Orange Cone

Computers that *really* need to know your identity usually ask for it with a login prompt. Maybe a wireless phone could make that easier than giving people passwords that they often forget. (I would still want to use a password, but it could be a short one.)

I recall you were at CHI so you probably attended Rekimoto-san's opening plenary where he described the use of a portable voice over IP device which doubled up as an identification unit. Using the device, you could pull up your information on smart areas and share them with another person.

Using RFID and mobile phones with bluetooth makes much more sense. I haven't read the article on the information cloud but if it's truly a meta "recent documents", I'm not sure it's that useful. Perhaps a "digital briefcase" (ignoring Microsoft's pitiful attempts with this terminology) where you choose what to put in would be more useful than what you recently read. That approach also helps solve privacy issues of letting people access anything you recently looked at or did.

So I've got a blue tooth phone, headset, Mac, and palm. They work together great, and I do get some of these benefits -- for example, if I walk away from my computer, it locks. If I walk back, it unlocks. Brilliant.

My brother's annoying girlfriend will never read my email again.

The problem is, walking away requires getting in my car and driving down the street before my bluetooth goes out of range. And newer phones have better bluetooth reception. Which means, in your admittedly wonderful vision of the future, my phone would tell everyone in all the cubes around me -- possibly the entire office -- that I was standing at their side.

Not so convenient.

I think for this particular vision, the more limited range of RFIDs makes more sense. Doesn't mean they can't slap an RFID in my phone. I just think range is a very key component here.

Ben: Yeah, the range of Bluetooth is an issue: it's potentially significantly larger than our immediate space, so it broadcasts our position potentially too far from our bodies. Since I'm not a Bluetooth engineer, I don't know whether there are good solutions to this. I think that there may be in triangulation (several sensors that monitor signal strength and figure out effective distance using it). Also, I believe that there's a piece of the Bluetooth standard that allows for one BT device (the master device at the moment, I think) to tell another device to turn its radio down. In situations like a cube farm, where there are a lot of BT beacons talking to each other, radio power may not be necessary and it may be acceptable behavior to have all phone devices at their minimum broadcasting power. In fact, when there are a lot of devices, I wouldn't be surprised if the network adjusted to this state on its own. But I agree, that IS the biggest issue with this: BT signals are significantly bigger than our bodies.

Kevin: read the article, if you get a chance. They describe what they're doing in a way that seems to have decent face value. Documents that have recent change times are effectively the tops of our work piles, which are generally the things we're most interested in. They also have interfaces that allow you to find any document in your document universe, not just the most recent ones, but using recency is a pretty good (if imperfect) first cut. It is, of course, important not to sacrific the effectiveness of finding nonrecent documents when creating the cloud UI, but that's the general information/document organization and retrieval problem and the cloud is a layer on top of it.

Brian: Right. I think that the phone-as-id idea adds a layer of security to traditional passwords, which means that password security may not have to be as hardcore when coupled with it. In that respect, it can kind of serve the role of those RSA SecurID key generation cards, which are essentially designed to create a physical object that you have to have to log in, as a secondary security measure:

http://www.rsasecurity.com/node.asp?id=1157

The first cell phone Bluetooth worm is out, which means a cooling off in the adoption of universally open Bluetooth beacons:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/epoc.cabir.html

Oh, well.

"Personalized Shared Ubiquitous Devices" by David Hilbert and Jonathan Trevor referenced above is downloadable from:
http://www.fxpal.com/publications/FXPAL-PR-04-273.pdf

It's 1Mb

Thanks! I've updated the original post.

I don't know much about it, but Sony and Royal Philips Electronics have a thingie called Near Field Communication ( http://www.nfc-forum.org/ ) as posted in this Wired Article ( http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,64778,00.html ). Perhaps this by itself or added to the BT might cover the range gap.

Also, I've seen that my PowerBook BT driver can show me the intensity of my phone BT signal, I'm sure then the computer can use that information in an useful way.