Berto Jongman: Key Innovators Under 35 — and Especially Kira Radinsky

Innovation
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

In MIT Technology Review

Introduction

For our 13th annual celebration of people who are driving the next generation of technological breakthroughs, we’re presenting the stories in a new way. We’ve grouped them by categories that reflect the variety of approaches that people can take to solving big problems. The Inventors, for instance, are creating new technologies. The Entrepreneurs are turning technologies into viable businesses. The Visionaries are anticipating how technologies can make life better, while Humanitarians are concentrating on expanding opportunities. And the Pioneers are exploring new frontiers, setting the stage for future innovations.

This project takes months of effort. It begins with nominations from the public and MIT Technology Review editors. People who have been selected by our publishing partners as local Innovators Under 35 in several regions worldwide are also considered. The editors go through the hundreds of candidates and select fewer than 100 finalists, all of whom will be younger than 35 on October 1. A panel of judges rates the finalists on the originality and impact of their work. Finally, the editors take the judges’ scores into account to select the group.

Get Started

See Especially:

Kira Radinsky: Web Prophen Maps the Past to Predict the Future

 

Stephen E. Arnold: Replicant Hopes to Free Mobile from the Tyranny of Proprietary Software

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Design, Innovation, Mobile, Software, Spectrum
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Replicant Hopes to Free Mobile from the Tyranny of Proprietary Software

August 27, 2013

Citing freedom and security concerns, the makers of Replicant are calling for donations, we learn from “Fundraising a Fully Free Fork of Android” at Boing Boing. The project hopes to give us all the choice to run our Android-based mobile devices entirely upon free software.

But wait, you ask, isn’t Android is already open source? Well, most of it, but a few “key non-free parts” keep our Android devices tethered to proprietary programs. Such parts, they say, include the layer that communicates with hardware; yes, that would be pretty important.

Also of concern to Replicant developers are the pre-loaded applications that some of us call “bloatware,” but upon which many users have come to rely. The team plans to develop free software that provides the same functionality. (I hope they also include the option to delete applications without them returning uninvited. That would be a nice change.) Furthermore, they have set up rival to the Google Play store, their app repository called F-Droid. That repository, the article notes, works with all Android-based systems.

The write-up summarizes:

“Mobile operating systems distributed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google all require you to use proprietary software. Even one such program in a phone’s application space is enough to threaten our freedom and security — it only takes one open backdoor to gain access. We are proud to support the Replicant project to help users escape the proprietary restrictions imposed by the current major smartphone vendors. There will still be problems remaining to solve, like the proprietary radio firmware and the common practice of locking down phones, but Replicant is a major part of the solution.”

Replicant is underpinned by copyrighted software that has been released under an assortment of free licenses, which their site links to here. This is an interesting initiative, and we have a couple of questions should it be successful: Will Google’s mobile search revenues come under increased pressure? What happens if Samsung or the Chinese mobile manufacturers jump on this variant of Android? We shall see.

Cynthia Murrell, August 27, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Jean Lievens: Networking Open Source Hardware Things and Creators

Innovation
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Networking Things and Creators in Open Source Hardware

By on August 23, 2013

As many of you know, just few months I had the chance to co-host the first Open Source Hardware Documentation jam in New York. It was an event dedicated to grow more interest from the Open Source Hardware community and the community at large to the topic of documentation, especially thinking about how this enables replication, reuse, integration among the different projects around.

titleThe event has been reported here if you’re interested to the results (a couple of reports here http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/open-source-hardware-documentation-jam-a-report/ and here http://www.oshwa.org/2013/05/16/oshw-doc-jam-followups-releasing-the-format-to-the-community/)

Few days ago, as I was browsing, I discovered, thanks to Alessandro Ranelluci who posted it on the  Facebook wall of the italian fabber community, that Gary Hodgson, a very active british developer and hacker, now living in Germany, is working on a very interesting project that deserves more attention and contribution. So I decided to interview Gary to introduce you to the Thing Tracker Network.

Read Interview with many links.

Patrick Meier: Making All Voices Count Using SMS and Advanced Computing

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Transparency
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Making All Voices Count Using SMS and Advanced Computing

Local communities in Uganda send UNICEF some 10,000 text messages (SMS) every week. These messages reflect the voices of Ugandan youths who use UNICEF’s U-report SMS platform to share their views on a range of social issues. Some messages are responses to polls created by UNICEF while others are unsolicited reports of problems that youths witness in their communities. About 40% of text messages received by UNICEF require an SMS reply providing advice or an answer to a question while 7% of messages require immediate action. Over 220,000 young people in Uganda have enrolled in U-report, with 200 to 1,000 new users joining on daily basis. UNICEF doesn’t have months or the staff to manually analyze this high volume and velocity of incoming text messages. This is where advanced computing comes in.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Making All Voices Count Using SMS and Advanced Computing”

Stephen E. Arnold: Open Source and Innovation Go Together

Innovation, Software
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Open Source and Innovation Go Hand in Hand

Posted: 08 Aug 2013 09:18 PM PDT

Open source, in all of its iterations, drives innovation and efficiency. More than ever, information technology circles are buzzing with news about how open source software (and an emerging open source hardware market) ensures that organizations of every shape and size can get their specific needs met by open source solutions. Tom Trainer covers this very topic in his article for Network Computing, “Open Source Poised for Innovation Explosion.”

Trainer begins:

“Open source software is now a common component in most organizations’ IT infrastructure, particularly at the server OS layer where Linux has made significant inroads. Now open source software is becoming more common in other data center realms such as storage, and is poised for significant growth.”

Trainer goes on to say that open source will continue to dominate the market for many reasons, but chief among them will be cost effectiveness. Even though the economy is on the rebound, efficiencies are still being demanded as the recession proved that companies really could do more with less. However, security and customer support are still concerns. For organizations with those concerns, a value-added open source solution is often a good fit. For instance, LucidWorks offers solutions for the enterprise including Big Data, with cloud and hybrid deployments. And while the solutions are award winning, the customer service and training offered by LucidWorks is unbeatable.

Emily Rae Aldridge, August 16, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

Jean Lievens: Vision for a Data Commons

Cloud, Data, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Our Vision

People everywhere have been organizing a more ethical economy, but they work in relative isolation, fragmented by geography, sector, and even organizational form.

Many organizations collect information about a small piece of these efforts. In every situation, there is another organization for which that information overlaps. In every case there is an opportunity to share that will strengthen all the organizations participating.

Sharing requires effort, it requires trust, and it requires infrastructure. The Data Commons is a cooperative of organizations that are sharing – sharing the costs of this effort, trusting each other with their information, and building infrastructure to make sharing is easy.

 

Members of the Data Commons Cooperative are principled economic organizations that want it to be easy to share with each other, and with the world, in the movement for a more ethical economy.

Examples of information overlap

 

 

Uniting the movements

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Vision for a Data Commons”