The MoPR Blog

Hewlett-Packard’s CoolTown

I’ve got weather on the mind. One reason for this has been my dramatic shift in location and climate in the last few years. I grew up in San Diego (warm nearly year round), but recently relocated to Northern Idaho (cold nearly year round). But the reason that the topic of weather has so firmly planted itself at the forefront of my brain of late is that we’ve been experiencing the strangest winter ever, with extreme conditions affecting pretty much everything I do. From Easter Egg hunts in the snow and wind and rain taking my power out while I try to work from home to having to sit in the snow while watching my son’s soccer game, weather has worked its way into my consciousness far too many times to count this year.

The area that I live in has experienced record snow fall this winter. Not a 10 year record, or even a 25 year record; but rather an “as long as we’ve been counting” record. It snowed here yesterday - - the 23rd of April, and that just seems silly.

Mobile technologies are most effective when they enhance the way we live and enjoy our lives. I think the weather has a lot of bearing on how I live and enjoy my life, and there are most definitely ways that mobile technology can present information to us that could improve our planning, comfort, and even our safety in regards to the weather.

In the early 90’s I had the privilege of doing PR for Hewlett-Packard’s CoolTown – a division of HP where engineers and marketing folks worked together to build, implement and bring to life the technology of the future being conceptualized and developed in the HP labs. The focus of HP’s CoolTown was applying Web-based technology to systems and services that would support the users of wireless, handheld devices (from watches, phones and PDAs to RFID tags and tiny Internet-connected sensors) interacting with their environment, from anywhere they may be.

One piece of technology from CoolTown that really resonated with me was a demo they ran with a group of school children in Helsinki, Finland. Helsinki is known for its high adoption rate and use of mobile technology and in this demo they used mobile technology to prevent school children from waiting out in extreme weather elements for their school bus to arrive. They used mobile devices and sensors on the buses to send real time alerts to the children inside their homes as the bus approached the point in its route where they needed to leave their home to reach the bus stop just in time for the bus to arrive. No more waiting outside!

Another CoolTown weather-related demo featured an alarm clock that was Internet enabled and knew the route you took to work in the morning and how long it took you to get to work, via that specific route, in perfect weather and traffic conditions. Assuming the weather was good and there were no traffic delays, the alarm clock would awake you at the pre-programmed time. However, the alarm clock would continuously scan the weather and traffic reports related to your trip and would then adjust and readjust your wake-up time accordingly.

I imagine how this last one could play out from a mobile device in my own life. In the morning my iPhone alarm would wake me up on time when the weather is good, since I work from my home office most of the time and have zero commute time. But, it would let me sleep in 45 minutes longer on days when the school district calls for a snow day, meaning school is cancelled and I don’t have to wake up my boys and ready them for school. That service alone would have saved me from waking up needlessly early during our 11 snow days when school was cancelled this winter.

While today’s mobile weather apps may not be as advanced as the ones I experienced in CoolTown nearly 10-years ago (although no doubt they are possible), there is a wealth of weather-related information available to all of us from our mobile phones that we can use today to help plan for the best (and the worst) the elements have to offer us.

If you are fortunate enough to be a member of the iPhone toting brigade, then you have been blessed with the elegant weather channel that comes standard with the device. The iPhone weather application leverages data from Yahoo weather, and presents it in Apple’s signature simplicity. I use it daily not only to check my own weather forecast (which is nearly always dismal it seems), but to check the weather for locations I am traveling to or where friends and family are located.

For the rest of you, here are a few basic mobile weather apps to consider:

WeatherTAP
No more weather surprises with WeatherTAP, the fastest weather on the web. With weatherTAP, you get the quickest, most current NEXRAD radar and a complete aviation weather package. There’s detailed lightning data as well as high-resolution East (GOES-12) and West (GOES-10) satellite images. Plus, you get forums, up-to-date forecasts, surface data, and colorized, animated maps: local, state, regional, and national coverage.
WeatherTAP continually monitors their data streams, processes images and makes them available online within seconds. No delays. No old images with new time stamps. With a WeatherTAP subscription you get the quickest, most current, accurate radar and weather available.
COST: $6.95 per month

The Weather Channel
Not really an app, but rather a site enhanced for mobile access. Go to weather.com on your phone. It’s fast! It’s free! All you need is a mobile phone with Wireless Internet capability to access severe weather warnings, forecasts and radar maps for your city, and thousands of cities worldwide. It’s weather anytime, anywhere from the leader in Wireless Weather.
COST: Free

WeatherBug Mobile
Offers Mobile Alerts (Stay informed with severe weather alerts and forecasts text messaged to your mobile phone), Mobile Weather interactive features (live local weather with full interactive features like radar maps, cameras and more, for your mobile phone), and Mobile on Demand (Instant Weather for when you need it most, for any U.S. ZIP Code).
COST: Alerts $2.99/month, Mobile Weather on Demand $0.75 per message.

AccuWeather.com WHERE Widget
AccuWeather.com is now available on WHERE, a collection of location enabled widgets for your mobile phone. The AccuWeather.com WHERE Widget gives you a forecast of the weather around your exact location. Get detailed location-based weather data, see your 2-day forecast, find wind, humidity, pressure & visibility conditions.
COST: $2.99/month (available on select carriers)

PocketWeather
(for Windows Mobile users) Get world wide weather reports directly to your Windows Mobile device anytime! The best weather tracking solution for Windows Mobile devices, featuring a robust weather engine wrapped with a stylish and simple to use user interface.
Cost: one time fee $14.95

Are there other mobile weather apps that you love to use? Let us know which ones you think are indispensable in the comments section. (Melissa Burns)

The SpinVox doll kicks back in MoPR’s Museum of Mobility Lounge.

Imagine you’re in an important meeting and your cell phone rings. You have your phone on silent but that dreaded light pops on your screen or your phone starts to do its vibrating dance that means you have a voicemail. But you can’t listen to it. What does it say? Did you leave the stove on at home? Are the kids waiting at school for you to pick them up? Is it really your anniversary already (and you need to pick up flowers)? Is there another meeting you’re supposed to be in? The suspense could kill you, or at least take years off of your life.

You might want to try SpinVox. If you went to CTIA, you probably noticed their amazing booth - the one with the halo of Barbie-like dolls with boxes surrounding their heads and their feet dangling in rows. I was one of the lucky ones to score my very own SpinVox doll from the booth.

SpinVox is a tool that captures spoken messages and converts them into text that can be read immediately. So when you’re sitting in that meeting, you have the ability to read what your mystery voicemail message says. It would certainly assure that the message is picked up… quickly, and without an audible disruption to your meeting. Simply put: with SpinVox, you can manage your voicemails more efficiently.

SpinVox also offers other helpful features, including tools for sending messages. For example, when you want to send a message, SpinVox lets you choose a specific destination – inbox, blog, wall or space - speak or type the message, and the service will automatically distribute it, via text, immediately. Talk (pun intended) about an excellent tool for social networking.

With SpinVox you can even leave yourself personal reminders ala the old Norm McDonald into-the-mini-cassette recorder “note to self” skits on SNL.

I know I’m not the only one who can be difficult to understand when talking too fast, but apparently that’s not a problem for the technology magic behind the scenes at SpinVox. The company’s Voice Message Conversion System, known as ‘D2’ (a.k.a. the Brain), captures your spoken words and spits them out as text content. I tested it talking in my usual rapid tone, and it performed perfectly.

I’m confident I’ll be using the SpinVox service myself - especially the auto post feature. During the NBA playoffs you can bet I’ll have lots to say as the Spurs take on the Suns, and with SpinVox my thoughts can be mainlined right to my blog. Go Suns!

Full disclosure, James Wanless is president and COO of MoPR client Talkster, and he’s a friend. But bias aside, he still posted a very interesting piece today about the “revolution” coming in communications.

James points out that the current view of communications is based on silos. For example, most people maintain separate accounts for phone, email and instant messenging (and may have separate accounts for each of these for home and work). This siloed approach means that people maintain a distinct contact list for each service. Even though we can synch and import contacts, the systems are distinct.

This approach is about to be shattered by the needs and desires of a new generation of people who are literally being weened on social networks. James is not talking about Facebook and MySpace users (although they matter a great deal too). James is referring to people like my daughters, who years before they could write their name or had any phone etiquette were meeting their friends and making new ones on Club Penguin. Club Penguin is a social network for kids, and despite it’s video game-like appearance has many of the same attributes of the more grown-up social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

James asserts that as these children become adults, their expectation of communications will change, forcing the communications platforms to likewise change. In the end what we will have is not a siloed series of communications services, but a singular platform that integrates everything we use and creates portability. Instead of using Outlook we’ll use Facebook. And Facebook will be on our mobile phone too. We’ll use Facebook (or MySpace or LinkedIn or Ning, etc.) as our conduit to communication.

Once that happens, instead of looking up a person, deciding whether to call, email or text, and then establishing the communication, we’ll simply open our friends list, click on a face and voila — we’re connected in the most convenient fashion for both parties. In this environment you have greater control on who and how you are contacted. Business contacts are able to reach you at certain times on certain devices whereas friends and family may have a different set of times and methods. You would no longer need to give out phone numbers, email addresses, etc (although you would probably still maintain them). Thus you would have a better ability to maintain your privacy while at the same time still be very public with your profile. And if you need to change any of this information, you simply update your profile and that information is updated for everyone, much like how Plaxo is building their service.

After walking the floor at CTIA with James and discussing this very subject, I think he is completely accurate. It’s an exciting development, and it’s surprising to me that the social networking Goliaths have not been more vocal about such a change. I am certain that the folks building Microsoft’s next version of Exchange are thinking about it.

One added benefit James didn’t discuss — this could spell an end to telemarketing! And for that reason alone, more resource should be devoted to making this change happen.

Oh yeah, and a sidebar note: I would be remiss in my role as a member of Talkster’s PR team if I didn’t point out that Talkster can already enable this revolution today with their communications platform.

Read James’ post “Giving Voice to the Social Revolution” at the Talkster Blog.