Andreas Jakl's Forum Nokia Blog

Protect your Skis with your Phone!

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:26:45 +0300

TDS-S uses NFC technology to secure your skis.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is mostly associated with micro payment systems or access solutions. These are the ideal use cases for rather slow, but contactless information transmission over distances of up to some centimeters.

Theft Deterrent System for Skis (TDS-S) is a novel approach to using NFC technology – it protects your skis from being stolen.

The students Markus Eder, Florian Lettner and Carina Madlmayr from the Mobile Computing department of the FH Hagenberg are fond of skiing – rather natural, considering they’re from Austria. Everyone who has already been on a slope in his life will know the slightly worrying thoughts when you go into a ski hut: “Are my skis still going to be here when I return?”

Especially if you know that there are more than 10,000 registered ski thefts every year only in Austria, it’s certainly not inappropriate to think about securing your expensive skiing equipment. Naturally, cameras outside of the restaurants usually don’t help much. If you consider what everyone is usually wearing when skiing, you’ll usually have a hard time to identify the thief should the police ever catch him. The only commercial solution that’s available today is to the skis together using a lock (like the simple bike locks). Unfortunately, this isn’t the most comfortable solution.

Near Field Communication is here to help

Surprisingly, NFC is the technology that proves to be incredibly useful to prevent ski theft, while still offering all the comfort you might want to have. The project “Theft Deterrent System for Skis (TDS-S)” is essentially about pairing the boot with the ski and doesn’t let the thief step into the binding if the secure code doesn’t match.

This is done by putting an MIFARE-tag into the boot. A small RFID-module is inserted into the ski and connected to one of the new bindings that electronically control the operation of the binding – like the Atomic Neox EBM. A Near Field Communication-enabled mobile phone or a PC is able to pair the boot with the ski. If anything else than the trusted boot steps into the binding, it refuses fastening and doesn’t let the thief drive away with your skis.

The project is currently still in development - you can read more about it at symbianresources.com or the project homepage. The first prototype has already been published and managed to be among the winners of several global competitions – the 1st Austrian NFC Developer Competition as well as the NFC Forum Global Competition. Who knows how much longer it’ll take until skis, which started out as simple wooden planks (The word “ski” meant “a stick of wood” in Old Norse) will finally turn into a product full of high tech.

NFC Congress

By the way, if you're interested in NFC, the place to go is the third annual NFC Congress from the 24th - 26th of February, 2009. It'll take place again in Hagenberg. After the successful previous two events, it has now turned even bigger and now consists of the conference, a workshop, an exhibition, a competition and even an IEEE scientific workshop day. Register now!

A video about the project:

Automatically Calling Back Saves Money

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:18:15 +0300

Auto Call Back can help you to save money.

Starting with today, I'm now also on one of the hugely popular all-inclusive phone tariff plans. In Austria, every operator currently has a plan with a certain number of minutes (usually 1000 or more) included - essentially, a flat rate for around €19/month.

On the other hand, many friends and relatives have minute-based plans, which can be rather expensive if they're calling to other operators.

Rationally, it'd be the best if I call someone with a minute-based plan back and don't accept his call. In this scenario, nobody of us pays anything (extra). Obviously, it's a bit of work - you have to discard the call, go to the call history and call back.

Automatic Call Back

Already two semesters ago, two students (Dominik Brandlberger and Daniel Haslinger) developed a solution to this called "Auto Call Back" (why always invent strange names if it can be that simple?). The whole call-back process is automated by the application.

The result after one semester is a prototype and no commercial application - after all, both didn't have any serious Symbian OS development experience before and the whole issue turned out to be not so easy.

Apparently, you can't easily cancel calls that you don't own through the public CTelephony-APIs of S60 3rd Edition-phones - it only seems to work if you accept them first and immediately cancel them. However, this means that the caller already has to pay up to one minute, no matter how short the call was. Therefore, the application now cancels the calls through simulating the red key. The disadvantage here is that the mailbox has to be turned off for rejected calls.

But how does the app know for which contacts to do it? After the first initial experiments with an own database, the best solution turned out to put all those contacts into a special group. This also allows the user to easily manage the call-back contacts through the normal contacts-app of the phone; the call-back app doesn't have to re-invent the wheel.

The prototype is available for free, but of course not yet ready for real-world usage. It lacks many features and is by far not bug-free. Also, you need to sign it yourself through the Open Signed-process from Symbian Signed.

If anyone is clueless what application to develop next, I'd be very interested in getting a finished and polished application that can do exactly what the prototype can do. Or is there already anything around on the web that I didn't find?

Abandon your Privacy

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:22:42 +0300

CrystalMe explores offering all your private data to the public any time.

When Nokia released the Mobile Web Server, we were always thinking, “There is more to this technology than is initially visible”. Just think about it – you carry a whole, dynamic web server around with you all the time. It offers full access to the device and all the data contained on it. You can essentially turn the mobile user from an information consumer to the source of new information, not only in the sense of sending out SMS and making calls, but providing data to everyone on the world, without any restrictions.

The only issue was: it was difficult to come up with an idea. What is the unique advantage of hosting a web site on a mobile device? What can you do with it that would not be possible otherwise? What’s the real advantage compared to using a standard server PC or to simply providing the data from the phone through a small Java ME / Python / C++ / etc. application?

Sharing your data

Take a look at the current status of the web, or maybe even the whole world. Everyone tries to guard his private data and is concerned about losing control over it, with governments and other companies constantly trying to accumulate as much information about you as possible.

On the other hand, especially younger people love to share their lives with social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or many others. Who has not heard the stories about bosses finding out stuff about possible job candidates beforehand – stuff that those people would rather not like their boss to know?

The mobile web server is about sharing with the world, about offering information to the global internet. Today, the mobile device is your personal assistant that knows about many parts of your life. Your calendar, your contacts, your pictures, your position, ...

This led to the project we called “Crystal Me”. Think about Facebook and take the whole idea one step further. Total surveillance. Always available through the mobile web server.

Accumulating data

The user data presentation on the web of a very early development version.

Through the intelligent use of sensor data, you can find out a lot more about the user than you might think. An example?

-    The phone doesn’t get a GPS lock -> the user is probably indoors.
-    The phone is moving in a regular pattern -> the user is probably walking.
-    According to the phone calendar, there is a meeting in a few minutes -> the user is going to the meeting.
-    The contact person that’s added to the meeting is from the other gender and it’s evening -> well, could be a date.

As you can see, there is a lot that you can reveal without any further knowledge just by combining the various bits of information that are available to you.

Crystal Me

The research project from Manuel Riegler attempts to investigate the total loss of privacy. How far can you go about revealing your life? How can you combine the available data to generate useful predictions about the current state of the user?

Right now, the project is still in its early stages. A very early prototype that was mainly built to get to know the technology is available through Nokia Mosh and was now chosen as the winner of the Forum Nokia Mobile Web Server Challenge.

But that’s not the end of the project – in total, it will continue for one year, and Manuel will also write his Master’s thesis about the research that went into Crystal Me.

Keep an eye on the project page at Symbianresources.com!

ShakerRacer is now Open Source!

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:33:38 +0200

A short summary: ShakerRacer allows you to control a real RC car with the accelerometer of the N95. This means that you can turn and accelerate simply by tilting your phone. Read more at the previous Forum Nokia blog post.

Close-up of the modded RC car that can be controlled by the accelerometer.

We have published a video of the app in November 2007 – since then, a lot of things have happened. The video at Youtube is currently at a whopping 105,000 views. The Forum Nokia Blog entry has been read 10,000+ times. We improved the code and added several new features, e.g. a speed limit mode for demonstrating the car at exhibitions.

And we got countless emails asking for the source code.

Now it’s finally ready – we have just released the source code along with some documentation. You can download it for free at symbianresources.com! So (nearly) nothing can stop the fun anymore.

Especially with the latest version of ShakerRacer, it is very easy to control the car – and of course it’s a lot of fun. The great thing is that you don’t have to explain the concept to anyone. It’s just a natural way to drive.

We demoed ShakerRacer at an information exhibition for pupils interested at studying. Obviously, it drew a lot of attention when a small car races around on the floor and someone just tilts his phone. During the development phase, the car lost both bumpers due to some serious crashes – luckily, there was only a single small crash with one of the visitors thanks to the new speed limit mode :)

Some more information

The most natural way to control the car turned out to be the landscape mode.

Keep in mind that the phone cannot simply connect to an out-of-the-box RC car, as the standard wireless remote control of a car uses some proprietary protocol and technology for communication. Only by adding a microcontroller + Bluetooth module, you can make the car understand Bluetooth and enable it to communicate with the phone. Stephan Selinger has written some short instructions on how to accomplish this, but it requires some hardware ownership as well as –knowledge.

The Python application now uses the official Nokia Sensor-API by default. This allows using the mobile client with the Nokia 5500, N95 (Firmware 20+), N95 8GB, N93i and the N82. For the N95 with older firmware, you can reconfigure the code to still use the very nice aXYZ Python-module from Cyke64.

Some more pictures as well as the documentation and the source code are available from symbianresources.com.

A Case-Study of Porting Widgets to S60

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:29:28 +0300

With data transfer charges for mobile devices finally going down, mobile widgets might possibly be the next big thing to conquer the mobile phone software and at the same time the attention of the users.

The case study contains a description of the solved issues when porting the "Heise News"-widget to the S60 Web Runtime.

As you might know, Nokia has just released the beta-SDK supporting widgets for the upcoming S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2. This allows more seamless integration with the mobile phone than their previous Java ME-based WidSets-software.

Before this was published, an early beta had already been part of the S60 3rd Edition FP2 Beta-SDK for MIDP. This SDK supports the Web Run-Time environment for developing and testing widgets in the emulator, but does not include any further documentation.

Christian Kaar from the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg tested the new engine and tried to port several Apple Dashboard widgets to the S60 engine.

Even though Nokia has been a few days too fast for us with publishing their official documentation, his technical report is still very interesting to read. After an overview of widget technology, he included a case-study of porting two widgets, whereas the official documentation only points out the general issues.

You can download and read the technical report at symbianresources.com.

Near Field Communication in Real Life

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:34:29 +0200

That's me in front of a smart poster.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is often handled as one of the most promising technologies of the mid-term future. Through contactless and at the same time simple data transfer using RFID – combined with a high security storage of encrypted data in the smart card (e.g. the SIM-card of the mobile phone) – it enables several new and exciting usage scenarios and improves the comfort of many existing areas. With this posting, I’d like to share some insight about the current state of NFC.

NFC-Trial

One of the world’s first NFC-trials is currently running at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria. 100 students and teachers (including me) got an NFC-enabled phone and can now use it for various services that are evaluated through usage studies and surveys. The goal is to measure the acceptance and use the input for improving the current ideas.

The trial is still running, but when talking to the project managers, they already reveal some of the first results. It seems like micropayment is one of the main killer applications for NFC – especially the coffee machine is the place where everybody wants to use their phone for quick payment, instead of having to carry around lots of coins or special chip-cards.

Another result is that speed is very important. An info-terminal that can synchronize the phone with the latest news and menu plans from the local gastronomy is a great idea, but data transfer is just too slow. NFC only works well if everything happens instantly – “touch & go”. Downloading a video through NFC by holding it to a smart poster for half a minute (as seen in the otherwise very interesting NFC video from Nokia) won’t be a great experience. If bigger data should be submitted, it would be better to use NFC to create another data connection, like seamless Bluetooth pairing.

Development

The Nokia 6131 on the pad of the NFC info terminal.

At the moment, only four mobile phones are available:

The pioneer phone: Nokia 3220
SAGEM my419X
Samsung SGH-X700N
The new Nokia 6131

Especially the new phone from Nokia is ahead from the competition and does already contain a thoughtful implementation of some standards that are partly not even yet standardized. Exactly this is also one of the major things to take care of during development – through the lack of finished standards, it’s not really possible to let the Samsung and the Nokia-phones communicate with each other. However, the JSR 275 (Contactless Communication API) is set to change this situation.

Another aspect that’s often overlooked in the early stages of development is battery consumption. For early adopters, it might not be a big issue if they have to charge their phone every second day. But when I was talking to “normal” students about the advantages of Smartphones about a month ago, they said that they really wouldn’t want a phone where the battery has to be charged so often. For example the NFC-phone from Samsung only lasts for two days. This is something where the clam-shell design of the new Nokia 6131 comes in handy, as it is by default (when it’s closed or switched off) only in passive mode, while it only activates the active mode when the phone is opened. In my opinion, this is an important fact when NFC should go mainstream.

More Information

If you’d like to know more about NFC or the trial that’s currently active in Hagenberg, take a look at http://www.nfc-research.at/. On this website you’ll also find the program of the upcoming NFC Applications Conference, a very interesting event with high-profile speakers talking about NFC technology and its future applications.

In the NFC Trial, the mobile phones can also be used to access the labs and the parking garage.