had a meeting with Jason yesterday.
he called the meeting because he felt that his Terms of Reference (which need to be submitted imminently) were still not very well sorted.
one of the things he suggested was for him to write what he termed a 'Multimedia Management System', which would essentially facilitate easy sorting on my part, of the various messages which would be accumulated over time. i thought this was a good idea, if it could indeed be carried out. We were concerned about the tight time frame (considering that i would like to finish beta testing by January), until we realised that this Management System need not be put in place till later in 2004. this meant that Jason could concentrate on developing the other applications first.
another insight i had recently was that since the p800 (and now the p900) both have browsers which can read html, there is really no need for him to code in wml if he does not wish to.
but the most exciting idea of yesterday was this:
we were idly exploring ideas on how to make the game task more challenging, in terms of its programming. i concede that simple quizzes are relatively easy to program. so i casually asked him if there were such things as multi-player games for the phone. in reply, he said, half in jest i suspect, "not unless we use N-Gage".
it did not take me long to realise that this was actually a very good idea.
the Nokia N-Gage is the first phone to truly support multi-player collaborative interaction in real-time. given especially the emphasis that my boss and many of my colleagues place a premium on technologies which support collaborative learning, and the fact that if we could pull this off, it would be quite a feather in Jason's cap.
i won't elaborate further at this point of time, in order to be fair to Jason and his intellectual property. suffice to say that the N-Gage will not replace the Sony Ericssons, as the former will be used only in the pre- and post-tests, whereas the latter will continue to be used (by dint of their superior imaging / recording / playback and storage capabilities) during the actual intervention in the field. in this way, we maximimally tap the affordances of each piece of technology.
:-)