Life's a Pitch

By Matthijs Rotte on 13 January 2011

Yesterday the new batch of graduate students pitched for a place in the CrossmediaLab graduate program. There was some sweat, some anxiety and some stuttering, but all in all the students did good presentations. But now! Now the work starts, sculpting the students into researchers is a painstaking process. I know, I once was a graduate student at the crossmedialab. Frustration, tons of literature and blank sheets of paper (that always seem to be winning the staring contest) are just a couple of the things waiting for them. But as I recall from my own time as a graduate student at the Lab, I learned a lot and I had a lot of fun.

The graduate students I’ll be supervising (Together with Kees Winkel) have their focus on all kinds of mobile research. They’ll be doing research on Usability(In cooperation with oneShoe mobile), Mobile meets social, and on location based services. There’s no question in my mind that all of these subjects can have a profound impact on the way we look at mobile. Hopefully the outcomes of the research will prove me right. 

When we were writing the graduation assignments it struck us how little is written about usability for mobile. Everyone is jumping the wagon, but there are little usability guidelines. This reminds me somewhat of the “golden internet days”, where everybody that could type on a computer all of a sudden was a web designer, with dire consequences.(Geocities, angelfire, and what not). And though it got a lot better since, sometimes you still stumble upon really bad webdesign. So why don’t we do it right from the start this time?

The location based services assignment is an interesting one. People are still wondering if they should use things like foursquare. Ofcourse there’s no need for it. ,,I don’t see the point” is what a lot of people say. But I bet you they are the same people that didn’t see the point of the mobile phone. Sure it’s in its gadget phase, but it is an interesting technology that has a huge range of possibilities to make our life easier(Or more complicated in a fun way).

Mobile meets social entails a lot of questions concerning marketing and mobile. We carry our lives in our pocket nowadays. Some people think all marketing is evil, but I disagree. If marketeers can target me more accurately I won’t have to wade through tons of diaper commercials every morning I go to work. I will have to wade through tons of interesting offers, made to me by companies that actually want to know me as an individual.

Call me naïve, but I’m not that scared of the big companies like Google. Sure I’m careful what I put out in the cloud. But some people are scared that companies know too much about them. Think of the way you dress every morning; by picking your clothes, doing your hair, the choice to brush your teeth; everything you do is because you want other people to know what kind of person you are, so the wrong people will not hassle you. Every day you are pitching yourself to the world. Maybe, just maybe the world will teach you a lot and gives you a wonderful time. That is.. if your pitch is successful.

tagged with: usability, pitch, graduation, social, mobile, Marketing

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