MoSoSo papers

There's a collection of papers on Mobile Social Software that might be relevant to some of your projects posted on the web. These are position papers (so not a lot of detail) that will be discussed at a workshop at CHI (ACM Conference on Human Computer Interaction) this spring.

Cell Social Network

I found this startup ( http://www.moblastic.com ) that seems to be doing a lot of the stuff that we talked about in class as far as social networks.

You may want to sign up for their invite list to check out the service once its out of beta, it may give some good ideas if you are thinking of doing something similar.

SIM card update

For those who needed SIM cards, they are on their way to coming. After dealing with some corporate-ness (lots of phone calls and lots of form-filling-out), I managed to get 10 cards at a discounted rate without contract. They'll be shipping them to me early next week, and I hope to get them to all of you by Friday. They will be Cingular with no voice service and have 20MB/month of data. They are in a pooled plan, so some people can go over 20MB as long as some people don't use that much. The MB possibly roll over from month to month, but I'm not sure on this yet. Anyway, not totally ideal, but that should be sufficient for everything you guys need to do.

If any projects think they need much more data than that, let me know and I'll let you know the additional cost for adding significantly more data to the SIM. We need to figure out payment for these, but just budget $90 for the semester as we had mentioned earlier and Ed and I will figure out a way to get that money to the appropriate place at some point.

Data Plans...

In order to use data from your own applications on the phone, you'll need an unlimited data plan. The following are the recommended plans...

Cingular: "Unlimited EDGE/GPRS Data" - call 1-866-cingular, and be sure to ask for the MIT "Premier" rate. It should be $29.99/month. Please post a comment if you're able to confirm this!

T-Mobile: "Unlimited GPRS/VPN" $29.99 - Call 1-877-387-4324 to change your plan. Don't let them talk you into the WAP/T-Zones for $5.99. T-Zones will let you use the web browser, but not to use data from your own applications or ones that you download.

Data settings for your phone...

Sorry for not getting this out sooner. Here are some instructions on how to set up the A780 for data on various carriers. There are two places they have to be configured, in the Setup application and in the web browser. Comment if you have questions/problems...

Cingular
In Setup, go to Data Network
Menu, New
Profile Name:Cingular GPRS
APN: wap.cingular.com
Save and close.

In the web browser go to Setup, Profiles
Menu, New
Profile Name: Cingular Web
Network Link: Cingular GPRS
Leave everything else the same, Save

T-Mobile WAP
In Setup, go to Data Network
Menu, New
Profile Name:TMobile GPRS
APN: wap.voicestream.com
DNS server (checked)
(1) 216.155.175.105
(2) 216.155.175.106
Save and close.

In the web browser go to Setup, Profiles
Menu, New
Profile Name: TMobile Web
Primary Gateway IP: 216.155.165.50
Port: 8080
Network Link:TMobile GPRS
Leave everything else the same, Save


T-Mobile Unlimited Data
In Setup, go to Data Network
Menu, New
Profile Name:TMobile GPRS
APN: internet2.voicestream.com
Save and close.

In the web browser go to Setup, Profiles
Menu, New
Profile Name: TMobile Web
Network Link: TMobile GPRS
Leave everything else the same, Save

SIM cards - Action required....

Please post a comment to this entry by Friday if you'll need a SIM card for the class. I'll work with Cingular to get one as soon as possible for everyone who needs one. My best guess is that it'll take 1-2 weeks, but you can still play with the phones and develop non-networked applications in the mean time.