Tuesday April 17, 2007

Sun Lab did it again. They started an incredible cool project called MPK20. In short it's SecondLife for professionals. But not to be bored by lonesome people all night long. It's more about being more effective and more successful during you daily job!

On any given day, over 50% of Sun's workforce is remote - and actually that's me included. MPK20 is a virtual 3D environment in which employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. Just like on Sun's physical Menlo Park campus, known as "MPK," inhabitants of the virtual MPK20 office building can work together in planned meetings, or can talk informally in unplanned encounters. Unlike the physical campus, however, in MPK20, community can be built and maintained without the constraints of physical location.

The goal of MPK20 is to allow users to conduct all their real work within the virtual environment so that doing private work and sharing with others can be accomplished seamlessly, without the need for a special application sharing tool. The team room and surrounding private work spaces are filled with documents and whiteboards. Team members, regardless of physical location, can maintain awareness of what their team is working on by scanning the contents of the room.

The technology is based by the way on Sun Labs' Voice Bridge, a software written in Java that handles Voice over IP (VoIP) audio communication and mixing for tasks such as conference calls, voice chat, speech detection, and audio for 3D virtual environments. The Voice Bridge supports a range of voice qualities from telephone to CD-quality. In addition, the Voice Bridge supports stereo audio and the ability for each individual connected to the Bridge to have their own private voice mix. Click on the image below to see a larger image of a poster about the Voice Bridge.

The Voice Bridge is a scalable, SIP-based platform for setting up and managing conference calls. Calls can either be entirely VoIP or combined with calls routed through a PBX. The Voice Bridge manages conferences, allowing members to join or leave the conference. It is responsible for receiving and mixing speech and sending the mix out to each member of the conference. Speech detection is done by the Voice Bridge so individual speakers can be identified easily.

Additionally, each caller can have his or her private mix of the conference. This supports a variety of features ranging from individual volume control to multiple, private voice chats within a single conference. The Voice Bridge has been in use internally at Sun since 2004 for conference calling as part of the Sun Labs' Meeting Suite prototype software.

And only "by the way": The MPK20 software is additionally built on top of the Sun's Gaming Server infrastructure, called Project Darkstar.

Isn't that REALLY cool?

Friday April 13, 2007

RaccoonOnMap is localisation service for your mobile phone whicch can show your location - and the on of your friends without using GPS technology. RaccoonOnMap has been built by engineers from Nokia and has been made public already in February 2007.

In RaccoonOnMap, the mobiles act as a location Web service providers via Raccoon (consists of a port of the Apache web server to the S60 smartphone platform - in short it is a mobile web server). The RaccoonOnMap server provides a mashup mixing Web services from mobiles and Google Maps.

All the queries are send from the mobile phone to the RaccoonOnMap server which will propagate the requests to the registered mobile users. The RaccoonOnMap server queries the location of the mobile with a Python script accessable via Raccoon web server. The mobile returns a location information of its current location.

The location information can be either GPS or GSM cell id information. If the mobile user has a bluetooth GPS device, the Python script reads the coordinates from it and return then with the cell id information to the RaccoonOnMap server. The RaccoonOnMap server adds the cell id and the corresponding GPS coordinates to its location database. If the mobile user does not have a GPS device, it will return only the cell id to RaccoonOnMap server, which will then calculate an approximations of the cell coordinates from it's location database.

When the RaccoonOnMap page is loaded it contacts RaccoonOnMap server and fetch the user information. The page refreshes itself every few minutes and therefore fetch the RaccoonOnMap users again from the server. You can force to fetch the information by reloading the RaccoonOnMap page.

All online users and those offline users which have given permission to show their location are marked in the map. Offline users are put where they were last seen. If the user is online the marker turns to red and more information is available. By clicking the marker on the map, the viewer can also send (anonymous) messages and ask the mobile user to take a picture with the mobile phone's camera. The viewer can also 'trace' the user by pressing the "TraceOn" button. The location of the user is then queried every 10th second and the trace of the users movement is drawn to the map.

The location database stores the information of the registered user's id, cell id, GPS coordinates and the time. These values are then used to calculate the approximations of the GSM cells. The calculated cell location approximations, which the RaccoonOnMap service gives out, do not anymore have the information of the user id. The original location database is still preserved and the user id is stored until the registered user wants to remove his/hers account or the RaccoonOnMap service is terminated, in which case all references to individual user's locations are deleted.

More info at http://raccoon.openlaboratory.net/RaccoonOnMap.
The topic is discusses as well at Forum Nokia if you have technical problems.

Thursday April 12, 2007

Vodafone Betavine is an online public, collaborative research and development space looking at encouraging the further convergence between the mobile phone and the internet. It is also aimed at encouraging the development of exciting new mobile applications. And anyone with an interest in mobile applications can join for free.
Vodafone Betavine is a pre-commercial space for collaboration and is not directly linked into the commercial functions of Vodafone.

Even if you're not a developer you gain after registration the right to access the full application download list (which is much bigger than the restricted list that casual visitors can access). Beta testers will be able to shape the development of these applications and suggest new applications.

So why Vodafone is doing this effort? "We hope that it will encourage innovation and act as a platform for some of the hidden talent in the world of mobile application development. We also anticipate that the site will encourage discussion and debate ensuring that visitors play an active role in creating new wireless and internet communications applications", so the responsible people from Vodafone Betavine.

More info at http://www.vodafonebetavine.net.