Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

I’ve been working on my resume.

My team and I are at the Game Developers Conference this week, thanks to Nokia.  We presented and demoed our game, Weekness, today.

Weekness turns your text messaging habits into a game.  In one player mode, users guess who text messages were sent to and received from, from weeks past.  In the two players mode, uers play in real time on one phone with another user to guess each other’s most often text messaged words.  In both modes, a new social interactions can be created, extending the pre-existing socail usages of the phone.

Rabia Malik , Yumi Endo and I were the Weekness development team.

Pigeon now cues up your unheard messages first and tells you which messages are unheard when listening to your contact’s Pigeon messages.  Let me know if you have any problems with this.

Very soon, Pigeon will tell you as soon as you log in if you have any unheard Pigeon messages from your contacts.

Google bought Grand Central, and now it’s Google Voice.  I think this is significant because it shows Google’s continuing interest in mobile voice communication.

The new iPod Shuffle has a feature called VoiceOver.  By pushing a button during a song, VoiceOver will tell you the name of the song and the artist without stopping playing the song.

I just found out that Weekness, a game I developed with Rabia Malik and Yumi Endo, has won the Forum Nokia Mobile Game Competition!

The ICU (International Telecommunication Union) has released the newest version of Measuring the Information Society - The ICT Development Index.  It has all kinds of statistics about land line, mobile, and broadband penetration.  The new edition also pays specific attention to the digital divide.

via MobileActive.org

Jordan Carver has been kind enough to let me use his Pigeon Typeface!

Pigeon now allows you to remove contacts from your flock.  Currently, you need to know the Pigeon number of the contact you would like to remove.  In the future, it may also be nice to simply read out the names of a member’s contacts and say if that is the person they would like to remove.

“Flock” language is also beginning to be integrated.

Just found the really wonderful Ideas Project, which is a collection of short videos from experts on their thoughts related to the “future of connected communities.”  I think I’ll make my way through most of the content on the site, but these are the ones I’m enjoying today:

• Ethan Zuckerman: Mobile reporting deepens global narratives
• Laura Fitton
• Loic Le Meur
• Iqubal Quadir