#OSE Open Source Everything – Page 141 – Public Intelligence Blog

Tim Berners-Lee:

“I was recently asked to talk about the idea of “open”, and I realized the term is used in at least eight different ways. The distinct interpretations are all important in different but interlocking ways. Getting them confused leads to a lot of misunderstanding, so it’s good to review them all.

When we tease apart their meanings, we can understand more clearly which aspects of each are the most important. The first, one of the most important forms of openness for the Web, is its universality.

Universality

When I designed the Web protocols, I had already seen many networked information systems fail because they made some assumptions about the users – that they were using a particular type of computer for instance – or constrained the way they worked, such as forcing them to organize their data in a particular way, or to use a particular data format. The Web had to avoid these issues.
The goal was that anyone should be able to publish anything on the Web and so it had to be universal in that it was independent of all these technical constraints, as well as language, character sets, and culture.

Net Neutrality is essential to an open, fair democracy Close to the principle of universality is that of decentralization, which means that no permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the Web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure. This has also been critical to the Web’s growth and is critical to its future.

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: A Typology of Openness (Tim Berners Lee via Michel Bauwens)”

2013/10/312013/10/31

Jean Lievens: Motorola Project Ara, Building Smart Phones From Modular Open Source Hardware

Hardware

Motorola Wants Everyone To Build Smartphones Like Lego Kits

Introducing Project Ara, an experiment from Motorola aimed to creating smartphones made out of modular open source hardware.

Dan Rowinski

ReadWrite.com, October 29, 2013

Google has teased us before. Rumors swirled for months that Motorola would introduce a customizable smartphone that would let consumers decide what kind of hardware—a bigger battery, choice of processor, a better camera—they wanted. The notion of a consumer-grade open hardware platform quickened the heartbeats of geeks across the globe.

What we got instead was the Moto X, a smartphone that can be “customized” by picking your colors, getting an engraving on the back and adding a personalized message to the startup screen. This was not the revolution in smartphone hardware we wanted.

Still, Motorola’s engineers were paying attention. Today the company announced Project Ara, an open hardware platform where users can pick and choose what type of components they want to build their smartphones.

The Module Connects To The Endoskeleton

Motorola has been thinking about Project Ara for a year. It started the campaign with a project called “Sticky,” a truck wrapped in Velcro and loaded with rooted and hackable Motorola smartphone components and 3D printing equipment. The truck would hold “MakeAThon” events with engineers who would take the raw components and build their own smartphones.

Project Ara aims to take that concept to its logical conclusion. According to Motorola, Project Ara is a “free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.”

The devices are built out of what Motorola calls endoskeletons and modules. The “endo” is the frame of the device, while the modules are the hardware, which could be just about anything that a hardware developer could dream up. Want a smartphone that specializes in barometric readings and air humidity? If someone designs and builds a module focused on sensor capabilities, you could add it to an endoskeleton—although with other modules like a CPU, storage, a camera, a radio and so forth.

Read rest of article.

2013/10/302013/10/30

Jean Lievens: Wikinomic Innovation Redux – World Upside Down

Cultural Intelligence, Economics/True Cost

Hothouse innovation redux: The world “upside down”

Recently The Economist released a feature report on how innovation in emerging markets may be eclipsing innovation in North America. The report, The world turned upside down (click “Buy PDF” for a complimentary copy courtesy of BASF) reinforces the fact that globalization and disruptive innovation is no longer something that is “driven by the West and imposed on the rest.” The notion that we in the West are the harbingers of all things new and advanced and that “developing” markets are cheap sources of labor and less mature audiences for low-cost, dumbed-down versions of our products and services is false. In response to the question, “Why are countries that were until recently associated with cheap hands now becoming leaders in innovation?” The Economist answers, “The most obvious reason is that the local companies are dreaming bigger dreams.” Of course, the real answer is far more complex.

In 2007, nGenera Insight began writing about what we call “hothouse innovators”—a new breed of global enterprises in Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe that are being built under fertile conditions for accelerated growth, including: A vast pool of low-cost, and increasingly highly-skilled labor; a rapidly growing group of wage-earning domestic customers with few preexisting expectations or brand loyalties; active government involvement in the private sector; and greenfield IT infrastructures that lack legacy complexities. By exploiting these conditions, global hothouse innovators are developing business models that allow them to move up the value chain, compete with firms in mature markets, and threaten the profit structure of incumbents in almost every industry.

The Economist article touches on all of these elements, but expands the argument by introducing additional factors worth discussing. Specifically:

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Wikinomic Innovation Redux – World Upside Down”

2013/10/302013/10/30

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

Advanced Cyber/IO, Commercial Intelligence, Design, Ethics, Innovation

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?

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Mining Mainstream Media for Emergency Management 2.0”

2013/10/29

Stephen E. Arnold: Better Data Is Out There [Just Not From the US Government, or the Banks, or the Corporations, or Most Universities and Media….]]

Data

Better Data Is Out There

Many have been operating under the assumption that the digital age has been providing us with reliable and accurate information. David Soloff noticed that this was incorrect when he was comparing grocery store prices against a government claim that they had dropped for the first time in more than half a century. Soloff discovered that prices, however, had increased by 5%. People are relying on misconstrued data, so Soloff founded Premise Data Corp. to sell better data. The San Francisco Gate details Soloff in “Google-Backed Startup Seeks Clearer Economic Signals Through Better, Faster, Stronger Data.” Backing the company are Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Harrison Metal.

Premise gathers data with a “global Internet trawl” that reads data from the Internet as well as using the old-fashioned approach of sending people into the field. The company plans on selling its “better” data to financial institutes, packaged good companies, and government and international organizations. So far the only customer they have is Bloomberg, but starting off with a big name like that is not a bad start.

John Morgan, an economist at UC Berkley, does not think it will be as easy to collect data as Premise hopes. He points out that governments change data for their own political aims and stores are not too keen on having people take photos of their wares. These are obvious observations, but Morgan goes on to say that not many people are going to want to buy Premise’s product:

“Meanwhile, he’s dubious that many consumer product companies will pay for this information because there are already many reliable sources on pricing for packaged goods. He’s also doubtful governments will be in the market for this information because they’ll insist on control over the collection and analysis. Morgan said the remaining question is whether Premise can earn a comfortable profit supplying tools to remaining potential customers, such as financial institutions, while paying a worldwide army of data collectors.”

It looks like we will have the choice of data vendors in the future. Who provides the best data? Who is going to be providing Google with the better results? A new market just opened up and Wall Street has not caught on yet.

Whitney Grace, October 29, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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….”