The Alumnai Human Network Planet

Guy Sheffer: Cheap USB interface to connect Ham radios and other devices to the PC

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:34:42 +0000

Ham radio PC interface

Hi all,
As promised in my last post, I have finally finished designing and building a cheap interface to connect ham radios or any other audio device that does not share audio common ground to a PC, including a PTT interface. Price should be around $17 or 60 NIS. The control is done using a USB interface, so unlike most ham radio hardware that uses serial connections, this one is plug and play in modern PCs. The neat thing is that it uses them same commands as a RigBlaster. So this interface works out of the box with common ham radio programs like Echolink and Svxlink. The interface should also work with soundmodem which can be used for X.25 packet digital communications, without any extra hardware (I am still trying to get this to work). This interface could also be used to connect to other devices that don’t share a common ground. For example like phone lines.

Parts you will need

TTL USB Serial interface – The main part is a simple CP2102 $4 controller that can be percussed from ebay. It simulates a serial device, meaning you can still work with older pieces of software with it. Note though you need to solder a cable from the RTS pin on the board, because normally they don’t come with a pre-made pin.
Audio line isolation transformer – This can be easily salvaged from any old dial-up modem. That’s how I get mine, it seems to be much easier to get them off old modems than finding them in electronics shops, plus they are so easily identifiable (just make sure not to break the contacts when you take them out, happened to me twice). If you can’t find any old dial-up modems you can get it from ebay.
3.5mm stereo and 2.5mm mono earphone connectors – You need one of each, PCs use a 3.5mm stereo jack and the radio’s microphone is usually a mono 2.5mm jack (consult your HT’s manual, they tend to have a schismatic for the mic). I personally like to have two 3.5mm phone plugs on each side and an adapter, so in the future I can use this interface for other things than ham radio.
(recommended) Isolated audio cable – Ham radios can produce a lot of interference and using isolated audio cable close to the transformer is a good idea, you won’t need more than half a meter, unless you want to put a larger distance between the radio and the PC.
Prototyping Perfboard – So you have what to solder the parts on.
Now comes the difference between the two circuits, you MUST have either of the two options 6 or 7 below:
(option 1) Reed relay – If you manage to find this part number HE722A0510, then you will really get a simple board, with just 3 parts on it. Its also quiet compared to a normal relay.
(option 2) 6 pin 5V mechanical relay and two NPN 2N3904 transistors – Adding two more parts to the board and a louder relay, this would be a lesser choice, but still fully functional interface. I am putting this as an option because these parts are so common I doubt anyone would have a problem finding them.
(recommended) 14 pin socket – If the relay breaks, it would make it easily replaceable.
A 3.5mm audio splitter and a set of cheap earphones – Most sound cards today have a circuit that checks if a device is plugged in to the card, otherwise they would not play anything though it. To overcome this you can split the outgoing audio signal, connect one side to the radio interface, and the other to a set of earphones. This is not needed if you want to plug a device like an MP3 player, where there is no such check.

The Schematics

I am going to supply two schematics, the first is the one I built which uses a reed relay, which is more quiet, faster but slightly less common and costs around $3 more. The second, I built and tested on the breadboard. It uses a normal 8 pin mechanical relay and two NPN 2N3904 bipolar transistors.

The finished interface looks like this:

PTT Interface option 1 using a reed relay and the CP2102 USB to UART controller

And here is the schematic:

PTT Interface1 using a reed relay (click image to enlarge)

Note that the reed relay I used can handle the strange 3.3V to 5V connection used (pin 2 and 6 on the relay). This saves the need for an inverter, since for some reason, the TTL’s logical high is 0V and logical low is 3.3V and not the other way round (still trying to figure out if this is the spec, or the Chinese assemblers fault).

If you can’t find part number HE722A0510, then you could use two NPN 2N3904 transistors and a 8 pin mechanical relay. The NPN transistor on the left inverts the signal, while the transistor on the right amplifies the signal to 5V. This is the schematic:

PTT Interface2 using a normal 8 pin relay (click image to enlarge)

Will build ham radio interfaces for food – If you want I would build you one

I am willing to build these for people and get paid via paypal, price is negotiable, but I don’t think I’d be willing to build this for under $55 (or 200 NIS). If I find cheaper ways to get parts, I’ll lower the price. This depends on how much call there is, and if I find a cheap way to print PCBs for this project.

I hope this interface brings use to people. The one I built I hope to donate to the Jerusalem Amateur Radio Society operations.

Thanks

As usual, I could not have done this alone, thanks to 4Z5UG, Eric, who helped me out with the inverting NPN circuit design, and for 4X1GM for suggesting the reed relay.

That’s it, Looking forwards to hear your thoughts on this post, 4Z7GAI wishing you 73, best regards.

Dmitry Epstein: Digital divide and civic engagement

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:13:29 +0000

With the dissertation defended I plan on bringing this blog back to life.

I started a post-doc position with the Cornell eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI), based in Cornell Law School. The project runs a very interesting operation called Regulation Room. It offers a platform and, even more importantly, a process for online public participation in the federal government rule-making process (if you don’t know what rule-making is, you are with the majority of people out there and should definitely go to the Regulation Room, because it has all the explanations). I will be working on collaborative drafting of policy input and consensus building around policy issues; aspects that currently are absent from the platform and frankly not sure will be necessarily a standard part of it. I hope to write about this work as I move along.

Yet, even before I started working on my own piece of CeRI research, just learning about the Regulation Room prompted interesting conversations that easily linked to my interest in the digital divide. The result is a paper I co-authored with one of my new colleagues, Rebecca Vernon, which will be presented later this week at the ”New ICTs + New Media = New Democracy? Communications policy and public life in the age of broadband” (CFP) – a workshop organized by the Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University and the New America Foundation.

I am not sure what the policy of the workshop is about publishing the papers, so in the meantime I’ll post the extended abstract. Hope you’ll find the premise interesting. If you are interested in the rest, please email me or just leave a comment.

Between Twitter revolutions and Facebook elections, there is a growing belief that information and communication technologies are changing the way democracy is practiced. But how universal are those effects? In this paper we look into what van Dijk labels “motivational access” in digital divide as an impediment for citizens to actively utilize information and communication technologies for civic engagement. We focus on the Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative as our case and conduct an in-depth investigation into its recent efforts to get the public involved in the Department of Transportation rulemaking process using online tools. Recommendations based on this analysis address both national policy frameworks and agency specific regulations.

The digital divide is viewed as major impediment to information-technology-enhanced democratic processes. But if you build it, will they come? Will making broadband more readily available necessarily increase participation in democratic processes? Will making government information available online motivate citizens to engage with government institutions? Will opening up communication channels necessarily yield productive feedback from people? Are the barriers for meaningful civic participation online primarily technological?

Regulation Room (http://regulationroom.org) is a project of Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI). It is an online platform developed to engage the public in the federal agency rulemaking processes. In addition to its technological platform, Regulation Room has developed a set of moderation and outreach techniques to make both the procedures of rulemaking and the content of the rules more accessible to the general public. CeRI works with the Department of Transportation on actual rules the agency is seeking public comment on. As such, it serves as a real-life laboratory to explore uses of technology in democratic processes.

Over the past 15 months, Regulation Room worked on 3 rules that resulted in formal comments submitted to the Department of Transportation. In this paper we unpack what it takes to engage citizens in democratic processes and help them make their participation count. Our analysis suggests that while digital divide defined in terms of physical access and technological literacy may play a role in impeding civic engagement, they may not be the only important factors. In effect, while ensuring that all citizens have broadband access and well-developed technical skills go a long way toward ensuring public participation in democratic governance, it will not result in the desired breadth and depth of participation without further policy changes and investments in new technologies. Practices that evolved around the use of technology on the one hand and the engagement with government processes on the other, play an important role affecting civic online participation.

The paper presents an assortment of lessons and observations from “Regulation Room” and offers policy recommendations that suggest viewing civic online engagement through the lens of socio-technical practice, wherein the technology requirements for citizens to engage effectively in democratic processes are examined in conjunction with the normative assumptions of individuals as they interact with their government through online media.

Guy Sheffer: Echolink Node Native on Linux with Svxlink, and a Cheap PTT Hardware Interface

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:12:16 +0000

The Jerusalem Echolink Node (4Z7GAI-R)

Hey all,

I recently got my amateur HAM Radio license from the Israel ministry of communication. My call sign is 4Z7GAI.

I have been working on getting an Echolink node running on the Jerusalem repeater using Linux. Echolink is a closed proprietary software that lets you connect ham radios to one another and key them across the Internet. Luckily someone wrote a FOSS program called Svxlink, which lets you connect to the Echolink network on Linux., A remote radio control with an echolink server, svxlink-server and an Echolink graphical client, Qtel. I am going to explain in this post how to get svxlink compiled and working (compiling is the hard part). I will also giving out here an Ubuntu package for the lazy ones among you.

I will also add a small section on the physical connection to the radio, an old Icom IC-02AT from the 80s (around my age).

Compiling Svxlink For Debian, Ubuntu packaging and Installation

My system is Debian, ubuntu needs a few extra lines and they are supplied in section number 2. If it isn’t, here is a .deb package for Ubuntu.
Note that I am checking out the qt4 branch.

sudo apt-get install libqt3-mt-dev libsigc++-1.2-dev tcl-dev libasound2-dev libgsm1-dev libpopt-dev subversion checkinstall svn co https://svxlink.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/svxlink/branches/qt4 svxlink cd svxlink/src

Only in Ubuntu (not Debian, these lines are not needed there) type these commands:

mkdir -p async/audio/alsa
ln -s /usr/include/sys/asoundlib.h async/audio/alsa
ln -s /usr/include/gsm.h async/audio/
ln -s /usr/include/popt.h echolib/

Then run:make sudo checkinstall
Then press 2 and type “svxlink” to give the package the right name.You will have a .deb package you can install now with dpkg -i svxlink.deb

Troubleshooting:

If you are getting strange compile errors, don’t panic, its pretty normal for svxlink. Post them here, or search for them in the svxlink message archive. There are quite a few common ones.

Installing the voice files

Svnlink can speak out information on the node, for example callsigns of hams joining in or announce the time. For that you need the freely available sound files from Svxlink.
Download the the heather sound package from the svxlink sound downloads
Extract the contents (including the en_US folder inside) to the path: /usr/share/svxlinks/sounds . You may need to create the sounds folder.

Configuring Svxlink

Svxlink has many options. And detailed man pages of what they all do. The main configuration is in /etc/svxlink/svxlink.conf where you set up your callsign for the station, the RX and TX sound ports and logics. The logics let you decide if you are running a simplex repeater or a full-duplex repeater. Also you can set which modules should be used (including Echolink). Each station is unique so you will need to go over the configuration slowly and figure it out. The svxlink.conf manpage is well documented.

The echolink configuration is located at /etc/svxlink/svxlink.d/ModuleEchoLink.conf . Again, its pretty simple and there is a ModuleEchoLink.conf manpage (if you get stuck on something just comment here).

My custom hardware interface

Hardware

The circuit is simply a computer-controls relay switch. Opening and closing the audio connection between the PC sound card output, and radio mic-in.

To interface with the computer, I used my beloved Bumble-b that I posted about before. However the bumble-b is not being made anymore (we don’t know if the maker of the bumble-b, dfletcher, is dead, alive, or neither). I hope to post here later a simpler interface using a $2 usb-serial interface. But for now you can see the general idea: you could use any other computer interface that opens and closes a relay (an LPT port for example), this relay would connect the mic-in of the radio in to the speaker of the computer’s sound card, serving as a Push-To-Talk button.

The radic-mic and PC soundcard are connected to each other via an audio transformer taken off an old modem, as shown in the picture below. You can get these transformers off any old dialup modem, its easy to spot the coil on the modem board too. The transformer goes between the radio and sound card because they don’t have a common ground, if you just plug them together one would fry the other. However the radio’s speaker out and PC’s mic-in are just plugged in directly. That seems to work fine when the sound on the radio is set down low, still, you could use another transformer if you want to, it might give better results for some radios.

Custom PTT Interface for svxlink

Software

For svxlink to key using this custom interface I had to slip a few quick and dirty lines of code in to the files src/svxlink/trx/LocalTx.cpp and src/svxlink/trx/LocalTx.h .

Here is the patch. Its generally useful to look at if you have your own commands to key your custom-built PTT for svxlink. In mine I just echo to /dev/radio ‘y’ and ‘n’ in order to open and close it respectively.

Come to my new Echolink node!

I hope this helps anyone who wants to work with svxlink. You are welcome to come to my echolink node at 4Z7GAI-R that connects to the Jerusalem repeater in Israel (R1).
I connect to it now using the android app for echolink. So I can key my radio from anywhere!

Thanks

Also great thanks to strata who is on the #hamradio channel on freenode, he showed me the program and that its worth doing the painful compiling for it (it was much more painful before this blog post).

Also thanks to Geoffrey Mendelson (4X1GM). Who gave me the radios and antenna to build the repeater, and his help along the way.

Comments are welcome as usual

73 for now

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Use of mobile phones in classroom

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:10:56 +0000

The following slides are being uploaded from the presentation titled

“ 26 interesting ways to use mobile phones in classroom” under the creative commons license. Though the original count was 26 it has grown upto 29 through valuable additions by various contributors. The presentation itself is a valuable example of crowdsourcing. To contribute, please visit here.

Some other valuable ideas about the use of Mobile phones in classrooms can be accessed here:

Smartphones in classrooms: It talks about various applications of the use of mobile phones in classroom for an interesting learning experience.
“Educators Look at Using Cell Phones as Teaching Tools” The article features how cell phones are being used in Joe Wood’s science class at Somerset Middle School in Modesto, CA. [published in Aug 03, 2009, The Sacramento Bee - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX]
“From Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education” This book is written by Liz Kolb, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan studying Learning Technologies. She is also an adjunct Professor at Madonna University and a former high school teacher and technology coordinator. Liz maintains a website called “CellPhonesInLearning.com” Inside Michigan Education conducted an interview with Liz that you can read online.
Smartphones belong in classroom: an article by NY Times.
Joe Dale’s tips on integration of technology into learning experiences.

Tagged: ICTs in classroom, ICTs in education

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Improving female literacy through ICTs in Pakistan

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 09:29:43 +0000

We have also covered the issue of improvements in literacy in third world countries on our blog. We have discussed a few literacy projects by Google, TATA (India & Africa), Planet Read’s (India – “Same Language Sub-titling project“), Tastan (Senegal – Jokko Initiative).

A current report titled “Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity” discussing the mobile phone gender gap in low and middle-income countries has presented some insight into the advantages of bridging the mentioned gap. The report suggests that:

Mobile phone ownership in low and middle-income countries has skyrocketed in the past several years. But a woman is still 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. This figure increases to 23% if she lives in in Africa, 24% if she lives in the Middle East, and 37% if she lives in South Asia.

One of the important impacts of ICTs is on literacy and we will be covering a case from Pakistan about SMS for literacy project by Bunyad Foundation in collaboration with UNESCO and Mobilink (Pakistan telco).

A brief description about Bunyad’s projects by Pakistan Herald is reproduced here:

The schools established under the project were known as ILM NFPE centres and were supported by UNICEF starting with literacy and education in one district Bunyad has gradually expanded both in geographical areas of operation as well as the field of its activities. It is presently active in 18 districts of the province of Punjab and particularly in more than 2000 villages and its programs, in addition to literacy and non-formal education, include projects in such diverse fields as child labour, women empowerment for poverty alleviation, saving and micro credit community development, integrated farming and sanitation, health, reproductive health and environment. Bunyad has been working in approximately 5000 villages in 500 Union councils on various projects in Pakistan.

Bunyad’s work won it international recognition through UNESCO’s awards in contribution to literacy and education. The organization’s president was also awarded Aizaz-e-Fazeelat (Civil award) from president of Pakistan.

Pakistani mobile operator Mobilink, a subsidiary of Orascom, has learned a great deal about attitudes regarding women and mobile phones, especially as penetration rates soared in Pakistan over the last several years. In addition to creating a product tailored specifically for the women’s market several years ago, Mobilink has sought to demonstrate the power of mobile phones to improve literacy rates for adolescent girls in rural areas of Pakistan where reading materials are often scarce. Yet there is often resistance to girls’ having the independence that mobile phones symbolise.

For four months in 2009, Mobilink partnered with UNESCO and a local nongovernmental organisation (NGO), Bunyad, on a pilot project in a rural area of southern Punjab province involving 250 females aged 15-24 who had recently completed a basic literacy programme. Each of the girls was provided with a low-cost mobile phone and prepaid connection. Teachers were trained by Bunyad to teach students how to read and write using mobile phones. The company set up a system for the NGO to send out SMS messages in an effort to maintain and improve participants’ literacy, which often lapses because of inadequate access to interesting reading material. Crucially, the low-cost phones were enabled to send and receive messages in Urdu, the local language, rather than in English. The girls received up to six messages a day on a variety of topics including religion, health and nutrition, and were expected to practise
reading and writing down the messages and responding to their teachers via SMS. Monthly assessments of participants learning gains were conducted to assess impact.

Programme organisers encountered considerable resistance on the part of parents and community leaders to the idea of allowing girls to have mobile phones, largely due to the conservative social norms of the area. This resistance began to soften, however, once people began to see the nature of the messages the girls were receiving and the benefits the programme conferred. Exams taken by the girls participating in the programme showed striking early gains in literacy, with the share of girls receiving the lowest scores dropping nearly 80%.

Participants and their families are even taking advantage of other features of the phones, including the calculator. While 56% of learners and their families initially maintained negative feelings toward the programme, 87% were satisfied with its results by the end. Families also appreciated the greater sense of security that being able to contact their daughters or wives provided. Users can pay US$6 to buy their phones at the end of the programme and continue receiving text messages, and Mobilink, UNESCO and Bunyad plan to expand the programme further.
The success of this programme demonstrates how mobile phones can be used to increase the reach and effectiveness of basic education programmes. It also illustrates the fact that suspicion of mobile phones can be overcome by showing parents and leaders how mobiles
can be used to transmit culturally sensitive information whilst increasing girls’ sense of security.

As reported by business recorder, Mobilink has planned to extend this pilot project further.

Uptil now, SMS have been perceived as a threat by academics and the discussion had always been centered around how to curb this nuisance during classrooms, as duly noticed by Micheal Trucano on his blog at World Bank. However m-learning initiatives are changing the landscapes of education. Trucano also referred to another interesting m-learning project from Pakistan. He notes that:

In Pakistan, some innovative folks are exploring how basic text messaging (SMS) can be used in the education sector to the benefit of people with even very low end mobile phones, leveraging the increasing high teledensities found in communities across the country.

Thinkchange Pakistan notes that:

The Asghar Mall College pilot project where 150 students who had their mobile phone numbers on file began participating in a daily vocabulary quiz exercise delivered by SMS. These young men from middle to lower middle class backgrounds were sent simple multiple-choice questions. Texts were addressed to each student individually, using the equivalent of a ’mail merge’ function. The students would reply via SMS, and then receive an automated response based on their answer. In this response, a notation was made about whether the answer given was correct or not, and then the correct answer was incorporated into a sample sentence.

Based on the results of the pilot, the Provincial Education Department of the Government of the Punjab is showing interest in exploring these activities further. The project principals have already started thinking about expanding the scope of their activities. For example they are currently toying with the idea of sending text messages to parents to encourage further parent involvement in the student’s academics.

Another similar concept of m-learning is being implemented in Niger and is worth visiting.

Tagged: ICTs for literacy, ICTs in education, ICTs in Pakistan, Innovative use of ICTs

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Curbing corruption through ICTs (e-governence)

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 06:13:30 +0000

As we have been repeatedly sharing new concepts about use of ICTs for empowering humans, their use in e-governance is an emerging field. The concept of “Jhang model” for curbing corruption is an elegant and simplistic solution for the local governing bodies to establish feedback mechanisms for checks and balances on corruption in daily operations of bureaucracy and government officials.
Started off in district of Jhang in Punjab, Pakistan, the idea is now gaining ground in other districts of punjab. The whole concept is expained in the video (some portions are in urdu and i’ll try to put it in words here).

Video presentation commentary:

I’ll show you a small video and it will give you the visual sense of the project.

‘It is a simple project, if any citizen pays a visit to any government office for routine work, his/her cell number be recorded and after a given amount of time any responsible government official shall contact him/her about the visit and the experience of the citizen. The officer can directly ask him/her if any corruption was witnessed? If any pattern is discovered representative officials should take action.

Call…

Allahdita, i’m DCO Gujranwala speaking (our call got hungup), i was talking about the program started on behest of Chief minister Punjab to check if there is any problems being faced by citizens during the registration process… You were here a few days back for your registry so i wanted to check back if you faced any such problem, did anyone overcharge you (yes), did you get your work done within one day? (yes) My bother how much did they charge you? (it cost me 3000 Rs in total). Does it include the documentation work too? (yes) Did clerk charge you anything extra? (No sir).

Second Call…

Is this Muhammad Sideeq? (Yes sir). Commissioner Bahawalpur will speak to you. (alright).

Sideeq sahab, Assalam-o-Alaikum, (Wa-Alaikum- Salam sir, is everything ok?) Thanks a lot. I’m commissioner Bahawalpur speaking, Mushtaq. You got your registration on 14th for for 5 Marla land in RahimyarKhan. Did you face any problems or anyone bother you? (Sir i did not face any problem, issue or tension. Thanks a lot for your follow up).

IVR Message – The following call is being made from Government of Punjab, you shall be receiving messages or calls from Government inquiring about the conduct you were provided during registration process. Did you face any difficulties or problems?

Tagged: egovernance, ICTs, Pakistan, TEDx

Glenn Omanio: My new home!

noreply@blogger.com (gomanio) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 23:50:47 +0000

http://secondpersonalities.blogspot.com/

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: The potential of ICTs in development

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:20:00 +0000

This is a self explanatory video by Intel about the use of ICTs in addressing local problems in rural areas. Worth a thousand words:

India Village – Intel from Bill Zarchy on Vimeo.

Tagged: India, INTEL

Guy Sheffer: TEDxRamallah My first TED event and visit to Bethlehem

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:30:40 +0000

Holding the x in TEDx

Hey all,

Last Saturday I was at my first TEDx event at TEDxRamallah, which took place in Bethlehem. As a TED lecture lover this was a fantastic experience for me. Moreover, this is also the first time I classified as a “Jewish” Israeli citizen (As an atheist its somewhat confusing to refer to myself as such). This does put me in an unusual position slightly different from most people there. I will try and summarize my own experience in this special event. I feel its important to for me to relay what I see to both sides that rarely see eye to eye.

I shall summarize the talks that I found interesting to me:

Salome Heusel – How TED’s strategy made TED what it is

It was interesting to hear the explanation of how TED grew to the size it is today. How the “radical openness”, even though this talk is of course not the first of its kind. strategic model adopted by TED let them grow by letting others take the TEDx logo and format to reach the huge number of conferences viewers and participants they have today. Things like opening the on-site video subtitle program that let others translate the videos and reach all literate people no matter the language.

Gisel Kordestani – “The Internet amplifies voices, some are heard for the first time.”

Gisel, director of business development in Google, talked about how the Internet amplifies people’s voices, and brings about change in the community. This talk touched me, as a technological-oriented person, I see daily how the Internet as a tool helps us build conversation and understanding bottom up. Unlike Gisel, I actually started on the technological side and reached the world changing thoughts from the opposite side.

I find it profound, that thanks to the level of communication that the Internet has given us a vast majority of people living in many countries view themselves as citizens of the world.This fact is backed up with statistics in the lecture. As citizens of the world, it seems to me much easier to engage in conversations with our neighbors and collaborate with them.

Muhammad Khatib – Don’t listen to your Mom

One of the highlights for me in the event was meeting my friend Muhammad Khatib, who I originally met in ITU TELECOM 2008 in Thailand, indirectly setting off the chain of events that lead me to TEDxRamallah. His talk was about why there are so few Palestinian entrepreneurs, and that one of their defining characteristics is that they are obligated not to listen to their mothers, who want them to have steady jobs.

Now that I am home safe, reaching TEDxRamalla was far easier than I expected it to be; the hardest thing yet was indeed not listening to my mother, who was worried sick about me going there.

Julia Bracha – A story can re-wire your mind, and the psychology behind it

This is for me probably the best lecture in the conference, mainly because it explained in to me what I am doing today out in the A territories – I am learning new things.

Julia spoke about the movie she made called Budrus the movie is about a non-violent demonstration that occurred in the Palestinian village 7 years prior to the making of the movie. She explained why this kind of film was missed in the mainstream media at the time because it didn’t fit “the narrative at the time”, being that at this time during the second intifada Palestinians were viewed as suicide bombers, not peaceful protesters. But this was the start, she borrowed psychological terms to explain why this is happening. Our minds are wired to prefer information that supports narratives that we already know. This term is known as “confirmation bias“, the tendency to favor information that confirms their preconceptions regardless of whether the information is true or not. When this tendency is overcome, we get a situation called “cognitive dissonance“, where we actually experience physical pain caused by holding two conflicting ideas. To relief this pain we ether ignore the information, or fit it in to our logical narrative of our world view. However this did make me realize I am a sort of a masochist, coming to Bethlehem where I am likely to have new information clashing with many of the narratives I hear back home. Nonetheless, I urge myself and others not to look away from such a narrative, even though cognitive dissonance can truly be discomforting. Sadly though, due to the fact that the lecture does favor the Palestinian side, when I tried to show it to a few friends here, they mostly dismiss it at once saying it’s one sided, not reaching the cognitive dissonance that one would want. I am not sure what to do about this just yet.

Slightly too political for me – The non-soldier non-settler Israeli

This TEDx was slightly too political. Although this is expected in such a place, I do find it hard to show all of the lectures to my fellow Israelis. There seem to have not been a single lecture by a Palestinian that was purely Technological, Entertainment or Design without politics embedded in to it in some way.

At first I thought it was only me, but it seemed like quite a few people from abroad approached me saying the same thing. I would like to hear from the Palestinians in the conference what they think. .I have a feeling a lot of the one-sidedness was done unintentionally. Plus it seemed like most speakers didn’t seem to know that there were two Israeli people in the crowd.

It is my opinion that if eventually we are to reach a dialog talking about the conflict, Israelis should first see Palestinians who are not talking only about politics. We need to shake the stereotype of savage terrorists first, and only then get in to the hard talks. Similar to what I was doing in TEDxRamallah myself, where some Palestinians I met said it’s the first time they saw an Israeli who is not a soldier or a settler. I was introduced a few times with the phrase “Meet Guy, he is proof that not all Israelis are bad soldiers or settlers”. Many Israelis here might find this odd, since most Israelis are indeed not in either of those categories. This made me feel how important it is for people to see that in ether side there are normal people.

Sadly people that are not allowed to enter Israel would never see this. The same goes for Israelis who think that Palestinian are savages, especially now, when I have conversations with Israelis after the recent massacre in Itamar. it’s extremely hard to convince Israelis that most Palestinians are horrified by this as any other human being would be.

Summary

The conference was indeed engaging on many levels. Politically it was an important lesson yet an uneasy one. As time passes here in Israel it becomes harder for me to grasp where I was, and how I can explain to others how it is to be there.
The psychological barrier in our minds is unimaginably higher than the physical one. Tearing it down is far more challenging than simply going against the wall separating us, going against the pain we feel when we hear an opinion we don’t like.

This blog post is radically different than the things I usually post here. However I felt I must write this down and share, if you don’t like it, please, flame responsibly.

Shy on the left, myself next to him and and Mohammad Khatib at the far right

Bethlehem Convention Palace reception

From outside the Convention Palace, one can see Efrat settlement on top of the hill

Dmitry Epstein: 60 days

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:49:21 +0000

In case you wondered why there were no updates on this blog recently, the answer is simple – I am dissertating. I need to have a finished manuscript by mid June, which leaves me with around 60 days to finish the task. Wish me luck! :)

In other news, which you may have already seen on Facebook, an article I co-authored with Erik Nisbet and Tarleton Gillespie got published in The Information Society and we got some press coverage in Cornell Chronicle. Here is the abstract of the paper:

Addressing the reasons for—and the solutions to—the “digital divide” has been on the public agenda since the emergence of the Internet. However, the term has meant quite different things, depending on the audience and the context, and these competing interpretations may in fact orient toward different policy outcomes. The goals of this article are twofold. First, the authors unpack the term “digital divide” and examine how it has been deployed and interpreted across a range of academic and policy discourses. Second, through a framing experiment embedded within a nationally representative survey, the authors demonstrate how presenting respondents with two different conceptual frames of the digital divide may lead to different perceptions of who is most accountable for addressing the issue. From this, they discuss the dynamic relationship between the construction and communication of policy discourse and the public understanding of the digital divide, as well as implications for effective communication about the digital divide and information and communication technology policy to the general public.

Feel free to contact me if you want to read the entire piece and don’t have access.

Guy Sheffer: TEDding from the car gPodder video Plugin for Rockbox

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:46:36 +0000

TEDing from the car

Hey all,
After a few weeks of bouncing emails with Thomas Perl I am happy to announce that we have a working plugin for his wonderful podcast application called gPodder. With this plugin installed, any mp4 video podcast that is downloaded with gPodder is automatically converted to a format playable by rockbox MPEG player plugin. Effectively meaning seamless sync of video podcasts to any rockbox enabled device. I am specifically using the Sansa fuze player, but just changing the screen resolution at the top of the plugin should make it work with any other rockbox device, and with the right screen size. The final product for me of all this technical stuff is that I can listen to TED lectures in the car. Or using the verb was coined by my friend Uzair “TEDding” from my car.

How to Install

First you should have gPodder installed (available also as “apt-get install gpodder” or any other distribution install equivalent).

Second you will need these packages installed too:

 apt-get install python-kaa-metadata  ffmpeg python-dbus

Now all that is left is to copy this script to

mkdir -p ~/.config/gpodder/hooks/
cp rockbox_mp4_convert.py ~/.config/gpodder/hooks/

If your are using a different player from the Sansa Fuse, modify the first lines to your screen resolution:
```
DEFAULT_DEVICE_WIDTH = 224.0
DEFAULT_DEVICE_HEIGHT = 176.0
```
make sure to include the .0 at the end.
Thats it! Now each time video is download, for example from the TEDTalks Video Podcast it would be converted on arrival, and relinked as the file to be synced.

As usual, I would love to hear feedback from users and suggestions.

TEDing from the car, thanks to a gPodder hook and Rockbox

gPoder downloading and converting

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Sugata Mitra challenges all kinds of barriers to education

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 23:55:21 +0000

As covered by our previous postings of the Hole in Wall project which started of as a curious experiment and continued as a chain of experiments across rural india has finally crossed its boundaries and reached schools in UK and italy and is all poised to challenge all kinds of barriers like language, culture, age to education. Dr. Sugata Mitra Speaks at TED.

Tagged: Children, Computer literacy, E-learning, education, ICTs in education, India, Innovative use of ICTs

Guy Sheffer: Build your own Free SMS to Twitter gateway with open source tools and cheap hardware

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:53:13 +0000

SMS Twitter Gateway logo

Hey all,

I am releasing here set of instructions and source that will enable anyone to set up a phone number, that if you SMS it, will post your massage on to your own twitter account. This service is called “Twiter SMS Gate”. The service handles multiple users, and should be easily modified to support other services like statusnet (and with a bit more code maybe even other social networks). The SMS hardware required is any cheap cellphone that can work with gammu-smsd (mine is a fake Nokia from India). Twiter SMS Gate also lets users easily register to it with their own cellphone.

I hope that people that like this idea would start hosting more SMS gates, as we create a wide network of those around the world. SMS Twitter Gate-IL , The Israeli Gate, has been running for a few weeks now and even got covered in the local media here.

The source is written in Python, which includes the phone hardware hooks, webserver, twitter client and database access.

Here is the cellphone used to run my server, just to show you how simple it is to do this, no super-expensive hardware required! (server is also my personal Linux-running PC:

Fake Nokia Cellphone acting as a dedicated SMS server

Source is available here on GitHub, along with basic instructions on how to set it up.
Working example of an SMS Twitter Gate in Israel
List of working gates (one at the time of writing this)

If you have any kind of difficulty setting this up, please give me feedback, so we can make it as easy as possible.

Gyanee Dewnarain: LiMo 4 supports four classes of devices

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:17:53 +0000

At the CTIA 2011 show in Orlando, LiMo is announcing that the latest version of its Platform will be able to support at least 4 classes of devices – flagship smartphones, mid-tier smartphones, entry-level smartphones and tablets.

In keeping with its spirit of collaboration, these specifications have been prepared jointly by a taskforce of LiMo Members. The objective of this exercise was to accelerate the commercialization of devices based on LiMo 4 Platform.

These specifications, which provide the baseline requirements for each device class, will be available to all LiMo Members as from today. The first commercial LiMo 4 devices are expected to come to market in the second half of 2011.

If you wish to find out more about these device class specifications, please read the full press release here:http://tinyurl.com/4g8gfmr

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Pakistans Education Emergency

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 04:12:45 +0000

The sad state of primary education in Pakistan has already been covered on our blog previously here while discussing the importance of teach for Pakistan initiative. Recently Pakistan Education Task Force released some mindblowing statistics about primary education and Pakistan’s role in UN’s MDG of education for all. The post on Pakistaniat.com has comprehensively covered this issue. Let’s join hands to act and lets start by signing the petition here. The education taskforce has called for “March for Education”: All Pakistan should talk bout during march is education (and cricket).

Pakistan’s flood of 2010 was the largest in the country’s history. We still haven’t recovered from the incredible destruction of life, property and infrastructure that it left in its wake. No one can argue that if such a calamity were to occur year after year, the existence of the country would be in jeopardy. The economic impact of a 2010 like flood year after year is no different than the long-term consequence of illiteracy in Pakistan!

Continue Reading at ATP’s post.

Tagged: education, Pakistan, Primary Education, UN MDG

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Teach for Pakistan

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:44:41 +0000

It may well be the replica of our famous teach for America campaign buts its still warmly welcome. Its time to take things in hand before our time delay with developed world gets more than a decade. It’s the current generation which needs to stop this relativistic movement of the development frame of reference for developed world and Pakistan.

Our part of world is one facing immense problems of populations exploding exponentially and the development graph just doing, at best, to follow up a linear graph. Information Communication Technologies provide us with the platform to beat that ‘lags’ in development and population. Our neighbor India has already started to bridge the divides through their innovative technology solutions. They are trying to win the fight of Systems Vs Society by improving onto their systems. TATA’s project of Computer Based Functional Literacy project is one of the epic examples of success stories which speak up for the case of use of technology in education. The project has been such a success that its being exported to Africa now.

If we do not act fast enough time will not stop for us! One of the classic problems with our system is the lack of means for us ‘expats’ to keep track of brilliant initiatives like Concern for Children where our capital can do marvels for little kids. Why do Indian cases make out to TED always? Simple ideas of educating the slum children, Dharkan 107.8 and Hole-in-the-wall are making a great impact. We need more work to develop platforms for investing in similar initiatives back home. Youth organizations like Pakistan Youth Alliance (comprising of ambitious youth) with their project Mashal are already delivering, all they need is your backing up and support.

All the message is. Teach for Pakistan

Else this will continue to happen to our next generations (forgive the sarcasm in the interviewer’s tone)

Tagged: Pakistan

Gyanee Dewnarain: Open Source Community Building: A Guide to Getting It Right

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:58:02 +0000

Community development in open source software is not just for geeks in sandals nor for niche Linux companies any more. It’s mainstream and it’s here to stay.

The recent analysis ^[1] of companies contributing code to the Linux kernel shows that large companies including Novell, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Texas Instruments are getting serious about engaging in community development. Organisations such as the LiMo Foundation are encouraging their members to work with community projects “upstream”, that is, with the community rather than in isolation, to avoid missing out on millions of dollars worth of “unleveraged potential” ^[2] (PDF link).

A diverse developer community is critically important to the long term viability of free and open source projects. And yet companies often have difficulty growing communities around their projects, or have trouble influencing the direction of the maintainers of community projects like the Linux kernel or GNOME. Sun Microsystems and AOL are prominent examples of companies which went full speed into community development, but were challenged (to say the least) in cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship with community developers. There are many more examples – but often we never even hear about companies who tentatively engage in community development, and retreat with their tail between their legs, writing off substantial investments in community development. Xara, for example, released part of their flagship software Xara Xtreme ^[3] for Linux as open source in 2005, before silently dropping all investment in the community project in late 2006.

What can go wrong? What are the most common, and the most deadly errors which companies make in their community engagement strategies? And how can you avoid them? Avoiding these does not guarantee success, but failing to avoid them may be sufficient to guarantee failure.

[Part of this article by Dave Neary is being reproduced courtesy of Vision Mobile; the full article can be read on the Vision Mobile website by clicking on this link:http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2011/01/open-source-community-building-a-guide-to-getting-it-right/print/ ]

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: 2010 in review

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 07:44:53 +0000

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,400 times in 2010. That’s about 18 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 62 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 79 posts. There were 32 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 18mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was June 19th with 188 views. The most popular post that day was Hole in the Wall – Challenges the traditional pedagogy.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, reddit.com, mail.yahoo.com, search.conduit.com, and android-vs-ipad.co.cc.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for innovation contest, intel rcp, ibm kidsmart, metfone cambodia, and ibm kidsmart computers.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Hole in the Wall – Challenges the traditional pedagogy March 2010
1 comment

IT@school project – Kerala, India March 2010
1 comment

IBM Kid Smart Early Learning Program donates computers to schools February 2010
3 comments

Tata Computer-based Functional Literacy Program January 2010
2 comments

The Malaysian Smart School project February 2010

Mohammad Khatib: @TEDxRamallah is happening on April 16, 2011. Ready. Aim. Inspire!

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:52:00 +0000

TEDxRamallah is a great initiative that is being organized by individuals from Palestine and the Arab world, lead by Ramzi Jaber. I've been helping out with the content management on the website.

TEDxRamallah is a platform to spread the amazing ideas and work that have been done by inspiring people in Palestine and around the world. Make sure to register to attend. And visit their English or Arabic website for more information.

You can also participate in the Open Blog they have and spreading inspiring stories you know of. Checkout the following video that was made by Mona Abdallah.

Join in, Volunteer and Get Involved, Nominate a speaker, and spread the world. Embed the video on your site, blog or share it with your friends on Twitter or Facebook.
To embed this video use the following code:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="545" height="478" id="viddler_722dc3ae"><param name="movie" value="http://www.viddler.com/player/722dc3ae/" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://www.viddler.com/player/722dc3ae/" width="545" height="478" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" name="viddler_722dc3ae"></embed></object>

Guy Sheffer: 3arabi Arabic chat to English translator

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:48:34 +0000

3arabi Logo

Hi all,

As some might have noticed, Arabic speakers on the net use a form of writing called ‘Arabic chat‘ or 3arabi, which involves using Latin characters and Hindu-Arabic numerals to write words in Arabic. I wrote a small service called 3arabi that lets you translate this Arabic chat directly to English.

Apparently there are tools to do transliteration (converting Latin letters back to Arabic), and also translation. But nothing that does them both. That is why I wrote a small script that uses Google’s transliteration service and ‘Google Translate’. This does the job, but is not perfect, however, it does actually help me understand some messages.

The source is also available in GitHub (its in python). If anyone contributes better code I’ll merge it back to the service.

3arabi translation website
Here is an example of linking to a translation

Thanks to Ira Abramov for hosting the service!

Thanks to Rajesh who wrote the transliteration API though after using it I moved to the javascript google tool with his help.

Thanks Muhammad Khatib who wrote Google Translate python API and for releasing it.

Enjoy,

Guy

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: New Zealand to launch m-learning initiatives to connect rural schools

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 14:28:23 +0000

The Government of New Zealand will look into possible mobile-learning initiatives to connect rural schools, following its announcement to subsidise the costs of ultra fast broadband.“The Ministry of Education is currently looking at how to harness the potential of digital devices that nearly all students have already – their mobile phones,” Colin McGregor, Ministry of Education, group manager of curriculum teaching and learning design, told FutureGov Asia Pacific.

“An ‘m-learning’ pilot has already been successfully implemented by Onehunga High School. The Ministry is currently supporting a second project at Howick College in partnership with Waikato University and Vodafone.”

The government has identified broadband as a significant driver for e-learning and equity in education and has committed to providing 97 per cent of schools with access to speeds of 100Mbps or more via the national fibre rollout. The remaining 3 per cent in areas too remote for optic fibre currently receives 10Mbps via satellite or wireless technologies.

The ministry has been using the Virtual Learning Network (VLN), which provides mainly rural students with access to online courses. In 2010, more than 2000 New Zealand students took part in these virtual classes over the VLN.

Other initiatives include the Ministry of Education’s Laptops for Teachers and Principals scheme, which subsidises the leases on laptops for permanent, full-time or part-time teachers at state and integrated schools. The Ministry has about two thirds of the lease cost of the teacher’s laptops and fully subsidises the base model for principals. More than 43,000 laptops are currently on lease, representing an 88 per cent uptake.

(Source: Aisa Pacific futuregov)

Full Story

Tagged: "remote areas", Connecting Schools, m-learning, Virtual Class Rooms

Mohammad Khatib: Introducing Bazinga! The yet-to-be-launched Technology Hub

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 21:09:00 +0000

Remember the project that I was working with couple of my friends. I've wrote about how hard is being an entrepreneur before. So here it is. The project I am working on with (@RashaRasem, @MoradTaleeb, @Qarout88) and Wasel Ghanem is called Bazinga! (And no, I am not going into what does it mean)

We're were inspired by the different models around the world like TechHub, Shelter and The Hub. And we're bringing it to Ramallah for the Palestinians Entrepreneurs, Startups, Geeks and High-tech people. This place will also be where you go looking for startups you would like to invest in. We've tons of ideas for the place and we're pretty sure you would love being part of it!

People are already giving us great feedback about this and they liked it! Thank you so much for the feedback, we are so thrilled and glad you liked it.

Today we launched Bazinga! Arabic and English Blogs, Podcast and Comics. Here's a part of the official press release for launching these 3 platforms.

Greetings,

Tonight, the 31 October 2010, we’re launching different platforms that we hope to be of a use for Palestinians and Arab Entrepreneurs and Startups, either by getting to know the latest technological events, products, startups or technologies through our Arabic and English blogs, or by learning how things are done and watching interviews with entrepreneurs in the region through our Podcasts, or by just enjoying a laugh with friends through our biweekly released sketchy comics that is inspired by the daily life of Palestinian Entrepreneurs.

The web interfaces are in their very alpha edition, so bare with us and please report any feedback you have, we would love to hear from you. We’ve tried to make the websites as social as possible so you can share things you like on the website with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

Bazinga! will soon open in Ramallah. A physical space where geeks, high-tech, developers, entrepreneurs, startups, freelancers, and businessmen will gather through regular conferences and events scheduled as well as causual meetings and gatherings aiming to develop and mature the entrepreneurial thinking around Palestine.

Bazinga will provide physical coworking space as well as dedicated desks for members to get work done on their own startups. Members will have access to facilities, services, tools and mentors during their stay at Bazinga.

This isn’t a new model, we’ve seen different models around the world, likeTechHub in London, Shelter in Dubai and The Hub around the world. These are some examples. We studied them carefully and we came up with Bazinga in Palestine, combining different features and tweaking others and coming up with innovative solutions for the region.

If you like Bazinga! and want to follow up with the updates, make sure to Like our page on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Make sure also to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We will be constantly bringing you fresh content. And in less than a month, you will be invited to visit our physical location.

Please spread the word, tell your friends about Bazinga! and start coming up with ideas, lots of them, because once Bazinga! launch, be sure that those ideas will come to life and you may have your own startup.

And here's Bazinga's first comics, if you're a Palestinian, then you sure have had it with Jawwal's latest campaign "La Lelmostaheel!". We had it too!

We've also starting publishing blog posts, so far we have 2 blog posts, one talking about "Internet Shopping in Palestine" and the other about "MIT Arab Business Plan Competition". Of course, we made them available in Arabic as well.

So, what do you think? Would you like to be a member of such great initiative? A place where you can meet great people just like you to work with on your startups. A place for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.

We can't wait until we got the place ready for you to come over and work there. Until then stay tuned with the blogs, podcasts and comics.

Make sure to like our page on Facebook and follow us on twitter.

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Grameenphone sets up Community Information Centers across Bangladesh

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:34:35 +0000

The Bangladeshi mobile operator Grameenphone (of Telenor Group) has set up more than 500 Community Information Centers (CICs) across the country, offering low-rate, but high-speed voice, data and other communication services to previously unconnected people.

Set up with technical assistance from the GSM Association in 2006, Grameenphone CICs are equipped with a minimum of a computer, a printer, a scanner, a webcam and an EDGE-enabled modem to access the Internet. The CICs provide high speed Internet access in rural areas, where the nearest Internet facilities would otherwise be at least 20-30 miles away. The centres are extending connectivity to those who have no alternative access to communication technologies and to those with little to spend on such services.

The CICs are designed to be run independently as small businesses by local entrepreneurs. The centres are set up in selected rural areas around the country, and people pay a small fee to access email or Web pages. Together with partners, Grameenphone also provides microcredit if needed and trains the entrepreneurs so that they become aware of the full potential of their business.

(Source: Telenor)

Further Details

Tagged: Community Connectivity

Mohammad Khatib: #Palestine is preparing the 7th #Expotech in multiple locations including #Ramallah and #Gaza

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 09:36:00 +0000

So it's time again. The largest Annual ICT event in Palestine is to be held in 2nd-6th of November 2010. This time it is happening in multiple places in Parallel:

Ramallah having the recently opened hotel The Movenpick. As well as the Best Eastern Hotel and Birzeit Center for Continuous Education.
Al Quds University in Abu Dees
Bethlehem University in Bethlehem
The Arab American University in Jenin
Polytechnic University in Hebron
Rashad Al-Shawwa Halls in Gaza

This is a huge step back from last year. Which I think is good and bad. The problem is they advertise this event as a Technology week. Which if you looked at the Westbank Part it is just 3 days, while Gaza is having the whole week. The bad thing that is people most likely won't be able to attend to multiple sessions especially in Ramallah as lots of sessions are jammed there! I would have loved to see these distributed in 5 days instead of 3.

This is a video from Last year expotech.

I am just pissed off because I am going to miss lots of sessions that otherwise I would love to attend to.

Expotech has made a bit of this jump last year, when they moved from just an Exhibition of companies products and services to a Conference and on-site sessions. That's when the Expotech seemed more interesting. This year, they're taking it to the extreme, there will be NO exhibition, at least in Ramallah. They're keeping the one in Gaza.

I am not sure why they did this, but there have been problems of people mis-interpreting the exhibition to mostly do marketing, and big companies (like *cough* Jawwal *cough*) obsessed about distributing gifts and stuff at the exhibition that you would find them taking the biggest booth and all people are gathering there getting their gifts, in an unprofessional way.

Giving gifts is great, but not all small companies get to give away gifts, so it ended up by the big eating the small. Which wasn't the spirit of the Expotech. Although that might be a reason why they canceled the exhibition this year, but again, why they kept it in Gaza. Most likely the same will happen there.

One of the things that expotech is missing is the hype and buzz around the social media world. I haven't seen an official event for it on expotech, and the tech community is asking about the official hash which apparently the organizers didn't give any attention.

Last year I've attended to the ICT Conference during the Expotech, and it was amazing that I am not planning to miss it this year. So yes, I will be attending the 2 days conference. Which brings us to what I see they missed there. They missed the Youth.

Once again, I see great people among the panelists, some I've worked for like Tareq Maayeh, and some I've known personally and some I hear of them first time. My problem here is that the panelists do not contain any Young people. By young I mean 20s and by people I mean entrepreneurs. This was one of the best things I liked about MENAICT Forum in Jordan 20 days ago, they have an amazing diverse of speakers, whether in fields, from where and age. Some people like, Mo Al Adham the founder of twitvid and a lot more. I think Expotech should extend youth participation in the conference.

To give you some tips on who you should invite next year to be part of this, you can checkout Yousef Ghandour, Ammar Ammar, Ramzi Jaber, Iyyad As'ad, Ahmad Ramahi and The Flotilla game 13 year-old developer. And you can try extending invitation to me as well ;-)

One last thing that I need to criticize :-). The Entrepreneurship Forum is only happening in Gaza as part of the Expotech while westbank is not getting one. One question, Why the hell not? I know Gaza has great entrepreneurial projects and startups, much more than westbank, but that doesn't mean ignoring the entrepreneurial efforts that is being done in Westbank. So I leave this to be answered.

Checkout the conference agenda here. For more information about Expotech, checkout their Website.

I'll be live tweeting from the Conference this year, follow me (@mkhatib7) or follow the hashtag (#xpotech). I will be also blogging about it afterward.

Will you be at Expotech? Let me know so we can meet and chat.

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Antigua and Barbuda: Schools and Communities to get free internet service

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 08:32:09 +0000

Digicel, in partnership with the Government of Antigua and Barbuda, is starting a new initiative which will deliver broadband internet service for free to communities and schools across the twin-island nation.

The initiative – entitled “Technology for Communication, Education and Empowerment” – is a joint initiative between Digicel and the Government of Antigua and Barbuda and will use Wi-Fi technology to bring Broadband Internet into 3,000 homes across the communities of Grays-Green, Yorks, and Lower Gambles, as well as more than 5,000 secondary school students.

Digicel is partnering with the government to provide community computer access centres in 12 secondary schools, which will include the physical infrastructure as well as the furniture and air-conditioning. Each of these community access centres will accommodate at least 20 students. The initiative will significantly increase the number of households with regular access to the Internet as schools, homes, and villages get connected for the first time.

(Source: Caribarena Antigua)

Full Story

Tagged: Community Connectivity, Connecting Schools

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Portugals e-school programme to provide laptops to schools in developing countries

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:33:48 +0000

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré and Mr Paulo Campos, Vice-Minister for Public Works, Transport and Communications of Portugal, signed an agreement that Portugal, through its e-School International programme, will provide comprehensive technological solutions for schools in a number of interested countries as part of ITU’s Connect a School, Connect a Community initiative. This announcement follows through on a commitment made by Portugal during the ITU World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF), in Lisbon in April 2009. Some twenty countries will benefit from this first phase, with the initiative supporting the launch of one connected school project per country.

Each project will test innovative approaches using ICT in the classroom, measure the impact, showcase the benefits and share lessons learned. The assistance to participating countries will include: 1) New laptops (up to a maximum of 50) for a group of students and teachers in one school per country, 2) Laptops equipped with software and educational content,3) A smart board in each classroom, connected to the laptops to facilitate interactive e-learning,4) Wireless modems along with a school server, 5) Broadband internet connectivity provided by the local partner.

A multi-partner, international group of experts will support project implementation, including the development of a national school connectivity plan.

(Sources: ITU news, Moneybiz)

Further Details

Tagged: Connecting Schools, E-learning, ICTs in education

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Qatar IT centre to aid the disabled

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:04:44 +0000

Qatar’s vision to empower and enable people with disabilities through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is receiving a boost with Mada, the Qatar Assistive Technology Centre. Since the non-profit organization opened on June 1 this year, a number of individuals have benefited from its state-of-the-art resource centre, described as the region’s only one of its kind.

The centre features interactive assistive technology (AT) environments for the visually impaired, hearing impaired, learning disabled and people with disabilities.The Mada resource centre is a showcase of cutting-edge technology, including computer software that reads the screen for the blind, eye tracking devices that allows to control a computer with eye movement, voice recognition, switch solutions that allow a computer to be controlled with a single movement such as sipping or blowing through a tube and word prediction.

There are separate workstations for individuals with hearing, visual, learning or physical disabilities. Screenreader solutions such as Ibsar and Jaws enables blind users to read, on their own, printed books and documents as well as electronic files. Ibsar helps them write texts in both Arabic and English, in addition to saving and printing these texts in Braille. The software speaks the text on a computer screen in both Arabic and English. With a screenreader a blind user is able to access the Internet and read websites, or send, receive and manage e-mail.The Tobii eye-tracking computer allows someone with no physical control of their body, other than eye movement to take control of a computer through which they can communicate, control the environment, browse the web and even play games.

(Source: Gulf Times)
Full Story

Tagged: Assistive Technology for Disabled, Disabled Persons

Dmitry Epstein: Footage from the workshop on core Internet values

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 23:37:11 +0000

With a slight delay, I would like to share video footage of the workshop I organized at the last IGF in Vilnius. This is the same workshop for which I was seeking your input about a month and a half ago.

The full title of the workshop is “Core Internet values and the principles of Internet Governance across generations” and the idea is exactly that – to have a dialogue between Internet pioneers and young Internet activists on the core of what the Internet stands for.

We had a great group of people. On the one hand, there were young people from different parts of the world. On the other hand, there were more senior Internet thinkers and practitioners. Here is the full list of participants (in alphabetical order):

Bill Graham, Global Strategic Engagement, the Internet Society (ISOC)
‘Gbenga Sesan, Paradigm New Nigeria
Drew Smith, Student at Elon Univeristy and participant in Imagining the Internet project
Grace Bomu, Young Kenyan lawyer, secretary of the ICT Consumers Association of Kenya, and cultural activist
Laura DeNardis, Yale Information Society Project
Marie Casey, Elected female representative at the ITU Youth Forum of future leaders, Geneva, 2009
Nii Narku Quaynor, Ghana.com
Rafik Dammak, Tokyo University
Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google
Vladimir Radunovic, Diplo Foundation

Ian Peter, who chaired the last year workshop on Internet Governance, was also supposed to take part in the workshop, but unfortunately he was not able to make it to Vilnius.

I hoped to be able to share a report from the workshop here, but other tasks take priority at the moment and I will be posting the report later. I do think we had a very interesting and lively discussion, so I thought at this point I will just share the video footage of the event. If you have a couple of hours to spare, I think you will find this engaging.

As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome!

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Jokko Initiative Empowers Women with mLearning

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:07:21 +0000

Tostan has come up with an intriguing way to teach basic literacy and numeracy, by tying it to the use of mobile phones, through their Jokko Initiative in Senegal. As part of this program, they teach basic literacy and numeracy to community participants, particularly women and girls.

They teach the cost-efficiency of sms texting relative to placing a call, which has immediate impact on the girls’ lives. They can use their newly acquired ability to read and write in their national language, Wolof, from the Community Empowerment Program, to compose and read text messages without assistance. Then, participants apply the skills they’ve gained to specific themes (such as health, agriculture, and the environment) relevant to their everyday lives. For example, to send text messages about vaccinations and awareness-raising campaigns, to make appointments at health clinics, and to ask for advice on matters concerning health and hygiene.

Tostan, UNICEF, and the Center of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA) at the University of California, Berkeley, recently completed an evaluation of Jokko that shows great promise for using text messaging as a means for improving literacy and community development.

(Sources: ETD)

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Tagged: Gender, m-learning, Partnerships

Mohammad Khatib: #MENAICT Forum in #Jordan was awesome! What went right and what went wrong?

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 01:43:00 +0000

So after Rasha Hussein (@RashaRasem) and I (@mkhatib7) won a ticket to attend MENA ICT Forum (@menaict) that was hosted in Amman, Jordan in the new Business Park in Dabouq. We've left to Jordan on Saturday, 9th October 2010 to attend to it.

Got a quick lunch and each went back to the place where we stayed at. I stayed at a friend of my brother place. Then went to pick up our badges and bags from the Ministry of ICT which we were amazed of their building. It's great, and shiny :-). We got our badges, and we didn't get our Tshirts as they said they made limited number of TShirts, which I still don't understand why, and they've served them as first come first served.

Of course gone in a tour in two of the biggest malls in Amman, City Mall and Mecca Mall.

Next day was the #42day, 10/10/10. A great day for being at such forum. At the beginning it was like they prepared a small room (other than the main room) for people to sit at and watch the main room streaming on TV (Kinda of separation of social layers). Lots of people got upset about this and some have already left angry.

The guys there quickly allowed us to in and took us to the main hall. It was crowded. Kicking off with the Opening session featuring the great Werner Vogels (@werner), VP & CTO of Amazon.com, which everyone was excited to have at the forum. You can read more about the speakers and the sessions on MENA ICT forum website.

Long story short, maybe the event wasn't perfect, but it was amazing and maybe one of the best (if not the best) events I've ever attended to. It has amazing set of speakers, regional and global, great topics and discussions around, interacting with audience through voting questions (which everyone loved) and by opening the space for questions after the panelists speak. You can see what questions and what the people voted for in this blog post.

The most thing I loved and I believe that lead to such success to this event is the government dedication and involvement. I mean King Abdullah showed himself at the event and gave an amazing speech after hearing Int@j and MoICT Marwan Jum'a (@ICTMinJO). This dedication and support by the government will take ICT sector of Jordan to the next levels rapidly. I wonder when Palestine would get such support of its *cough* government *cough*.

Interesting facts and numbers were announced at the forum. ICT revenue in Jordan participates of 14.3% of the total, which is around 2.2 Billion Dollars.
One of the things that they got right is diversity, in everything, age, specialization, experience, you name it, they had it. They had panelists that are experienced, they had starting entrepreneurs, they had speakers in 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. They had speakers from Jordan, Suadi, Syria, India, US and so on (And unfortunately only few from Palestine, two or three). They had it all. And that amused me.
In the audience however the average age was maybe around 35. I am not sure and they told me they'll post statistics online, so that should confirm it. Will update this once the stats are out.
Let's see, what else they've got right. Oh yeah. They have created a mobile application (for Black Berry and Symbians) to guide you through the sessions, agenda and speakers. Although I was looking forward to a better mobile app that helps you manage your schedule for the day but that was nice to have.
They've also got some various sessions running in parallel that you can attend to that was lead by Amman Tech Tuesday (@AmmanTT). But I don't think that was clear enough, not for me at least, I've only known about these through twitter stream and it was a bit late to join them.
They managed as well to couple the event with some amazing announcements, Microsoft opening up their new office in the Business Park, OASIS 500 (@oasis_500) winning finalists and some others.
One of the problems that we had was socializing with the crowd. All people were in suites! (I've got Suitephobia :-( ) and I know none of them and no one there were to connect us. I know Tova (@tova_s) tried to connect us with someone from Wamda (@Wamda) there but I guess they got really busy and we couldn't meet them. Again it was too hard to find anyone in that big crowd. Thanks a lot Tova! If some more Palestinians were involved this might have been easier for us as they might be able to connect us with people.

Anyhow, I managed to meet some of the great people I know, Habib Haddad (@habibh) of YallaStartup (@YallaStartup) and Yamli (@Yamli), Mo Al Adham (@maladham) of Twitvid (He's on my right in the side picture), Ahmad Hamzawi and Wael Ghonim (of Google) and Al Masodi. And of course I've met some amazing entrepreneurs that is being hosted at Meydan. Too bad I couldn't make it to Meydan to meet up with them. My schedule was too tight, I didn't even get the chance to meet some friends in Amman. Sorry guys. Next time inshAllah ;-)
Another thing they've missed was in their survey system, they didn't have Palestine as one of the middle eastern choices to choose from, but again they've also dropped mistakenly IT as a profession (which is ironic), but I guess human errors happen. Someone replied to my tweet that Palestine is on the list of the stats and it will be published soon.
One of the thing that annoyed me is that no one mentioned or talked about censoring content on the web and web freedom (specially what happened lately with the arrests and investigations with Arab bloggers). I don't know how I missed this, but if it came to me I would've brought it up at the forum and discussed it. Unfortunately, angry people about this only started tweeting about it just after the event ended.
Another annoying thing to me and to lots of twitter followers was the extensive retweeting of repeated information. I mean, come on, some people retweeted that the forum is about to start in the second day!! Lots of the retweets were irrelevant and/or deprecated. I know lots of people who unfollowed those people who retweets for the #MENAICT Hash tag. This main problem was actually created by MENAICT staff themselves when they've announced that the one who retweet thier tweets the most will win an iPad, and people have gone mad retweeting WHATEVER they find out there, no matter how old the tweet is or how many times it has been retweeted already. People where shouting on twitter that they want original content not retweets. Luckily there were some people who are doing this including but not limited to YallaStartup (@YallaStartup), Sleepless In Amman or Lara A.Hadi (@larahadi), Yaman W.Saqqa (@abulyomon) and I, Mohammad Khatib (@mkhatib7), we even got special shoutout from MENA ICT twitter account. Well, I still hope I get the iPad anyway ;-) :D.

Sorry for the long post, there're lots of stuff to talk about and I've only tried to touch in general right and wrong that were executed in the forum. But as a summary, again it was an absolute success. I loved it. I am sure someone would make sense out of stuff I noted to and make the next event a perfect one.
I might write some more blog series about topics and sessions discussed in the forum, but that depends on how busy I get these days, which frankly looks very busy. Anyhow, stay tuned.
This post is already too long to add to it. So I'll just end this one with a funny banner on one of the shops downtown Amman ;-). Translation: "Love Birds for Fish decoration".

What did you think of MENA ICT Forum? Why didn't you attend? Comments? Would love to hear from you.

Update
Offical MENAICT Pictures stream here.
Some of my pictures I've taken here. (will update them once I got the rest from Rasha Hussein)
As promised, videos will be uploaded here.

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Vodacom launches low cost solar powered cellphone

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 19:09:44 +0000

South Africa’s Vodacom has launched the VF 247 low-cost solar powered cellphone. Developed by Vodafone, this device has the unique ability to charge on the go and makes it possible for people to benefit from mobile communications even in areas where electricity is scarce.

The VF 247 is designed with an integrated solar panel, and the special built-in Sun Boost software ensures that the phone charges even when it’s not in direct sunlight. Charging the phone in sunlight for an hour or two every day should be enough to cover the power needs for average users, but if the battery runs low the phone can be topped up with a traditional mains power charger.

“Cellphones are the primary means of communication for millions of South Africans and thanks to our association with Vodafone we’re able to supply this new solar powered handset which makes it as easy and practical as possible for people to connect. In many communities, electricity supplies are intermittent or non-existent, but with this new handset people won’t have to worry about when they are next going to be able to charge the battery,” said Shameel Joosub, Managing Director of Vodacom South Africa.

The VF 247 is an easy to use device that has all basic voice and text features along with FM radio, torch and a colour display and can be purchased from your nearest Vodacom retail outlet for less than R300.

(Source:it news Africa)
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Mohammad Khatib: Attending #MENAICTForum #101010 in #Jordan #Amman

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:26:00 +0000

In 10/10/10, MENA ICT Forum will be hosted in Jordan Amman with a theme of "Yesterday's Challenges, Tomorrow's Opportunities".

MENA ICT Forum is now a regionally comprehensive assembly which showcases the MENA region’s ICT success stories and addresses industry trends, opportunities, and future outlook. The Forum, which will be held on October 10-11, 2010, also presents a unique opportunity for stakeholders to network, capitalize on existing prospects, and strategize for future growth and expansion of the ICT industry on a regional level.

This is an amazing opportunity to hear from the best people in this industry, focusing in EMEA region. One of the most cool things I've noticed is there will be lots of amazing speakers with various ages and backgrounds! Some of the faces that I could recognize are:

Mo Al Adham (@maladham) Founder of TwitVid the video sharing service for twitter.
Fadi Ghandour (@fadig) Founder and CEO of ARAMEX.
Wael Ghonim (@ghonim) Driving Google's B2C growth strategy in EMEA region.
Habib Haddad (@habibh) Founder and CEO of Yamli and YallaStartup.

There're yet many many more. And those are the short listed of people that I either have communicated/interact with or just quickly recognized them by skimming the list. Hopefully I'll be able to meet as many of them as time permits.

In order for me to get invited to MENA ICT Forum, I've created a video to get in the OASIS500 competition to get a free pass to the forum. Help me get it by viewing the video and sharing it with your friends.

Attending MENA ICT Forum? Let me know in the comments.

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Bridgeit: Assisting teachers through educational videos via mobile phone

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 19:19:06 +0000

The Tanzania-based m-Education program called Bridgeit, locally known as Elimu kwa Teknolojia (Education Through Technology), involves an innovative process of disseminating educational programming directly to the classroom via a mobile phone. The program is a function of a multi-sector partnership involving Tanzania’s Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT), the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), the Pearson Foundation, the International Youth Foundation, Nokia Corporation and funded by a three-year $2 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Through the Bridgeit program, teachers are provided with access to a digital catalog of educational videos that are typically 4-7 minutes in length. The teachers download the videos from the server via a mobile phone connected to a television installed in the classroom. With each video comes a lesson plan crafted to allow teachers and students interact with the ideas introduced by the video. Hence, a typical teaching period would involve a viewing of the video followed by teacher-led exercises and activities aimed at reinforcing the ideas the students have just learned.

Leveraging the power of cell-phone technology, Bridgeit improves the quality of teacher instruction and increases primary school student achievement in math, science, and life skills. In Tanzania, over one year, Bridgeit has been implemented in 150 schools, training 1,544 primary school teachers, and benefiting 40,400 rural and urban students.

(Sources: ETD, IYF)

Further Details

Tagged: Children, ICTs in education, Teacher Training

Mohammad Khatib: Assembling #Palestinian Group to Participate in @YallaStartup @StartupWeekend in #Lebanon

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 11:01:00 +0000

Update:
Muath Just told me he got a response from Habib Haddad, they're excited about having us that they have issued special 20% discount for the Palestinian group! How awesome is that!

Yesterday, I've shared a link to a YallaStartup blog post about the forthcoming Startup Weekend to be hosted in Lebanon. I got contacted by a friend, Muath Badawi (@mrbadaw), telling me he's interested in going if a group of Palestinians are going.

For Palestinians that would like to get involved in amazingly fun weekend, coding, hacking and networking. This is the place to be. It's happening from 12th to 14th November in Beirut.

We're now collecting interested people to see how many people would like to participate, Muath already contacted the coordinators of the event to see how they can help. Meanwhile, if you would like to participate drop a comment on this post and checkout the website for more information. Also checkout this funny video they made for promoting the event:

YallaStartup Weekend 2010 - Lebanon from YallaStartup on Vimeo.

The ticket cost is $50 for students, $100 for Professionals. And they're having $25 discount for early birds registrants. Anyone would like to sponsor the Palestinian Group? Any information about how easy/hard Palestinians can travel to Lebanon, how long does a visa take to be issued?

Let me know if you're interested.

Dmitry Epstein: How do young adults access websites?

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:59:57 +0000

I am currently at the fifth IGF in Vilnius and yesterday I presented some data from our study on the online routines of the digital natives at the GigaNet. Here, i would like to share one observation that I find particularly interesting. In the graph below you can see a summary of our coding of how our participants reached website during our observation sessions. It reflects coding of over 650 instance of accessing website in each China and the US.

As we can see, in most cases, our participants searched; this is consistent across both groups and I think was not particularly surprising. Similarly, the use of bookmarks was equally consistent across both groups, which in my view was more surprising (perhaps since I am not a big bookmark user).

The differences, as you can see, were in the use of autocomplete and reliance on links. Interestingly, in the Chinese sample, there were significantly more instances of using reliance on links compared to the use of autocomplete. In the US sample what we see is practically a mirror image of this trend – significantly larger proportion of instances involved the use of autocomplete.

What makes it even more interesting is a glimpse at where do the Chinese participants follow the links from. We are still organizing that data, but my initial observation is that many of those are coming from websites that basically large repositories of links (for example take a look at www.2345.com or www.114la.com).

All this brings up some thoughts about the role of English in the online experience. In my view, one plausable explanation of this data can be the knowledge of English language. I can see how use of the autocomplete function comes more “naturally” to the native speakers, compared to those for whom English is a second language. The large collections of links that were utilized by our Chinese participants, further support this idea – why would you make an effort of typing in an inconvenient language, when you can go to just one website, where all the links you use are?

There are currently more questions than statements suggested by the snippet above – there is still a lot of work to be done on these data. Having said that, I’d love to hear your thought about this little observation. Please share…

You can find the slides from the presentation here.

Mohammad Khatib: 12 Technology Summer Camps around #Palestine to teach Kids about #OpenSource and #Scratch

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:58:00 +0000

On Mid June, a Technology Summer Camp started throughout 12 camps around the westbank. These camps focused on teaching the kids about: Scratch Programming Language, Ubuntu OS, Introduction about Computer Networks and Disassembling and Assembling a PC learning about the different parts of the PC.

July 22, 2010 was the most exciting day in the Technology Summer Camp that has been going for a month, it was the final ceremony for the , or was it!?

Kids were excited, jumping around, competing and looking forward to winning. Some of the excitment was shown with their words: "I am totally gonna win this!", "Miss, I hope we at least get third place!", "We've been working day and night, some girls were staying till 1:00am in the morning working on the game".

I've accompanied the trainers while they were talking to their students, and have seen how frustrating was to hear these words from them as they just heard that there will be NO competition and NO prizes! They were like "How am I suppose to tell these kids about it!", "They are truly excited about it and I won't be the one to kill that buzz".

Gone to the closing ceremony with the excited kids and the disappointed trainers. Started with long repeated words from different people. And without offending anyone, I think one short word would have been enough and more complening.

The ceremony should have included presentations for the best chosen games, presented by the trainer and the kids who developed the game. Only 2 had the chance to present their work, the others were ignored and cut-out due to tight time of ministers and other officials attending the event. This event was supposed to be about kids and what they've accomplished rather than official speeches that barely kids could understand. TV and Press was here until the officials have left! What the hack? I mean shouldn't you document what the kids have done! Instead of just documenting what officials have said with the same words we hear all the time.

Anyway, I promised myself that the kids and the trainers work won't be gone waste. So I recorded all the Scratch Games presentations done by these kids and will be uploading them to YouTube and putting them in this blog. While holding my camera, I've been amazed with what the kids have done and the way they think. The most amazing one to me was a little kid from Hebron who developed an amazing game inspired by the latest events of the Flotilla Freedom Ship to that was heading to Gaza before the Israeli Army attacks it and stops it. I've already blogged about this in the "13 year old #Palestinian kid develop a game for #Gaza #Flotilla" post.

Other games ranged from a simple pacman to a complex ones. The first game presented by a girl from Qalqilya, Ein Safoot summer camp was titled Save Jolieat. "It's a game inspired by the famous Shekespear story Romio and Jolieat" the girl said. Checkout the video.

Another game that was developed by one of the Ramallah summer camps is inspired by Sponge Bob Square Pants, Graveyard Mario. Checkout the video.

Another one was developed around a ping pong game that hits bricks, this was developed by Jericho Summer Camp. Checkout the video.

One cool group from Nablus developed a cool game that basically a maze with questions in the way. "The girls worked so hard on this game day and night, some of them stayed till 1am and their parents came and too them at that time." the trainer of that summer camp said. Chechout their video.

One cool game I really liked it idea was developed by a girl for girls. It's a dancing game where you suppose to move the character to the music and with some arrows guidlines. Although the game isn't designed well, I think the idea is great. (Video is coming soon...)

Another bricks ping pong with interleaving Mathamtical, Chemical, Islamic and other fields questions that requires the user to answer correctly in order to move on to the next level. (Video is coming soon...)

The following game was developed by Salfeet summer camp which is simply in instrumental music mixer, a set of drums, pre-recorded guitar music and piano that can be played on keyboard. (Video is coming soon...)

Another one was the classical find the differences between two pictures, developed by Hebron summer camp. (Video is coming soon...)

And of course it wouldn't be so perfect if no one made a better version of the classical pacman. The game progeress and different mazes each level has with increasing number of enemies that eats the pacman! Check it out. (Video is coming soon...)

This bring us to the summary. I really think this was a great success although gone unappriciated through the speeches of officials. I hope next time people responsible about this would be wanting the real development of the kids rather than just something they just did and they want to advertise!

For more information and pictures please visit the official website for the camps. Also visit Rasha album for the Final Ceremony, and another for Training of Trainers. Also checkout my album for the final ceremony.

Mohammad Khatib: Mobile Monday Palestine - Projects Showcasing

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:26:00 +0000

(For pictures, see this and this. Thanks Rasha Hussein for uploading the pics)

On 6th September, the second MoMoPal meetup was held at Ankars Suites. The meetup was at the Iftar time around 6pm (+2GMT) where we had a nice quiet meal and then socialized a bit. Then started the presentations. Around 60 people attended and 4 applications where presented.

The apps that were presented (as in MoMoPal website):

SouqTel: mating jobs and job seekers through SMS.
Mobile Multi-player Game using Blue-tooth (Tarneeb)
DoitThere: GPS based reminder using IPhone
Mobile ATM: mobile based banking

The app that we presented was DOitTHERE. The whole experience was good. Although the applications presented weren't (in my opinion) that strong. Souqtel and Mobile ATM were focusing too much on SMS rather taking leverage of the new technologies available for people. Souqtel provides a way for people to get jobs matching through creating an account through SMS. Frankly, I don't see why anyone would need to receive SMS about a job advertisement. I mean it's not like the job is going to fly away in a minute or two. Email or a web portal should be enough to seek for jobs. SMS is an extreme. For Souqtel I would say it's better if you moved on with the project and provide consider the latest technologies around rather than just sticking to SMS.

MobileATM is a great idea and it would be great if it would actually come to life. It is simply paying using your mobile rather than cash. So I can just send "Pay 50 NIS to Checkers" and so on. However, the presentation wasn't good enough the web backend for the project didn't work at that time and they got tough audiences shooting questions and concerns about security. It simply was weakly presented. I really would encourage MobileATM team to keep working on the project and try to bring this to life. I am sure it is gonna be revolutionary.

Tarneeb Mobile Multi-player game using Bluetooth is a game based on sharing 4 players a game and playing by turns. The idea itself is great, however the Tarneeb didn't make much sense to the jury as Dr. Wasel commented "I could bring real physical cards and get the full experience. Why I would bother playing on the mobile". My advice for that team was to think about porting this into a development framework where developers can use it to develop multiplayer games through bluetooth.

This brings us to DOitTHERE. And I love the name, it simply have emphasize on two things "Doing" and "Location". It's a cross-platform mobile application that helps users get their tasks done by adding a new dimension to the tasks, geolocation. The user would be reminded to do that task whenever they're around that location. Based on Location not Time.

I presented the general idea and some snapshots of the app, followed by George Khadder explaining the financial and marketing that will be done to get the app out there. Followed by Ayman Qarout demoing the app to the audience through the iPhone Simulator.

We are working on two parallel versions, one for the Android and one for the iOS4. Further development is needed to get the best user experience through a simple GUI. I've been working on developing the iPhone app, Rasha Hussein will be working on developing the Android App and Morad Taleeb will be working on developing the backend web services to synch the tasks to the different platforms and plugins. George and Ayman are working on the business model and others.

We knew we got the jury attention as well as the audience themselves. They simply said Congratulations after we finished. It was a bit obvious that we won. And there we are, the results were announced and we won first place!

The winner of this showcase get the chance to go to the Mobile Monday Global Summit that is being hosted in Finland, Helsinki at 26th September, and present their project there. I was chosen to present DOitTHERE. So now it is a matter of getting a Visa. Hopefully, we would be able to get the visa on time.

A lot of people asked me for the presentation we did, I will try to upload it along with the videos of the presentations soon that Rasha took, will update the post when I get them.

The event has been covered on the MoMoPal official website as well as on Ma'an News agency (Arabic).

Are you attending Mobile Monday Global Summit? What do you think of the Apps presented? Why this event didn't get the attention of a lot of Mobile developers/companies around Ramallah and Palestine? Was it badly marketed? Late announced? What do you think of DOitTHERE and how do you think we could enhance it even further? Let me know what do you think in the comments.

Gyanee Dewnarain: Over the Air – 24 hours of mobile development

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:38:02 +0000

Friday September 10th & Saturday September 11th, Imperial College London

Over the Air is a grass-roots mobile developer event that is completely unique in the mobile industry calendar – it is free to attend, covers the cutting edge of current mobile development (as opposed to glossy future-speak or sales-pitches), and is a great place to meet others in the community. The workshops allow attendees to really roll up their sleeves to tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs and SDKs and tutorial sessions feature real business cases and hands-on experience. Attendees are invited to stay ov ernight so that they can work on ideas, apps and widgets on the fly, to be entered into various competition categories and demo’ed on the second day – in true hack-a-thon style. It’s a great vibe of bean bags, learning & collaborating, and all the gadgets that you care to goggle at.

Here is a nice write-up of last years event http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8332665.stm?ls and our blog for more info: www.overtheair.org

This year will be our third annual event, and we already have 500 mobile developers, designers and entrepreneurs registered to attend, as well as people from the web and software worlds who are starting to branch out into mobile. If you’d like to join us, be sure to register soon!http://overtheair2010.eventbrite.com/

Mohammad Khatib: 13 year old #Palestinian kid develop a game for #Gaza #Flotilla

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:34:00 +0000

Recently I've read two posts one talking about a 16-years old millionaire and a 14-years old Kuwaiti iPhone developer. This reminded me of something I promised to blog about but I seem to have forgotten for awhile.

In the final ceremoney of the Technology Summer Camp that the Excellence Center in Birzeit University arranged, the kids got the chance to present their Scratch developed games.

The most amazing one to me was a 13 years old kid who developed a game using Scratch Programming Language inspired by the latest events of the Flotilla freedom ship that was heading to Gaza before the Israeli Army attacks it and stops it.

The game tells the story perfectly. The main character of the game was a well-known guy in Palestine, Raed Salah. The gamer will try to move Raed and make sure none of the Soldiers that come on the ship with their guns stays on the ship. He has a wooden stick which he used to hit the soldiers and drop them from the ship.

I truely was amazed (You could hear me whistling and mumbling "that's amazing" in the video above). So I did a small interview with the kid to see why he did it and what he thinks about it. Here's the video interview with the little kid.

Finding out that we have an amazing minds and promising kids. I wonder if anyone would actually take this any further and invest in such kids development or would they will go unappriciated and unnoticed. That's one of the reasons I blogged about this. And that's one of the reasons you will share this with your friends and contacts.

P.S. I will be posting a longer post about all the Summer camp and all the participating kids.

Dmitry Epstein: Seeking your opinions on internet values and core principles

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:08:38 +0000

The next Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is just around the corner and for the first time I am organizing a workshop there. I think the title of the workshop speaks for itself. It is: “Core Internet Values and the Principles of Internet Governance Across Generations.”

The idea is very simple. We are going to have a group of very smart people. Some of them are internet pioneers from different countries, some of them are established researchers, and some are well known practitioners. We will also have a group of young, less known (yet) people, whose activism and professional lives are related to the internet in one way or another. The panel itself is quite large and we are also counting on having a very diverse and engaging audience from the IGF community.

So, the plan is to have a discussion among the panelists and then involve the floor, about core internet values and principles. The question is not only what those values and principles might be, but whether the perception of these values and principles varies across generations and what that may mean for the future of internet-related policies.

This is where I would really appreciate an input from anyone reading these lines. What do you think are the core values and principles of the internet where we can find the widest gaps across generations?

One example may be the notion of privacy. I think since online social networks became popular there is an ongoing debate about how the younger generations’ perceptions of privacy online differ from that of their parents. We all heard Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that the age of privacy is over. But is it so for everyone?

What are the core values and principles of the internet that you still hold dear? Which ones do you think were important in the past, but are no longer important?

Please share your thoughts!

Mohammad Khatib: Being an entrepreneur ain't easy!

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:04:00 +0000

After quitting Exalt Technologies to leave to Google. Few problems regarding visa to Switzerland or UK managed to keep me for few more couple of months in Palestine before going to the US. So long I've waited to try and jump off and just try entrepreneurship.

While I am still having troubles pronouncing the word. I am trying to learn what does it mean by doing. One thing I've learned that it ain't easy!

I've been working for more than 6 weeks now on a new business idea with 4 of my friends. We're pretty excited about it and working very hard to get it to real life. I will be blogging more about it later.

One thing I also learned that an entrepreneur needs an inspiration, a model, another entrepreneur to look up to. My inspiration was Yousef Ghandour. The only Palestinian guy that I know with 2 kids and a wife and still have the guts to jump off and take the risk while working on his project Timevel. Each time I fail at finishing a stage I just say to myself, "If Ghandour can do it, hell I can!". That was enough to boost me off.

Besides Yousef, I got my inspiration from talks and articles. One of them being Wael Fakharani (Of Google) talk at TEDxCairo "The Discomfort Of Our Comfort Zone". Video embedded below (will try to find/write the English translation later). This is just amuses me. And I always keep reminding myself that I can just go and be in my comfort zone at home with my Family, sleeping most of the day. But I CHOOSE and I WANT to be in my discomfort zone. This also reminds me of a quote of one anonymous entrepreneur who said: "Being in your comfort zone wouldn’t ever benefit you. Get out of it, face the real world."

Two more videos that gave me a boost are the following:

and

and fo course I won't be forgetting the most amazing speech I've ever heard. Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement. Which I keep watching from time to time.

I just hope one day we would be one of these who give you a boost to dare and do something and stop hiding in your comfort zone.

You have your own inspirational people, talks or quotes? Share them with us.

Dmitry Epstein: The 5th GigaNet Symposium

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 04:54:06 +0000

Over the past few months I had the pleasure of working with a great group of people on planning the next symposium of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network. The final program is now available online and I am also posting it below. I think it will be a very interesting day and if you are interested in internet governance, you should definitely try to participate (there should be options for remote participation announced soon).

I have more Internet Governance Forum related updates, which I will post soon. In the meantime, here is the program of the symposium, which will take place on September 13th:

9:00-9:15 Opening

9:15-10:30 PANEL 1: Internet governance theory and issue

Moderador: William Drake, Centre for International Governance of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva

Peng Hwa Ang and Natalie Pang. Going Beyond Talk: Can International Internet Governance Work?

Everton Lucero. Global Governance of Critical Internet Resources: A Perspective from the South

Jean-marie Chenou. Multistakeholderism or elitism ? The creation of a transnational field of Internet governance

10:30-11:00 Poster session and coffee break

11:00-12:15 PANEL 2: State power and Internet governance

Moderator: Rolf Webber , European Law Institute and the Center for Information and Communication Law at the University of Zurich

Joanna Kulesza. State responsibility for acts of cyber-terrorism

Jeremy Shtern. Models of Global Internet Governance and the Projection of State Power: The Case of Facebook and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Lorena Jaume-Palasi and Ben Wagner. Nosy preferences of Google and China: Modelling an internet governance conflict using Amartya Sen’s liberal paradox

12:15-12:30 Sponsorship slot

12:30-13:30 Lunch – Sponsored by MIT Press. Welcome speech given by William Drake, editor of the MIT Press series on “The information revolution and global politics” and Milton Mueller, author of the newly released book, “Networks and States: the Global Politics of Internet Governance.”

13:30-14:45         PANEL 3: Interaction of technology, operations and governance

Moderator: Meryem Marzouki, LIP6/PolyTIC – CNRS

Brenden Kuerbis. Securing Internet routing: Influence and control of critical Internet resources through social networks and delegation

Dmitry Epstein, Qiu-Hong Wang, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Milton Mueller. What’s in the name? A behavioral study of the use of the URLs in China and the US

Laura DeNardis. The Privatization Of Internet Governance

14:45-15:45         PANEL 4: IGF practice, multistakeholderism and emerging issues

Nanette Levinson. Evaluating and Analyzing Collaboration In Cross-cultural and Cross-sectoral Perspective: Indicators from The Internet Governance Forum

Ivar Alberto Hartmann. Universal Access policies and Internet Access as a Fundamental Right: The Constitutional Law Perspective informed by the Brazilian Case.

15:45-16:00         Closing

16:00-16:30         Poster session and coffee break

16:30                    GigaNet Business meeting

POSTER SESSION:

Charlotte Bogusz. Openness and Privacy v/ Security : The example of filtering measures.2

Charlotte Bogusz. The promotion of the general interest through ICTs : The French and Senegalese examples

Daniel Oppermann. Analysing cybercrime from a multistakeholder perspective

Luiz Costa. The Internet and the Constitutional restrictions on foreign participation in Brazilian Media

Luiz Costa. A case study on the Brazilian E-Commerce Forum

Mona Badran. Is internet changing the social life of Egyptian college students and affecting their privacy?

Rolf H. Weber. Policies for Governing Critical Internet Resources

Shawn Gunnarson. Securing ICANN’s Accountability

Sofiane Bouhdiba. Internet governance and Education: the Tunisian Virtual University in the context of the Tunis agenda

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Pakistan: TSF on site to provide emergency telecoms services

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:15:02 +0000

Technology experts from charity Telecoms Sans Frontieres are providing emergency telecoms services to the victims of the flooding in Pakistan.

TSF, which has been in Pakistan since 9 August, said it has been providing telecoms services to victims of the flooding to allow them to call relatives and friends abroad. Around 945 families have been provided with calls so far, according to TSF. “For many people, the call provided by TSF is the first call since the outbreak of the disaster,” the organization said. “Many victims have lost their mobile phone or are in places with no electricity to recharge or simply have no money to buy credit.”

According to UN officials, the Pakistan floods cover an area the size of England with up to 20 million people affected. At least 1,600 people have been killed, with health officials warning the toll could rise as water-borne diseases spread, TSF reported.

TSF said it has 8 mobile teams, equipped with satellite and GSM phones, in the districts of Peshawar, Nowshera and Charsadda and plan to operate in the country for at least a month. The teams are composed of one man and one woman to allow both men and women to make a call, TSF said.

TSF staff also provides support to OCHA/UNDAC and the other UN agencies in the inter-agency office in Multan, Punjab Province. This assignment is scheduled until staff from the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster and other OCHA partners (IHP) take over. TSF continues to coordinate with the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC) as per further needs for ICT support to aid agencies.

Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF) deployed to Haiti in January to respond the impact of the earthquake in the country. The charity specialises in setting up communications infrastructure to allow aid-agencies to communicate on the ground more effectively.
(Source: eweek europe, TSF)
Further details

Tagged: Emergency Communication, Pakistan Floods

Gyanee Dewnarain: Thoughts from GUADEC 2011

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:06:07 +0000

GUADEC is the GNOME Users' and Developers' European Conference, and I got to go there this year, following my visit to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit last year and LiMo & GNOME's announcement of their partnership. GUADEC is the place to be if you want to find out what's going on with GNOME, catch up with key developers from a wide range of GNOME projects, get involved in writing or contributing software, or generally hang out with a bunch of scarily smart individuals.

This year as an added bonus, two days of developer training were available, which seemed like a great opportunity to fill some gaps in my GNOME knowledge, so I went along to that. The training was organised by Dave Neary, who did an excellent job of putting together a packed schedule. It's really great to see professional-level training at an event like this, as it helps dispel the myth that open source is somehow less serious. The course was well-attended with about 10 people from a very diverse group of companies and backgrounds, including one hobbyist who paid for the fun of it!

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the full second day of training, due to a schedule clash with the GNOME Advisory Board meeting. The Board meeting more than made up for it by being an excellent opportunity to hear the views of some of the organisations and companies who are investing in GNOME. It was a great opportunity to put names to faces as well, with a superstar list of representatives being part of the Board.

Following the training was the usual packed talk agenda. This is not an easy conference to attend - it kicks off at 09.30 every day, and with more than 60 talk slots over three days, not including BoFs and hacking. It's pretty intense! The talks are of a very high standard, often extremely technical, and give a very good insight into GNOME.

Some of the talks that particularly caught my eye included:

Who makes GNOME, by Dave Neary. The statistics weren't surprising: a huge number of people are involved, and a very wide range of companies (with no single dominating company) and a good mix between large and small companies. It was good to see some hard facts to back up the GNOME open development story. A big thanks must go to Dave for publishing this report.
State of the GNOME 3 Shell, by Owen Taylor. It was really interesting to see GNOME Shell taking shape, with a definite feeling of progress since GCDS. I've been playing with it on a horribly underspecified laptop, and can't wait to see it complete.
GNOME's next place in the industry, by Alberto Ruiz; The future is JavaScript, by John Palmieri; My platform is bigger than yours by Xan Lopez and Gustavo Noronha. More on these below...
Clutter: State of the Union, and Everything You Ever Wanted to Do With Clutter were sure to be crowd pleasers, given that Clutter is all about exciting user interfaces and effects. It didn't disappoint, with lions and tigers and monkeys and robot ponies:

On a serious note, it's great to see continued investment in Clutter as a UI toolkit. I think it's delivering some exciting innovation in netbook UIs and elsewhere.

During my talk at GUADEC(GNOME, Linux Mobile Stacks and You!) I tried to drive home the fact that mobile needs to become an important part of GNOME developer thinking, more so than now. To demonstrate this, I showed some statistics on the size of the mobile market, compared to other platforms. I also talked about how difficult it is to find key information about GNOME compared to competing projects, and the comparisons that are taking place between GNOME and other technologies even now. The GNOME Foundation does a fantastic job of outreach, including sponsoring people to go to GUADEC, but like any open source project it's important to ensure a constant flow of new developers and to make it ever-easier to develop for the projects. I hope that message got across.

One of the most interesting themes of this year's event (and I've only been to two, so I can't draw any inferences on patterns) was the focus on the future. From this year's event it's easy to believe the future is the web, simpler scripting languages, results-driven development and making application development simpler. All these tie neatly into the way that iPhone has changed the industry and made people think more carefully about the elusive third party developers and apps stores. Solutions like better scripting integration, cool UI toolkits and frameworks like Quickly are only part of the story, but all contributing to give GNOME a boost and making sure it's around over the coming years.

Dmitry Epstein: testing WPbook plugin

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 03:16:36 +0000

Please disregard this post. I am just testing a new plugin…

Dmitry Epstein: Is it the time to lobby?

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:03:50 +0000

It’s been quiet on this blog for a while, so I decided to share an observation based on some conversations I recently had at one of the Internet governance meetings. The conversations were about ICT companies and the point was that while Western companies are extremely enthusiastic about emerging markets, they do not consider their regulatory systems with the same rigor as they do in the developed world. In other words, while in the developed countries these companies invest considerable resources in working with the governments and lobbying, in the developing countries their efforts are primarily in marketing. Even when they do work with governments, it is mostly done through the marketing departments where the governments are viewed primarily as costumers, less as regulators.

I heard similar observations from a number of industry players and also from a government official. I listened and “filed” these observations, but they were brought back to life with the recent explosion of the BlackBerry story. You may know that the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and now also India and a number of other countries, are threatening to ban BlackBerry unless RIM allows them access to the encrypted email data of BlackBerry users, stored on the company’s servers. India gave RIM an ultimatum until the end of the month to comply and the rumor is that the Indian government has similar plans for Google, Skype, and perhaps others.

I wonder how did RIM find itself in such a situation? Will other global technological companies find themselves in a similar situation soon too? Peter Svensson writes in Washington Post today:

“Threats by the governments of India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to shut down BlackBerry’s corporate e-mail services reflect unease about a technology that the U.S. government also took a while to accept. The foreign governments are essentially a decade behind in coming to terms with encryption, a technology that’s fundamental to the Internet as a medium of commerce. (…) RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry, doesn’t have years to wait for foreign governments to adopt the more relaxed U.S. stance toward encryption.”

I assume Svensson is right about his historical perspective; after all, writing about this is his bread an butter. At the same time, given that all the governments currently having an issue with BlackBerry are in developing countries, I think he is missing the point made by the people I talked to about the Western companies’ attitudes to the emerging markets’ governments.

It did not take the US government years to figure out its stand on encryption on its own. On the contrary, this position is a result of years of dialogue, argument, and debates between the government and the various interest groups, primarily the industry, through its lobbying activities, and the civil society. We can see a similar discussion taking place these days around the issue of net neutrality.

It seems to me that until the RIMs, Googles, and Skypes of this world won’t take the regulators in the developing world as seriously as they take the governments back home, we will continue seeing more “BlackBerry” cases. Until the multinational MICT companies will not engage in a meaningful way with the local governments in the emerging markets, the barriers to their activities there will continue growing and become more sophisticated, especially when it comes to such a politicized area as information.

So, I wonder if it is the time for these companies to start lobbying in the developing world just the way they are lobbying here. While I am aware of the potentially harmful influences of lobbying, it is an integral part of the policymaking mechanism and, for better or worse, it also has an educational impact on the policymakers. At the end of the day, usually those are the governments that are catching up with technology, while the industry is ahead of the curve.

What do you think? Is it the time to lobby?

Gyanee Dewnarain: Unstoppable forces and immovable objects

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:34:08 +0000

It's been a busy few weeks, so I'm a bit behind on writing up events.

At the end of July I was in Cambridge for another of the Open Source and Software SIG meetings. This time, the theme was "Open Source Software vs Commercial Hardware: When the unstoppable force hits the immovable object ".

The Cambridge Wireless events are usually quite good fun, with a wide range of individuals and a great mix of businesses represented. The format of the event includes a number of talks with ample opportunity for questions, and some networking opportunities before and after the event. They are quite informal, and this tends to result in some lively discussions. This time was no different. (Disclosure: I'm one of the SIG champions, so I'm biased. But another of the champions, Dave Roberts of Ogma Solutions, did a lot of the heavy lifting for this event, so this is not entirely impartial praise!)

I didn't get a chance to make extensive notes on the talks themselves, but the slides can all be found online. I did however scribble down some questions and comments - only a few of which I got to ask the presenters during the event. As the Chair of the panel session, I felt obliged to let a few others ask questions too ;-)

James' talk on Open OS, the phone and the converged device was entertaining and provocative. His (self-confessed) increasingly wild assertions that user experience will become device agnostic feels right to me, especially with the pervasive usefulness of solutions like Dropbox and GMail. Are there any other pervasively useful cloud solutions that are as successful, by the way?

I really liked James' focus on integration being a key problem too, calling out Apple and RIM as examples of successful but closed vertical stacks. It seems obvious that hardware vendors need to work more closely with open source projects in order to compete, bringing more tightly-integrated stacks to market. Linaro is just the start of this.

Nabeel's Impact of Mobile Open Operating Systems on the Mobile Operators provided an excellent snapshot of the operator perspective. He asserted that operators fear a monoculture and exposure to risk, and that the success of the iPhone represents a big risk to them. For example, if the antenna flaw had been serious, the cost of exposure and recall for the operators would have been great, and the damage by losing such a premium item in the line-up is extensive.

It seems to me that the monoculture we're heading for in open source mobile operating systems is equally risky - whilst I think Android is great, I really want to see more than one Linux-based mobile operating system succeed. Competition most certainly breeds innovation. I think the operators have a vested interest in a small degree of fragmentation, and should continue to recognise that.

Two other comments from Nabeel caught my eye - firstly, according to my notes, he indicated that commodity open source mobile devices only attract something like a 3% margin (a far cry from Apple's ~ 30% margin). Is this true? I'd love to see the numbers on this. Secondly, during the presentation, the Vision Mobile developer survey was mentioned, including one particularly insightful quote from an anonymous developer, "Operators should get out of the way of developers". Speaking as that anonymous developer (oops), I think it's worth clarifying that efforts like O2 Litmus (and to a lesser extent, betavine) are good, but the operators do a lot of other things that actively hurt developers (content transcoding is one of the less contentious examples). Facilitate, don't frustrate.

Nigel's talk on Open Source Business Models discussed the 3-6 month product gestation period that's becoming typical, and how open source is the only way it can be possible to put together a product within such a timescale. This left me thinking that maybe we have an industry founded on unrealistic expectations, and the all-you-can-eat buffet of open source mobile components being thrown at products simply won't work. Maybe this ties neatly into Dave's opening comments in Mobile Platforms 101. Hardware might become a commodity, as software becomes more important.

Perhaps that's the true unstoppable force hitting immovable objects: the need for an open source platform approach in a very product-oriented sector. Can we really have both?

Gyanee Dewnarain: Unstoppable forces and immovable objects

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:34:08 +0000

It's been a busy few weeks, so I'm a bit behind on writing up events.

Perhaps that's the true unstoppable force hitting immovable objects: the need for an open source platform approach in a very product-oriented sector. Can we really have both?

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Pakistan Floods: Disruption of communication links makes the relief process difficult

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:48:20 +0000

Pakistan has been severely affected by unprecedented floods triggered by heavy rains. It has led to tragic loss of lives besides widespread loss of livestock, destruction of physical/communication infrastructure in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir, Punjab, Balochistan and Sindh. Flooding has submerged whole villages in the past week, killing at least 1,600 people, according to the UN. Pakistan authorities believe more than 12 million people have been affected, with the figure likely to rise as flood waters head south.

Christian aid agencies have warned that the destruction of transport and communication links is leaving many victims of the Pakistani floods virtually “cut off” from outside help. Ashraf Mall, Tearfund’s Country Representative for Pakistan, said:

“It’s one of the biggest floods in the history of Pakistan. People need food immediately as they have lost their homes and possessions. But it is not proving easy to respond to this emergency. Bridges and roads have been destroyed and the disruption of transport and communication links is making assessments difficult, with many survivors effectively cut off from outside help.”

Some pictures of Pakistanis coping with the floods can be seen here. Some ways to help through your donations are listed here.

(Sources: SAMAA, Christian Today)

Tagged: Emergency Communication, Floods, Pakistan, Pakistan Floods

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Peruvians Access Public Services with a Few Simple Clicks

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:27:13 +0000

In cities and villages across Peru, basic information that was once nearly impossible to obtain – about municipal budgets, public services and elections – is now accessible through a few simple clicks of a computer keyboard. Comun@s, which stands for Municipal Communication at Your Service in Spanish, is a project designed by AED and implemented in cooperation with USAID and the government of Peru to bring more transparency and public accountability to municipal government through information and communication technology.

AED teams based in Peru travel to the municipalities to install computer equipment located in public kiosks, called Modulos Ciudadanos, and provide training on how to use them, including how the community can tap into new online systems established by Peru’s government. In addition, AED helps local officials create municipal Web pages with useful information for their citizens. The project provides training on the importance of transparency to officials and residents in 84 municipalities that are scattered across seven regions of the country.

“Through this project, people can actually approach their government, become involved in their government and feel empowered to take part in their government,” said Maria Victoria Pascual, AED’s chief of party in Peru. “They become a part of the future of their community.”

Information on the modules is available in three of Peru’s languages—Spanish, as well as Quechuan and Ashaninka. The most popular feature so far, Pascual says, provides users with information on how to obtain basic documents, such as driver’s licenses, national identification cards, and marriage certificates—and what those documents should cost, so that people trying to buy them aren’t taken advantage of at the local level.

(Source:AED)

Full Story

Guy Sheffer: Using CHDK to photograph blackboards in University Courses

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:51:44 +0000

CHDK used in university for capturing blackboards

Hi all,
During last semester I developed a set of scripts that lets me photograph pictures of the blackboards during my university courses, categorize them while I am taking them and automatically generate PDF document for each course week. Because physics equations are not the simplest things to input in to a laptop in realtime, I have developed the following method. I am writing the post because I have a feeling this tool could help people in many ways, since it did change how I study in lectures.

You can see my blackboard photographs here (and here is a simple pdf example, if you get lost in the Hebrew).

How it works in a nutshell

The work flow - photograph, store, generate pdfs

During the lesson I take the photographs of the blackboard with a script I wrote for CHDK. In the script you set the course and week of the semester and this is stored per-picture on the SD card.

When I get home, I can quickly clear the card using the build.py script, moving the pictures to my computer, I might be taking dozens of photos a day, so its useful to do this a few times a week. The images are automatically stored in corresponding folders (e.g. /camera/coursename/pics/week1/ ).

Once the images are in the directory structure, all that is left is to generate PDFs from each ‘week folder’. There are quite a few things taken in to account here, due to the fact that the images are resized for fast PDF rendering, to setting the temporary folder of Imagemagick (it needs a few gigs to generate the PDFs!). The final outcome is a PDF file per-course per-week. From here I will go in to the technical configuration.

What you will need

Canon powershot camera running the CHDK software (Cannon Hack Development Kit). I use a Cannon powershot A590
Python + bash (+ Linux)
Imagemagick installed (the convert command)
Free space is important (both for PDF generation and storage of your photos)

Setting up CHDK script

I will not go in to the details of installing the CHDK, I wrote about this already, and its a post I recommend you read!

Once you have CHDK running on your camera you will need to use this script for shooting pictures (copy it to /CHDK/scripts and load it).

The script lets you pick the course and week, you can edit the script to have a little abbreviations for courses. For example (line 3 in blackboard.lua):
@param c Course (0=inf,1=QM,2=ds,3=fn,4=op)

It will give you a message each time you photograph with it.
The script saves files with the images filenames to the LOGS folder on the card, containing the course ID and week number.

Screenshot of the CHDK script menu

Importing you photos from the camera automatically

Using the build.py will move all the photographs from the camera to the disk, you will need to set a few things in its header, here is how the build.py file looks:

### configuration ###</p>
<p>#path to which the camera is mounted<br />
cameraMount=&quot;/media/CANON/&quot;</p>
<p>#path were the photos should be moved to<br />
DESTDIR = &quot;/media/Elements1/University/camera/&quot;</p>
<p>#path where the photos are in the camera (you might need to change this if you took more than 1000 photos)<br />
PICDIR = cameraMount + &quot;DCIM/100CANON/&quot;</p>
<p>#the number, and hte course folder to move it to<br />
course= []<br />
course.insert(0, &quot;infi&quot;)<br />
course.insert(1,&quot;quantum1&quot;)<br />
course.insert(2,&quot;dast&quot;)<br />
course.insert(3, &quot;lab2&quot;)<br />
course.insert(4, &quot;oop&quot;)

Its pretty straight forward. The last list sets which ID number corresponds to which course.

Generating PDFs

The script to generate the PDF is called genpdf.sh, It basically scans the folder and generates the pdf files using imagemagick, it also creates a small file with the picture list, so it only generates when there is a change. Generally useful script! I recommend you set the temp folder that it uses for the generation to be somewhere on your disk (and not just /tmp), because it can take as much as 10GB sometimes to generate!
Here is the settings header:

#this temp dir is where the PDF are generated, it can reach gigabytes! so its recommended to set it to a place with space<br />
export TMPDIR=/tmp</p>
<p>#path where the images are saved<br />
PICS_DIR= /media/Elements1/University/camera

Camera setting tips – How not to blind your lecturer

If you are using this tool, here are just a few minor tips for getting a good result:

First use the manual setting in the camera (the M option). If the course is in a closed lecture hall you can tweak the exposure time to get better resultes. As you can see I also set the picture to grayscale.
Make sure to set the flash off! Also you can set the AF-Assist beam off (its the red light on the camera). The manual setting remembers these options, so this is useful too.
I personally try not to photograph lecturers, I suggest you do the same.

What courses are good for this method? – Tips for Lecturers

I found that some courses are better than others to photograph, usually if you have a tidy lecturer who doesn’t erase in the middle of calculations, then you tend to get a good result. Also there are some lectures that think that the whole lecture can be done with equations only, no text. Those lectures tend to be much harder to follow, I would really suggest that they add notes, it tends to help everyone. Even a tiny title over a calculation can really change things, students don’t always follow.

That’s it! This technique really changed how I study in university, I am sure there are ways to improve the process and the code or use this for another things. I would love to hear feedback and would be glad to assist anyone attempting this.

Here is a package with all the scripts you need

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Macedonias Primary Education Project (PEP)

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:35:27 +0000

The Primary Education Project (PEP) is a five-year initiative targeting all public primary schools in Macedonia. PEP seeks to improve the quality of instruction and increase employment skills in youth.

PEP’s ICT in Education Component is supporting the computerization of Macedonia’s primary schools by training teachers, developing maintenance solutions, providing digital content, and introducing innovative uses of ICT such as computer control, robotics, electronic music, video & audio recording.

The highlights of ICT component are that it supports the development of digital content for Macedonia’s schools and helps to adapt and localize existing applications in Macedonian and Albanian. The focus is on Math and Science, but content is created across the curriculum. This will enable students to benefit from modern technology in all subjects. PEP has also introduced innovative hardware and software solutions in selected primary schools in Macedonia. The range of hardware varies from low-cost lap-tops to electronic microscopes, music recording equipment, robots and control technology kits.

Macedonia, once the least developed of the Yugoslav republics,has been transformed into the world’s first “wireless country” of its size or larger. Through a grant from USAID, and support from Microsoft, Motorola and several other partners, AED project Macedonia Connects worked with a local internet service provider to connect every one of the country’s 430 primary and secondary schools to a wireless network. Now a vast majority—95%—of the country’s population has access to wireless, broadband internet service.

(Sources: PEP, USAID)
Further Details

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Jordan Education Initiative uses ICT to transform education

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:19:39 +0000

The JEI is one of Her Majesty’s Queen Rania Al Abdullah’s nonprofit organizations. The JEI works hand in hand with the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Information Communication Technology (MoICT) to support Jordan’s efforts to improve the education system and its use of ICT to transform the learning environment in Jordanian schools and advance learning for all students.

Since its launch in 2003 by the World Economic Forum partners, the JEI has been involved in multimillion dollar initiatives that have had a strong impact on the modernization of education in Jordan. The JEI relies highly on partnerships and collaborations with local and global entities. The global partners include WEF, USAID, UNESCO, CISCO, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, IBM, SMART etc. Direct contributions to the Initiative from global and local partners have reached over US$ 25 million.

The initiative has so far reached more than 80,000 students, up-skilled more than 3,000 teachers across 102 Jordanian Public Schools. Thousands of electronic lessons have been developed and many electronic teaching tools and equipments have been deployed in schools. The JEI has also employed SMART interactive whiteboards in its discovery schools. The JEI has also piloted installing 100 Intel Classmate PCs in discovery schools.

The JEI has not only received an award from Ministry of Education but has also received 2009 UNESCO award for use of ICT in education.

(Sources: JEI, WEF )

Further Details

Guy Sheffer: Twitter hashtag support in non-Latin letters using Greasemonkey

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:14:20 +0000

Hashtags working in Hebrew

Hello all,

I have been using twitter quite a lot recently and to users that are using non-Latin tweets, it might have occurred that the hashtags don’t work.

So I took the time to write a greasemonkey script that does the job (for Firefox, Chrome, Webkit and others).

It will add a search link on the word, unfortunately due to a twitter bug, I had to remove the number sign (#) because twitter can’t search with it.

The script should work with all non-Latin languages (tested Hebrew, Arabic and Chinese)
~~The script does not work when the “more” button is pressed. If anyone knows how to solve that please contact me.~~ fixed!

I hope this becomes a useful tool for people.

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Indias prototype $35 tablet for students

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:45:10 +0000

India, known for the “world’s cheapest” innovations, unveiled a prototype of a $35 tablet computer aimed at students.

The project is part of an ambitious education technology initiative by the Indian government, which also aims to bring broadband connectivity to India’s 25,000 colleges and 504 universities and make study materials available online.

The government even plans on subsidizing the cost of the tablet for its student which would bring the purchase price down even lower. According to Kapil Sibal, the country’s Minister for Human Resource Development, this is their answer to MIT’s $100 computer.

The Linux-based computer at first glance resembles an Apple iPad and features basic functions you’d expect to see in a tablet–a Web browser, multimedia player, PDF reader, Wi-Fi, and video conferencing ability. It has 2GB of RAM (but no hard disk, instead using a memory card) and USB ports and could be available to kids from primary school up to the university level as early as next year.

(Sources: telecentre.org, cnet news, bbc news)

The computer has been named “Nano” and has been developed through joint efforts of IISc Bombay and IIT Chennai. Although the computer itself has been developed through the interfacing of various off-shelf components yet it has been engineered to be rugged and all-weathered, suited for use by children, and can be termed as a very promising innovation. The use of opensource software and cheap hardware, memory cards instead of hard-disk, makes the promise of $10 (aimed target) somewhat plausible.
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Mohammad Khatib: Google D3vF3st 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:49:00 +0000

For the Pictures here's 173 Pictures taken with my Evo, and here's another 251 taken by @rasharasem Camera.
As early as it gets, my roommate woke me up at 5:30am. Carelessly without even opening my eyes, I started calling my friends to make sure they’re all awake. Done so, hit the shower, wore my Nexus One TShirt that I got from GTUG Palestine Android Hackathon event, and headed out at 6:10am.

Meeting @moonitta at Abu Jassar square, waiting for 20+ minutes with no cars having five empty spots (We were going to pick up @hammamsamara, @rasharasem and Reham on our way). That was it to decide to go separate. Got to Ramallah around 6:40 a 7-passenger van left to Qalandiya while I await the rest of the guys, once we got everyone, we headed to Qalandiya, got there around 7:00am.

Shocked by being shocked with a Typical snapshot of Qalandiya Israeli Checkpoint. Busy as hell! over 150 people (including some of us) where still outside the first entrance door. Great enough this didn’t take as much time as we thought it would. 30 minutes later we were inside the checkpoint (some took even more as they came a bit late).

Tried waiting for @zafersh for sometime, but he was stuck inside the business of the checkpoint. Had to leave without him.

@Tova_s from Mercycorps had already arranged the transportation for all of us with 2 vans waiting behind the checkpoint. That was a great help, so thank you @Tova_s.

While on the way, and at another Israeli checkpoint, called in Hebrew Moda’een, they told us to get off the vans and get inside to get rechecked all over again. This time was even terrible than the first time. Especially that I foolishly took my packbag with me carrying the laptop around. They spent like more than 20 minutes just inspecting my MacBook Pro! I mean what’s their to inspect! They kept flipping it around, hitting it around, putting it in differnet pauses. And I was dying inside seeing my full-month-payment-interning-in-Google Macbook get smacked out each time they get it back and forth inside the XRay Machine! It’s just a laptop for God sake! They even asked me to remove the battery and I was like “uh.. no can’t do! Battery is built in.”.

Anyhow, one more check on the IDs and Permits and we were out. This one was exhausting and kinda depressing, but once we were out the guys got their shiny smiles back and ready to Go Google.

A bit of traffic jams and we were at the Avenue! Awesome!

Getting inside, registering our names and getting our badges printed out, to find out that there’s amazing amout of desert and light breakfast. And the first thing caught @rasharasem eyes were the Google IO Cupcakes! “Yay they’re here, we wanted some since the IO!”. And what caught @HammamSamara eyes was the free chips at the GTUG Booth. (And He actually spent most of his time there).

One of the most enjoyable thing we found, at least me (@mkhatib7) and @rasharasem was what I like to call “Binary Hunting”. They had these binary strings printed all over the posters and on the badge. I was kinda hoping it would be something like Google IO QR Codes Treasures, but they were binary strings that translates to some stuff like: “Welcome to Devfest”, “Have a great Day”, “Session Room”, “Agenda”, “Hacker Launge”, “My Name is”...etc

At 10:00am the keynotes started out, starting with Tal as MC and a small speech Marissa Mayer, VP of search product and user experience. Followed her Brian Rakowski Product Manager of Chrome.

After the keynotes, we took a 10 minute break, and the parallel sessions started. There were two tracks one for Webmasters (Web) and one for Developers (Dev). We were so excited about the Chrome Web Store and Extensions, unfortunately we were out of the session in the first 5 minutes as the speaker was speaking in Hebrow rather than English. Luckily enough, the next two sessions were in English. Chrome Developer Tools and HTML5. After which was the dinner. Unfortunately most of us didn’t like the dinner and barely ate something. The food didn’t taste as good as it looks.

After the lunch, it was time to do some hacking. The session were already started, but we found some spots to sit down on the lovely beanbags. I personally liked the hackathon, the bad thing was as @rasharasem puts it “it wasn’t challenging” hence most of the guys left a bit early and maybe didn’t even hack around with the code. But we kept coding, and we loved it, and didn’t leave until we got it working.

We’ve met some cool guys there, @aloncarmel and @amir_harel enjoyed talking to both of you and hope to meet sometime soon again.

At the end, we picked up our Chrome TShirts and headed to Jerusalem. The guys were too excited to visit the Dom of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque. Unfortunatelly not all of us made it there as at our way back the second van was returned and they had to even go to Ramallah rather than Jerusalem.

The 6 guys who made it to Jerusalem including me, went for a quick tour in Jerusalem, visited Al Aqsa and Dom of the Rock. And had a Kabab and Falafel Sandwishes while going home to Ramallah.

Thanks everyone who made this possible. And hope all enjoyed their time as much as I did. Now I leave you with my Awesome Google Cupcake along with my Super Cool Nexus One Loading TShirt! And my amazing Android-powered HTC Evo 4G mobile.

Mohammad Khatib: Android Hackathon - Live Wave #gtugpal

noreply@blogger.com (Mohammad N. Khatib) — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:35:00 +0000

Uzair Sukhera and Aneeqa Ishaq: Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Engineers

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:14:29 +0000

Innovation and Entrepreneurship seem like alien words in the world of College of E&ME, where walking on the layed out (SOP certified) line is “siraat-e-mustakeem”. The lack of appreciation for different personalities and their ideas, coupled with the sole benchmarking based on GPA has turned it into a stagnant system. The immediate and evident consequences of this being that the top notch students of nation coming to this college are provided with a mindset (by default) to seek jobs. Starting a new business or a venture is out of their books! Or at least a lowest grade back up. Students would even prefer low income research jobs (even though they don’t have research aptitude). A brief study of stats shows that it was not until the recession hit market cut down vacancies, that the students started thinking of doing something of their own, otherwise doing own business is out of question. Not that the students aren’t capable enough or worst non-innovative, it’s the general mindset of society, educational institute and the family that first goal set for fresh grads is to find some “cool” job – which necessarily entails some famous multinational or a permanent government job.

Breaking this ice of stagnation, Society of ICTs arranged a lecture on “Innovation and Entrepreneurship for engineers”. The guest speaker was the well-known, Mr. Adnan Shahid (president EME Alumni Association, De 14EE Graduate, Director post paid solutions at Mobilink and an MBA from MIT). The speaker had a solid IT background polished by the studies at MIT. He has been lately talking to the college administration to promote new ideas and concepts in a bit to foster entrepreneurial ventures by EMEnets. These are the earliest attempts of shifting the excessive academic focus of the college administration though. It might take much time to develop an atmosphere conducive to innovative minds to break the conventions and take up new challenges – eventually to get spin out companies formed by college graduates.

Though the lecture was held at a very short notice, the simplistic yet inspirational speaking skills of the guest kept the audience alive, interested and at the same time calling their pals to come to ECR (through SMS). Sir Adnan presented several examples of small ideas which later on changed the technology or the lives of people. Through the brilliant examples and news report clippings (from Pakistani newspapers) he explained the terms Innovation and invention as well as their link. He presented several case studies to students e.g. Facebook, his target of research, and presented his analysis of the marketing techniques Facebook guys implemented to make it such a huge success. Mr. Adnan challenged the students to come up with ideas along with their business proposals and start their own ventures. He presented the examples of content development (applications, wallpapers, ringtones etc.) for Mobilink itself. The students look forward to more of such lectures by alumni to guide them and inspire them J Society of ICTs will be working with the Alumni Liaison Committee to hold more of such lectures. Next semester a series of lectures on software development are also planned with the alumni owning software houses.

Gyanee Dewnarain: WIPJam @ LinuxTag

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:35:49 +0000

Last week, I went to Berlin for the annual LinuxTag event and to participate in the WIPJam running on the first day.

This was my first visit to LinuxTag, and it was interesting to compare it to FOSDEM, which I visited for the second time earlier this year. For those that haven't been, LinuxTag is an interesting combination of trade show, commercial exhibition, conference and community get-together. Apparently, some 11,000 individuals were in attendance, which would make it almost three times the size of FOSDEM. But a combination of the much larger exhibition centre in place of FOSDEM's university campus, and being a 4 day event compared to FOSDEM's weekend, meant that it never really felt that busy. This is borne out by the speaking events - FOSDEM had almost 300 talks over two days, while LinuxTag only managed 231 across four. Much more leisurely! This turned out to be a good thing - it was handy to have some time to look around the show floor, hold conversations in the corridors, and generally soak up the atmosphere. On the whole, the LinuxTag talks seemed to be pitched more at introductory level, while FOSDEM felt more bleeding-edge and intensively technical. This seemed to suit the audience, which was much more mixed at LinuxTag.

The WIPJam on Wednesday turned out to be lively, with lots of good discussions. I really like the WIP format for these sessions - relaxed and informal with just the right amount of nudging from the organisers to keep things moving. Carlo and Thibaut did a great job of running the event, despite the blistering heat. I'd been asked to help facilitate discussion on "Cross Platform development - platform choices and mobile dev tools". We ran two sessions, both with more than a dozen participants, from a range of backgrounds including developers, researchers, industry luminaries and business owners.

One of the key messages that came out of the discussion was that these developers are very much focussing on HTML5 to help solve their cross-platform problems. The message was "as much HTML as possible, only use native when absolutely necessary". It was suggested that a significant number of apps in app stores only use native to embed browser engines and provide a wrapper around HTML, combining the benefits of cross-platform standards-based development with the benefits of the app store delivery model. It would certainly be interesting to see some hard statistics that back up this perception.

We looked a bit at priorities for picking a platform, and the consensus was that reach, monetisation, tooling, openness and the availability of a vibrant support community ("fan boys") were key. A corollary of that was that no amount of openness or reach can make up for a platform that is simply too difficult to write for. There was also significant enthusiasm for multiple app stores to be available on each phone platform (a view I'm not altogether in agreement with as I think it will frustrate and confuse consumers). Developers also wanted "Babelfish for Apps" to help them with cross-platform development: a guide to how things work on each platform. For example, on Palm you have a swipe gesture to go back in apps, on Android you have a back button, on iPhone it's typically a UI element on screen.

Finally, the discussion group members were all conscious that we're entering a new era where we don't just need to worry about cross platform development, but also cross form-factor and cross-category development. With the proliferation of mobile devices, netbooks, and the oncoming tsunami of tablet computers, good design and an MVC approach to app construction will only become more important. Cross-platform UI toolkits and frameworks will help, but design and testing will become increasingly challenging.

Elsewhere in LinuxTag, some of the highlights included:

* Paul Adams' talk on Kolab (it's great to see effort being put into a truly secure, open source cross-platform PIM solution).

* Chatting to the Cream Desktop Environment guys who had a slick demo, some neat ideas and tons of enthusiasm - I hope to see them get involved with upstream GNOME and getting their ideas more widely accepted.

* Most of the mobile sessions were packed with standing room only. Several talks included lots of interesting Q&A at the end (for example "Mobile Development with Qt and Qt Creator") so the audience were not just interested but also very clearly engaged in the topics.

* Dirk's talk on MeeGo, which was interesting, informative, entertaining and included a risky live demo. Dirk was a great advocate for the platform, and spoke at just the right level for the audience.

Next year's LinuxTag is 11-14 May in Berlin, and there's a load more WIP Jams coming up in the future - catch one if you can!

Gyanee Dewnarain: BONDI Web SDK v1.0 released

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:04:06 +0000

Some of you may have missed the recent news of the v1.0 release of the LiMo-sponsored BONDI Web SDK, which is downloadable here. This tool, developed in the open by LiMo member companies Aplix and Azingo, makes it much simpler to develop mobile web widgets that conform to the OMTP BONDI v1.1 specifications. This is a key industry standard which is being considered for adoption by the global alliance of operators known as the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC).

Using only HTML, CSS and Javascript, web developers can now create advanced mobile phone apps that access mobile features such as sending and receiving SMS or email, finding the user’s current location or capturing a photo.

The SDK includes an emulator that implements most of the BONDI APIs so that it is possible to run and even debug your web widget using breakpoints without access to a BONDI-enabled handset. This doesn’t eliminate the need to test your app on real devices but it does mean that you can iron out most of the bugs earlier and it reduces the time spent getting it working well on the handset. If you happen to work for a company which is a member of the LiMo Foundation, you will find that the SDK also works with the LiMo platform simulator so your widget can be tested in that environment as well.

To assist with rapid UI prototyping, the SDK contains an “HTML Preview” window which updates immediately when any changes are made to the app’s source code. There are no excuses now – give your app the compelling interface that will attract those millions of users and keep them hooked!

If you’re not familiar with the BONDI APIs yet, the SDK can help by providing a browsable list of all the available BONDI APIs, auto-completion when you begin to type in a BONDI API, and extensive Help documentation.

The SDK can be installed either as a plug-in to Eclipse or as a self-contained package which includes everything you need to get going, emulator included. It supports Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Once your widget is ready for the limelight, you can package it, sign it with a digital signature (if you wish) and publish it, all using the SDK. OMTP, the industry body which created the BONDI specs, provides a widget gallery here. Check it out to see what’s been done with BONDI so far, and then get coding!