Helio is a 3-G mobile cell platform that gets it - integration, that is. They have appeared to combine easy-to-use mobile photo blogging; Internet; music; news/video downloads and games; plus the capability to move your own media content from your pc. However, the part that interests me the most is the real-time photo blogging portion to MySpace. Mobile is the trend for media delivery and interactivity -- it is a natural progression therefore to provide people with the capability to create their own story arc with photos and text in real-time.

My through line is not simply about the software integration of this particular device, No, I am more interested in story telling. Look at two other projects of interest, PLOG by HP and Microsoft's Photosynth, and you will see where I am going.

The PLOG, research project would enable users with image content sharing while mobile-- read: social networking meets story telling. What is equally compelling is the aspect of time and location-based clustering, meaning your location is tagged via a mapping program. Google Earth comes to mind. As you take photos over the course of a day, the system allows you to share photos taken along with your mapped itinerary, which you could send to your friends or colleagues. You may feel uneasy about turning on your phone's GPS for fear of being tracked by Big Brother however, if you can get past that (if they want to find you they can anyway!) then it could make for an interesting story telling experience. On another front, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for businesses to target customers in proximity to their brick and mortar location. Of course this is all based on users who have opted-in to this service. This has similarities to an article I wrote about Jambo.net.

With the Photosynth system, a 3D map is created from dozens or perhaps hundreds of still images of a scene, for example St. Peter's Basilica. Think of it as a walkthrough by way of clicking on different images contained within that 3D image structure - wide shots, close ups, and even point-to-point traversing. I have some familiarity with 3D walkthroughs having once owned a company VP3 (later sold the name to On2), which endeavored to create 3D storyboards for filmmakers. What is significant from that experience reinforced for me the importance of creating an environment people are comfortable navigating through so they do not get lost in the UI - for example in a 3D space people were not familiar with X/Y axis navigation. MUDs, like Second Life seems to have solved that problem however, a program, be it 3D or uploading images and text to MySpace, needs to be simple enough especially on a mobile device so people do not have to go through too many layers to get to the content they want.

What the Helio device and these research projects may point toward is putting the experience into a visual and text based context for the user - storytelling in an intuitive and useful experience. Taking this a step further would be video segments, again shot in an arc, or unfolding story. With sites like Jumpcut offering on site editing of original and public domain content, one can create augmented or mashed-up stories. I wish wireless providers would remove caps on uploading of video content. For example, the Helio is limited to 949KB transfer to other Helio users, and when sending video to an email address, only 176x144 resolution is supported, yikes. The Nokia N90, which can record over an hour of high-quality video, is similarly constrained. I understand capacity concerns should people start uploading 10MB files however; it is time for the Telco to scale up their networks given the purpose of these devices and the trend with sites like YouTube. The trend with sites like MySpace, YouTube, Jumpcut and projects like PLOG and Photosynth are moving in the direction of personalized storytelling, my hope is that hardware like Helio will match these capabilities in an easy intuitive fashion.