Multi-touch screens are very fashionable these days, but there are not many practical applications for them. Now, researchers at Durham University in the UK are using them to develop the world’s first interactive classroom. The new learning environments are using ‘interactive multi-touch desks that look and act like a large version of an Apple iPhone.’ Their initiative, called SynergyNet, has several goals, including the development of learning by sharing. So far, the research team has linked up with manufacturers to design software and desks that recognize multiple touches on the desktop. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

The following is a very informative excerpt by Masters of Media from the University of Amsterdam of the Surprising Africa event at Picnic 08.

Bring the world to Africa and bring Africa to the world.’ (Gisel Hiscock, talking at Surprising Africa)

Hiscock, one of speakers at the Surprising Africa conference, held a lecture about Google’s interest in giving information-access to the one billion Africans. On the other hand, these same Africans need a way to share their information with the rest of the world: they need a voice. According to Hiscock the focus should be on developing technologies that answer local needs, empowering communities and in this way achieving the most. She finds Africa interesting because of it’s innovative character. Another speaker, Ethan Zuckerman, shares this interest: ‘A hammer isn’t a hammer in Africa. In the West a hammer is solely a tool to hit nails, in Africa they use it to do a lot more.’ Surely this is a necessity due to poverty, but nonetheless a capacity that has great potential in using new technologies. His presentation was far more interesting than the Google-presentation Hiscock came up with, since the latter seemed to be more interested in putting Google on a shiny pedestal instead of discussing relevant issues.

Zuckerman, speaking of citizen media rather than citizen journalism, explains how internet could be a great addition to the uses of radio and the mobile phone by bringing the news, and also providing the opportunity for the African people to share their opinions. With a mobile phone it is possible to call someone who has access to internet in order to gain information. Radio and the mobile phone have proven to be a fruitful combination in case of political violence in corrupted societies. Instead of turning to the untrustworthy police, people can call the radio instead, and thus put pressure on the authorities and the police to act correctly. Additionally, radio is a very important tool because of the huge illiteracy in Africa. By creating internet connections in radio stations and spreading the (world) news via the radio, whole communities can profit from just one internet connection. There is, however, still the issue of the ‘digital divide’, as people tend to call it. As this is a concept that cannot encompass the complexity of the difficulties, Zuckerman breaks up the concept into four aspects:

These problems need a longterm focus in which infrastructure has to be increased enormously; everybody should get a voice. Zuckerman gives an example of a mother with a sick child (Baby Kamba). She created a blog and her story got so much attention that she managed to raise enough money to pay for an operation. Zuckerman states we should not look at the baby here, but at the mother. Citizen media at it’s best. Why is Africa surprising? Because we just don’t pay enough attention!

Next week the SMX Search Marketing Expo East will be held at Javits Center in New York City. The event unexpectedly finds itself with the nation and world in a climate of economic crisis. Perhaps this will be a setting for some awakening to the often spectacular economic value to marketing in the connected online environment. Strongly to this point, of the seven “search topics” stated on the SMX homepage, only the first one requires the cash outlays usual in 20th century advertising: paid, organic, link building, local, mobile, social, analytics.

The other six principles create value that far outweighs any cost to optimizing search marketing (SEM). Why? Well, it’s the smartmobby principles of networks. Tom Hayes puts it this way in his listing of principles of networks (page 31) of his book Jump Point:

Principle 4. The more connected a node is, the more valuable it is.
Principle 5. Information in a network moves like a virus, from node to node.

In the new economic times it is very useful to know that the stock market and credit crunches to not affect how connected a node is nor how its information moves virally among the nodes. What does affect those things — and what captures and multiplies their value — is how much an enterprise knows about search engine optimization (SEO).

Erik Hersman talked at Picnic 08 on ‘Surprising Africa - what we can learn from Africa’ about the way they use Mobile Phones. Here is the slideshow of Erik’s presentation.

The truth about Africa is that there are some very interesting, and surprising, developments coming out of Africa. Every culture modifies use or the device itself to meet local needs - this is no different in Africa, and we’re seeing that evolution happen right before our eyes.

On Erik’s weblog White African you find the statistics and contextual info on some innovative payment systems.

Web strategist Eric Hersman founded Ushahidi a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis.

Erik is also known from AfriGadget, a website dedicated to showcasing African ingenuity. A team of bloggers and readers contribute their pictures, videos and stories from around the continent. The stories of innovation are inspiring. It is a testament to Africans bending the little they have to their will, using creativity to overcome life’s challenges.

Also read about his ideas on mobile blogging and check out some more articles of Erik Hersman.

Software Randomizes Airport Patrols

A guard patrol is nearly pointless if it’s predictable, because criminals and terrorists usually surveil potential targets as they plan their attacks. That’s why many security managers direct their officers to vary their routines. But what security professionals may not know is that humans trying to randomize actions invariably sink into predictable patterns, unintentionally offering adversaries the predictability they seek. A new software program called Assistant for Randomized Monitoring over Routes (ARMOR) may solve the problem.
Source: Joseph Straw, Security Management, September 2008

Train engineer was texting just before Calif. crash

The train driver blamed for the worst U.S. train crash in 15 years was sending and receiving text messages seconds before his crowded commuter train skipped a red light and collided head-on with a freight train, federal investigators said on Wednesday. The Metrolink commuter train plowed into a Union Pacific freight locomotive on September 12 in Chatsworth, California, killing 25 people and injuring 135 in the worst train accident since 1993.
Source: Reuters, October 1, 2008

How do bloggers make money?

Last week, the blog search engine Technorati released its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report with the slightly menacing promise to “deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind.” Bloggers create 900,000 blog posts a day worldwide, and some of them are actually making money. Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually — though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year.
[Note: I have serious doubts about the validity of these numbers.]
Source: Michael Agger, Slate, October 1, 2008

Seven blog news trackers compared

In many ways, Wednesday’s release of an updated front page to Google Blog Search has put blog news tracking into the limelight. Google didn’t get there first though. Sites like Techmeme, Blogrunner, and Technorati have been tracking the hottest blog posts for quite some time. Now’s a good point to take a look at what makes these sites (and others) individual and different from Google’s new tool.
Source: Josh Lowensohn, CNET’s Webware, October 2, 2008

Hijacking Satellite Navigation

The Global Positioning System (GPS) lies at the heart of an increasing number of technologies, from vehicle navigation systems to the power grid. And yet, although the military version of GPS includes security features such as encryption, civilian signals are transmitted in the clear. Now, researchers at Cornell University and Virginia Tech have demonstrated a relatively simple way to fool ordinary GPS receivers into accepting bogus signals using a briefcase-size transmitter.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, October 2, 2008

Who were you in 2001? Check Google’s old index

Once of Google’s 10th birthday gifts to the world is its re-release of a 2001 version of the search index. (The FAQ says there are “various technical reasons” for not displaying results back to Google birth year of 1998.) On it you can see what the service knew about any topic back then. Like you. Go ahead.
[Note: the 2001 Google index is at http://www.google.com/search2001.html.]
Source: Rafe Needleman, CNET’s Webware, October 1, 2008

Bank robber hires decoys on Craigslist, fools cops

In an elaborate robbery scheme that’s one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities. It gets better: He then escaped in a creek headed for the Skykomish River in an inner tube, and the cops are still looking for him. “A great amount of money” was taken, Monroe police said, but did not provide a dollar value.
Source: Caroline McCarthy, CNET’s The Social, October 3, 2008

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Google Reconsiders it Aversion to Advertising: Search Giant, Long Reliant on Word-of-Mouth Promotion, Has Held Discussions With Several Madison Avenue Agencies. From the article:

. . . Google is beginning to “break with its relatively low-key history” around marketing, says Greg Sterling, an Internet analyst with market-research firm Sterling Market Intelligence. “They’re definitely doing more things that look like traditional marketing.”

Google’s own marketing staff, which is decentralized by product groups, is also trying new approaches, such as projecting massive images on buildings in New York to promote its custom homepage service.

And the company has started slapping its brand on products, like the G1 cellphone that runs its software. Google and T-Mobile USA are launching an online, outdoor and TV ad campaign to promote the device, which hits stores this month.

The company last year hired Andy Berndt, a former co-president of WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather in New York, to help evolve its strategy. As managing director of a new group called Google Creative Lab, Mr. Berndt’s job is to find new ways to promote Google products while keeping its brand consistent. . . .

It is estimated that “30,000 or more ‘Internet police’ monitor online traffic, Web sites and blogs for political and other offending content [...] in China. The “always-on panopticon” does have its draw-backs and Skype is the latest victim of State-sanctioned surveillance.  I am highlighting this article from the IHT to bring about awareness of the potential and real threats network-based technologies and services can pose to us.

“A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.”

Surveillance of Skype messages found in China - International Herald Tribune

This morning my friend Pete sent me the link to the Yahoo! News story yesterday about the YouTube movie Charlie Bit My Finger. When I found the movie on YouTube and clicked to play it, I was number 53,210,582 visitor to do so. The theme of the Yahoo story is what it “tells us about Web 2.0.” Here is some of the flavor:

But here’s the really interesting part: Tens of thousands of people who saw this clip did more than just smile and surf on.

They “mashed” it up with other media (”Charlie Bit Sarah Palin”), created a song about it (”Charlie bit my finger – The Musical”), created their own versions (”Shoshi bit my finger … again!”), posted their own comments, shared it with friends, or otherwise interacted with the original clip.

This is the world of Web 2.0. It is the evolution of Web platforms that are supporting millions of simultaneously connected global conversations. And it promotes the idea that a community is more powerful than an individual.

The point of this new media landscape is to create something and share it with the world. When we post anything to the Web, we are begging for a conversation. We want to be ridiculed, called out, accepted, talked about, linked to, and, most important, not ignored.

It’s easy to criticize the rise of participatory social media as a giant waste of time. And it’s true that a fair amount of what’s being created is adolescent. But that criticism misses the point: This trend is setting the stage for greater long-term engagement. It’s an indicator that people are working to find new ways to collaborate and to be part of something larger than they are individually. The sheer immensity of the participation is the story.

True to its purpose of identifying tools and technologies for communication, cooperation, and social and scientific development, Ars Electronica comes with a new initiative for the year 2009: 80+1 - A Journey Around the World. Inspired by the wager of a journey around the world in 80 days depicted by Jules Verne more than a 100 years ago, a journey thought to be impossible by the human mind in the 19th century, Ars Electronica proposes another wager: a real trip around the world by virtual and telematic means.

In fact, the emphasis is not placed on the journey itself, but what comes out of it. If Jules Verne was preoccupied only with the technical means for making such a trip possible, with the main character, Phileas Fogg, not carrying for the people he met along the way, Ars Electronica circles the world to find ideas that are forging our future as we speak, in the good and bad ways altogether. A sort of Earth diagnosis with the goal of foreseeing and influencing the future in its statu nascendi.

As for the goal of making these ideas known to everybody the organizers envisioned what they call “live bits:” information as complex as it can be, that will be sent during the event via the communication networks to Linz, the cultural center of Europe, where it will be available to be experienced by the public through new and innovative technologies.

In the search for places and people with ideas in key areas of human (or earthling) existence, a number of themes will be accounted for: aging, food, climate change, cultural diversity, markets, happiness, exploration, energy, traffic, education, progress, revolution & growth, cultural heritage, migration, resources & recycling, democracy & civil society, water, neighborhood & vicinity, bio-diversity, bio-technology, ecology, privacy & community. I mentioned them all because I believe each of them is worth mentioning.

So, it’s gonna be in 2009, in Linz, with the sponsorship of voestalpine, as partner. Walking, in a way, on the footsteps of Phileas Fogg, this event will last for 80 days, plus a special extra day with a conference that will coincide with the Ars Electronica annual festival. There is, of course, a call for proposals. The main requirement for all proposals is “live bits:” real-time digital information via any network of any viable quantity and in any modality. There are also financial rewards for bright applications.

This is a reminder that on October 6th, 2008 the Institute for the Future will be launching The Superstruct Game.  Superstruct is billed as “the first massively multi-player forecasting game which is helping to invent the future.”  For more information visit the Q&A section of Superstruct at IFTF

Also read: Superstruct: Alternate Reality Gaming Meets Future Forecasting