David Tebbutt

While not the only game in town, mobile phones and other handheld gizmos grabbed plenty of attention at Innovate! Europe in mid-May. This event brings together inventors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and early adopters. Plus a sprinkling of media types and facilitators to help things go with a swing.

The whole thing takes place in Zaragoza, an increasingly hi-tech city, in Northern Spain. This year, Ryanair flew some of us there for one penny, plus extras, from London’s Stansted airport.

The event brings a whiff of Silicon Valley to Europe and, after last year’s rather hand-wringing examination of the European innovation scene, this year the event was transformed. The place was bursting at the seams with new ideas, many of them destined for a place on the world stage. Some, I suspect, were not. Here, I’ll concentrate on some of the goings-on in the mobile world.

For starters, I’ll mention a lipstick-sized projector. Without a case it is even smaller and can be embedded inside a phone, a PDA or a laptop. It is from Australia’s Digislide . Quite how they got into a European event is a bit of a mystery. But they certainly caused a stir. Whether it’s a clip-on accessory or a component, it pushes out a VGA or SVGA colour image up to 1.5 metres diagonal. Suddenly, personal interaction can become social, just point your mobile at the nearest wall. PowerPoint anyone? Aarrgghh.

Of course, you need stuff to project and there’s plenty of that around. For instance, just the week before Zaragoza, Ross Mayfield at Socialtext showed me his Miki - a wiki for a mobile phone.

Back at Innovate!Europe, Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz, used his mobile phone to grab movies of conference participants then published them online using his vpod.tv software – vpod stands for video publishing on demand. Grab movies from any device and publish to any device. Kewego, an online video service, was somewhat eclipsed by Rodrigo’s antics.

Less glamorous perhaps, but no less useful, were the two text-to-speech systems. Whether you have poor vision, or you simply prefer the spoken word, both ReadSpeaker and Otodio have something to offer. ReadSpeaker allows website owners to put a speech icon on their web pages while Otodio will read an entire newspaper to you if you wish. Think of it as an audio Acrobat. It could offer a useful channel for delivering company information to mobile phone users.

Two devices that provided presence-based services were Clicmobile and navx. Clicmobile is geared to finding friends and friends of friends who are nearby. You can then send an SMS to either, even if you don’t know their number. This system could be useful for business networking as well as for making the more obvious social connections.

The navx service uses satnav to warn you of traffic jams and speed cameras and advise you about parking availability. You can also annotate trips with your own tags or photos and share them with others. And, if you elect to pay a lower monthly fee, you can have details of your movements monitored, thus contributing to a real-time traffic jam service.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!