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Breaking labour news on your wristwatch?

by Eric Lee

About three years ago, at a conference in New York City, I heard the labour educator and futurist Art Shostak attempt to convey the excitement of the new information technologies to a skeptical audience of trade unionists. He went on at some length about "wearable computers" -- but to be honest, I think the audience wasn't convinced.

Art had been at this for some time. Back in 1997, in an article entitled "On the Revitalization of the U.S. Labor Movement" he talked about "advances in inexpensive devices to access the Internet without a PC . . . promise to soon vastly expand the reach of the Net (to say nothing of speculation that a voice-activated/voice-responsive Palmtop, or very small computer worn on the wrist, may be commonplace by 2005AD)".

We're not yet at the Internet accessible wrist watch stage, but on the whole, Art proved to be right.

There are far more users of mobile phones today than Internet users, and in the year 2000, over 400 million mobile phones were sold around the world. According to one survey, by 2003, 82% of Europeans will have mobile phones. Most of those phones are able to access the Internet.

In other words, for hundreds of millions of people, their only access to the Internet in the near future is going to be through small mobile devices -- and not desktop or laptop PCs.

Of course the technology now being used to display web pages on mobile phones is not at all user-friendly. Jakob Nielsen, the guru of website useability, was already bashing the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) back in October 1999. He wrote:

"[WAP] will lead to impoverished user interfaces for two reasons:

Nevertheless even Nielsen admitted that "mobile access to the Internet will be its third killer app (after email and Web browsing)".

A day doesn't go by without some announcement of a new product to make mobile access to the Internet cheaper or faster.

The newest devices offer full color, relatively high speed access to normal web pages (not just WAP pages) -- most notably the Pogo device now being marketed in Britain.

Yesterday, Research in Motion, makers of the popular wireless Blackberry device (which doubles as a personal digital assistant, or PDA), announced plans to release a voice enabled version. Not in 2005, as Art Shostak predicted 5 years ago, but today.

All of these developments require a response by trade unionists, especially those of us concerned with communications.

Many of us have only recently completed the task of getting our unions to use email, or develop a website. Some of us have only recently gone online ourselves. What -- another revolution?

I think that Jakob Nielsen is essentially right. High-speed, always-on, truly mobile access to the Internet with a decent sized screen and proper navigation tools is the next killer application. It will revolutionize the way we work -- and will vastly expand the number of people accessing the net.

A very good first use of the new technology would be to get breaking labour news stories -- and particularly urgent action appeals -- out to people even when they are away from their desktops, or don't even have desktops.

While WAP has been criticized for being a poor subsitute for real mobile access to the web, the use of short text messaging, known as SMS, has exploded in recent years.

I think that we in the labour movement will have to use both these emerging technologies (WAP and SMS) as well as whatever will work on the Palm i705, the Blackberry, the Handspring Treo, and the Pogo -- whatever it takes.

LabourStart is very pleased to announce this week the launch of our first two mobile applications.

If you have a WAP enabled mobile phone, you will find top global labour news headlines (updated every 15 minutes) on our mobile page, which is located here:

http://www.labourstart.org/wap/index.wml

You can add this to your list of favorites on your phone.

If you live in the UK, you can get occasional text alerts to your mobile phone by signing up for our service. Details can be found here:

http://www.labourstart.org/mobile.shtml

This is just the beginning.

If you are interested in having a WAP page in your language, or for labour news from a particular country, let me know and I'll set it up.

If your mobile phone provider offers an email-to-SMS gateway that works (meaning that we can send you an email message which you'll receive on your phone, as a text message), let us know and we'll set that up.

All these services are provided to the labour movement world-wide free of charge. However, your mobile phone provider might charge you to receive text messages -- find out before you sign up for anything.

I'm very interested to know your thoughts and particularly to know if your union has begun to explore mobile Internet access.

Some of the sites mentioned in the article above:

Voice-activated Blackberry:
http://www.pdabuzz.com/#newsitem1012412439,3440,

Pogo mobile device:
http://www.pogo-tech.com

Jakob Nielsen on WAP:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991031.html

Statistics on mobile phone and WAP use:
http://www.rcb.dk/uk/staff/chm/wap.htm

Art Shostak on revitalizing unions (and wristwatch computers):
http://www.futureshaping.com/shostak/pages/essayRevitalization.html

This document was last modified: Wednesday, 23-Nov-2022 08:34:03 CET



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