Nikolaj Nyholm
Nikolaj Nyholm serves as a member of the board of directors of the people photo-identification service, Polar Rose. Past chair of EuroOSCON, he's working to connect European emerging tech and open source milieus, hoping to contribute to the creation of a vibrant cross-border tech sector. Nikolaj's background is as an entrepreneur, co-founding several startups picking at the loose ends of topics ranging from DNS to identity to Wi-Fi. In his spare time he channels his creative energy into Copenhagen-based collective 'Wheatpaste', and is co-organizer of reboot.
Maker wares at EuroOSCON
Our colleagues at Make Magazine have put out a call for Euro Makers to take part in the EuroOSCON Make Fest that they'll be hosting on Wednesday, September 20. It's always fun to be around the Make guys, and last year was no exception. Help us make this year just as good and ping Phil Torrone and crew if you've…
House of Commons Echo Test
I'm an avid fan of British collective MySociety's slew of succesful civic and community websites which include HearFromYourMP, WriteToThem, and most notably TheyWorkForYou. TheyWorkForYou is a site which indexes the raw transcripts from the House of Lords and House of Commons according to speaker and debate topic. Apparently Jack Straw, former British Foreign Secretary and current Leader of the House…
Nokia S60 Apache (Raccoon) Open Sourced
A month and a half ago Nokia Research made available on an experimental basis Raccoon, a S60 Series web server based on Apache. The phone as a server has tremendous applications and implications for the phone as a fully equal peer on the Internet. Seeing first-hand the reaction to Chris Heathcote's demonstration at reboot8 of Raccoon, drove home the point…
Where 2.0: Location Sensing Lightning Talks
The first lightning talk session at Where 2.0 on location sensing: Christopher Schmidt on Geolocation Using GSM Cells. GSM Loc allows you to collaboratively map GSM cell towers using GPS allowing other non-GPS users to approximate position based on signal strength of individual cell towers. OpenStreetMap for cell towers. Jason Kaufman on Gumspots and GSPS. Gumspots is a fantastic crowdpleasing…
Where 2.0:Mikel Maron on GeoRSS
As Mikel Maron starts out pointing out in his GeoRSS talk, GeoRSS has been mentioned in all five of the morning's talks. Mikel restates Ray Ozzies's quote that "RSS is the Unix pipe of the Internet", and his presentation shows that GeoRSS follows up well on that promise. GeoRSS provides "a number of ways to encoding location in RSS feeds",…
Second Life meets the Web
Correction (I've been offline for a couple of days, so correction comes in a bit late): As commented below and highlighted in emails from among others Matt Biddulph, I was mistaken to assume that v1.10 includes 3D uBrowser. However, while Matt used Second Life's "streaming media feature to 'stream' a flickr jpeg onto the side of an object", it seems…
GPS barcodes on Manhattan?
Update: It appears that the initiative is not the work of Google tagging New York nor an initiative mandated by government regulation, but something as distant as an accounting standard titled GASB 34 issuing municipalities financial reporting requirements to maintain their credit ratings. Interesting geodata can emerge from anywhere indeed. As so many times before, we only need inherent openness…
Thinglinks
Ulla-Maaria Mutanen of Crafter's Manifesto fame, launched her Thinglinks beta at previous weekend's Maker Faire. Thinglinks are persistent unique identifiers for individual creations, and Ulla has previously described them as "product codes for democratizing the global market". In December, Dave Weinberger was out claiming that 2006 would be the year of unique IDs "because they enable people and systems to…
Lego to Open Source the Mindstorms NXT OS
Soeren Lund, director of Lego Mindstorms NXT, today announced at our CustomerMade conference in Copenhagen that the Mindstorms NXT operating system is to be open sourced. This is just the latest evolvement in the saga of Lego's transition into a true customer company. As Danish Internet pundit and CustomerMade interview host Claus Dahl put it, Mindstorms NXT would be totally…