In total, six person from Screen Interaction will attend this years GSMA MWC. Beside the CEO and business development the attending team consists of interaction designers, project managers and mobile developers. This is the fifth time Screen Interaction is present at this event and it has almost become a tradition for us by now.

This year’s main objectives are as usual to support our client demos and assisting them in successfully demonstrating their products during the exhibition. Second, we are looking forward to meet people like you – business minded colleagues and hopefully new clients to discuss mobile, UX, IxD, apps and brilliant new business opportunities!

Screen Interaction will cover all the trends and buzz of whats going on in the mobile world today and tomorrow. The coverage will be summarized in a whitepaper with all the goodies available for everybody. For a free copy of the whitepaper, please send us a mail to contact@screeninteraction.com.

Are you attending GSMA MWC this year?

Don’t miss out Screen Interactions free Cava Mingle Party! Stop by for a chat and say ”Hello!” or maybe ”Hola!”. It is held in the Swedish Export Council monter (Hall 2 F13) at 15:00 on Monday 27th of February.

Later same day (19:00-02:00) the party continues with the SWEDEN@MWC PARTY. A tapas party sponsored by Screen Interaction together with some other Swedish companies. If you’re interested in attending this event drop us an email to contact@screeninteraction.com, we still have a few free tickets to give away!

Briefly about the competition:
The main goal was to encourage developers to create good and intuitive mobile application that can serve as support in the daily lives of people with cognitive disabilities. The jury has placed great emphasis on how the application can provide support in everyday life for people with cognitive impairments. The jury criteria were:

• Idea
• Ingenuity and innovation
• Realizability
• Ease of use
• Functionality that satisfies the end user needs
• Design

The competition was arranged by Almega/IT&Telekomföretagen, Flexenita, Hjälpmedelsinstitutet, Innovationsbron, Kista Mobile & Multimedia Network, Post- och telestyrelsen, Tidningen Mobil och Stiftelsen för internet infrastruktur.

The team:
Adnan Yafi , Interaction designer
Anne Vold Hellman, Visual designer
Reza Assareh, Concept and UX

The jury’s motivation:

The contribution from Screen Interaction creates, on a visual exciting way, a clear and concrete instruction to independently manage important daily activities.

Here follows an interview with Reza and Adnan from Screen Interaction.

However, there was one subject that I found particularly interesting, namely cloud-computing.

With cloud computing applications and services will be moved from your computer to the cloud, (i.e. the Internet) and therefore provide endless opportunities when it comes to accessibility and mobility.
You will no more need a heavy and computational powerful device with bad battery time, since the cloud will do the heavy computations for you.

Another benefit is that the cloud could allow products to be available through subscription or charged depending on usage, which is something that can ben very beneficial for individuals and small companies.

Of course not everything about the cloud is fantastic. There are concerns about privacy, security, and what happens if your access to the cloud goes down?

However, I’m positive that those questions will get their answers and that the cloud will be a natural part of our everyday life in a near future!

/Andreas

Keynote speaker Bruce Eckel, the well-known author of many books like ”Thinking in Java” and ”Thinking in C++”, shared his experience and knowledge in his talk about the power of Hybridization. Bruce Eckel’s point was the importance of combining the best features of different languages, leaving back their weaknesses and ”blind spots”, in order to focus exclusively on the actual problem and not the tools used to solve it.

After having a quick break for some coffee, it was time for the first session of the Web track; An introduction to Ruby on Rails.

Here in Screen Interaction we have used Ruby on Rails in several projects and we are all big fans of 37signals, the company behind this well known framework. However I never had the chance to look more in to it, so I was really looking forward to listening to Shay Friedman‘s talk.

Ruby on Rails (or just Rails) is a web framework for Ruby and it is open source.
It is based on the Model-View-Controller architecture and its philosophy is to ”let you write beautiful code by favouring convention over configuration”. Sounds nice!

After installing Rails (on a mac, you will need Ruby, RubyGems and Rails and it is very simple to get it up and running) you are only one command away from your first Rails web app:

$ rails new ApplicationName

That’s it! Wait a bit, and Rails will create for you a bunch of folders with everything you need to get started. Have a look at the folders – most of the names make sense and you’ll be surprised by how tidy and ”in place” everything looks! Even a web server is there for us to use:

$ cd ApplicationName
$ rails s

will start WEBrick, so go to your browser and hit http://localhost:3000/ to see your first app.
From that point, using scaffolding, it is possible to setup very quickly views and models.

During his talk, Shay showed us how easy it is to create a database with ”sessions” and associated ”speakers”, and add new or edit existing entries.
In addition, using partial templates, he showed how to easily render views with content from different models.
Validations are also supported very well; if a person should always have a name, then it is as simple as writing:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
validates :name, :presence => true
end

Serving json or xml, is just a method implementation to the controller:

respond_to do |format|
format.html # show.html.erb
format.xml { render :xml => @person }
format.json { render :json => @person }
end

and the framework is full of conventions designed to make the life of the developer much easier.
For example, time in human readable format (like the one used in twitter) is baked right in the framework; time_ago_in_words(3.minutes.from_now) returns ”3 minutes” or distance_of_time_in_words(from_time, 50.minutes.from_now) returns ”about 1 hour”. Neat!
Another cool feature of Rails is the console; perfect for making quick tests or changing data directly on the server!

In general, as Shay stressed, the beauty of Ruby on Rails is the fact that it was born from an actual need. It is created keeping in mind the necessities of a demanding production environment and it is optimized for simplicity, without scarifying productivity.

It was amazing how much did Shay manage to show us in just 45′, and if you are still sceptic about it, go on and watch some screencasts, or even better, download it and get started!

Remember, Ruby on Rails is made for programmer happiness and who doesn’t want to be happy?

For best innovative technology Screen Interaction and ASSA ABLOY are nominated with ASSA ABLOY Mobile Keys.

In the category for best mobile health solution our partner iDoc24 is nominated with a service that let people use their mobile phone to send images and ask a dermatologist anonymously about skin diseases.

CallControl is nominated for best service in the Utility category. It’s a smart answering machine service that we have worked on together with the great people at Aurora Innovation.

See the full listings here and check out the video presentations of the three services below.

ASSA ABLOY Mobile Keys

iDoc24

CallControl from Aurora Innovation

Sebastian Kellgren is the latest recruit to the Screen Interaction team. Sebastian, who has a background of working with Agile web development, starts with Screen Interaction on October 3. He will focus on working with to develop test and quality assurance processes of Screen Interactions solutions for mobile and web. Sebastian also has a keen interest in back-end development and will handle the build servers for some of Screen Interactions projects.

We all look forward to using Sebastian’s expertise to improve the quality of our applications!

Over 300 impressive entries from across 33 countries, 70 entries was shortlisted to the final Jury Round at IxDA’s Intraction Awards. Screen Interaction was one of the few selected with the AssaAbloy Mobile Keys solution in the Disruptive category.

Disrupting

Re-imagining completely an existing product or service by creating new behaviors, usages or markets.

-ASSA ABLOY Mobile Keys, Screen Interaction
-Avaya Flare UX Strategy, Native Design Ltd
-Ford SmartGauge, Smart Design
-Hiboo, books to explore, Gobelins, l’ecole de l’image
-Low2No – Smart systems for carbon neutral lifestyles, Experientia
-Morgan Stanley Matrix, Morgan Stanley
-Nike+ GPS, R/GA
-Peel, Peel
-Spotify Box, Umea Institute of Design
-SWYP: See What You Print, Artefact
-The Waste Land, Touch Press LLP
-Urbanflow Helsinki, Nordkapp, Urbanscale LLC
-Vendo: An Urban Hybrid, California College of the Arts

See the full list here: http://www.ixda.org/node/31304

To celebrate Martin and Fia, Screen Interaction decided to create a mobile service that would help the married couple to communicate. The result was two great applications called iWife and myHusband. We’ll give a sneak-peek below but to get a full demo you need to get hold of Martin or Fia as the applications will only be available in one copy each.

Congratulations on your wedding day Martin and Fia from everyone at Screen Interaction!

Yesterday night our mobile travel expense service “Reseräkning” was awarded at the Catwalk11 event in Karlskrona, Sweden.

The motivation by the jury:
“A service that makes it easy, simple and secure to report purchases and travel expenses. A smart, efficient service that can be used by anyone. The winner is Reseräkning by Screen Interaction!”

Try it out now for iPhone or Android

Thanks to Telecom City that arranged a great event. See you again next year!

Screen Interaction attended MobileHCI 2011, the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. This year the conference was held at Münchenbryggeriet in the Screen Interaction home town of Stockholm, Sweden.

We met a lot of interesting people from all over the world that are doing research within the field of mobile interaction design. At the conference Swedish eye-tracking pioneers Tobii showed some really interesting solutions for eye-tracking of mobile services. For more info about this check out their blog post.

After the conference, Mobile Life Centre had a great event a few blocks from the Screen Interaction office. People from Mobile Life Centre did presentations and talked about different studies and papers. At least some of the projects can be found on their website.

One of the highlights was a collection of prototypes from 10-15 year old research studies. Even if a lot have happened during the last decade many of the concepts that was research back then are part of popular mobile services today. Another great presentation was a study about Vanuatu and how one of the last groups of users on earth started using mobile phones. Check out the paper if you want to read some cool mobile academic research!

Thanks a lot to Mobile Life Centre, SICS, and Stockholm University for a great arrangement this year and see you next year at MobileHCI 2012 in San Fransisco!