Entries Tagged 'Projects' ↓

MIT Labcast: The Comm.unity platform enables mobile devices to discover and communicate with each other in close proximity. It also transforms these devices into social sensors, and allows programmers to rapidly develop locally and socially aware applications. Several use cases demonstrate key concepts of Comm.unity.

[ Via : Textually.org ]

Clark Harris (aka @SilentClark) is only speaking using social media for the month of May in an effort to raise awareness and money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in memory of his mother. He is only going to communicate via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flikr & Google Chat and no Email, talking, writing, text messaging and use of sign language – may be little nodding for yes and no types questions. His SocialMediaExperient is about finding, is it possible in today’s world of social media to more effectively raise money and create awareness for a cause online versus traditional methods?

You can find him on Twitter & Facebook and to support his case visit http://socialmediaexperiment.com

Joel Johnson on Gizmodo interviews the people behind 48Hrs Magazine which will be soon available for purchase. 48 Hour Magazine, Issue Zero began on May 7th where contributors had 24 hours to produce and submit their work and the next 24 hours were invested in editing and creating it. You can know more about the people (editors) involved with the project here, read the official blog or follow them on twitter.

Joel Johnson has tried to keep his conversation, in the spirit of the project to exactly 48 minutes and is an interesting one.

Joel Johnson – What’s the lesson of 48 Hour Magazine? Are you guys trying to show the big magazines something?

Sarah Rich (former senior editor at Dwell, co-founder of The Foodprint Project and co-author of Worldchanging) – I don’t know if I’d say we are trying to show the big magazines something so much as trying to demonstrate the potential to produce an excellent media product using "new tools"—meaning online collaboration, crowdsourcing, web-to-print production systems. I love traditional magazines; This isn’t an attempt to dig their grave, it’s just an example of the possibility of something new.

Mat Honan (Giz contributor and Wired contributing editor, who made Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle in four hours) – We’re not trying to show established magazines a way out of the wilderness, but I do think we all have aspirations to try to make something new and different work in terms of the way magazines can be produced and financed. We were all pretty inspired by MagCloud’s possibilities, and in particular Strange Light—the magazine Derek Powazek put together on the fly from the Australian dust storm. It was why we approached him before we got this off the ground and convinced him to come onboard. We thought that by using our networks on Twitter and Tumblr and that horrible piece of shit Facebook, we could likely get a lot of contributions in really quickly. And because it’s print-on-demand, we wouldn’t have to run around trying to find advertisers first, or figure out what our print run was going to be, or any of that other bullshit that traditionally makes launching a new title so cost-prohibitive.

More responses & full interview on Gizmodo

From 48HrMag site we also found that they were inspired by by a range of other projects: Strange Light, Pop Up Magazine, Ash Cloud Tales, and The Whole Earth Catalog.

Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for the first world problems :

We live in a com­plex world, one full of inequities and won­der­ful things. Our fel­lows in the First World have been con­cerned for a while with us hav­ing the major share of the bad­ness, so we thought, why don’t we pay back? After all, their life isn’t problem-free either. And that’s where this com­pe­ti­tion starts.

We’re call­ing artists, design­ers, tin­ker­ers, mak­ers, and thinkers with an idea to par­tic­i­pate. Two con­di­tions only: you were born in and live right now in a Devel­op­ing Coun­try and you are 13 years of age or older.

Devel­op­ing into what, exactly?

What does it mean to be a devel­op­ing coun­try? Among other things it means that the future is to become devel­oped. We are on our way toward devel­op­ment, and we assume that’s a great thing, but let’s stop to con­sider for a minute whether devel­oped coun­tries are some­thing we want to turn into. Are peo­ple in devel­oped coun­tries hap­pier or health­ier? Do they live a bet­ter life? Do they have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of nature and live in a bet­ter equi­lib­rium with the envi­ron­ment? Do they live in peace?

We have been focus­ing our energy and resources on try­ing to solve our Devel­op­ing World prob­lems to become more like the First World. But per­haps it is time that we, the so called Third World minds, focused our energy and cre­ativ­ity on solv­ing some of the First World prob­lems. We will have a brighter future to look for­ward to, and per­haps this can help us rethink and approach our cur­rent prob­lems from a dif­fer­ent perspective.

The competition deadline is 30th May and they are calling the solutions for:

• Reduc­ing obesity.
• Address­ing aging pop­u­la­tion and low birth rate.
• Reduc­ing con­sump­tion rate of mass pro­duced goods.
• Inte­grat­ing the immigrant population.

For more updates visit their site and follow them on their blog or on twitter

Privacyrevolution.Org informs: Choose Privacy Week is a new initiative that invites library users into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age. The campaign gives libraries the tools they need to educate and engage users, and gives citizens the resources to think critically and make more informed choices about their privacy.

The first-ever Choose Privacy Week will take place May 2-8, 2010 and is a new program created by the American Library Association to help librarians organize events in their communities about the role that privacy plays in their lives, why privacy is important, and how their privacy can be compromised on a daily basis.

Join the revolution here and find some great tools and resource materials.

Choose Privacy Week Video from 20K Films on Vimeo.

Choose Privacy Week Trailer from 20K Films on Vimeo.

The Comic Book Literacy Documentary ( blog | @CBLiteracy ) is an independent feature length documentary film.  The film showcases comic books as a way to inspire a passion for reading in both children and adults.  Comics have traditionally had a bad reputation from the perspective of the general public and it is the goal of this film to shatter the negative stereotype of comics as "junk food for the brain" and to show them in a new light.

Here’s the trailer :

MusikPitch is a new service which brings together songwriters and consumers together.

Finding that perfect track has never been easier. At MusikPitch, talented songwriters from all backgrounds compete for your specific project. To begin, launch a music contest, describe the music you are looking for, and set your price. Soon you’ll start receiving complete tracks from artists around the world. And there are no worries with our 100% money back guarantee.

MusikPitch – Get unique music created for your movie, video, product, or project! from MusikPitch on Vimeo.

[ Via TheNextWeb ]

community-roundtable.com – a peer network for community managers and social media practitioners has come up with this great community maturity model . According to the post this model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization. Read the full intro post here.

Mobile Active informs about Freedom Fone & Orbot, the open source mobile tools:

About Freedom Fone;

Freedom fone is an interactive voice response system that allows callers to access audio information on their mobile phones. It is aimed at organizations who want to set interactive up audio news services for their audiences. Freedom Fone is now out in version 1.5 and available for public testing and use.

About Orbot:

Tor is available for Android by installing our package named Orbot.

Orbot is an application that allows mobile phone users to access the web, instant messaging and email without being monitored or blocked by their mobile internet service provider. Orbot brings the features and functionality of Tor to the Android mobile operating system.

Orbot contains Tor, libevent and privoxy. Orbot provides a local HTTP proxy and the standard SOCKS4A/SOCKS5 proxy interfaces into the Tor network. Orbot has the ability to transparently torify all of the TCP traffic on your Android device when it has the correct permissions.

Ericsson’s 2020 Shaping Ideas are series of great video talks by some great thinkers on their views on the drivers of the future and how connectivity is changing the world.

From the site: Broadband connectivity and mobility are changing the way we live, the way we work, the way markets function, and the way societies operate. At Ericsson, we need to collaborate and get inspiration from people outside our business in order to adapt to these changes – people that take a stand, and that want to share and work together.

In 2020 – Shaping Ideas, we ask 20 thinkers to share their view on the drivers of the future and how connectivity is changing the world.

They describe a future where a growing population faces never before seen challenges and opportunities; where digital natives will shape their lives and the enterprises they work for, and where technology could create a global golden age.

We believe it is important to share our knowledge about the future. If we do, the future might not be a place we are going to, but a place we create.

Jeffry Sachs – Fighting Poverty with connectivity
Will Steffen – Our world: transform or collapse
Ian Pearson – Twenty Four Seven connected
Calota Perez – Golden Age or another crisis ?
Johan Bergendahl – New demands on the telecom industry
Don Tapscott – Growing up digital
Adrian Bowyer – Download, adjust, print!
Jeffrey Cole – A new era of advertising
Anne Lise Kjaer – Ethical Business & Female Power
Hans Rosling – On our way to a stable world