Downtime
Our campus is currently without Internet, which means I finally have time to write something here (thanks, GPRS!).
I’m working my way through the Horizon report on tech trends for the next few years, and I can definitely confirm the importance of mobile devices. Just saw a survey also that businessmen are starting to rely more on phones than laptops. It’s no surprise — phones can do most of the same things, are always on, and rarely greet one with a blank screen after an upgrade ( I’m looking at you, ubuntu).
Libraries have a ways to go in this regard, though. One thing I’d like to see is an extension of applications which help one identify things. There’s one that lets you take a picture of a product, and the app then uses the picture to find the product for you on amazon. What if we had a similar app that could take as input pictures of bookcovers or retail barcodes, and return (by email) a formatted citation for the item? That might be useful enough for a large userbase to adopt. Just thinking out loud here, I’ve got a million of ‘em.
– Post From My iPhone
