Postcardie

Thanks to flickr.com/photos/jaqian/

Watching the Apprentice a couple of weeks ago (I know, it’s despicable) where the task for the teams was to produce a free magazine. One team went for a “lad’s mag” whilst the other was intended to be an alternative to The Oldie. FYI (and so you don’t have to watch it), they could have come up with a winner – instead they chose a front cover that looked like a knitting pattern, and picked the name Hip Replacement. Part of their “elderly” focus group had suggested Zimmer which I think would have been excellent.

Anyway, I only mention this as an introduction to the difficulties we have had choosing a name for the projects we are involved in for the elderly. From a “silver surfer” sort of direction, we originally went for the name Silvermail, and are still still using it as our project code name. It came our of our desire to do something that wasn’t email and wasn’t necessarily specific to the elderly thus making the joining of Silver and Mail doubly misleading despite it having a pleasant connotation.

I have been describing our system as analogous to the sending of holiday postcards and this comes across really well. As you might expect, any thought of getting a domain name with just the word “postcard” was just not going to happen – so we started to play around eventually coming up with the word “postcardie” – links to postcard and, satirically, cardigans. Warm and comfortable

But what do you think – a hit, or a hip replacement?

LocoMatrix has become well known as a creator of location-based games – but rumours are abound that they are now creating a social network for the elderly. Is that true? Yes, in a word, but the more interesting question is why. Here at LocoHQ our core interest is in mobile phone technology and the problems that can be solved using mobiles. In fact, we have gone one stage beyond that, in that we believe that the real game changer these days are tablet computers (or big mobiles!).

When one looks at how the digitally excluded see (and fear) computing, we believe (and to some extent have proof) that tablets are the best bet entry point. Tablets are almost cuddly. Ok they are not but:

• they are small and can be held in the hand
• they look a bit like a telly
• they don’t have lots of scary bits – mice, keyboards
• you just touch things on the screen to make things happen
• you don’t wait ages for them to boot up
• you don’t need a special room for them or a desk

That’s our first point – tablets are fun. Our second is that we don’t want to think about how we can make the computery things that we use, work for older people – email, surfing etc. They won’t work for older people. Instead let’s look at the problems that older people have, and see if we can find novel ways of solving them, using the new technology that is becoming available (better still, is technology needed to solve the problem – an older person has a spare room that they don’t use – lend it to couple of people needing some desk space, in return for providing meals and a little companionship). The problems that we see are isolation/lack of companionship/meeting other people/dealing with existing technology – tvs & microwaves/shopping/coping with cold. The list goes on.

On this site we will talk about the problems that we have identified, and the ways that we are trying to solve them. This will include our Postcardie social network – staying in touch with friends and family by sending postcards to each other (electronic cards with pictures and voice): Invites a way of getting older people together for social occasions: and TV Mate, a way of talking to your telly from your tablet, in a way you could never do with your remote.

Conversely, what we won’t be doing is:

• foisting our technology onto those that don’t want or need it
• designing by taking complex technology and stripping out the functionality
• redesigning existing systems by providing big buttons