Thanks to Nokia's partnership with Kring, their upcoming Ovi Store (aka the Nokia App Store) is going to kick off with some of the most innovative content that has ever come to the mobile platform. It's set to open in May soon after the store will feature Kring's new project and is code-named TEVA. As for what exactly TEVA will look like and what it will be about...well, details are still vague. Kring wants to make sure spoilers don't ruin the fun for the audience...or perhaps we should say "participants."

ARG Explained

What we do know, however, is that TEVA will be a combination of user-generated content and Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). In you're unaware of what "ARG" means, it's when an interactive narrative is told using the real world as the platform. Instead of passively consuming this sort of entertainment, ARG players actively participate in it. A somewhat recent example of this is what ARG called the "Lost Experience," which launched back in 2008 as an online clue hunt developed by ABC for fans of the TV show "Lost." In this game, web sites across the net contained clues that when pieced together told a story that tied into and paralleled that of the show. Another example would be the ARG created for the band Nine Inch Nails to promote their "Year Zero" album. This time the adventure started when concert goers found thumb drives in the bathrooms that contained unreleased songs and clues.

TEVA is No Ordinary ARG

So the idea of an ARG isn't an entirely new one, but using the mobile platform to play the game is...at least like this. You see, TEVA isn't just a traditional ARG moved to the mobile platform - it only involves some elements of that type of story-telling mechanism. Another piece to this mobile experience is user-generation content. This is a new twist. In the past, ARG players would just interact with the story line - now they're going to help create it. And yet another aspect to this mobile experience will be local. Gameplay takes place in your city - not just in an application or just on the web. How exactly this happens, we don't know, but TEVA will use GPS and other location-based services in some way. 

So What Do We Call This?

When we asked if there was a name for this type of entertainment, Kring said perhaps we could call it a "mobile immersive experience." It's a bit long, but it works.

Since there aren't a ton of details about TEVA yet, we have to use our imaginations to guess at what sort of interactions might be included. Based on some of the other discussion topics that evening, one of the possibilities that may come into play in this new mobile experience is an augmented reality application.

At the dinner, one of the Nokia execs described how we could use our mobile phones to record geo-located images and videos and tag them with specific keywords. This media could then only be accessed when you arrived in the same geo-location with your mobile phone. For example, if you showed up at the local park, you could pull up a video of your friends playing Frisbee there last week. This "mirror world," as it is being called, isn't so much an "alternate" reality, but a real one...just one that's been recorded, tagged, and archived. With this, we sort of become the ghosts of ourselves.

The Possibilities are Endless

The TEVA project will initially launch in the Ovi Store while it's being developed for other mediums (iPhone? Web? This, too, is unknown.) What is known, though, is that Kring is extremely excited about the project. As a creative, he's less interested in the technical details of the technology itself - just what it can do and how he can use it to create an entirely new entertainment experience.

Kring noted that there are already mobile applications that allow you to go out into the real world and "collect clues, send things, create things, and share with other people nearby...using the locative qualities of the phone. Once you get the parameters of what these services can do," he continued, "then your imagination is the only thing that stops you...if you attach a narrative to that."

TEVA will launch this summer and will be rolled out regionally.

Above image is the TEVA logo.

Entertainment is increasingly the center of our lives, and we also want work that challenges and entertains. With the rise of the Social Web and new forms of communication like Twitter, iPhone, YouTube and others, entertainment is just a click away. In this post we look at today's Web through the prism of both entertainment and utility.

Help me: Search, Business Tools and Autocomplete

Search is the most important utility on the web and is indispensable in business. Whether you're a programmer looking for a library, a researcher seeking a scientific paper, or a doctor wanting detail about a drug, search helps you find information.

Today's search is dominated by Google. Much has been written about Google stagnation and many attempts to improve the search, but the fact remains, people prefer Google. Yet there has to be a better way to search. After each query we must sift through myriad choices. And we start each new search from scratch.

We're looking for software that will guide us through the pile and help us find the answer.

In business we have a set of tools to help get things done. From Microsoft Office to the skinny gems from 37 Signals, business tools enable us to collaborate, manage projects, sales pipelines, contacts, etc. While we complain about these tools, the fact is we couldn't do without them.

The most important factor about business tools is context. The best tools understand what we're doing. The best tools encode business flows and processes, and guide us through the process.

Back in 2003 at IBM, I encountered a giant flow chart that described the process of releasing a piece of software. My immediate reaction was, this needed to be a piece of software because no human could work through it without making a mistake. This is what software is for, to help us deal with complex processes.

The autocomplete function is common in your search box, iPhone and spell-checker. Autocomplete mode works by listing a set of choices that match what you typed. Imagine in the future most utility software understanding the context of what you're doing and offering an autocomplete: choices that make sense in this context.

We already see this in many systems. All popular IDEs offer automatic fixes for common programming errors, iPhone understands that you're looking at a phone number and offers you to make a call. Google understands that you searched for an address and shows you a map. These are examples of autocomplete or shortcuts, based on your context.

Truly helpful software of the future will be a sequence of shortcuts that understand your context and help you navigate to the next step. The computer will present the choices and the decision will be yours.

Entertain me: Twitter, Randomness and Recommendations

While utilities are getting more rigorous, entertainment software is getting more casual.

The new entertainment is based on a couple of patterns. First is brevity. With increasing (and nowadays unbearable) amount of information and choice, modern entertainment software knows it has your eyes for only a limited time.

Twitter is the proto entertainment riding the exponential curve of popularity. The reason is it's short. But there's another aspect to Twitter that's part of a broader pattern. Twitter is casual.

The Twitter UI is a flattened list of messages intended to be scanned. Unlike its archetype email (link), which is meant to be drilled into and answered, Twitter places no obligation on reading or replying. It's a feel good, hedonistic experience not meant to last more than a few minutes.

Modern entertainment is more casual and short because with ubiquitous web access, rise of the social web and work from home, people want to be entertained during the day. Nothing that takes a long time could work, but checking Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook for a few minutes is fine in most people's minds.

The other face of casuality is randomness. Apple made a brilliant move when it released iPod shuffle; a lot of people don't care about the order songs play. Netflix cracked it with the Queue a long time ago; many people don't care what movie to watch tonight as long as they pick it at some point. Digg shines with its top news because people are looking for random bits of information.

We still talk about personalization, and ideally we'd love to get the right recommendations for everything. But in the absence of such a magic algorithm, randomness and Amazon Bestsellers do the trick. We're entering the age where entertainment is a mode of browsing, where the browsing part is squeezed to 0. We don't want to spend time choosing entertainment. We want a quick pick, quick duration, quick satisfaction. Unlike business application where we must pay attention, we want entertainment to be relaxed, quick and simple.

Conclusion

Software is increasingly polarized into utilities and entertainment. Utilities help us work and are becoming more rigorous. We're looking for helpful software that understands our context and guides us through the process, whether it is search or a complex business task. Entertainment software is at the opposite spectrum, being casual, brief and random. We're unwilling to spend hours browsing, but instead seek quick and satisfactory entertainment.

And now, please tell us what business software is the most helpful to you? And what entertainment software you find the most entertaining?