"emerging telephony" entries

Marc Bohlen: Finding the Intersection of Art and Technology

Artist-Engineer Marc Bohlen uses some fairly advanced technology to express his artistic visions. It's not often you find an artist with a degree from CMU in robotics, or an engineer with an Masters in Art History. Bohlen's projects explore how people and technology interact, ranging from the bickering robots Amy and Klara, to his latest project, the Glass Bottom Float. In advance of his appearance at the E-Tech conference in March, Bohlen talked to us about how he approaches art, and just what art is.

ETech Preview: Inside Factory China, An Interview with Andrew Huang

China has become the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew “Bunnie” Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new internet appliance. He’ll be speaking about the experience at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. In an exclusive interview with Radar, he talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on the consumer’s right to hack the hardware they purchase.

Developer Interest in the iPhone, Android, and Symbian

With several hundred applications now available in the iTunes App store, I decided to consider alternate ways of gauging interest in the platform. Using MarkMail, one can quickly scan thousands of mailing lists and restrict the results to those related to software development. Based on the number of posts to (MarkMail) mailing lists, Linux-based alternatives generate considerably more email chatter…

Hacking TCP/IP To Support Location Aware Services

The idea here is to enable devices to automatically search for other
addresses that are mapped to physical locations. If a device
knows its latitude and longitude, it can scan the address space
to find other devices in the local zone. This
can probably be done most efficiently by sending a multicast message
that routers repeat to devices that are nearby with the matching
public IP addresses (e.g., “I am trying to contact all mobile phones
near 37.46N / 122.26W”).

The combination of these techniques would make device discovery and
search open and vendor-neutral. Once devices have discovered each
other, they can communicate using existing Internet services, such as
email, XMPP, SIP, etc. via conventional IP addresses. The key idea is
to create a peer-to-peer discovery mechanism that is not dependent on
centralized services or proprietary vendor APIs. With that in place,
any device should be able to find and talk to other devices within a
cell or group of cells defined by latitude and longitude coordinates.

Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF. There has been some incredible discussion on…

You Become what You Disrupt – (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users. This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop….

Getting the iPhone Open Source Tool Chain Up and Running

Tomorrow at 10 am pacific time, oreilly.com is hosting a free webcast with Jonathan A. Zdziarski, one of the original hackers of the iPhone and author of iPhone Open Application Development. From the announcement: Jonathan will demonstrate how you can use the iPhone open source tool chain to design third-party software that will run on on both today's iPhones, and…

US Judge censors WikiLeaks.org by ordering DNS records removed

The BBC and many others report that the international whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org has been taken down as of this morning. Judge Jeffery White ordered that the WikiLeaks.org domain be removed at the request of Julius Baer Bank & Trust. Not only does the judge order that the site be removed, he orders that the whois privacy protections be turned off…

Mainstream acceptance of Twitter for disaster communication…

I'm stuck at San Francisco Airport due to delays from the big storm yesterday. A few minutes ago a plane was struck by lightning at the gate which caused quite a bit of excitement. Planes are designed to take a lightning strike and apparently it happens all the time. They took off after a quick check by the pilot and…

'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by Princeton University – January 14-15

Marc Hedlund and I will be speaking at the 'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton on January 14-15. The sessions look very interesting and registration is free. Panel 1: Possession and ownership of data – In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored…