We Are Mobile Phones, But Our Mobiles Phones Are S**t

There are currently 4.023 billion mobile phones connected globally with the world population of 6.75 billion people. That's 0.596 phones per capita (per person). It (roughly) means that more than a half of the world population owns a mobile phone. Let's dig it.

More people have access to mobile phones in India (543 million), than to adequate sanitation (366 million) (UN, 2010). 

China is a leading single country with the highest number of mobile phones connected - 547.3 million (with India being second). But lets put it in the context. Population of China is 1.31 billion people. So the estimate is 0.416 phones for a person.  

Europe has 712.8 million mobiles connected. With population of around 593 million, we have 1.2 phones for a person. Even if you look at fine details, countries like Germany, Italy, France, UK, Poland, Spain or Ukraine have roughly between 1.1 - 1.5 phones per capita. So proportionally, we are leading, side-by-side with Russia (which has also around 1.3 phones per capita).

It's a big number. It means statistically every person in Europe has a mobile phone. Obviously, that's not the case, but number is still extremely high.

Mobile phone is becoming a body organ. You can now browse the net, watch TV, listen to radio (ok thats old school), geotagg the reality around you, direct yourself around any place (with GPS coverage), play complex games, shot photos and videos, book a tickets or restaurant with just few clicks. We are constantly connected. You go to the pub and you see 8 people sitting silently around the table, clicking their phones. They eventually come back to conversation, but every social pause will be an excuse to send a text or check/update Facebook/Twitter.

But with all this attachment and expansion of mobiles there is still not that much innovation coming in a field, just redesign and recycling old solutions.

Sure, iPhone redefined touch interface and globalised common app use, and the trend is now evolving very quickly within mobile application development. But hardware development just froze in time, and mobile phones are becoming increasingly clunky. Phones from HTC, Apple, RIM, Nokia are loosing their key features - battery life, sustainability, simplicity of interface, cheapness, signal strength and toughness. And services are also going down with expensive contacts, confusing insurance policies, expensive roaming and data transfer rates. My iPhone can let me send the e-mail, but it will cost me £3/Mb from outside UK, and the battery dies on me after a day. Ten years ago I had Nokia 3310 which battery least for 5 days easily, with frequent use. 

My point is that someone has to redevelop current concept and services of mobile phone. Software is there, but hardware and mobile networks lacks perspective. It's all iPhone-touch-screen-HTC-another-version-clones now, with competition on 'who get's bigger OLED screen' and whether O2 or Orange screws more users on data plans with "free" phone.

So...

I want good battery life (5-7 days, or 2-3 weeks like ebook readers!). 

I want very simple interface (well, Apple kind of succeeded here). 

I want just a few apps I use on the daily bases. Honestly, how many apps that you download from App Store you actually use regularly? 5? 8? I recon that's my personal estimate. And I have about 100 of them kicking around in my iTunes library - most of them just useless crap (for some of which I paid, looser...). 

I want a quality calls (with faces, yes, they have it in Japan already, Apple) and good network coverage. I want cheap roaming rates and cheap data. Not for downloading YouTube movies, but to turn on simple GPS to find some cool bar when I'm chilling somewhere abroad. 

I want simple and clear contract, that I can easily personalise and adjust according to my calling/traveling/data needs with free access to wi-fi hotspots around Europe (especially airports).

Is it really THAT much? ;-)

[All data in this post has been calculated and sourced using Wolfram Alpha]

[Image: Geek On Acid ©]

Coming Back via Information Overload

We are currently spending around 23% of our online time on social network sites (Nielsen Internet, 2010). It's a 7% increase since last year this time. As such, social networking sites jump to the top of the list of online activities. Second most popular activity is playing online games (10%) and third - checking e-mail (8.3%). People spend more time on Facebook and Twitter and playing FarmVille, than browsing Google or searching videos online. It's a biggest shift of online trends in years. 

We have on average 22 apps on our phones, from which 33% know our location, and 14% access our contacts (App Genome Project, 2010).  

Browsing internet on iPad is better for your cognitive system (here defined as 'level of disorientation' and 'cognitive load') than browsing internet on your desktop computer. Demirbilek found that subject using the tiled-windows (tablet) interface were significantly less disoriented than subjects using an overlapping-windows interface. He also found that participants working with overlapping windows were substantially more likely to experience cognitive overload than those working with tiled windows (Demirbilek et al., 2010).

FDA has approved bionic telescopic eye implant (photo above). In clinical testing from VisionCare Ophthalmic  70% of over 200 patients "had their vision improve from severe or profound impairment to moderate impairment" (VisionCare, 2010).

Apple released their worst iPhone ever (see also Antenna-gate), and Amazon released their best Kindle so far. Both companies sold out within day or two.

Nintendo will release 3D version of their handheld console that won't require any special glasses, potentially starting a new revolution in 3D entertainment. Or bringing it down.

Violent dreams may indicate developing brain disease (Boeve et al., 2010).

Medical use of marihuana is having it's momentum, with research wide-spreading from multiple sklerosis and cancer to inflammation and anxiety (Seppa et al., 2010).

And the information chaos just keeps flowing through my mind... 

[photo credit: VisionCare]

FarmVille Phenomenon

What is the game which is played by 1% of world population every month? 

That's right, welcome to FarmVille with population 82.4 million players (as for May 2010). Some 30 millions of them check their crops daily.

This mean that 20% of all Facebook users login FarmVille every month to plant, tend and harvest virtual crops, over and over and over again. And folks from the company behind the game, Zynga, say that it's only the beginning - and they already released iPhone app, showed in most recent Steve Jobs presentation. 

Wow, I am not really a big gamer geek (regardless of what you all think, I only play Scrabble on iPad recently). But it is still fascinating for me - what is the key to the success of this shit-graphic, repetitive and extremely simplified game that looks like rip-off from early Nintendo adventure games?

There are a number of factors here, all purely hypothetical and only based on surveys rather than well controlled studies. 

First - social factor - if a player persuades their Facebook friends to become their FarmVille "neighbours", they can be rewarded for fertilizing their friends' fields or feeding their hogs. 

Playing games like FarmVille is “intimate, yet public.” You can publish your accomplishments to your Facebook Wall for all to see, in case you want your friends to know that you’ve mastered the art of farming strawberries or won a blue ribbon for your prize eggplants. Obviously, this is something that non-invasively keep people in touch as well - a phenomenon I call 'ping communication' - when you don't actually exchange any particular information with your social contact online, but rather virtually 'poke' each other, or send invite for some stupid quiz or send a pig to friend in FarmVille. 

What's more, FarmVille mechanics is based on the oldest action-reward idea in the gaming history, borrowed from old Chinese games, which are in turn based on old Japanese RPG games. You have control, you make an action, which will have predictable result. You don't make an action on time, and your crop will die. So you have to come back to the game after a while when you leave the Facebook to maintain your farm. Simple. 

And it's extremely simple to play as well. Almost every age group from teenagers to older players can set up their own virtual farm within couple of minutes. Simple diagonal layout borrowed from those old Japanese games combined with straightforward options menu, and minimalist iconic graphics, makes the game learning process almost instant. And the fact that you have to get back to the game regularly, works like a virtual pet, a Tamagotchi - you have to nurture it and look after it every day, otherwise it will be sad and will die soon after.

We can add more theories to it, like an urban fantasy of having farm, but at the end of the day, it seems that FarmVille is a masterpiece of simple combination of all the things we already know in gaming - simplicity of interface, control, predictability, direct action-reward model and social networking. All those aspects shifter social online gaming to the mainstream. Today's average social online game player is 43-year-old women and generally housewives staying with kids at home. But FarmVille population covers all group ages, which is absolutely unprecedented phenomenon. 

It also looks like Zynga reported a revenue of over $200mln in 2009 and FarmVille is definitely one of their key product. It's a good figure, but not as much as you would think. There are no exact numbers on how many users actually spend money, but it looks like only a small percentage of users do so. To put it in the context - Blizzard, with biggest online MMORPG game World of Warcraft (population of ONLY 11.5 millions - 8 times smaller than FV), gets an average profits of $100mln PER MONTH. Console games producers also report much more profits than Zynga. 

But Zynga strategy of keeping it simple and continuously expanding FV universe by a small elements keeps users logged in for a long time. Ultimately, they seem to learn well from other games producers and combine best features to keep you attached to your farm, so the future... might be interesting ;-)

[photo credit: Wired.com, Wikipedia, Zynga]

Stoned honey-bees, Facebook jealousy and swearing.

Honey-bees dance more, when they are given cocaine, and they have withdrawal symptoms (1). In the paper 'Effects of cocaine on honey bee dance behaviour' from November 2009 issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology, Stephenson and colleagues explored in five separate experiments, such aspects as honey-bees level of locomotive activity, dance behaviours, responsiveness to sugar and learning processes - everything when bees were high on coke...

The usual science of Facebook brings us some new data. Lets start from numbers - from the sample of 5000 filled divorces, 19.78% couples quote Facebook as a factor in break up. Now, study from last year Cyberpsychology and Behaviour journal shows that increased time spend on Facebook by couples in romantic relationship significantly predicts Facebook-related jealousy and suspicion (2). Muise et al (2009) surveyed 308 undergraduate students. Quoting they results, authors argue that using Facebook exposes people to often uncertain and confusing information about their partner that they may not otherwise have access. Then the loop occurs - people start using Facebook more, and track more information that might heat up their suspicions. Whats more, majority of participants reported that their partners have unknown individuals and past romantic and sexual partners as friends on Facebook, which creates potential environment for jealousy. There is increasingly more data of that type, which nicely shows how online social networks integrate smoothly with our lives, as a part of augmented information reality. So beware ;-)

Finally, in a different article from 2009 issue of NeuroReport titled 'Swearing as a response to pain' authors investigate whether swearing affects pain tolerance (to be more precise - keeping hand in icy water for some period of time), pain perception and heart rate (3). In addition, they look at gender differences and the roles of pain catastrophising. They found that swearing increased pain tolerance, increased heart rate and decreased perceived pain compared with not swearing. However, swearing did not increase pain tolerance in males with a tendency to catastrophise. I guess that the implication is - swear as f**k when you're in pain, and it should feel better, but it won't work if you moan too much in general.

References:
1.
Barron, A. B., Maleszka, R., Helliwell, P. G., Robinson, G. (2009) Effects of cocaine on honey bee dance behaviour. The Journal of Experimental Biology 212, 163-168.
2.
Muise, A., Christofides, E., Desmarais, S. (2009) More Information than You Ever Wanted: Does Facebook Bring Out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy? CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR, 12, 441-444.
3.
Stephens, R., Atkins, J., Kingston, A. (2009) Swearing as a response to pain. NeuroReport 20, 1056–1060.

[image credit: CharlesLam]