Arguably, the genre of science fiction was born in 1818 with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The book saw a scientist create a monster which he then lost control of, and this has been a common theme throughout the genre ever since – man creates being, being causes havoc & inspires fear in humans, humans react by trying to destroy it.

Prestigious sci-fi author Isaac Asimov developed the Three Laws of Robotics as a guide for governing/guiding robot ethics but, of course, plots in which these laws are broken are all the more compelling for the way they juxtapose themes of a fear of the unknown, slavery and identity, for example.

Anyone who has been given chores by their parents understands that human creators always want their creations to make life easier for them. Likewise, human nature determines that robots will serve us, and it was a Czech play R.U.R. that introduced the word ‘robot’ (Czech for ‘slave’) to the English language and the science fiction genre. Films made around the future-obsessed turn of the millennium, such as I, Robot and The Matrix, have seen machines rising above their station and others, such as Minority Report and (the novel) Nineteen Eighty Four have seen technology accentuating the very worst aspects of human motivations to control and gain power.

While these works of science fiction are brilliant from the perspectives of entertainment, stretching the imagination and interrogating complex ideas of the ethics of increased reliance on robot technology, their side effect can be one of increased suspicion and fear towards technological advance. Earlier this week I read an article titled ‘How bots are taking over the world’ which, besides making use of my favourite bot-related stock photo, discusses the current state of robots and the web and in particular the implications this has on identity. One particular phrase in the article says that the internet is ‘increasingly becoming a post-user environment’ regulated by machines, which struck me as what must surely be ‘the goal’ – machines doing the work so we don’t have to. My current favourite example of this is If This Then That, which gets your online accounts talking to one another so that the internet finds the information you want without you having to search for it. This really is the future, even if I’m missing my jetpack.

Although there is fear and resistance in any kind of advance or change, friendly, helpful robots are only a small step away from everyday reality, helping with much more real-world, everyday tasks than regulating the internet. Taking the best elements of both R2-D2 (sensors and tools) and C3PO (etiquette/understanding context), these bots will live in your lovely shiny slimline smartphone and automate the tasks that rob you of the time you would rather spend on Draw Something (or something involving the outdoors, maybe).

For example, say you have fish because they’re a living alternative to a lava lamp, and you have enough common sense not to plan your life around your silent pets that can’t even moult on you. Those fish will need feeding whether you are there to do it or not, so you have an automatic feeder installed in the tank. However, when you do come home, you quite like to feed them yourself and perhaps re-enact the bit where Claire Danes and Leonardo di Caprio lock eyes in Romeo + Juliet (it’s the only reason I would ever own fish). To avoid overfeeding/starving the fish, the automatic fish food dispenser would communicate with your mobile phone – if you reached home before a certain time then your pets would be fed by your own human hand, but if you failed to make it back in time for fishy dinner time then their tiny stomachs would not go neglected. I think the process of remotely feeding the fish is more interesting than having the fish in the first place, but that’s just me. I like to potter around the garden doing the watering so it’s not something I’d want automation to take away from me, but if I got kidnapped, the last thing I’d want upon my release would be returning to a barren garden of wilted flowers and dry twigs. Instead, I’d want the backup watering system to know that I hadn’t been home (via the absence of my phone) and keep things lush and green. I imagine cutting it all back would be the perfect post-kidnap therapy. This example also works (hopefully more often) for going on holiday, because who has time between changing currency, telling the bank that you’ll be out of the country* and packing climate-appropriate outfits to reset their garden watering program?

The importance of context in finessing automated short-cuts is clear – some tasks are dull for some and enjoyable for others and if everything around you is automated there is a risk of living life on fast-forward. Spending time doing simple things is not time wasted if you enjoyed it – the fact we don’t all eat in fast food restaurants all the time is supporting evidence of this. Science fiction set in dystopian worlds will always be a great source of dramatic storytelling, but the key is in the ‘fiction.’ A world where robots assist us is not far off, and it’s not as scary as Hollywood/the Daily Mail would have you believe.

*As an aside, surely your bank could know where you’re headed because you bought the flights using their card? This would save the tricky moments when a busy jet-setting life grinds to a halt over a block on a bank card. Or would this be information sharing between companies taken too far? Either way it’s a question for discussion…

Anyone in Barcelona last week will have found it hard to ignore Mobile World Congress’s presence in the city, if they missed the huge billboards with GSMA graphics on, then the (laughably) large police presence in and around the Fira to ward off student anti-capitalist protests will have certainly caught the attention of all those in the Plaça Espanya area.

While Overlay were in town we met a number of really interesting people from highly innovative companies: P2i’s Aridion technology for protecting devices from water damage impressed, but their card tricks were a little on the un-nerving side; Sensirion showcased humidity and temperature sensors for mobile devices which could potentially be a fantastic additional input to our current contextual definitions, but the item that caught our imaginations most readily was QGate. The QGate product looks like a large electric plug adapter but enables remote control of household appliances via mobile apps. Currently this technology involves the user making the changes within the app, but from our perspective it seems like a perfect scenario for the Context Engine to step in and make changes based on a user’s behavioural context cues, which is at the very least quite interesting if not really rather exciting (you can guess what we think).

Although many might observe that mobile operators have been losing their over-arching control of the mobile market, they were all represented in their various parent company-guises across the stalls and even had the good fortune of lots of extra traffic due to the free wifi being highly elusive! This bonus from my roaming data charges, while significant, probably won’t be enough to keep operators in a position of power, but helpfully Simon Andrews has supplied some interesting suggestions for leveraging the ever-present (but currently not-very-exciting) subject of mobile payments to networks favour.

Elsewhere at MWC there were keynote addresses from major players in the mobile industry, notably this included Google’s Eric Schmidt, who boldly suggested that -if the company play it right- in twelve years ‘there will be an Android in every pocket.’ And if Android’s ubiquity across the exhibition halls at the HTC, Samsung and their own stalls in particular is anything to go by, this dream of an ‘every pocket’ level of ubiquity is certainly not one to be easily dismissed. Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley shared the company’s ideas of passive awareness to revitalise a check-in system which is at best clunky for the user and at worst repels them. With our focus on context awareness, Foursquare’s recognition of a need for a phone to passively understand more about the user is interesting, but does raise questions about privacy and sharing settings – will they fall foul of the frequent mistake of sharing as default like Spotify with Facebook?

Despite the (inevitable) backlash within future-thinking media circles, Mobile World Congress still serves useful function in mixing the mobile world up together and creating opportunities to meet people that would not otherwise occur naturally. However, the miles we must have walked around the Fira Barcelona in the two days we were there have not been missed since we reverted to email contact on our return! Until next year…

While we might roll our eyes at the plethora of 2011 roundup articles that present themselves this week, we’re not too proud to join in too. And while events worldwide may have been on the scale of an end of season finale, events in the world of Mobile Context have also been dramatic (but with fewer lives lost).

After launching the blog section of the Overlay Media website in February, we looked at the contemporary state of location-based services, ruminated on what the advances in mobile location sharing meant for privacy and explored ideas of context awareness, with particular focus on activity recognition. At this earlier stage of 2011, the idea of Mobile Context was not one widely discussed anywhere besides among the very most advanced mobile technology developers.

As the year wore on and with these basics covered we also looked at the impact of Mobile Context on social media, tourism and in defining appropriate levels of social sharing. Mobile Context Google searches were returning more and more results and with the arrival of the iPhone 4S and Siri, suddenly a whole lot more people were getting interested in the phone-as-personal-assistant idea. With Apple stepping into the space of Context, it is a sure sign that it’s something worth running with and also a great trigger for more and more people to start asking questions about mobile context awareness. With Gartner’s predictions about the adoption of context-aware computing within the next few years, this is only going to grow.

Only this week came news that gesture recognition could become an alternative to the TV remote within the next year, and – while this might raise questions about potential injuries when squabbling for control of the television with one’s family members next Christmas – it also demonstrates the speed at which these technologies can be developed and adopted. 2011 has seen great developments – here’s to 2012 seeing great adoption!

Here at Overlay Media, we know that the future of mobile computing is context aware (and we’ve known for a while) so it is always nice when more people wave the context flag. This past month has been particularly pleasing with positive affirmations that when it comes to areas within mobile computing, context-aware is an important and burgeoning one.

Take for example the following press releases from Gartner on the subject; one proclaims that next year, context will be a ‘$12 Billion Market’ while the more recent says that context will ‘affect $96bn of annual consumer spending in 2015.’ Both articles promise wide-reaching and diverse opportunities for context information providers and understanding these is a challenge in itself.

For new readers not yet aux-fait with context-aware computing, a helpful recent tweet described it as ‘the intersection between our “separate” lives in the digital, mobile, social & physical world,’ or in other words, a means of making computing mesh with ‘real life’ in a more seamless way. The more ‘stitched-in’ your mobile is to your everyday life patterns, the more it will know about you without you having to explicitly ‘tell’ it; just like your housemate, partner, family or friends might know your routine, so will your phone.

According to Gartner this increased intimacy with the user will allow enterprises to ‘leverage context to better target and deliver’ content to customers. They also warn that ‘organisations that do not prepare for thoughtful information sharing [...] will be at a severe disadvantage.’ The report goes on to say that the disruptions caused by context aware computing will include ‘model-driven security in fraud detection and prevention’ as well as a ‘convergence in television, game, web and mobile advertising’ and ‘new styles of application programming.’ So in other words, context would enable new ways to tackle crime, a more uniform experience of advertisements and a new set of tools for application developers.

Users will be attracted to sharing their life patterns due to the improvements brought by context to their overall mobile experience. For example, according to Computer World, ‘the best hope for better battery life lies in optimisation’ and a context aware phone could optimise its power consumption based on what it knew about your daily routine.

The research tank also states that in 2015, 40% of smartphone users across the globe will opt-in to context service providers that track their activities: that’s the equivalent of the populations of the UK, North and Central America, and Brazil, all choosing to share details about where they are at all times. The value of that data alone is something that is hard to comprehend, but Gartner suggest that $96bn of consumer spending that year will be influenced by context information.

The size of this figure boosts William Clark’s assertion that ‘there is little doubt that context will be a defining principle of mobile business for the next decade, especially advertising and marketing.’ The mention of advertising in particular will serve as a welcome boost to a sector with well documented consumer aversion and avoidance. Even as a person who likes to skip/mute/avoid adverts as much as possible, I don’t really mind it if it’s relevant to me or offers me something I might otherwise miss out on, and this is the kind of experience that context can enable.

With only seven weeks left of this year, this $12bn market with ‘the potential to be a real “game changer” in terms of competitive advantage’ is on our doorstep, and if Gartner are right, the companies that put ‘Use Context’ on their new year’s resolutions will be the ones that achieve that advantage.