Bing Mobile Application for Nokia

In early 2008, Microsoft announced that they’d be bringing Silverlight to the Nokia S60 platform and at Mix 2010, that effort took a big step forward with the beta release of the plugin for Symbian. Stimulant, which has been working with Silverlight on mobile platforms since its inception, was chosen (along with a few other elite agencies) to participate, helping deliver applications to showcase the runtime.

The application Stimulant worked on is a mobile variant of the Bing Bar desktop application. Stimulant worked closely with the Bing team and was able to reuse a significant portion of code and existing graphic assets, while adding in mobile-specific interactivity for this unique form factor. Much of the Bing Bar’s functionality has been ported, including stocks, weather, and real-time feeds of MSN content.

Got an S60 phone? Point your mobile browser at the demo application, located at http://silverlight.net/content/samples/s60/bing, and experience Bing in the palm of your hand.

Nathan and friends will rock SXSW on March 15!

Hosted by Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz, our design director, Nathan Moody, will be honored to chat with such luminaries as Michele Parras of the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre, David Merrill from Sifteo (the group behind Siftables), and Johnny Lee (of WiiMote hacking fame) of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group.

We expect the panel discussion will be cover a lot of ground between research and application, private and public computing, mobile and installation experiences, and a great overview of how human-computer interactions are evolving beyond the traditional desktop form factor. For more updates, follow @stimulant at Twitter and don’t hesitate to reach out directly by emailing us at sxsw10 [at] stimulant [dot] io … and definitely say hello if you find yourself in Austin, too!

When Microsoft showed SecondLight at PDC 2008, we were inspired to make something similar work with our current Surface unit. What you see here is a prototype that takes advantage of Surface’s object recognition capabilities to recognize the position of one or more iPhones on the Surface, and allows those phones to “see through” the images and reveal a second layer of information. The possibilities here are fairly extensive; what’s most interesting to us is the potential for adding a layer of personalized information on top of a public computing experience. This could enable users to capture content and take it with them, or to have the system display a personalized information layer (translated text/larger-print type/private messages) for individual users of a multi-user system.

iPhone was the first mobile platform we dug in to, but we’ve also got XRay working on Android-based and Windows Mobile-based phones as well. Big props to Josh for pulling this all together, and to long-time friend Arthur Mount for the use of his fantastic illustrations.

How are you feeling? Where can you go to match your mood...and when? These are complex, location-based questions that our MIXr social networking application helps to answer.

Social networking isn’t usually about being social in the real world. When Microsoft asked us to re-imagine what a location-aware, mobile user experience could be for the MIX08 Conference keynote, we wanted to put the “social” back in social networking.

Just checked in to V-Bar.

Stimulant worked with Microsoft and StepChange to create a Silverlight-based application that would run on a mobile phone and enable location-based social networking, but we had to create it in only 6 weeks. It also had to be built with very early, pre-release technology on a touchscreen handset. The result was an application that we dubbed MIXr.

MIXr was the world’s first touchscreen-based Silverlight application to deployed on a mobile phone. It allows users to set their current mood and location, and contribute various ratings of venues, which then can be used to not only suggest venues that match the user’s mood, but to also visualize historical data and identify trends in energy level, wait time, food and drink quality, and more.

Thus, the system’s intelligence is built by using user-generated content and opinions to fuel its recommendation engine, while also leveraging existing services like Facebook and Twitter for contact management and real-time updating.

We even added in a sobriety test, triggered by a user’s inability to press the otherwise easy-to-manage buttons. This was to ensure, shall we say, responsible mobile etiquette. One can never be too careful.

MIXr premiered at the MIX08 Conference keynote, designed for (and shown on) an HTC Touch Dual handset. Since then, we now get manicures before all important mobile demos.