I want to talk with you today about a little Canadian company doing big mobile things that I discovered during last months Mobile Monday Global Summit in Helsinki, Finland. Yiibu is a small team of creative types with one obsession—creating unique and engaging content for emerging mobile technologies and devices. But that explanation does not even merely come close to their creative skill and the powerful aspect of mobile medium that they have tapped. When Stephanie Rieger (cofounder and head of content strategy and design) first showed me some of the Flash Light Symbian Series 60 based content that Yiibu has designed I immediately fell in love with it.

You see, sometimes mobile games like Snake are not enough for those “passing the time” moments on the Subway or in the doctors office. A lot of the time I don’t want to start a game that I know will get interrupted. Sometimes I just want a quick little application that I can I have fun browsing around on and perhaps even learn something in the process (a lot like how I leave the History or Discovery Times channel on in the background while I work or clean). Well, along comes Yiibu which, as they say on their website “creates small lifestyle and learning applications for those ‘in-between-moments’ you spend with your mobile devices.”

Take their “A Wee (Illustrated) Guide to Tropical Fish” as an example. It’s simply a Flash Light application that lets you surf through various illustrations of Tropical Fish from the Common Clown Fish to the Yellow Tang. Various parts of the fish are marked with numbers that when pressed (on your keypad) teach you about the distinguishing mark or quality of the fish that they are pointing out (so you can recognize it the next time you go Scuba Diving). Clicking down on your phone’s navigator will bring you to a second page with some good “General Information” like “Clownfish live in a mutual relationship with the poisonous sea anemone…” and that page is followed by the always interesting “Quick Facts” and “Did you know” type of information.

Another fun application they built especially for the Mobile Monday Global Summit was a culturally-themed guide to some of the 12 countries participating in the Summit in Helsinki. Picking a country brings you to the countries page where the guide (standing in front of a creative commons Flickr picture) greets you in the countries native language and tells you various facts about the countries mobile sociology such as percentage of mobile penetration and interesting facts like “Did you know that 82% of Americans are irritated by loud or annoying cell phone users in public spaces.” My favorite “Did you know” fact is Singapore’s where, apparently, they have created a a battery that runs on human urine so that you can make that emergency call in case your battery dies. The last option plays the countries national anthem which I thought was a nice touch, educational and extremely cool. If you do not have Flash Light or a Series 60 phone you can play with an online mobile emulator version that does everything but play the national anthem part.

Yiibu has also created a great tongue-in-cheek guide to copyright, fair use and Creative Commons. In this “Tale of Two Fish” we are introduced to two clownfish: Creative Commons Fred and Copyright [name which cannot be said]. Through a very nicely laid out style we follow Fred through a fantastic journey with all the things you can do with the different types of Creative Commons licenses. It was a real fun way to clear up some baffling issues that often come with trying to understand the CC. Sadly, Copyright [name which cannot be said] had no comment as to what you can do with him and asked you to contact his agent.

Another great application that they offer, and one that is more “environmentally” friendly than it is educational is a game that emulates everyone’s favorite pastime (especially after moving or something like that) bubble wrap popping.

My one complaint about the design of some of these products is the relatively small font size used. If I had to squint and move closer I know that people like my dad would get no use out of it at all. But I am sure Yiibu will figure out a way to make it readable for everyone.

Yiibu’s products also harnesses the power of another ubiquitous nature of the mobile industry, “the pass back.” The “pass-back” was first coined by mobile video mongols who see short cartoon kid-like mobile video’s as the perfect thing a mother can use to occupy a cranky kid in the back seat. Mom is driving. Kid in the back seat is crying, cranky, bored, whatever. Mom picks up her cell phone and turns on or tunes into some kind of kid-oriented mobile video and passes it back to her kid. Kid shuts up and is entertained (or throws the mobile phone out the window). Well, what if instead of passing back a video I a can pass back one Yiibu’s mobile learning applications (of course that only works for a certain age but still). This past weekend while visiting San Francisco I entertained my friends “sans-sit-still” daughter Avery Renee with the Tropical Fish Guide (and she was into it).

But Yiibu is for all ages. The Flash-Light created content is entertaining enough for kids but not annoying enough to deter grown-ups from using it to learn a quick thing or to. Its kind of like the Muppets in which Jim Henson mastered the art of disguising adult issues in a kid friendly setting. Anyways… I am blabbering.

I have some great ideas for things people would use these types of applications for. Why not create one for various cities so that people can learn some quick and interesting facts while commuting in a city that they are visiting. Or how about a tool that teaches you the basic language skills you have to learn when visiting a foreign country. These are the types of things that Yiibu’s design and application skills are perfect for.

The applications require that you have Flash Light on a Series 60 phone… two things that most American’s do not have but I am gambling to say will start dropping into American pockets soon enough.

What Yiibu has done is tapped an area in the mobile market place that is so simple its huge: quick, easy and ubiquitous learning on your mobile phone. Yiibu’s products are everything a mobile phone application should be in that it allows you to use a mobile phone the way its meant to and supposed to be used, what author of “Personal, Portable, Pedestrian” Mizuko Ito would refer to as “a medium of lightweight ‘refreshment’ analogous to sipping a cup of coffee or taking a cigarette break.” And the great thing about it is that you are learning something at the same time.

Technorati Tags: education, flash, flash light, games, mobile, mobile monday, s60, symbian, yiibu

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 6:46 am and is filed under Mobile Applications, Youth, Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.