By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

UGA’s New Media Institute has developed a new program called the Mobile Media Consortium. Director Scott Shamp explained the idea to Columns.

Columns: Tell me about the Mobile Media Consortium.

Shamp: It’s an industry-academic partnership that is designed to promote the field of mobile media. A lot of people define mobile media as being wireless, but this isn’t just wireless.

Information for the longest time has been a destination—if you wanted to know, you had to go. You had to go to a library, to a professor, to the oracle, to the bookstore, to the Internet. With these powerful new technologies, information can be a companion rather than a destination, something that travels with you, that enriches daily experience.

That’s a sea change. So in the past three years we’ve been working on mobility and wireless. One of our biggest projects was to create a real-world research test bed, which is what the WAG zone [Wireless Athens Ga. zone] is. We built a wireless cloud all over downtown Athens so people can start to experiment with mobile media. We’ve built the infrastructure, and now we have students working on projects, creative and innovative and sometimes downright crazy ways that you could use wireless.

We move it to the next level with the Mobile Media Consortium. Now we’re bringing industry partners into the mix. We’ve got, at this point, seven industry partners who are participating with us: HP, Intel, McDonald’s, and four Georgia companies—AirToWeb, ExecuTrain, iAnywhere, and AppForge.

They all have a real interest in mobile media, but different interests. They’re coming to the University of Georgia to see the future of mobile media, and they know one of the best ways of figuring out the future is interacting with our students. So that’s what the Mobile Media Consortium is—they’re providing resources and we’re providing ideas.

Columns: Do they literally bring you potential projects?

Shamp: No, they aren’t coming to us and saying “Do X.” They’re coming to us and saying “Show us the future.” They know that’s where they’re going to make their money. These students are going to be the ones to figure out what mobile media can and should do.

Columns: I think I need a specific example to grasp this.

Shamp: We’ve created a group of students that we call Mobile Media Scholars. These students sign up for a year’s tour of duty with us. Last year was the first for the Mobile Media Scholars. We challenged them to tell us how mobile media is going to have a positive impact on quality of life. We said, “Don’t give us the bells-and-whistles, don’t just tell us about the gizmos that are technologically cool—tell us where it can have a positive impact on people’s lives.”

The students spent fall semester doing research on what we called quality of life verticals—education, health care, tourism, all these different areas. The next semester they built prototype projects that would, they believed, show how mobile media and wireless could help people.

One of the coolest projects came from a group working on health care. They discovered one of Georgia’s healthcare problems is prenatal care during teenage pregnancies. They tried to figure out how mobile media could help with this. They came up with an application for a handheld PDA—a Personal Digital Assistant—that would allow a teenage mother-to-be to track her pregnancy, to get questions answered.

Now, there are companies, like McDonald’s, that are putting up wireless clouds. The students designed a system that would give a teenage mother-to-be a handheld device and every time she went to McDonald’s it would send her information about her pregnancy. The students calculated that the device that you would hand to the mother-to-be would cost less than a single doctor’s visit.

Columns: Teenage mothers-to-be and PDAs don’t seem to be in the same universe.

Shamp: PDAs are not very pervasive right now—but cell phones are. Perhaps in the future you can give a teenage mom-to-be a cell phone and teach her how to log in and find out about her pregnancy.

Columns: Are these undergraduates? Graduate students?

Shamp: Last year they were all undergraduates, all New Media Certificate students. This year, they’re graduate students, three master’s students and a Ph.D. student. No undergraduates this year—we found that the research component requires someone who has had some experience.

Columns: And you don’t necessarily carry the students’ projects further?

Shamp: There are some parts of these projects that might be developed. The partners of the Mobile Media Consortium have the right to license any of the applications or technology developed out of the consortium, and the students can be involved in that as well. All of this technology can be commercialized, and that’s very important for the University of Georgia.

Columns: How many students this year?
Shamp: There are four Mobile Media Scholars. We are doing mobile media in all of our classes this year, so there will probably be about 200 students working on some type of mobile media project. We’ve got a class that will be pushing video to cell phones. We’ve got another class that’s working on using cell phone cameras to cover the upcoming election. One of the projects in the capstone class is developing a mobile media application for tourism that would run on a Segway scooter.

Columns: So you’re guiding students to see beyond what they’re using.

Shamp: Because they do use it. They’re using cell phone technology like text messaging. There’s a hundred billion text messages sent every month. And the truth of the matter is—it’s hard to send a text message. What are we going to see when text messaging becomes part of everyday life?
And that’s why companies come to the Mobile Media Consortium. They are forward-thinking companies and they realize they’ve got to get the people who are going to use it to tell them what’s important about this technology.