At CES, Chaotic Moon showed off their appropriately named Board of Awesomeness. It’s the result of hooking up a skateboard, a Kinect and a Samsung tablet to control the board’s speed through hand motions.
It’s an excellent example of the kind of unexpected, quirky, wonderfully playful bottom up innovation you only get when you open up technology for experimentation.
There’s a good write-up over at WIRED.
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_Image by Peter Bihr, Creative Commons (by-nc-sa)_
Mozilla Festival (aka #Mozfest) is over, and it was intense. Throw a mix of 500 journalists, hackers, web devs and activists in a room and shake it up, and interesting things are going to happen. As well they did.
There’s plenty of good reviews out there, so I’m just going to highlight a few points that stood out for me.
Ben Hammersley, who among many other things advises the EU in digital matters, made a point about the importance of education: Those who decide upon the future don’t understand the present.
We have several digital gaps in education – education in all things digital, about all things digital, across all things digital. One, there’s a gap along education lines. Two, there’s a global divide. Three, there’s a gap along income (and education) of parents that prevents kids in poorer neighborhoods the same chances to participate online (which might enable them to bootstrap knowledge).
And then we have – four! – a gap between those who by belonging to the group that really gets the web and how it works and those who don’t, where politicians are mostly on the wrong side of the gap. It’s a structural divide more than anything – give it a few years and things might work out fine, but as it stands (repeat!) Those who decide upon the future don’t understand the present. And this is something we need to work on. Luckily, it’s easier to educate some smart folks than change whole strata of society. (At least in theory.)
This is where we all can come in and help out. If you find yourself talking to a politician, help them out. Take the time to explain stuff. Don’t be snobby about it. It’s politics where we can leverage power, and it’s politics where the foundation is laid for how our most important infrastructure will work (or be broken) for years.
Let’s all work on some truly relevant things.
Image by Pierros Papadeas, some rights reserved
Just a brief shout out: A large group of journalists and data diggers gathered and wrote a Data Journalism Handbook. It’s not finished, but it’s an impressive draft and a great basis to extend over time. They just dug in, and built something cool over the weekend, then took it from there. This is the way to go, really.
The real killer – a real eye opener! – for me was certainly Popcorn.js, or rather the Popcorn Maker. Popcorn.js is a framework to make video on the web more interactive – more of the web – an event framework, or in other words: a little toolkit that helps you make your videos interact with the websites around them and vice versa. For example, you can pull maps or Flickr images or a live Twitter search into your video, or into an adjacent box (or pretty much wherever you like, really).
It’s harder to explain than to understand, so here’s a Popcorn demo.
And the Popcorn Maker, launched last Friday, is a web-based authoring tool to make all this more accessibel to non-developers – you need only the most basic understanding of HTML etc to use a video you uploaded to Youtube or Vimeo and enrich it with web data.
It’s super impressive, and it’s great how this has come about since last year‘s Mozilla Festival in Barcelona.
It’s also very clearly alpha software at the time, so try at your own risk – in a first test, I wasn’t able to save a project, but could pull a Youtube video and add map data, photos and tweets within less than 5 minutes – it’s really quite something.
Every morning, I went for a run. Since my hotel was close by, my run would take me around the Royal Observatory. At the Observatory there are a number of mindboggingly interesting things on display: The Prime Meridian, the original kilogram, a measurement of feet and inches (to compare with your local merchant), as well as the (probably) first clock to display Greenwich Mean Time to the public (since 1852). There’s also a red ball on one of the rooftops that every day would be pulled up slowly, then drop at exactly 13:00h every day. The ball was visible from the river Thames, allowing the ships to reset (and thus synchronize) their clocks.
The Royal Observatory was by and large the center of standardization for most of the world. From here, standards of space and time would ripple and spread throughout the Commonwealth.
It’s a bit like what the W3C is for the internet today. And like we needed to agree on standards for space and time 150 years ago, we need to agree on standards for the web today. The more open they are – the more they allow us to look inside the box, and tinker, and exchange data, and the more anybody can use and contribute to them – the better off all of us will be.
[permalink]Since I’ve seen Jay Cousins‘ prototype of a wallet he made from self-produced bioplastics a few days ago, I’ve been enthusing about it. Jay kindly offered to run a workshop to teach some of us how to do the same thing. A bunch of people showed up to work with the material Jay had prepared. Below you’ll see some pics to get an idea of general goo-eyness as well as the results.
In case you’re wondering: Nope, it’s not a product you’d want to buy and rely on just yet; and nope, that’s not the point of the exercise. This is a very early prototype where the goal is to learn (about the production process etc) rather than the result. Could my first go at the wallet fall apart? Yes, anytime. But it’d still be totally worth it since I’ve learned a fair bit. And should the thing decide to fall apart next week, it wouldn’t matter: I could just cook up a new one, probably better than the first. (I might even get the stitching right.) Open design, anyone?
Grassrooots Mapping: Field Mapping Training from TungstenMonkey on Vimeo.
Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers use helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras. The resulting images are georeferenced and stitched into maps which are 100x higher resolution that those offered by Google, at extremely low cost.
Huh. There’s so much in this video I won’t even comment much. This pretty much sums up the awesomeness that open source & hacking can be.
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Below, in short, you’ll find: Thanks! International geeks! Interview! Party photos! Food! Smart cities! Drumbeat!
#Thanks! Wow, what a week. Big thanks and props to the team behind re:publica 2010. Like the last few years, it’s been a blast and incredibly well organized.
#International geeks! Yet something has changed over the last years it seems – to the better in my point of view – and that is: more international geeks. It might just be my personal perception, but I think the number of talks in English back it up: More international geeks have shown up this year. Republica has managed to become the most important geek (“geek” as in “non-corporate”) conference in Germany, and the folks outside Germany started noticing. For me that’s always a good sign, as the web scene here is pretty fragmented and really needs focal points like this. (Small side note: Lots of talks had English titles but were in German which led to some confusion.) So: If you want to get to know the German geeks, republica is the place to go.
#Interview! Speaking of change in the conference scene – and again, this is just a personal feeling – it seems to me that the less marketing and PR and agency focused conferences (republica, SXSW, barcamps and what not) keep getting more and more important. Of course, they’re each aimed at different audiences and different kinds of exchanges take place at these very different event categories (geek vs corporate event, conference vs trade fair etc). To over-simplify: On one, knowledge and personal respect are exchanged; on the other, financial deals are made. Yet, to me it seems like the lower-profile events that are aimed at those that do cool stuff will be giving the much more expensive, agency-centered conferences a run for their money. Let’s see how that plays out. Markus Richter of Trackback kindly interviewed me briefly about the role of web conferences (in German), here. (There’s also a bunch of great CC-licensed music to be found there.)
#Party photos! Also this week, my friends Igor, Caroline and I organized a party with the support of Tumblr, Tribaspace and Ketchum Pleon. Check out the photos!
#Food! Having two foodies visiting, the whole week we were out looking for great food and coffee. If you’re visiting, don’t miss out on: Bonanza Coffee Heroes and Espresso Ambulanz, Korean BBQ at Kimchi Princess and a tea time at Chen Che. Unlike will show you the way.
#Smart cities! Igor Schwarzmann and Johannes Kleske gave a talk on smart cities and how cities can be discovered in more playful manners by using technology. Their talk “Playful Urbanism” will be is up on video soon. (I’ll be posting it here, too.) You can watch their talk “Playful Urbanism” on video below and read up on the whole thing here. Igor had already talked about Smart Cities at Ignite Berlin, and they also write the blog cognitivecities.com. So along with a few others, we decided to have an event this fall around the same topic. Updates and more details soon.
Update: The video is posted below, and here’s the write-up with all the links.
#Drumbeat! Mozilla Drumbeat is all about keeping/making the web open. Drumbeat will be coming to Berlin with a full-day event on 8 May. You should be there. (I certainly will.)
While I’ll catch up on a bunch of links, I might be updating this post to include some videos or more links. But first it’s time to catch some rays.
Update: The good folks over at pl0g asked participants to tag the conference (in German):
[permalink]Lately so much has been going on in Berlin that has to do with the whole field of open design, tinkering, DIY – and last week was another highlight. I had the chance to drop in at the Open Design Workshop at Betahaus. (Sadly I could only pop in for a few minutes, but that was enough to see – among many other things – Jay Cousins cooking up bioplastics from some starch and Martin Bauer doing some serious laser cutting. Awesome stuff, all of it!) It was the latest, but certainly not the last congregation of the whole cluster of tinkerers and makers and builders in Berlin. It’s a trend that has been going on for awhile, and all over the world, but it seems that Berlin is a very fertile ground for this kind of maker culture. (We also noticed that by the massive positive feedback as we were putting together the atoms&bits Festival last year.)
The Open Design workshop was a part of Social Media Week and organized and attended by a very diverse and cool group of people, all of which are extremely fine folks (and some of which are close friends of mine, so I’m totally biased here).
These two videos emerged from the workshop:
Delivered in Beta from KS12 on Vimeo.
I can’t find a good link except a Facebook page, so here’s the list of organizers taken off the Facebook page:
This is great stuff indeed. Props to the organizers, and thanks for the videos!
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It’s almost the end of the year, and that means it’s the time to take a minute to think back to what happened during the year, and remember the good stuff, so to speak.
As is always the nature with this kind of posts, it’s more interesting for the author than the readers, so like I said in last year’s post:
The longer version below will be more interesting for me than you, probably. If you skip this post I won’t be disappointed. I promise ;)
So, here’s my 2009. A year which I’m sure will always remember fondly. For me it was a year full of political campaigning, coworking and events galore.
Work-related, I had the chance to work with many new and old clients and partners, and it’s been great. Thank you all – I really feel privileged to be able to have the kind of live I have and get paid for doing stuff I love to do, and I’ve been having an awesome time working with you guys. Thanks, thanks and thanks!
One project I found particularly interesting, and I spent a good deal of time and energy on it: Together with Thomas Praus & Panorama3000 I helped Jusos (the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party, in short SPD) run their federal election campaign. It was, as far as I know, the first time that the Jusos ran their own campaign independently from the party. Even though the election results were disappointing in the end, we experienced a great community of politically engaged young adults and we all learned a tremendous deal.
What else? According to Dopplr, I went on 25 trips in six countries. One of them was to New York, where I spent the whole month of May, working from the great Brooklyn-based coworking space The Change You Want To See. (My friend Matthias, who designed the waving cat xmas motif above, also spent some time there.) The community at The Change inspired me so much that upon return to Berlin it didn’t take much convincing to be one of the first members of a new coworking space in the making in Berlin-Neukölln: When we were introduced to the location, it was a matter of weeks until Studio70 opened up.
At Studio70, a great crowd ranging from fashion designer to tinkerer to journalist and many more gathered, and it wasn’t long until it became clear that an event needed to be held to celebrate this mix. Atoms&Bits Festival was born, and within just a few months we pulled together the whole thing that in the end had reached out to some 30 locations in several cities. It was a lot of work, but also very rewarding to see all these different scenes and subcultures mix and mingle. Atoms&Bits culminated in a weekend of events the same day as the federal elections in Germany, so the weekend of the 26/27 September 2009 was kind of a big day for me. If I had a paper calendar, this weekend would have been circled in a thick, red circle. (But I don’t, and Google Calendar doesn’t do this kind of stuff, so it became just another weekend ;)
Right after Atoms&Bits and the elections, it was time for a little break, so off to a vacation I went. Luckily, a good friend and former housemate from my university time in Sydney happened to get married just then and I had the honor to be one of the brothers/best men, and even more luckily he lives in Singapore, so the destination of the trip was easily decided. After a blast of a time there and seeing many faces I hadn’t seen in years, I came back to Berlin, just in time to receive a notice from the TED crew, informing me that our request to run a TEDx event was approved. So we putTEDxKreuzberg on the map, to be held at, and more importantly with, Betahaus. Again, great fun, and we’re still processing all the things we heard and saw there. (And the videos, too.) And just like last year, we had a monthly Likemind kaffee klatsch at good ol’ St Oberholz. Thomas and I have been having a great time with this and we’ve both met so many cool folks, we’ll definitively going on doing this, so make sure to drop by (3rd Friday of the month, 9am).
To finish the year off, the most recent turn of events led me to Strasbourg, France, where I’ve been spending the last couple weeks (and until some point in January 2010) at Arte, a German-French public TV station, doing some behind-the-scenes concept work.
So that was my 2009. Definitively not bad. And since 2010 always has been the start of the future, we’re bound to see another cool year in just about a week. Hope to see you there.
Image: The lovely xmas motif was done for me by Matthias Pflügner. (Thanks!)
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