Design – Page 28 – Public Intelligence Blog

Forking Google: The Future of Fone Flaps

I read “Samsung Is Pulling Another Amazon on Android, But This Is Even Bigger.” I liked the write up. It acknowledges in a semi-nice way that Google is either smarter than everyone else or Google is less smart than everyone thinks.

The idea is that open source Android is working like a Petri dish. Instead of growing little Googles, the Petri dish harbors a big Amazon and may soon give birth to a bigger Samsung. Here’s the point I noted:

As much as Google likes and touts that Android is open, that freedom may come with the cost of some control over the platform. Amazon may have started the first truly successful “fork” of Android, but Samsung is going after the whole place setting. Samsung kicked off its first Developers Conference on Monday and based on the keynote message, I wouldn’t be too happy if I were Google.

The point is that Android is supposed to be Google’s open source mobile platform. Others can use it, but Android is Google’s idea.

With iPhones too expensive for most mobile users and Microsoft mobile not getting the buzz Redmond hoped, Android is the mobile platform with legs it seems. Amazon and Samsung have figured this out. The companies have been moving forward with Android that has been reworked to make it less Googlely than Google may have hoped.

Amazon is a lesser problem for Google. Samsung, however, seems to be a bigger potential problem.

But my view is that the larger challenge will be from innovators in other countries who surf on Android. When I was in China, I learned about a number of mobile phones running Android that performed some interesting tricks. One taxi driver had a line of four mobile devices in his taxi. Each mobile had four SIMs. Each SIM connected to a different service providing information about pick ups.

I asked the taxi driver if the phones were running Google Android. The answer was, “I don’t know. There are cheap and do more than a high dollar, upper class phone. These are the future, not Apple or Google.”

Is the taxi driver correct? My view is that Google’s Android is not just fragmented. Android is enabling innovators to go in directions that may prove difficult for Google to control. Samsung may be the near term challenge for Google. Looking out over a longer time line, there may be a different set of challenges created by an open source mobile operating system, new manufacturing options, and a burgeoning demand for mobile devices that are delivering fresh, high-value functionality.

Sure the four phones put on a light show when orders came in. My smart phone has one SIM and was woefully out of step with the Chinese taxi driver’s needs. Google has to think about Android as free and open source software that may spawn some antibiotic resistant competitors.

Stephen E Arnold, October 29, 2013

2013/10/29

Patrick Meier: Mining Mainstream Media for Emergency Management 2.0

Data, Design, Innovation

Mining Mainstream Media for Emergency Management 2.0

by Patrick Meier

There is so much attention (and hype) around the use of social media for emergency management (SMEM) that we often forget about mainstream media when it comes to next generation humanitarian technologies. The news media across the globe has become increasingly digital in recent years—and thus analyzable in real-time. Twitter added little value during the recent Pakistan Earthquake, for example. Instead, it was the Pakistani mainstream media that provided the immediate situational awareness necessary for a preliminary damage and needs assessment. This means that our humanitarian technologies need to ingest both social media and mainstream media feeds.

Now, this is hardly revolutionary. I used to work for a data mining company ten years ago that focused on analyzing Reuters Newswires in real-time using natural language processing (NLP). This was for a conflict early warning system we were developing. The added value of monitoring mainstream media for crisis mapping purposes has also been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years. In this study from 2008, I showed that a crisis map of Kenya was more complete when sources included mainstream media as well as user-generated content.

So why revisit mainstream media now? Simple: GDELT. The Global Data Event, Language and Tone dataset that my colleague Kalev Leetaru launched earlier this year. GDELT is the single largest public and global event-data catalog ever developed. Digital Humanitarians need no longer monitor mainstream media manually. We can simply develop a dedicated interface on top of GDELT to automatically extract situational awareness information for disaster response purposes. We're already doing this with Twitter, so why not extend the approach to global digital mainstream media as well?

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2013/10/282013/10/28

Patrick Meier: Second-Order Eyewitnesses — Twitter, Open Sources, and the Information Revolution the US Intelligence Community Refused to Think About….

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency

Automatically Identifying Eyewitness Reporters on Twitter During Disasters

My colleague Kate Starbird recently shared a very neat study entitled “Learning from the Crowd: Collaborative Filtering Techniques for Identifying On-the-Ground Twitterers during Mass Disruptions” (PDF). As she and her co-authors rightly argue, “most Twitter activity during mass disruption events is generated by the remote crowd.” So can we use advanced computing to rapidly identify Twitter users who are reporting from ground zero? The answer is yes.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Second-Order Eyewitnesses — Twitter, Open Sources, and the Information Revolution the US Intelligence Community Refused to Think About….”

2013/10/24

4th Media: Putin Trying to Build & Secure Rail Link through DPRK + High-Speed Rail RECAP

Architecture, Design

Putin Trying to Build & Secure Rail Link through DPRK(aka, “North Korea”) for Moving Goods between Asia and Europe

Putin is inching closer to his goal of turning Russia into a major transit route for trade between eastern Asia and Europe by prying open North Korea, a nuclear-capable dictatorship isolated for half a century.

Russia last month completed the first land link that North Korea’s Stalinist regime has allowed to the outside world since 2003. Running between Khasan in Russia’s southeastern corner and North Korea’s rebuilt port of Rajin, the 54-kilometer rail link is part of a project President Putin is pushing that would reunite the railway systems of the two Koreas and tie them to the Trans-Siberian Railway.

That would give Putin partial control over links to European train networks 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) away. The route is as much as three times faster than shipping via Egypt’s Suez Canal, which handles 17,000 ships a year, accounts for about 8 percent of maritime trade — and is increasingly beset by pirates and political instability in Egypt and Syria.

Shipments to and from western Europe and Rajin will be delivered in just 14 days, compared with 45 days by ship.

Getting the two Koreas to work together on the railway and a long-stalled plan to build a pipeline to supply both Koreas with Russian natural gas is fraught with financial and political hurdles, said Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy research group in Moscow. They stem from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and lingering animosity from the 1950-1953 Korean War.

“Russia’s position is to get North Korea involved in profitable projects to make them realize that cooperation is better than isolation,” Lukyanov said by phone from the Russian capital.

“The rail route is faster but more expensive, so it will probably become a niche product,” Tasto said by phone Oct. 7. “Cargo trains are not mass-transportation vehicles like container ships.”

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2013/10/17

Patrick Meier: World Disaster Report: Next Generation Humanitarian Technology

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance

World Disaster Report: Next Generation Humanitarian Technology

Posted onOctober 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

This year’s World Disaster Report was just released this morning. I had the honor of authoring Chapter 3 on “Strengthening Humanitarian Information: The Role of Technology.” The chapter focuses on the rise of “Digital Humanitarians” and explains how “Next Generation Humanitarian Technology” is used to manage Big (Crisis) Data. The chapter complements the groundbreaking report “Humanitarianism in the Network Age” published by UN OCHA earlier this year.

Learn more, includes video.

2013/10/172013/10/17

Jean Lievens: What Is The Future Of The Open Source Sharing Economy?

Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance

What's the Future of the Sharing Economy?

by SPARKS & HONEY CULTURAL STRATEGISTS

October 15, 2013, 5:04 PM

The Sharing Economy is a topic that has been garnering a lot of attention lately — from startups embracing the collaborative model to consumers embracing the age old “sharing is caring” philosophy when it comes to vacation rentals, like AirBnB, or transportation solutions like NYC’s Citibike or Zipcar. We at sparks & honey have seen real value in the sharing economy trend as of late and recently partnered with global digital agency, Tribal Worldwide, to host the Collaborative Economy Summit, in which we set out to gather thought leaders in this space an answer one simple question — where is the Collaborative Economy heading and what value will it bring to business, brands and customers of the future?

Learn more.

2013/09/23

Patrick Meier: Seven Principles for Big Data & Resilience

Data, Design, Resilience

Seven Principles for Big Data and Resilience Projects

Authored by Kate Crawford, Patrick Meier, Claudia Perlich, Amy Luers, Gustavo Faleiros and Jer Thorp, 2013 PopTech & Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellows.

The following is a draft “Code of Conduct” that seeks to provide guidance on best practices for resilience building projects that leverage Big Data and Advanced Computing. These seven core principles serve to guide data projects to ensure they are socially just, encourage local wealth- & skill-creation, require informed consent, and be maintainable over long timeframes. This document is a work in progress, so we very much welcome feedback. Our aim is not to enforce these principles on others but rather to hold ourselves accountable and in the process encourage others to do the same. Initial versions of this draft were written during the 2013 PopTech & Rockefeller Foundation workshop in Bellagio, August 2013.

1. Open Source Data Tools

Wherever possible, data analytics and manipulation tools should be open source, architecture independent and broadly prevalent (R, python, etc.). Open source, hackable tools are generative, and building generative capacity is an important element of resilience. Data tools that are closed prevent end-users from customizing and localizing them freely. This creates dependency on external experts which is a major point of vulnerability. Open source tools generate a large user base and typically have a wider open knowledge base. Open source solutions are also more affordable and by definition more transparent. Open Data Tools should be highly accessible and intuitive to use by non-technical users and those with limited technology access in order to maximize the number of participants who can independently use and analyze Big Data.

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Category: Design

Stephen E. Arnold: Forking Google – The Future is Samsung?