As computing moves beyond the confines of the the desktop, there is the potential for a much wider community of users to benefit from interactive systems. The primary platform that is serving as a catalyst for this change is the mobile phone. Currently, the rapid growth in users is causing an explosion of unmet mobile computing needs.

Preliminary need finding suggests that mobile computing needs are more user- and community-specific than in desktop computing. That is, the "Killer Applications" of mobile computing may not exist. Instead, there will be many applications which are incredibly valuable to small communities of users, but of little value outside those communities. We suggest, then, that mobile computing is more likely to succeed through a Killer Ecology of many small, specific applications.

Our work investigates the development of tools to support the designing and building of this killer ecology. More specifically, we seek to provide tools that support the domain expert programmer -- the individual who is an expert in the application domain and user community, rather than an expert in the specific technologies used to create the application.

Joel Brandt, Noah Weiss, and Scott R. Klemmer. Designing for Situations with Limited Attention. Technical Report CSTR 2007-13. March 30, 2007.

Joel Brandt, Noah Weiss, and Scott R. Klemmer. txt 4 l8r: Lowering the Burden for Diary Studies Under Mobile Conditions. Work-in-Progress. CHI: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, CA, 2007.

Lash-Ups – A Toolkit for Location-Aware Mash-Ups

All software will be released soon as open source under the BSD license. Until then, please contact us if you are interested in using any of our software.

Joel Brandt
Noah Weiss
Scott Klemmer

Joel Brandt (jbrandt at stanford dot edu)