

Microsoft Is Expected To Make its own Tablet

For decades, Microsoft has made the software that runs a majority of the world’s personal computers, leaving a gang of outside hardware companies to design the machines. Apple, its rival, makes it all.

Microsoft is about to concede that Apple may be onto something.

On Monday, Microsoft is expected to introduce a tablet computer of its own design that runs a new version of its Windows operating system, according to people with knowledge of Microsoft’s plans who declined to be identified discussing confidential matters. It is the first time in the company’s 37-year history that it will offer a computer of its own creation. The device is aimed squarely at Apple’s blockbuster iPad, which has begun to threaten Microsoft’s hegemony in the computer business.

A big deal, and probably a good idea. Why didn't they make a phone?

Spotted: Phone as a pixel -- enabling ad-hoc, large-scale displays using mobile devices

Similar to a project from our mobiles course a bit over a year ago. 

Phone as a pixel: enabling ad-hoc, large-scale displays using mobile devices

Julia Schwarz, David Klionsky, Chris Harrison, Paul Dietz, Andrew Wilson

We present Phone as a Pixel: a scalable, synchronization-free, platform-independent system for creating large, ad-hoc displays from a collection of smaller devices. In contrast to most tiled-display systems, the only requirement for participation is for devices to have an internet connection and a web browser. Thus, most smartphones, tablets, laptops and similar devices can be used. Phone as a Pixel uses a color-transition encoding scheme to identify and locate displays. This approach has several advantages: devices can be arbitrarily arranged (i.e., not in a grid) and infrastructure consists of a single conventional camera. Further, additional devices can join at any time without re-calibration.

Spotted: Determining the orientation of proximate mobile devices using their back facing cameras

Yeah, but what if I don't want to point just at the other guy?

Determining the orientation of proximate mobile devices using their back facing camera

David Dearman, Richard Guy, Khai Truong

Proximate mobile devices that are aware of their orientation relative to one another can support novel and natural forms of interaction. In this paper, we present a method to determine the relative orientation of proximate mobile devices using only the backside camera. We implemented this method as a service called Orienteer, which provides mobile device with the orientation of other proximate mobile devices. We demonstrate that orientation information can be used to enable novel and natural interactions by developing two applications that allow the user to push content in the direction of another device to share it and point the device toward another to filter content based on the device's owner.

Spotted: Small window on a large world -- gyro and face tracking for viewing large imagery on mobile devices


Looking at you: fused gyro and face tracking for viewing large imagery on mobile devices

Neel Joshi, Abhishek Kar, Michael Cohen

We present a touch-free interface for viewing large imagery on mobile devices. In particular, we focus on viewing paradigms for 360 degree panoramas, parallax image sequences, and long multi-perspective panoramas. We describe a sensor fusion methodology that combines face tracking using a front-facing camera with gyroscope data to produce a robust signal that defines the viewer's 3D position relative to the display. The gyroscopic data provides both low-latency feedback and allows extrapolation of the face position beyond the the field-of-view of the front-facing camera. We also demonstrate a hybrid position and rate control that uses the viewer's 3D position to drive exploration of very large image spaces.

Spotted: how easily can someone shoulder surf your phone's gesture lock?


Assessing the vulnerability of magnetic gestural authentication to video-based shoulder surfing attacks

Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Peyman Moghadam, Hamed Ketabdar, Albrecht Schmidt

Secure user authentication on mobile phones is crucial, as they store highly sensitive information. Common approaches to authenticate a user on a mobile phone are based either on entering a PIN, a password, or drawing a pattern. However, these authentication methods are vulnerable to the shoulder surfing attack. The risk of this attack has increased since means for recording high-resolution videos are cheaply and widely accessible. If the attacker can videotape the authentication process, PINs, passwords, and patterns do not even provide the most basic level of security. In this project, we assessed the vulnerability of a magnetic gestural authentication method to the video-based shoulder surfing attack.

Spotted: first phone contact -- on Vanuatu.


Appreciating plei-plei around mobiles: playfulness in Rah island

Pedro Ferreira, Kristina Höök

We set out to explore and understand the ways in which mobiles made their way into an environment--Rah Island in Vanuatu--for the first time. We were struck by their playful use, especially given the very limited infrastructure and inexpensive devices that were available. Based on our findings, we discuss tensions between playfulness and utility, in particular relating to socio-economic benefits, and conclude that playfulness in these settings needs to be taken as seriously as in any other setting.

Spotted: changing the shape of your mobile device


Rock-paper-fibers: bringing physical affordance to mobile touch devices

Frederik Rudeck, Patrick Baudisch

We explore how to bring physical affordance to mobile touch devices. We present Rock-Paper-Fibers, a device that is functionally equivalent to a touchpad, yet that users can reshape so as to best match the interaction at hand. For efficiency, users interact bimanually: one hand reshapes the device and the other hand operates the resulting widget. We present a prototype that achieves deformability using a bundle of optical fibers, demonstrate an audio player and a simple video game each featuring multiple widgets. We demonstrate how to support applications that require responsiveness by adding mechanical wedges and clamps.

Spotted: mClerk -- enabling mobile crowdsourcing in developing regions


mClerk: enabling mobile crowdsourcing in developing regions

Aakar Gupta, William Thies, Edward Cutrell, Ravin Balakrishnan

Global crowdsourcing platforms could offer new employment opportunities to low-income workers in developing countries. However, the impact to date has been limited because poor communities usually lack access to computers and the Internet. This paper presents mClerk, a new platform for mobile crowdsourcing in developing regions. mClerk sends and receives tasks via SMS, making it accessible to anyone with a low-end mobile phone. However, mClerk is not limited to text: it leverages a little-known protocol to send small images via ordinary SMS, enabling novel distribution of graphical tasks. Via a 5-week deployment in semi-urban India, we demonstrate that mClerk is effective for digitizing local-language documents.

Spotted: The google maps image of the city -- differing perceptions of the urban environment


Drawing the city: differing perceptions of the urban environment

Frank Bentley, Henriette Cramer, William Hamilton, Santosh Basapur

In building location-based services, it is important to present information in ways that fit with how individuals view and navigate the city. We conducted an adaptation of the 1970s Mental Maps study by Stanley Milgram in order to better understand differences in people's views of the city based on their backgrounds and technology use. We correlated data from a demographic questionnaire with the map data from our participants to perform a first-of-its-kind statistical analysis on differences in hand-drawn city maps. We describe our study, findings, and design implications for location-based services.

Spotted: The case of the missed icon: change blindness on mobile devices


The case of the missed icon: change blindness on mobile devices

Thomas Davies, Ashweeni Beeharee

Insights into human visual attention have benefited many areas of computing, but perhaps most significantly visualisation and UI design [3]. With the proliferation of mobile devices capable of supporting significantly complex applications on small screens, demands on mobile UI design and the user's visual system are becoming greater. In this paper, we report results from an empirical study of human visual attention, specifically the Change Blindness phenomenon, on handheld mobile devices and its impact on mobile UI design. It is arguable that due to the small size of the screen - unlike a typical computer monitor - a greater visual coverage of the mobile device is possible, and that these phenomena may occur less frequently during the use of the device, or even that they may not occur at all.

Spotted: Using mobile phones to present medical information to hospital patients


Using mobile phones to present medical information to hospital patients

Laura Pfeifer Vardoulakis, Amy Karlson, Dan Morris, Greg Smith, Justin Gatewood, Desney Tan

The awareness that hospital patients have of the people and events surrounding their care has a dramatic impact on satisfaction and clinical outcomes. However, patients are often under-informed about even basic aspects of their care. In this work, we hypothesize that mobile devices - which are increasingly available to patients - can be used as real-time information conduits to improve patient awareness and consequently improve patient care. To better understand the unique affordances that mobile devices offer in the hospital setting, we provided twenty-five patients with mobile phones that presented a dynamic, interactive report on their progress, care plan, and care team throughout their emergency department stay.

Guest: Karl Larsen aka "Raleigh Boy"

Folks,

We'll be visited by Karl Larsen on Monday. He'll talk to us about Raleigh's history and his historical content.

Best,

Ben

Homework: your touch readings

Folks,

Your touch readings are available on the wiki here. Please read the first three, since the last two are related.

We'll discuss on Monday. I haven't prepared a lecture on these previously, so no pencast yet. Still I'll try to avoid going too deeply into the lecture format.

Best,

Ben

Find: The Google APIs Explorer has a new look


The Google APIs Explorer has a new look


Jake


Antonio
By Antonio Fuentes and Jake Moshenko,

Google Developer Team

Last March we introduced the Google APIs Explorer, an interactive tool that enables you to try out a Google API in minutes and explore its supported methods. When we launched it, the APIs Explorer supported over a half dozen APIs.

Starting today, the APIs Explorer has a brand new look to make it easier and more fun to navigate. We are also adding new features, including an indexed history of your API calls, a better editor for the body of a request, and a search box so you can search for APIs and methods easily.

screen shot

Moreover, we have been busy adding support for more APIs to the Explorer. The Explorer now supports over two dozen Google APIs, and the list continues to grow! We have also added an indicator to show which methods require authenticated requests.

To get started, here are some sample requests you can try in the Explorer:


  • Use the Books API to search for a particular book.

  • Use the Google+ API to list your personal Google+ activiti...
  • Competition: viz of civic health data

    Via our collaborator Carol Strohecker at CDI

    Press: more reports on our successes at CityCamp

    examples for travel app


    GateGuru, feat. Airport Maps 

    A mobile app that helps track airport information while you have no idea about the airport that you would go through for transferring flight.





    This app simply helps people to know about a certain airport that they never been and estimate the distance of concourse gate at your location while rushing to a particular gate to catch the flight. The service look-up will help the passengers to know the list of restaurants, duty free shop, speciality stores, and other services. This app also provides coupons for daily specials within airports. This would help passengers to have a better idea on their spendings at airports. 

    App: Bus Snooze

    Bus Snooze (market link) is a convenient app for Android users to be alerted when they approach a given location, such as a bus stop.  While our prospective app is focused on helping you arrive at your bus on time, this app is more oriented towards making sure you don’t miss your stop. You simply set an alarm by placing a pin on the map and give it a label and some relevant information (including a time, in case you will be by the same location several times in a day). Once that's done, the next time you approach within 1km of that location (or whatever range you have specified), you will receive an alarm notification.


    This particular app seemed to be one of the higher rated ones on the market, but there are several others with similar objectives. What sets this particular implementation apart is its intuitive menu system and flexibility - it can use GPS location for fine positioning, or network information for a coarser location fix. Bus Snooze is also unique in that it provides a time component to deal with more complex use cases. For example, you might ride past a stop on your way to work in the morning but stop there later in the day for groceries on your way home, etc. Overall, this category of apps (and this one in particular) are useful tools to have access to for anyone who frequently makes use of public transit.


    Twitter App for iPad


    Twitter’s iPad app introduced a card interface in which context is kept by stacking new screens on top of the previous ones. Navigation between the screens can be achieved by either sliding the screens/cards or by clicking on the visible slice of a card bellow. Sliding from left to right in the navigation bar shows the labels of the menu items. Overall the navigation feels natural and an extreme improvement over the Twitter’s phone app.

    When I read about “visual momentum” on the first paper this is the first thing that pop in my mind.


    I highly recommend this app: App Store

    App: Transloc

    The Transloc app is a convenient app for bus patrons to easily access real-time information on bus locations and arrival times. This app is for people who use local transportation and want to know when and where the bus will arrive so they are not late or do not have to wait at bus stops. Along with a real-time map feature, it has multiple agencies and provides announcement section for when there are updates or information about particular routes. It also provides a way for users to send feedback to the transit agencies. The real problem is that you have to open the app to receive this information so if you open the app to late you might have to wait a little while longer for the next bus to arrive.  

    It's functionality is really straight forward. You open the app and select nearby transit agencies that you use. Then you have the option of choosing any bus you want to learn real-time information about. You then have two options. You can click on the arrow in the list section to see approximate arrival times to all bus stop destinations or you can click on map view and see the selected routes highlighted on your screen. There are many apps with this kind of functionality and most are region specific. For example, New York has real-time transit apps, but it crosses over many different transit options, or the Cat Tracker in Raleigh. 



    App: Google Maps for Mobile


    We also chose to look at the navigation technology provided by Google in their default maps application, which is installed by default on most Android phones, and is also available for iOS.  Google Maps is a mapping and way finding application which includes turn by turn multistep directions. Particularly, we were interested in the directions that this application could provide for transit riders, and how these might be improved upon by extension in a new application. The Google Maps API is easily accessible by third-party applications. The success of their application is undoubtedly due to the nearly-comprehensive data which Google has collected about transportation systems worldwide, making it difficult to create a competing product for companies without similar resources.

    Press: the N&O on our course's involvement at CityCamp Raleigh


    CityCamp group devises guide to the greenways

    At CityCamp, participants think up ways technology can be used to improve local government. The winning team won $5,000 and plans to launch its app next month.
    Click to Continue »

    Find: Vuforia Augmented Reality toolkit from Qualcomm

    Vuforia brings a new dimension to mobile experiences through the use of augmented reality. Simply point your device at real world objects, and entertaining and useful information will suddenly appear.

    For marketers, Vuforia can drive brand engagement in entirely new ways. Advertising can literally jump off the printed page. Product packaging can come alive on retail shelves. And once purchased, products themselves can provide enhanced interactivity to provide instructions and drive future sales. See how leading global brands are using Vuforia today.

    For developers, Vuforia provides industry-leading technology and performance on a wide range of mobile devices. Vuforia's computer vision functionality will recognize a variety of 2D and 3D visual targets. With support for iOS, Android, and Unity 3D, Vuforia will allow you to write a single native app that can reach over 400 models of smartphones and tablets. Download the Vuforia SDK and get started today!

    Ref: What Is Google App Engine?

    App engine is a nice way to get some starting backend functionality up. Free until your app is quite successful. Since it uses a web interface, it should also work with iOS, though not sure if Google and Apple allow them to do so.

    https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine#

    Competition: IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge; Student Project Competition -- deadline November

    Some of you may want to develop your projects toward this competition.


    IBM and IEEE are in search of creative team based student projects that can help students at any level learn about applying engineering, science and other disciplines to solve real world problems. It's a great opportunity to put your engineering skills to use…and earn cash prizes too!

    The competition is open to college/university students from all geographic locations. Student teams should have three to five members in any year of university study. At least one team member must be an IEEE member. To find out more about this exciting opportunity, visit: http://www.ieee.org/go/smarter_planet_challenge or email smartplanetchallenge@ieee.org.

    Find: last semester's student Khiry Arnold a Finalist in 2012 LuLu eGames

    Keep this in mind for next year. 

    “Pure Modness” a Finalist in 2012 LuLu eGames

    Khiry Arnold’s interactive Android video game “Pure Modness” was named a finalist in the 2012 LuLu eGames.

    Spotted: mobile software testing using both mass releases and lab work


    A hybrid mass participation approach to mobile software trials

    Alistair Morrison, Donald McMillan, Stuart Reeves, Scott Sherwood, Matthew Chalmers

    User trials of mobile applications have followed a steady march out of the lab, and progressively further ''into the wild', recently involving ''app store'-style releases of software to the general public. Yet from our experiences on these mass participation systems and a survey of the literature, we identify a number of reported difficulties. We propose a hybrid methodology that aims to address these, by combining a global software release with a concurrent local trial. A phone-based game, created to explore the uptake and use of ad hoc peer-to-peer networking, was evaluated using this new hybrid trial method, combining a small-scale local trial (11 users) with a ''mass participation' trial (over 10,000 users).

    Spotted: on the visual experience of canvas presentations like prezi

    Need to read this one. 

    Fly: studying recall, macrostructure understanding, and user experience of canvas presentations

    Leonhard Lichtschlag, Thomas Hess, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers

    Most presentation software uses the slide deck metaphor to create visual presentation support. Recently, canvas presentation tools such as Fly or Prezi have begun to use a zoomable free-form canvas to arrange information instead. While their effect on authoring presentations has been evaluated previously, we studied how they impact the audience. In a quantitative study, we compared audience retention and macrostructure understanding of slide deck vs. canvas presentations. We found both approaches to be equally capable of communicating information to the audience. Canvas presentations, however, were rated by participants to better aid them in staying oriented during a talk.

    Spotted: A comparative evaluation of finger and pen stroke gestures

    Shumin does good work, now at google. 

    A comparative evaluation of finger and pen stroke gestures

    Huawei Tu, Xiangshi Ren, Shumin Zhai

    This paper reports an empirical investigation in which participants produced a set of stroke gestures with varying degrees of complexity and in different target sizes using both the finger and the pen. The recorded gestures were then analyzed according to multiple measures characterizing many aspects of stroke gestures. Our findings were as follows: (1) Finger drawn gestures were quite different to pen drawn gestures in basic measures including size ratio and average speed. Finger drawn gestures tended to be larger and faster than pen drawn gestures. They also differed in shape geometry as measured by, for example, aperture of closed gestures, corner shape distance and intersecting points deviation; (2) Pen drawn gestures and finger drawn gestures were similar in several measures including articulation time, indicative angle difference, axial symmetry and proportional shape distance; (3) There were interaction effects between gesture implement (finger vs.

    Find: iOS 6 walkthrough -- includes scheduled quiet times


    iOS 6 Beta Posted Online for Developers - Update: We Try it Out


    Apple just set the iOS 6 beta page live, and we're hurreidly downloading our build 10A5316k install images. Interestingly enough, Apple has decided to call the iPad 2,4 "iPad 2 Wi-Fi Rev A" which is a decidedly more human name, if a bit confusing. The iPhone 4S image weighs in at around 880 MB. As rumored, the beta page doesn't include images for the original iPad WiFi.



    Find: from wwdc 2012-- iOS 6 unveiled with Siri enhancements, Passbook, new Maps

    Apple's dev event happened today. Highlights here.

    iOS 6 unveiled with Siri enhancements, Passbook, new Maps




    Ars Technica

    iOS 6, a new version of Apple's mobile operating system, was unveiled at the company's Worldwide Developer's Conference on Monday. The version will feature "significant enhancements" to Siri, Apple's own Maps app, a new app called Passbook, Facebook integration, changes to phone calls and FaceTime, and improvements to Mail, Safari, and Photo Stream.
    Apple stated it has been working "very closely" with Facebook to integrate it into iOS 6. Users will be able to post to Facebook from different apps, similar to the level of Twitter's integration now. Users will see notifications from Facebook in the Notification Center, and Facebook events and birthdays will appear in the Calendar app.
    Third-party apps can now be launched with a command to Siri—for example, "Play Temple Run" opens the app. Users can also now tweet from Siri, a formerly noticeable hole in the Twitter integration throughout the rest of iOS. In addition to hands-free mode, Siri now has "eyes-free" mode, where the app doesn't light the screen, but still reads responses out. Apple is working with BMW, GM, Jaguar, Mercedes, and Honda to bring a "Siri button" to their cars that will work with iPhones within the next 12 months.

    Siri showing answers to sports questions
    Jacqui Cheng


    Jobs: Graphics & infrastructure positions at Google in Chapel Hill

    Seems they do the graphics in Android and Chrome. Via our former faculty member David McAllister.
    Benjamin Watson
    Director, Design Graphics Lab | Associate Professor, Computer Science, NC State Univ.
    919-513-0325 | designgraphics.ncsu.edu | @dgllab


    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    From: David McAllister <davidm@cmonline.com>
    Date: Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 9:56 AM
    Subject: Fwd: [CS-Alumni] Jobs: Graphics & infrastructure positions at Google


    Begin forwarded message:

    Date: June 8, 2012 9:55:34 AM EDT
    Cc: Tom Hudson <tomhudson@google.com>
    Subject: [CS-Alumni] Jobs: Graphics & infrastructure positions at Google

    Since we're all posting positions: Google would really, really like to hire several more people to do low-level graphics work in our Chapel Hill office, or to help with build/performance/tools infrastructure to support the team here. Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, OpenGL, DirectX all welcome. We're still looking for a good computational geometer and an assembly-language (SSE / Neon) hacker.

    We may not be the "minutes from the beach" that Z can advertise, but we're minutes from your alma mater and the Southern Part of Heaven. Most of the pixels drawn by Chrome and Android are drawn by our code, which means your RGBs show up in front of a plurality of web & smartphone users in the world.

    Tom

    Find: msr develops facial recognition sdk


    Inside Microsoft Research: The Friendly Faces of Microsoft Research Asia

    Researchers from Microsoft Research Asia have just released the Microsoft Research Face Software Development Kit, incorporating the latest in face technologies and enabling development of face-based applications for Windows Phone.

    Find: nice history -- the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS

    webos lead


    Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS

    Thirty-one.
    That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract.
    Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore. There are parts of the story that are simply lost, viewpoints and perspectives that have been rendered extinct either through entrenched politicking or an employee base that has long since given up hope and dispersed for greener pastures. What we do know,...

    Find: Malcolm Gladwell , leading thinker in business and creativity -- history will remember Bill Gates, forget Steve Jobs

    Bill Gates


    Malcolm Gladwell on entrepreneurship: history will remember Bill Gates, forget Steve Jobs



    The two great icons of our industry, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, came up in a talk given by Malcolm Gladwell recently at the Toronto Public Library. In discussing capitalism and entrepreneurship, Gladwell makes the point that amorality — i.e. the absence of a moral compass in making business decisions — is a fundamental prerequisite for being a successful business leader. He considers the entirety of Bill Gates' tenure as Microsoft chief to be that of "the most ruthless capitalist," which is not too dissimilar from his analysis of Steve Jobs' leadership. The difference, says Gladwell, is that Gates turned away from that amoral (note, not immoral) behavior after retiring and took up the task of spending his wealth on philanthropic...

    Find: Mozilla shows off web apps accessing phone sensors with WebAPI

    WebAPI

    Web apps for mobile will indeed slowly grow at native expense.

    Mozilla shows off web apps accessing phone sensors with WebAPI



    We've been pretty impressed by Mozilla's powerful HTML5-based phone OS, Boot to Gecko, which can do anything from send messages to play Cut the Rope with the equivalent of web apps and bookmarks. A similar project is WebAPI, an attempt by Mozilla to help developers standardize web content to work on a wide range of hardware. In the demo below, developer Paul Rouget shows how an app based on some of the WebAPIs can access the accelerometer, the proximity sensor, or the battery of an HTC phone.

    Mozilla isn't the only group with an interest in standardizing web apps. W3C has a similar project, although Mozilla's is focused much more around Boot to Gecko, and webOS / Enyo is also HTML5-based. Chrome's web store sells cross-platform web apps,...

    Find: looks like our project -- Raleigh, Then and Now: Flanders Gallery


    Raleigh, Then and Now: Flanders Gallery

    Top: 1947, Bottom: 2012. Top image courtesy NC Dept. of Archives and History


    Pictured is 302 S West Street, the building currently houses Flanders Gallery. In 1947, Swift and Company, a meat warehouse, occupied the space.




    ‘Raleigh, Then and Now’ is a new monthly column in which photographer Ian F.G. Dunn presents his temporal diptychs. Historical photographs are used to re-photograph a scene from the exact location and angle the original photographer used. This has proven to be no easy task. Lenses used by our ancestral photographers were much different than today’s lenses and often distorted the image, sometimes making it incredibly hard to achieve an exact present-day photograph.  Other issues include lighting and changes in topography and infrastructure. Many of the historical photographs are courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives and will be credited as such.

    Find: Gartner Says Worldwide Sales of Mobile Phones Declined 2 Percent in First Quarter of 2012

    Samsung number 1 mobile device maker, Nokia 2, apple 3

    Gartner Says Worldwide Sales of Mobile Phones Declined 2 Percent in First Quarter of 2012; Previous Year-over-Year Decline Occurred in Second Quarter of 2009

    Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users reached 419.1 million units in the first quarter of 2012, a 2 per cent decline from the first quarter of 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. This is the first time since the second quarter of 2009 that the market exhibited a decline.

    Announcement: let me know if you need devices

    Folks, We can lend both iOS and Android devices to you, if you need them. Email me and let me know what you need, if anything. Best, Ben

    Guest: Vidya Setlur of Nokia Research will visit us remotely on Thursday June 21 @ 130p

    Vidya Setlur of Nokia Research will visit us on Thursday June 21 @ 130. She'll be speaking about the future of mobile interfaces.


    Guest: Amber Howard of NewKind visits Tuesday June 12 @ 130p

    Folks,

    We'll be visited by Amber Howard of NewKind on Tuesday, June 12 at 130p. She'll be speaking about designing mobile experience.


    Guests: Allscripts will visit next Thursday, June 14.

    Folks,

    We'll be visited by several developers and designers from Allscripts next Thursday, June 14. They'll be sitting in on critique of your prototypes.

    Among our visitors will be Ross Teague.



    Guest: Dawson Roark of Decode Solutions, Thursday @ 1:30p


    Hey folks,

    Tomorrow we'll be visited by Dawson Roark of DecodeSolutions, a local mobile developer. He'll talk about his experience building apps, and sit in for critique of our projects.

    Best,

    Ben

    Assignment: on projects -- github, index site and content

    Folks,

    Several announcements about your projects:

    • Your GitHub repos are up! Send me your github IDs as soon as possible, so that you can begin pushing, pulling, etc. If you need to include collaborators outside the class, let me know and I'll give you the rights to do so.
    • I've got placeholders up for your projects on our project page. Data is pretty sparse so far, so whenever you can, please send me:
      • Updated icons (I've hacked my own where possible)
      • URLs for your Prezis, both those you've made and any in the future
      • Permission to list your names (if you sent your permission form, I can already do this, but nevertheless I want to give you a heads up that I'll do this soon). If that is okay and you have a personal site I link to, please send that too.
      • Any other content you'd like me to link to.
    • Watch your email: if you don't already have clients from CityCamp, we may be introducing you to them soon.
    Best,

    Ben

    Press: coverage of our class's impact on CityCamp Raleigh

    Folks,

    Here's press coverage of our class's impact on CityCamp Raleigh, though I'm not sure they realize that 4 of the top 10 projects were our own:
    Best,

    Ben


    Ref: Audio of CityCamp Friday

    Folks,

    Here's some audio from CityCamp on Friday, thanks to Codebass Radio's Real Time Expectations show:

    Best,

    Ben

    Spotted: a mobile based symptom monitoring system for breast cancer patients in rural Bangladesh


    Findings of e-ESAS: a mobile based symptom monitoring system for breast cancer patients in rural Bangladesh

    Md Haque, Ferdaus Kawsar, Mohammad Adibuzzaman, Sheikh Ahamed, Richard Love, Rumana Dowla, David Roe, Syed Hossain, Reza Selim

    Breast cancer (BC) patients need traditional treatment as well as long term monitoring through an adaptive feedback-oriented treatment mechanism. Here, we present the findings of our 31-week long field study and deployment of e-ESAS - the first mobile-based remote symptom monitoring system (RSMS) developed for rural BC patients where patients are the prime users rather than just the source of data collection at some point of time. We have also shown how 'motivation' and 'automation' have been integrated in e-ESAS and creating a unique motivation-persuasion-motivation cycle where the motivated patients become proactive change agents by persuading others.

    Spotted: improving ten-finger touchscreen typing through automatic adaptation


    Personalized input: improving ten-finger touchscreen typing through automatic adaptation

    Leah Findlater, Jacob Wobbrock

    Although typing on touchscreens is slower than typing on physical keyboards, touchscreens offer a critical potential advantage: they are software-based, and, as such, the keyboard layout and classification models used to interpret key presses can dynamically adapt to suit each user's typing pattern. To explore this potential, we introduce and evaluate two novel personalized keyboard interfaces, both of which adapt their underlying key-press classification models. The first keyboard also visually adapts the location of keys while the second one always maintains a visually stable rectangular layout. A three-session user evaluation showed that the keyboard with the stable rectangular layout significantly improved typing speed compared to a control condition with no personalization.

    Spotted: CheekTouch -- can we deliver telecaresses?


    How do couples use CheekTouch over phone calls?

    Young-Woo Park, Seok-Hyung Bae, Tek-Jin Nam

    In this paper we introduce CheekTouch, an affective audio-tactile communication technique that transmits multi-finger touch gestures applied on a sender's mobile phone to a receiver's cheek in real time during a call. We made a pair of CheekTouch prototypes each with a multi-touch screen and vibrotactile display to enable bidirectional touch delivery. We observed four romantic couples in their twenties using our prototype system in a lab setting over five consecutive days, and analyzed how CheekTouch affected their non-verbal and emotional communication.

    Find: NotiQuiet: like an app we developed for Android last semester

    NotiQuiet Disables Notifications When Selected Apps Are in Use [Jailbreak]
    NotiQuiet Disables Notifications When Selected Apps Are in Use

    iOS (Jailbreak): When you're in the middle of doing something important on your iPhone or iPad there's nothing worse than getting a notification that takes you out of the moment. Worse still is when you get a notification right in your ear when you're on a phone call. NotiQuiet is a small tweak that lets you silence notifications based on which app you have open.

    NotiQuiet is a single purpose tweak. After you download NotiQuiet you'll find its options in the Settings menu and you can choose apps you want to have a silent-mode for. When those apps are in the foreground NotiQuiet blocks notifications from bothering you but still stacks them in Notification Center or as a badge on the app. If you've had the unfortunate instance of getting an email chime right in your ear when you're on a call then NotiQuiet is a simple fix. It's a free download in the Cydia Store that you can find by searching for NotiQuiet in the ModMyi repository.