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Citizens beware *scowls sternly* it seems there is a new menace threatening our society. Haven’t you heard the news? Web addiction is well on its way to becoming a clinically recognized form of dangerous dependency.

That’s right citizens, just when you thought you were a clean living, smoothie drinking, yoga posing goody two-shoes, your dabble in to cyber-crack (social-networking, gaming, googling…) has gone and got you hooked.

I know that I am, and that the Miyowa office contains quite a few others who are too.

But luckily we functioning web addicts are not likely to find ourselves banged up next to Winehouse or Woods just yet. It’s the high school drop-outs who pass weeks locked in their dark, sock-ridden bedrooms, developing rickets and interacting solely with avatars, that really need to watch their backs. Apparently an ever-increasing number of adolescent addicts are being prized from their bedrooms and wheeled in to 12 step programs, military schools and detox camps in Utah by desperate parents trying to ween them off their 18-hours-a-day PC habit.

So, what does that say about the industry we all work in – providing mobile internet? Are we pushing a product that enables addicts, helping them feed their addiction anywhere, anytime?

Well, sort of. But at the same time, we are the lighter, healthier ‘safer’ option. We’re the booze-free beer or like playing poker for pretzels, if you will. In my mind, mobile internet is less of an enabler, and more of a cure.

For the shizzle we’re shiftin’ gets the web addicts out of their dark and dingy lairs – away from the decomposing pizza fumes and in to the fresh air of day. After all, could there be anything more embarrassing than only ever checking-in to various corners of your bedroom on Foursquare?

And, we all need to get out to take some photos for Facebook sometime, do we not?

Especially now that stepping *grimaces* away from the PC and out of the house no longer means logging off.

Mobile internet, and in particular (plug) Miyowa InTouch5™, allow you to take every one of your social communities with you….all the way in to the real world!

You can keep connected, notified and in-the-loop – you can tweet on the hoof, IM on the go and meet your friends in the flesh.

When it comes down to it, I don’t think that there’s any need to, sense in, or chance of ‘curing’ this very human addiction to discovering new things, interacting and maintaining our place as part of a social group (albeit via the web). But I do think that we might all end up a bit less fat around the behind, and rather more rich in vitamin D, now that mobile internet has given us the means to do this on the move.

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This post isn’t exactly about mobile, but seeing as the Miyowa office has recently been so abuzz with all things design, I wanted to share a few of the cool things we’ve been looking at.

A while ago, when the developers emerged from tirelessly building, testing, re-testing, re-adjusting, tweaking and perfecting the R.A.B framework, and produced the final, optimized InTouch5™ Rich Addressbook architecture, it was time for the team to really get down to ensuring that every aspect of the end-user experience was at its very best. Not only, of course, the scenarios and sequences of how to use the application – that’s been an ever-evolving key concern from the get go – but also the details of the ‘look & feel’.

Over the past few months, the team have been musing over inspiration from far and wide.

While I don’t want to give too much away about the final design of InTouch5™ R.A.B interface (available for the end user in Q3 2010), I thought I could at least share some of the images we found, and appreciated along the way. Suffice to say the inspiration gathering process was pretty extensive, so I just want to dip in to some of it, and that’s not to say they represent the look we’ve finally gone for. First up, I had a rummage in to the folder marked ‘Geometric Shapes’ and today I thought I’d share some of the content we sourced from the city of Melbourne.

If you’ve never been to Melbourne you’re missing out on an incredibly good-looking city that’s somewhat of a treasure trove of very, very cool design. Here are some images of things we liked:

The recent re-branding of the city:

Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre:

Melbourne’s VCA

Melbourne’s TCA

And….not from Melbourne at all, but just because they’re pretty awesome, and I wanted to include them too, some origami shoes from the French graphic artist Ndeur.

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I just tried Google Buzz and OMG!

Oh, I don’t mean, “OMG this is great”. Well, sure, it is cool and relevant enough that we at Miyowa are prototyping it to incorporate it into our InTouch5™ product.

What I do mean is:  OMG, please not another social network.

I already network on all the standards:  LinkedIn, Facebook (multiple versions including fans of Miyowa, Fans of Pascal, my neice’s cool group, etc.), Twitter, and I continue getting requests to join all kinds of groups. I am connected, but it sure takes time and I am all over the place trying to stay connected.

I chat on every flavor known.  My colleagues want me on Yahoo IM; others want me on Skype, some on Windows Messenger, and so it goes.

Everyone complains that I am not “present”.  But, who has the time to keep connected through all these networking mechanisms?

So, Buzz on, Google, but I need filtering, aggregation of social networks, and a simpler, consolidating way to stay connected—not another social network.

I recently read something Belinda Parmar wrote in the Times Online Tech & Web section about a common strategy employed by technology companies who want to make their products appeal to women: “pink it and shrink it”.

euuuggghhh.

I totally agree that a hell of a lot of technology is very poorly aimed at women and I’m glad to see a company like Lady Geek exists, to provide some much needed guidance in the male-dominated tech industry.

Luckily at Miyowa our products are about simplifying the way we stay in touch with our friends – something that crosses any gender divide.
In fact, if anything, it’s refreshing to see instances like today where one of the female staff checked with the boys that the heart shaped logo that she had designed for the Rich AddressBook ‘favorites’ function wasn’t likely to put any guys off.
They were fine with it, but did insist it was red, not pink.

Fair enough.
It shows that getting the opinions from the opposite sex is always the most useful way to understand how ‘they’ are likely to feel about something. (no pigeonholing going on here, of course).

So anyway, I just wanted to share a traumatic technology purchase I made a few years ago, that utterly proves the point that some companies just don’t (or at least didn’t) ‘get’ women. I sincerely doubt any women had any input in to the decision making process that went into designing it.
Said company will remain nameless, as I promptly got rid of the offending purchase and I don’t remember who it was made by.

It was a phone, and I have to admit that I was actually seduced in to buying it due to it’s rounded contours and…dare I say it…pinkish stripe. It was indeed a whole lot prettier than all the other big bulks of black on offer, and I was caving in to the french femininity I was newly surrounded by. The problem was, having just moved to France, I didn’t speak a word of french – so when the sales assistant tried explaining the wonderful features of my new phone I didn’t understand a thing.
It was when I got home and read the manual in English that I discovered that my new phone had an integrated feature that allowed me to keep track of (look away boys) my friends and my menstrual cycles. This was bad enough, but yes, maybe it could be useful to some people? Like those trying to get pregnant? Or those who are horribly nosy? But what really got me mad was the incredibly inane section that asked me to fill in all my friends favorite perfume scents. Not just brands, but individual smells they like: ‘lavender’, ‘spice’, ‘citrus’, ‘fruity’, ‘wood’, ‘rose’. Because, yeh know, we girls all talk about that. A lot. Because it’s very important to us. Then there were shopping wish lists, shoe sizes and god knows what else. Suffice to say it annoyed me so much that I gave it away to a friend who needed a phone. To make calls on. Because that’s certainly the only thing that mobile was useful for.

Thankfully nowadays there are plenty of phones with lots of very useful apps and functions, and plenty of designs pretty enough not to need to be pink. And resources like Lady Geek to help tech companies make a better stab at giving girls what they actually want.

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