David Merril from MIT Media Lab gave a very nice presentation on Siftables at TED. Watch it here.

GPS mission is a new app on the iPhone and a web based application. It says the world is your playground, you have an online mission editor with which you can edit the mission flow, bonus items users can collect, define photo tasks, and edit other details. You have direct access to the map and can connect these things to locations. This is quite similar to what we worked on some years ago in the Remote Access to Field Trip Project (Beside the Videconferenceing things). Nice interface on the iPhone, well used combination of gaming location based services and multi interface stuff.

You can share and distribute your missions with others.
Try it out! Soon you can play some of my mission in Bonn if you come to visit 😉

http://gpsmission.com/

Hi all,
as I am writing also on an elgg blog for CELSTEC.org I have setup my account here also to aggregate my posts from celstec.org. So stay tuned.

Regards

The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons
licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs. This is
what sets freesound apart from other splendid libraries like ccMixter. You can find collections, geotagged sounds and remix the sounds. Great stuff if you want to build geotagging environments.

Acces the search here, I found also very interesting the exploration by tags!

A recent study about the WII console and it’s use has shown that the social experience is at the core of the gaming experience. see more at  Pasta&Vinegar » Blog Archive » Console game as a social place

SmartMobs writes about a project that uses the distributed sensoring power of mobile phones for analysing traffic data. So for context aware learning apps we can also use the sensors of others for learning in the future. Today most apps just use the sensors of the devices users carry around with them (GPS, Movement, Tilting) so but sensors are everywhere, so lets harness the power of these for supporting learning in context. One other app we build in the RAFT project was using a combination of user’s device GPS and infrastructural weather sensors to store additional metainformation about photo’s taken in a certain location.

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Mobile phones as pervasive traffic sensors

Nokia Research is offering free real time traffic information to users with GPS-enabled mobile devices.

The Mobile Millenium project, which Nokia is developing along with researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, will be available to people as part of a pilot project aimed at collecting and studying traffic data. Currently it covers the greater Bay Area in California; users can download the software for free starting midnight Monday.

“Traffic is very common problem anywhere in the world and it affects issues such as energy consumption and carbon footprint,” says Henry Tirri, vice president and head of Nokia Research Center. “We want to show what you can do with pervasive sensing of the environment through millions of phones that people carry every day.”

Nokia says it believes a community of users with GPS-equipped mobile devices can help reduce traffic by enabling drivers to make better decisions.

Another iPhone App Sold: MindMaker Goes To MindMeister

so this can be also interesting for the mindmeister demo scenario in the teamroom or the CELSTEC Laboratory.

as twittr is already the fastest growing app do you also want to increase your followers?

This guest post is written by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers:

1. Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
2. Fill out your bio. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who you are. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
3. As @garyvee says, “link it up.” Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere. Link it on your Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, email signature, and everywhere else you live online. Also, check out the great feedburner-like badges from TwitterCounter for your blog.
4. Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them. Quality content coupled with an easy way to find it never fails. If others enjoy your content, they’ll add you. Learn more about #hash tagging here.
5. Bring your twitter account into the physical world. Every time I give a talk, speak on a panel, shoot a podcast, present slides, or hand out business cards, I figure out a way to broadcast or display my twitter account.
6. Take pictures. Pictures are heavily retweeted/spread around. This one from US Airways Flight 1549 has been viewed 350,000+ times. For mobile pics use iPhone apps such as Tweetie or Twitterific, both which support on the go uploading.
7. Start a contest. @jasoncalacanis offered a free macbook air if he reached the #1 most followed spot. That never happened, but Jason added thousands of followers…brilliant.
8. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.
9. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes. search.twitter.com lists the hot ‘trending topics. Look for the #hash topics and jump in on the conversation (see #4 for links to #hash instructions).
10. Track your results. TwitterCounter will show you how many new users you’re adding per day and Qwitter will email you when someone unfollows you after a tweet.