Last week, I chaired the “All in hand: Working with handheld devices conference”, which took place at the Royal College of Surgeon in London. It included various presentations from small- to large-scale UK museums discussing their experience with mobile interpretation.

Two years ago the proportion of the world's population living in cities eclipsed those living elsewhere for the first time in history. The trend has persisted, in fact it seems an unstoppable juggernaut with the ratio predicted to reach 3:1 by 2050. Of course, city-dwelling is nothing new, but cities that 20 million people may call home certainly are. As Justin McGuirk discusses in this article, the transformation presents some of the most profound design challenges of our era. The process of regeneration is relentless - you can't go far in New York or London without seeing immense construction work underway, or derelict buildings whose future is no doubt already a glint in the eye of some ambitious developer.

To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program.

Firstly, let's a get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of the digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to Brighton's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume [http://www.tomhume.org/] (MD of Future Platforms [http://www.futureplatforms.com/ ]) and Joh Hunt [http://bluejoh.com/] (a postgraduate research at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun.

Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people of different backgrounds working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.

But enough of the build up, "What was it you were actually doing?" I hear you cry. The exercise splits the group into several teams (in our case, 4 teams of about 5 people) and introduces us to the fictional Jeremy, a 34 married civil engineer with 2 young children. He is a novice in the world of mobiles - using his allocated texts, minutes and data allowance sparingly - but considers himself technically aware. He is dyslexic and enjoys nothing more than exploring his local peak as part of a spot of mountaineering. Each team was asked to design a mobile application for Jeremy that would allow him to interact with his workmates and family whilst on a mountain, and given a swanky dummy mobile on which to design it.

The teams all went to different corners of the office and got prototyping. Whilst I can't speak for the creative methodology behind the other groups, we had a discussion and created a Journey On- inspired mountain route planning and sharing application that we dubbed Journey Up. After hours (or minutes) of intensive (or lighthearted) prototyping, we had our idea, and we welcomed Mr. Joe Baskerville from a competing team for a bit of vigorous (or easygoing) user testing. This part of the exercise really highlighted the necessity of even the smallest amount of user testing, as clearly apparent but previously unidentified kinks in our product were brought to light by Joe's scrutinizing eyes.

After a reconvening session where teams displayed their designs so far, the proverbial spanner wasn't so much thrown into the works as it was hurled in with wild abandon as Tristan instructed us to swap the mobiles on which we were developing our apps. In all cases this completely changed the capability of the technology with which we had been working. All the teams had to adapt their development to accommodate the new technology and whilst some (a campfire emulator was adapted to incorporate a music purchasing program by one team) were more successful than others (Journey Up took a big hit when GPS was removed from our phone's spec), it showed how important it is to keep the wider audience in mind at all stages of development.

After a quick discussion of the lessons we'd all learned and a riotous round of applause, TTOP ended. Hats off to Tristan for a brilliant and welcoming Tech Tuesday, and indeed to Tom Hume and Joh Hunt for creating an imaginative and thought provoking exercise (read about their successful running of the event here [http://www.tomhume.org/2009/09/mobile-mountains-over-the-air-2009.html] and here [http://www.tomhume.org/2009/08/agile-2009-many-paths-to-the-top-of-the-mobile-mountain.html]).

To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program. Firstly, let's get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to London's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume (MD of Future Platforms) and Joh Hunt (a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh, and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun. Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people with different skills working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.

Last week Joe and I attended Over The Air - a developer-centric conference focused on mobile phone technology and applications.

It had been 18 months since the last conference, and the first thing to strike me was just how much has changed in the mobile landscape. A year and a half ago, the iPhone had only just started to impinge on mass consciousness and the Apple App Store hadn't even opened.

Nowadays, every new phone launched vies with the iPhone for features, and there are over 20 different app stores - run by platform owners, mobile carriers and independents. This change becomes even more striking if you consider how little has altered in the world of desktop computing, or even web apps, in the same amount of time. In short, the mobile space feels now very like the start of the dot-com boom in the 90s: expect a lot of innovation, a lot of failed ideas, and a lot of attempted land-grabs by both incumbents and newcomers.

Keynote address in Imperial College's Great Hall

With six separate tracks, and a day-and-a-half's worth of lectures and workshops, it would be hard to list everything that went on, but here are a summary of some of the trends that I identified:

• Things are moving fast (see above)
• The rise of web techniques (Widgets, PhoneGap etc.)
• The rise of Linux (Android, Maemo, LiMo)
• Increased fragmentation (more platforms to support)
• Standardisation efforts (e.g. OMTP and BONDI)
• The rise of the App Store (see Distimo's report)
• Augmented Reality is the buzzword du jour

Augmented Reality (AR) is the practice of adding computer-generated information to something you are experiencing already. Often, this involves injecting computer-generated images into a live video feed, and there's some very impressive stuff out there which sees computers spotting special tokens (fiduciary markers is the jargon name) and overlaying images or videos.

However, it turns out that there is another, simpler way of letting the computer know what you are looking at: if you can specify the exact location of the camera in relation to what it is viewing, then you can go ahead and enhance things to your heart's delight, without having to go around tagging everything with markers.

As an example of this, I've found that augmented reality has become a lot more, err, real, thanks to my new phone, an HTC Dream. It contains some handy embedded hardware that means it knows exactly where it is and where it's pointing (the GPS tells it where it is on Earth, the accelerometer tells it which angle it is pointing relative to the surface, and the compass tells it which direction it is facing relative to the poles).

One application that takes advantage of this is Wikitude AR - it will search publicly available sources of information, and then overlay their position on top of the camera feed from the phone, as you can see from these screenshots taken while I was looking out of our office windows:

Then, there's the truly amazing Google Sky Map: you simply point your phone at the area of sky that you are interested in, and it will overlay constellation information. You can also type in a search term (e.g. Venus), and it will give you a handy arrow and target, helping you to swing your phone round until you are pointing right at it. This is extremely useful for any other parent who has been pestered by their child wanting to know what that bright star is called...

Last Saturday saw Brighton's first Outdoor Gaming festival (a.k.a. BOGfest), organised by Richard Vahrman, COO of innovative GPS-gaming company, Locomatrix. The day featured a variety of games, mainly featuring mobile phones, so I thought what better way to contribute than to resurrect the Hunt the Wumpus game that I originally created to demo at Brighton Barcamp back in 2007.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, the idea is to navigate around a series of interconnected rooms and to shoot the Wumpus before he eats you, all while avoiding other hazards such as giant bats and bottomless pits. The original 1970s version was entirely text based, but my updated version uses a series of Quick Response (QR) barcodes to represent each room in the maze. Players scan the codes using a camera phone, and are given clues on their telephone handset.

In its first incarnation I printed these codes out on stickers, and created a cave on a roll of wallpaper. For BOGfest, however, I thought it needed to be much bigger, so I regenerated the codes on A3 sheets of paper (all hail OpenOffice, which, because of its XML format, allowed me to automatically generate the document instead of manually inserting all the graphics). I then enlisted the help of my sons to stick these bits of paper on a 10m x 10m area of Hove promenade, and to draw the rooms and tunnels in coloured chalk.

Then it was just a case of helping people get the barcode software running on their phones (or just lending them one of the Cogapp R&D handsets) and letting them get on with it. During the afternoon dozens of people played, and it was fascinating to watch their reactions: everything from extremely skeptical ("what are you selling? How much does it cost to play?") to the extremely enthusiastic ("this is a lovely idea").

I've been spying on my neighbours.

I've been listening in on their conversations, stealing little snapshots of their lives. Don't be too alarmed - they've also been spying on me. We're all in this game of espionage together.

No, it's not Neighbourhood Watch - it's location-aware twittering. If you've been twittering within a 5km radius of me, I might just know about the film you enjoyed on Sunday, or your thoughts on the roadworks...

OK, such voyeurism is admittedly not that interesting. Yet.

I'm fairly new to the 'mobile web', having suffered for too long with handsets that take you to a 'web portal' with news from your friendly network provider and poorly displayed text-pages (that cost a fortune to view). Thankfully Apple have helped shake up the market, and more and more people are starting to experience the mobile web in one way or another (with shiny iPhones, or any number of other newer phones that are addressing the less-than-perfect user experience of yore).

As everyone knows, the uptake of mobile phones has been an incredible modern story. The penetration is so great, people will probably think you're pretty strange if you haven't got one. Behaviour has changed for everyone - even if you don't carry one you'll find that decision affects the people who want to contact you. It's hard, as they say, to imagine how we ever lived without them....

So now that serious uptake of the mobile web has begun, will it be on a par? Will it change behaviour as dramatically?

I think the answers are "yes" and "yes" again, which is why I went on Tuesday evening to a Chinwag event about mobile search and location-based services. It was a panel discussion, chaired by some interesting people from nascent (and more established) businesses seeking to really capture a part of this new territory. These including Taptu (mobile social search), Rummble (for personalised recommendations), Plazes (a mobile social network) and The Cloud (the Europe-wide WiFi hotspot service).

A great deal was discussed through the evening, but I'll focus on a single area.... spying!

Well, almost; let's call it the 'tracking versus publishing' problem.

I just spotted Enkin.

As you can see from the video below, it's an Android application that combines Google Map data with GPS-and-compass positioning info, plus video footage from the phone's camera.

It's all very very clever. Three things to note about the cleverness:

1. In map mode, they use camera motion to drive the interface (i.e. no need for an accelerometer)
2.

Ever find yourself standing at a bus stop, starring at a poster for the latest Hollywood Blockbuster, and wondering "well, looks exciting, but what's it all about?!"? ViPR Visual Search, developed by Evolutionary Robotics, promises an answer.