Topic: Mobile and Wireless
Phil, Ben, and Scott are joined by Tyler Whitaker to discuss some of their current projects and activities. They first talk about alternate uses of mobile phones and how cellphone usage in other countries is quite similar to the United States. Scott then talks about the status of his work with Asterisk, an open source PBX, telephony engine, and telephony applications toolkit.
In this panel discussion from the Emerging Communications Conference, experts from wireless carriers, application developers, and entrepreneurs discuss the potential, and the obstacles to wireless innovation. They present a range of viewpoints on topics from open networks to software for handsets.
Phil, Ben, and Scott discuss recent technology conferences. Phil talks about his visit to China for WWW2008, while Scott reports on the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The group also has time to review other topics, including Wii remote programming using Java, using a cellphone to control realtime, multiplayer games, as well as Scott's video blog on QIK.
Mike Liebhold has a dream -- a dream of a decentralized mobile web consisting of a mesh of distributed ad hoc networks. Realizing this dream could unleash a wave of creativity and new services, but there are powerful business imperatives holding it back. Is there a way out of this dilemma? Mike thinks there could be, and there are some compelling real world precedents that show how it can be done.
Students get a shot at hybrid design as IEEE Spectrum Radio reports on the "Challenge X", a four-year competition tasking college teams with modifying a standard SUV for extreme fuel economy without sacrificing utility. Following that is an interview with Professor Scott Fahlman, the inventor of the emoticon. Finally, we hear about the trials of launching a Low Power FM station as community activists build a grassroots beachhead against corporate commercial radio.
Just as Moore's law turned personal computers from a curiosity to a powerful tool over the last 20 years, it is now turning cellular phones into mini computers with many of the same capabilities. Indeed, next year, more smart phones will be sold than personal computers. Smart phones are a huge, attractive platform for application developers, but how are you supposed to develop software for them? Alex Russel, creator of the Dojo web toolkit, shares his thoughts from the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference.
Michael Lenczner is one of the founders of Ile Sans Fil, Montreal's community wireless network which comprises over 150 hotspots and serves almost 60,000 registered users. By any standards the project is a huge success. On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Lenczner whether Ile Sans Fil has really enhanced community life in the ways the founders hoped it would.
WiMAX, a new wireless broadband standard, is coming, and the buzz is growing. How is it different from what is available today, and where will it take wireless broadband in the future? These and other questions are answered by Tim Sanders, a leading industry expert and champion for this new wireless technology.
Dr. Joel Selanikio is the co-founder of DataDyne, a non-profit consultancy dedicated to improving the quantity and quality of public health data. He works mainly in developing countries where the dominant computer is the cellphone, and the dominant network protocol is SMS, a phenomenon that he calls "the invisible computer revolution."
From the start, phones have been a point-to-point communication method: pick up the receiver, dial a number, hope for an answer. Jyri Engestrom's microblogging app, Jaiku, changes all that by interfacing your mobile phone with pervasive internet connectivity. What we get is a handset that is used increasingly less for calling and more for sharing what you're doing, where you're going, who you're with, and the photo you just took. These microposts broadcast a river of rich presence information about you: from one-on-one to many-to-many.
