Archive for Openmoko
by Imran Ali
July 6, 2008 at 7:40 am · Filed under Open Source, Openmoko
Last Friday, pointedly coinciding with Independence Day celebrations in the US, Openmoko launched the latest edition of its open source Neo handsets, the FreeRunner. Unlocked from carriers and running an open OS, the FreeRunner really is a product of independence day and stands in stark contrast to the impending iPhone launch next Friday.
Features such as a tri-band radio, wifi, touch screen, Bluetooth, A-GPS and graphics acceleration are kinda mundane now ,and actually so is open source software. What’s quite unique about the FreeRunner is the remixability of the handset’s physical form factor.
Openmoko has made available downloadable Pro-Engineer format CAD files under a Creative Commons license for the developer community. Sadly, the CAD files aren’t available for lower rent 3D software, which might encourage further experimentation. Nevertheless, it’ll be interesting to see how the developer community adapts the insides of FreeRunner to various form factors and application areas.
You can find the CAD files here…
by Imran Ali
April 1, 2008 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter, Openmoko, Politics, Android, Activism, OLPC
Last month - I had the good fortune to sit in on Ethan Zuckerman’s ETech 2008 session, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism, summarising his insights into global activism and his role at Global Voices Online.
Ethan’s a research fellow at Harvard and has spent the last few years exploring activist usage of the web, mobility and social media across the developing world; Global Voices is an aggregated manifestation of bloggers and citizen journalists across this community.
Ethan’s talk was oriented around the notion that tools built for activism generally remain unused whereas mainstream tools adapted and adopted by activists remain the most popular channels; particularly when mainstream services are censored, driving even apathetic users to activism when they can’t reach their favorite sites!
Perhaps Ethan’s key insight was the importance of mobile phones as a light platform for activism and blogging; echoed by another speaker, Joel Selanikio, on Africa as a hothouse for mobile development. Their observations included…
- Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fateh’s use of Twitter and SMS to periodically indicate his status, such that when he stops updating, supporters can surmise that he’s being detained and begin agitating for his release as well as ensuring his blog
- Again in Egypt, anti-government activists organised resistance to the arrest of Malek Moustafa simply by coordinating themselves via SMS to block the street at his place of arrest.
- As early s 2004 there were 82m mobile users in Africa in 2004, but even as recently as 2007 only 4.7m broadband users.
- SMS could and should be the principle media for communications and content - from medical information and healthcare records to banking and commerce.
- Limited bandwidth and limited computing power aren’t necessarily barriers for digital innovation.
Though such insights aren’t unique - we’ve covered them previously - they point to an increasing disconnect between the services designed and offered versus those lashed together by the ingenuity of end users - the activism for open government embodied by those such as Alaa Abdel Fateh isn’t echoed by the closed nature of most mobile platforms and networks…I suspect Android and Openmoko will have a more profound effect than OLPC on the democratisation of technology and culture.
[ Note: You can see Ethan Zuckerman’s full presentation at his blog ]
by Imran Ali
March 25, 2008 at 4:36 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Usage + Usability, iPhone, Twitter, mobile social networking, Openmoko, Communication, Android
Late last year I wrote about the Mobility of Messages and how the tools for archiving our ‘emotional bits’ are crudely shortsighted, lacking the means for durable longevity and personal curation.
So I was recently very pleased to discover Treasuremytext, a startup - based in Liverpool and Amsterdam - that’s been helping users archive and preserve precious text messages for the best part of five years!
Treasuremytext’s founders - Katie Lips and Paul Stringer - were motivated by issues similar to those described in my earlier post; the very personal desire to treasure those evocative, poignant, sexy, cheeky and deeply personal messages at a time when handset inboxes were often limited to just 10-15 messages.
Katie and Paul very much saw their mission as one of liberating valuable messages from mobile handsets - presaging the currently in-vogue openness of Android, Openmoko and LiPS (no pun intended!) - and placing them in a web-based archive.
The web elements of the service came about due to the company’s frustrations at trying to work with mobile operators and technologies (SyncML, SIM readers etc.) - the web was simply the best medium for personalising and manipulating treasured messages. Treasuremytext’s strategy has enabled them to maneuver around cellcos, whilst still providing value to end users; a strategy that when multiplied across many service providers rightly deepeds the commoditisation of mobile operators.
Curiously, Treasuremytext has been a bigger hit with people in their 20s, 30s and 40s and messages largely focusing on relationships - indicating that SMS is a more disposable medium for younger users and romantic messages are likely to be the most treasured. Indeed, the service is almost inadvertently aggregating unique analytics and ethnographic data of the usage of SMS over time.
The service works well - with users simply needing to forward their messages to a specific number, via SMS; though it seems some meta information can be lost (original time, date stamp, sender name). This may simply be the vagaries of SMS infrastructure and handset software, but some simple tools to manually adjust metadata for each message (sender, time, date, tag) would be useful, particularly tags - with some users saving thousands of messages, folders will no longer be flexible enough tools for storage.
The more social features of the service are actually quite reminiscent of Twitter - but that’s no bad thing, Treasuremytext has a different emphasis and, as such, will be well positioned to evolve alongside other messaging services; indeed, they’re already experimenting with iPhone clients.
As my friend Ross notes, some operators are beginning to offer similar features as part of their suite of bundled services - notably O2’s Bluebook. However, operator services are notoriously, um, *crap* and generally closed like a nun’s knickers. By adopting open data principles, Treasuremytext could again maneuver around cellcos and deepen their claim on their philosophy of openness. New platforms such as Android and Openmoko could also help to provide wider distribution and I believe there’s a strong analytics and ethnographics opportunity for them too…
In the meantime, it’s worth spending a few minutes with co-founder Katie’s BarCamp session on 12 mistakes not to make when launching your startup!
by Imran Ali
December 26, 2007 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, Studies + Research, Usage + Usability, Events + Conferences, iPhone, Twitter, Video Conferencing, Openmoko, Communication, Voice, Research
With the sad cancellation of O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conferences, it seemed that the unique melting pot of traditional telcos, cellcos and bleeding-edge disruptive innovators, hackers and entrepreneurs would dissipate.
Thanks to the efforts of one of the former ETel advisory board members, Lee Dryburgh, the unique conversation between these communities will move beyond telephony into ‘communication’ in all its forms - social media, telephony, ethnographics and - of course - mobility.
Lee is hosting the inaugural Emerging Communications 2008, conference next Spring in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. The conference wil also be accompanied by an unconference day, providing a mix of traditional conferences with the energy of a parallel BarCamp-style event.
Though the lineup isn’t finalised yet, there are some interesting speakers lined up already, including sessions on Building Twitter from Blaine Cook, Emerging & Usage Patterns from Intel’s Dawn Nafus, OpenMoko’s Michael Shiloh and thought leaders such as Norman Lewis and Sheldon Renan.
One of the underlying implicit themes from the current programme of speakers seems to be the potential in the intersection of telephony and social networks - issues which speak to the future of mobile messaging, a topic covered by MM2.0 contributors just recently.
Though not focussed exclusively on the mobile industry, eComm 2008 promises to surface some interesting directions for messaging and communication. As such it’s a community that we need to watch closely, listening for the weak signals that’ll give clues as to what happens next in the industry…
{ Disclosure: I’m a member of the voluntary eComm 2008 advisory board. }
by Ewan Spence
November 23, 2007 at 10:47 am · Filed under Devices, Mobile Tech, Platforms, Software, ARPU, iPhone, Google, Apple, Instant Messaging, Openmoko, Communication, Convergence, Symbian
The launch of Android, and the Open Handset Alliance (primarily with Google and over 30 other partners) has prompted a huge amount of discussion around the internet, from Telecoms Analysts, Industry Watehrs, Developers and enthusiatic bloggers. That’s been reflected here on Mobile Messaging 2.0.
So what exactly is the impact of this in the mobile space? Debi Jones and I sat down to discuss that very topic in our latest podcast.
Google, Android and the Implications - MM2.0 With Debi Jones and Ewan Spence:
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Download
by Imran Ali
September 16, 2007 at 7:58 pm · Filed under Devices, Platforms, touch screens, BUG, Open Source, Wifi, GPS, Tuxphone, Greenphone, Chumby, Openmoko, Long Tail
My dad was an electrician by profession, but even from childhood, he loved to take things apart and rebuild them into something new. An original tinkerer/hacker; when thieves stole a TV from Dad’s car, he designed and retrofitted an alarm of his own design; when we couldn’t install a doorbell to our aluminium framed front door, he designed and built a bell triggered by the opening of the letterbox. He’d love what the Bug Labs guys are about to launch…
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Bug Labs’ BUG product is something I’ve been jonesing to see for a couple months. BUG is essentialy an open source, modular consumer electronics platform that purports to making hardware design as easy as writing web applications.
The BUG system consists of…
- The BUGbase: a Linux-based computer with wifi, ethernet, USB, some onboard memory and rechargable batteries.
- BUGmodules: The company plans to offer GPS, cameras, touchscreen, motion sensors, keyboards and audio modules over the course of the next few months.
- Software: A combination of a software API and a developer community (BUGnet); I’m interested to see how Bug will enabled the various hardware components to be ’scripted’ together.
Open source hardware is nothing new - from my good friend Surj Patel’s Tuxphone project, to Trolltech’s Greenphone, the Chumby and Openmoko’s Neo1973 - but BUG’s moving beyond a single device made of open source components, to a series of hardware modules that can be combined and remixed into new device categories. BUG may represent the opening of the Long Tail of consumer electronics.
The implications on mobile communications are profound. What kinds of niche wifi messaging devices will BUG enable? Imagine the development of GSM, EDGE or 3G BUGmodules, leveraged by the BUGnet community?
Maybe BUG will enable my Dad to remix his car alarm with periodic texts asserting its GPS coordinates next time it’s stolen…
