Company

Matter 2 media provides professional services and develops mobile and pervasive technologies.  Our goal is to help those with a message or an experience to reach their audience in the most effective way.

Mobile & Pervasive Expertise

Tim Kindberg, the founder and managing director of matter 2 media, has two decades of experience as a computer scientist, helping technologies grow to solve business problems and enhance individuals’ experiences.  He spent the last decade researching and developing mobile services and technologies — at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto and Bristol, and then at matter 2 media.   He is an expert on pervasive (ubiquitous) computing, which makes use of cameras, location technologies and other sensors found on mobile phones to deliver media that integrates with the real world around us.  He has been the leader of industrial partnerships.  He is a textbook author, holds five patents, has published many scientific papers, and is a regular speaker at conferences.

Mission

Our mission is to help brands, advertisers, publishers, communities and individuals deliver their message where the audience will best appreciate and benefit from it: away from the desktop, out and about in the world where it links to their real lives.

Values

Our priority is your message and the user’s experience of it.  Quality, creativity and playfulness are foremost; the detail of the technology is secondary. Since we deliver content embedded in specific places and sometimes to specific individuals, it is our policy to take the greatest care to protect users’ privacy and to enhance rather than interfere with their environments.

Portfolio

2D barcodes (mobile codes)

Tim Kindberg is one of the world’s leading experts on reading 2D barcodes with camera phones.  He first developed handset technologies and services to read barcodes in 2000, creating many of the applications that only now are being commercialised with the arrival of mass-market smart phones.  He carried out public trials with the BBC and News International in 2005 as part of the Active Print project, in which he developed not only a state-of-the-art code reader but sophisticated barcode creation and management services.  The work with the BBC gained two Royal Television Society awards. He spent the next few years on ecosystem building.  He co-founded the Mobile Codes Consortium to create marketing-driven standards, with Publicis, Nokia and other major corporations.  That in turn kicked-off groups within the Open Mobile Alliance and the GSM Association.

New methods for real-world interaction

Beginning with HP’s seminal Cooltown project, Tim Kindberg has developed technologies for “physical hyperlinks” that take the user from an object to web content — including RFID and several types of electronic beacon, in addition to barcodes.  This resulted in, for example, one of the world’s first “electronic guidebooks” at San Francisco’s Exploratorium.  He was also part of a team that researched and developed new ways of interacting electronically with paper documents.

Mobile technology in urban environments

The Cityware and Mobile Bristol projects led not just to deployment of mobile services in urban spaces such as cafes and streets, but to new methods for studying how best to embed content so as to provide real value and enhance those spaces.   These projects also created new methods for measuring and representing digital behaviours in cities.

Security and trust

From secure shared electronic workspaces for clinicians, to protocols by which users can establish the trustworthiness of the services they find in the wild, a user-centred approach has resulted in new ways for helping ordinary people maintain their privacy and secure their data.

Understanding and enhancing the user experience

Tim Kindberg has extensive experience in studying how people actually use mobile  technology (as opposed to how the designers intended them to use it).  This includes ground-breaking research on how people use the camera and Bluetooth on their mobile phones — especially the social uses of these mobile technologies.