Mobile Caching

One late afternoon, I went to a public administration office in Helsinki and found out that the office has moved to a new address unfamiliar to me. Realising that I only had a very short time to find the new place before the office closed, I took a few pictures of the moving announcement and the map of the new location using my mobile phone camera. To save time, I immediately left the old office and started to walk around and ask people nearby .


The first several people I asked were familiar with the street, but had no clue about the exact location. I remembered that I have taken the map of the new location using my mobile phone, so I started to show the pictures to the next several people I met on the street using my mobile phone.

A lady immediately recognized the building and gave me a direction. "A good start", I thought. After thanking the lady, I walked toward the direction provided and asked another lady with the map from my mobile phone. Looking at the map, she pointed out that the building was located somewhere across the street block. After thanking her, I rushed to cross the street and went around the block where I found a nice young man walking towards me. I told him about the information from the previous two ladies while showing him the map. He directly pointed out the building I was looking for and suggested me to go inside, because the office is located somewhere in the building. Thankfully, I found the new office before it closed that afternoon.

My camera phone has helped me to store and retrieve in-situ information within seconds. It has also become a means of sharing information. The process of knowledge sharing became smoother with the presence of simple visual information. This visual information presented by mobile phone is similar to the context scenarios in Pair Writing. By sharing a chunk of incomplete information, each passerby has helped me to incrementally build and share a new knowledge about the location in a very short time, which would have not been possible without the help of my mobile phone.

Queueing and Civilization

In a very competitive environment like Singapore, queueing is a custom, rather than a guarantee. As a part of the society, I also have to bear with this custom. Queueing for trains, tickets, dining, groceries, taxis and even for newspapers.

Sometimes, the time spent for queueing is even longer than the time for acquiring the actual goods and services.

A correspondent sent a letter to TODAY newspaper sharing her experience of queueing for the newspaper at Toa Payoh MRT station. She observed that the people behaved so ungraciously and inconsiderate to others when they queued up.

I was also once queueing for newspaper in the station. I came early in the morning around 7.a.m. before the TODAY's newspaper distributor came. The queue was already long when I arrived. Luckily, I still got the paper for that day. The distribution of the papers lasted less than 15 minutes and so did the queue.


Instead of coming to the station early in the morning without a guarantee to get a newspaper, now I go to the TODAY's website and read the paper online. The paper is already published online at 6.a.m. There is no need for me to rush and waste my time in queue without any guarantee to get the paper. By reading the paper online, I can also know the news, special offers and events earlier than the people who queue.

I wonder if those people queueing at the stations know about the possibilities of reading Today online. It would have saved them a lot of time and energy.

In the Singapore information society, the telecommunication infrastructure is good. The cost of having an Internet connection is quite low. However, the gap of Internet literacy is still wide. In addition, the custom of reading is also difficult to be changed. Reading a newspaper on "paper" is still preferable than reading the electronic version.

People in Singapore still prefer to queue for newspaper rather than accessing it from the Internet. After all, queueing is a part of Singapore civilization. Yet, I am still waiting for the time when TODAY is available on my mobile phone.