Apparently my recent remarks regarding homebrew mobile phone communities were right on the money:

I’m announcing the formation of the “Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club.” Our purpose is to provide support and guidance for individuals building their own “convergence devices.” We’re going to have monthly meetings where we discuss designs and applications with the idea that two heads is frequently better than one. Don’t toil in solitude, trying to get your latest wireless hardware hack to work.

Links: Announcement, The Open Phone Proposal
Preliminary site: telefono.revejo.org

And Stacking Fault points to a number of people already active in the field in the insightful overview Build your own mobile phone.

LONDON (Reuters) - A group of the world’s mobile operators and handset makers said on Thursday they are to join together to develop an open-source Linux-based operating system that could to be used in phones by the end of 2007.

Mobile network operators Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo and handset makers Motorola, Samsung, NEC and Panasonic, said they would form an independent not-for-profit group to share the costs and speed up mobile software and handsets and cut the number of operating platforms on the market.

I’m curious what this will do for the homebrew/customization scene. Ideal scenario: a (usable!) open source operating system for cellphones. Think about how many times you heard someone complain about sucky phone menus — and then imagine what would happen if people would finally be able to do something about it.

This goes way deeper than Palm OS or Symbian in terms of the possibilities — if nobody screws this up it could spawn a wave of mobile user interface innovation, and create an infrastructure of experimentation where 20 year old kids can innovate in a slow-moving industry.

If you put the right tools into the hands of people who are actually using a system, and who aren’t pulled back by business interests, amazing things can happen. Think of Firefox/Flock, of OpenWRT, or even Napster.

(Yeah this isn’t necessarily the motivational factor for these companies, but you can’t develop a Linux derivate without open sourcing the result — so people will have access to a significant part of crucial sourcecode.)

Link: Mobile players form Linux platform pact - Yahoo! News, Slashdot | Cellular Companies Join to Improve Linux

Making things is part of being human. Whether you make bikes, kites, food, clothing, protocols for biology research, or hack consumer electronics, a good way to show “How-To” is critical. Instructables is a simple and fast way to share projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. Show your colleagues how to operate a machine, show your friends how to build a kayak, show the world how to make cool stuff. Instructables leads the way in Open Source development for “Stuff”.

Link: Instructables: step-by-step collaboration

Just listened to an edition of Radio Open Source on the NSA wiretapping case, and was struck by how well the topic maps to social networks as we know and use them. Privacy, degrees of separation, pattern analysis, and more. With comments by William Gibson!

Patrick Radden Keefe: I was talking to a bunch of high-school kids about a month ago, talking about the government surveillance, and the Bush administration’s moral-less eavesdropping, and was meeting with dead uninterested stares from these high-school juniors.
Eventually the Q&A started, nobody seemed very engaged, and a certain point I said “Why doesn’t this concern you, aren’t you worried about the government?” And after a pause a girl in the back row raised her hand and said “We’re worried about our parents!”

Chris Lydon: Meaning what?

Patrick Radden Keefe: Privacy from their parents. In a very micro-context, within the realm of their family, they’re worried about their parents knowing what they did online. But anybody outside that family capacity: let ‘em at it!
There’s a kind of impersonal space in the Internet, that they figure: “Somebody could look into it, but it’s impersonal enough, so why would they be interested.”

Link: The NSA’s New New Phone Database

The Christian Science Monitor about a society reacting to a widespread phenomenon: That their kids document their initianition rituals on the Internet.

In separate meetings with freshmen and upperclassmen on the team, they probed to find out whether there was any implication that freshmen were expected to do this to be socially accepted. A group of freshmen chose to do this while others sat out, and several left the party to go to church, with no repercussions, Ms. Altmaier says. She adds that officials clearly conveyed to students that the behavior, including some underage drinking at the party, was unacceptable.
“We’re not happy about it, but it could become one of the best educational things for all the student athletes,” says the baseball coach, Jack Dahm. Participants felt remorse for making bad choices and attracting negative publicity, he adds. (The photo wasn’t posted by a team member.)

Link: Online photos put hazing in the spotlight again | csmonitor.com

Photo by AMagill

Via Engadget: Samsung just presented a laptop that uses flash memory instead of the conventional hard disk.

While this may sound like another impenetratable tech buzzword that geeks invent to irritate the rest of the non-geek world it’s actually a big deal.

There are a number of attractive advantages of flash drives over conventional mechanical hard drives: because they have no moving parts data access on flash drives is faster and the drive is completely silent. Flash drives are shock resistant. Dropped your computer? Not that big a deal. Flash drives use less energy than a conventional hard drive — expect battery performance to sky rocket with future generations of laptops.

And computers with flash drives can potentially be much smaller than current models. Most people already use this memory-on-a-chip on a daily basis in the form of USB flash drives — and a USB stick with 1 GB of storage is no larger than a small lighter.

Think of it as the difference between the clunky and heavy first-generation iPod (5 GB hard drive) and the current generation iPod nano (5 GB flash drive).

There are still technical quirks to overcome, and the current price of flash memory is breathtaking (PCWorld cites $960 for a 32 GB disk). But it’s only a matter of time that affordable models are available for the mass market, and the effect on consumer products will be huge. Your watch could become a 100 GB flash drive.

See also: Ubiquitous Computing

While watching the progress of masterpiece cleaners‘ new wireless network for the café St. Oberholz in Berlin you can’t help but notice the potential: using technology to create and enhance existing social spaces.

St. Oberholz is a beautiful café in Berlin Mitte, and if you’ve been there recently you’ll have noticed the large amount of laptop users. The café is one of the few places in the area with free wifi, and lots of places to sit. And they just got a new wifi network, hand-crafted by a couple of enterprising artists and technology activists.

I recently talked to smallcaps of masterpiece cleaners, and he tells me they are now trying to create a social marketplace within this technical space — the café’s owner is a little resistant, but I’m sure he’ll cave in as soon as he realizes the potential.

It might sound like a paradox: isn’t this just like the old joke, people silently sitting next to each other, staring on their laptop screens, talking to each other via instant messenger?

But it can be more than that. It has the potential to establish other types of connections, other relationships.

It never has been so easy to ask all of a café’s visitors, present or not: “Hey, where are tonight’s cool parties?!”

Or as Clay Shirky put it succinctly in an article about the value of social software:

[…] there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

Great machinima spoof of last year’s gorgeous Sony Bravia ad. This video is a trailer for the upcoming “Mine 2″, a short movie by Swedish machinima group Snoken Productions using the Battlefield 2 game engine. The predecessor, “Mine“, was released in Summer 2005 and quickly became popular among European gamers and machinima lovers for its pop culture references, refined production values, and because it’s darn funny.

Reminiscent of machinima’s most popular outlet to date, Red vs. Blue, Mine consists of loosely connected war episodes and humorous dialogue in contemporary Iraq, and among other things includes a spoof sequence of Disney’s “The Lion King” and a number of references to Monty Python sketches.

Mine 2 is still under production, a release date has not yet been set.

Watch the Mine 2 Trailer
German Interview with Noken of Snoken Productions

Image by Ralf Schmerberg/Dropping Knowledge

On the Iced Coffee blog: “I think New Orleans is now one of the most technologically advanced cities in the U.S…”

Says the author, Aaron:

There is literally NO ONE I know in this city who does not have a cell phone, and I’m talking 8 year olds to 80 year olds. […]

Half of the city still doesn’t have land telephone lines and even more don’t have cable, so we have cell phones and we have to hop in the car to drive to a coffee shop (where I am now) if you need to check your email. And you do need to check your email, because many of your previously neighborhood friends are still spread out about the country, once because of evacuating, now because that’s where the new job is, and email might be the only way to stay in touch if you don’t want to talk to them late at night because of time zones and work. […]

The end product is a modern, shiny, 21st century New Orleanian, pretty much across the board. Even grandma learned how to answer the cell phone instead of looking at it like it’s something that might bite her. Crazy flip phones.

Read the full article for some other details, e.g. about how people started buying satellite radio because FM radio stations were scarce.

The screenshot above is from a short documentary by Ralf Schmerberg called “Chocolate City - We are here to stay”, shot on January 12th 2006. You can download this Copyleft-licensed movie at the Dropping Knowledge film gallery.

Spotted today at Paul Lincke-Ufer.

Image by KrisJohn

There has been some talk about the observation that World of Warcraft is more and more used as meeting point in business environments, just as golf used to be — a place where you hang out and socialize with your business partners, where potentially the real deals are made.

People have been talking about these aspects of the game for a while, but the golf connection entered public awareness with a recent interview 1Up.com did with Joi Ito:

Overheard, at brunch: two tech entrepreneur types discussing World of Warcraft. What server are you on? What guild? Oh yeah, me too, I heard it’s a good way to schmooze.

It seems irritating at first that such a phenomenon happens within the rather conservative environment of WoW, when e.g. Second Life seems much more suited as both social environment and playing field for new ideas. On the other hand the typical entrepreneur is probably prone to play competitive games in his spare time, and hence will rather be found playing WoW than slacking in the comparatively noncompetitive environment of Second Life.