I was only a little surprised when I found out that Qi Hardware, the company behind the NanoNote, was founded by former members of the OpenMoko team. They’ve already made commitments to copyleft software, community driven software development and upstreaming their Linux improvements. This gadget is particular intriguing to me because I did a fair bit of OS coding for school using OS/161 as a basis, which has a 32-bit MIPS kernel. I might actually be able to contribute to the OS. If not, I could certainly contribute to application development.

This device, with its 32 MB of RAM, doesn’t take aim at the netbook market so much as the gadget market. Think Sony Mylo, or GP2X, or the Nokia Internet Tablet series. It’d be a welcome replacement to my Nokia 770. For one thing I imagine I’d be able to IM a lot more easily with it.

What’s possible? Hard to say. Even for a thin client the machine is very limited. Don’t expect to be able to view websites as well as you can on your iPhone. Do expect something a lot more hackable than a PDA. I missed out on the Zaurus clamshells that I wanted so badly in 2005, but I might save up to grab one of these NanoNotes. Maybe not the 本, maybe I’ll wait, but I would love to play with one. The 本 will ship in fall. I hope that Qi releases their projected price soon.

Take a look at a list of the Zaurus software index for ideas of what’s likely to hit the NanoNote first. My guess is an emulator will be the first port, probably for either the NES or the Commodore 64.

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Most people I talk to hear “microblogging” and put too much emphasis on one of the two benefits of blogging. Blogging is a printing press in the home of everyone with an internet connection and it’s also a conversation.

It’s hard to say much of worth in such short confines when you look at it alone. A stream of posts from a single author would have been much more conveniently read in a small blog posting. To think of microblogging only as a publishing tool is to overlook other areas of value. The problem I see is while there’s a blogsphere, there’s no microblogsphere.

Conversations on Twitter happen in through tracking keywords and hashtags.  Back when Twitter had an official IM client I used it to track dozens of keywords and hashtags. Tracking meant that Twitter would notify me the instant one was used, and I’d be able to respond instantly through my phone or IM client. Unfortunately that was killed off.

There’s still a few easy ways to track keywords on Twitter. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of a search query and mash it up any way you want or you can use Tweetdeck.

The problem so far is that this all relates to Twitter. Right now I can think of at least two open source microblogging applications, laconi.ca and OpenMicroBlogger. Jaiku will eventually be open sourced. There’s already dozens of proprietary ones and the number of installations of open ones is slowly growing. The community is too fragmented.

The two open source applications support the open micro blogging specification which lets you subscribe to microbloggings of users of another site, similar to how users of a Jabber IM can usually add someone to their list who’s on another server. It’s not implemented on the most popular servers, but it fixes half of the problem with conversation.

What it doesn’t fix is being able to reply. Since addressing a reply is done in-band, that is inside the message itself, including the server the recipient is on robs you of scarce message space. If you don’t include the server then you run into name collissions. Am I addressing a message to lance_ on Twitter or identi.ca or Jaiku or what?

The proposed OpenMicroBlogger 0.2 spec might solve that by including a hidden out-of-band variable  to the message, similar to how Twitter did so with the specific message ID that you’re repling to.  Each time you do something like this you’re fragmenting the users into “users of clients who support that feature” versus “users of clients who don’t support that feature.”

What’s it going to take to have a microblogsphere? Communities will need top open up and support OpenMicroBlogging or similar, and some hard choices are need to be made to compromise between preserving message space and vital features.

It’s $300 US for the basic kit which is pretty well stocked. It includes the stylus, headset, carrying pouch, a half gig memory card, lanyard and the data cable. The $450 developer kit stuffs all that into a big padded toolbox plus a debug board, extra battery and memory card, extra USB cable as well as a Torx T6 screwdriver and a guitar pick to pop the thing open.

The openmoko site has been updated. It has many more details than before but the best sources of information remain the mailing lists. The announce list is a good one to be on as a bare minimum, the others tend to be high volume. I’m still waiting on a better data plan before I replace my phone but this is a good candidate.

David Wheeler has recently written a slide on what popular FLOSS licenses mix and how. It includes the latest draft of GPL3. He’s posted it to his blog and he’s looking for comments. It doesn’t pack much depth into its one page but it gives a quick overview of what additional responsibilities are tacked on when combining MIT and BSD licensed code, for example. Not every combination has this incremental responsibility or reserved rights delta yet. Finding out if one piece of licensed code can mix with another is as easy as following a flow chart. Very cool.

Writer of the Wikinomics book, Don Tapscott is giving this presentation. His book is on mass collaboration. He’s from New Paradigm. His book was given out with the expensive passes. All non-reserved seating is used. There’s about twenty people standing five minutes prior. Thirty-something two minutes prior to start.

This has a lot of notes.

• Book has been on US&Canada non-fiction best seller list for 15 weeks.
• Don is chief exec of int’l thinktank New Paradigm founded in 1993
• Research in tech, productivity, completed multi-million dollar IT and Competitive Advantage report
• Trying to convince us that tech is the heart of change in large corporations
• social networking growing, new blog every second, Time selected collaborator as person of the year, but it’s all so 2006
• We’re in new mode of production
• four big drivers:
  • technology, web today isn’t daddy’s internet, changes include access modes. The object of interest is the “thing”: phone, fridge, pen barcode reader that price compares.
  • it’s fast now. Wifi is growing. Eg. One Zone. Bell Canada didn’t expect the power company and San Fran telcos didn’t expect the Google. Google’s business model doesn’t include wifi, why did they do this?
  • geo-spatiality. Geotagging. Browse the physical world. Related searches to your location. Check out Plazes. Or Socialight. Put a sticker on the bakery, when your friends go by they know you like that place. IntelliOne is cool: using cellular signals to figure out where you are roughly. Can be used to figure out speed of traffic. Maptuit does traffic routing.
  • True multimedia. Not just pictures and text. Add Skype. TIOTI: Tape It Off The Internet. Look at PS3. Very realistic graphic. 3d animation could be new paradigm of media. Old web was static HTML, presentation, new web is distributed computing, programming. New web is as much about sharing content. Metadata is now important. Tags. Problems with lack of consistency. Once was said we’d only need five computers. He was off by five: we need one. Not desktop, webtop. New web moves IT to the web. God might have created the world but he didn’t have an installed base. Easier to start new with web2.0 designed to collaborate than to tack sharing onto old base.
• The net generation. People currently under 29 roughly. Thought children were prodigies, then realized it’s a common trait. Conclusion from ~300 kid study: no fear of tech, natural as breathing.
• Echo generation bigger than baby boom generation, marginally.
• Time on the net takes away from time on tv. Huge multitasking trend. IM+news+collaborating+gaming at once. Processes information differently. Kids are authorities on web2.0. Not as big of a generation gap: compare your ipod to your kids’. Generation lap: kids lapping parents in tech race. Check interview on newparadigm.com. E-mail is already dead. Kids only use it for formal tech. :) Question was asked: When do you use email? Response was: Something like a thank you note, something sort of formal.
• Generation wants choice! Customize everything! Don’t be like the auto industry that missed the tuner market. Scion vs Ford. Scrutinizers – they check everything eg images for signs of photoshopping. Integrity!
• Kids don’t get their news from the Daily Show. Daily Show isn’t funny unless you know the news. Gets news online.
• Collaboration allows you to know people online.
• Online do you collaborate, or learn, or entertain yourself? Net gen does all at once but doesn’t always realize it.
• senior exec asks net gen what to do to make company attractive. Kid answers “make the place more fun.” Google vs factory.
• Social revolution? Check flickr vs webshots on alexa. XML based community eclipsed old websites. Community over in-house content presentation.
• Check out Wikinomicists of the World Unite. Within hours of the facebook group’s creation, had ~120 users and critiques of the book (first 2 chapters were posted)
• Economic revolution. Collaboration costs used to be higher. Ford used to have a glass factory because it was more expensive to collaborate with others than to own factory.
• Theme #2 is openness. “The naked corporation.” Fitness is no longer an option, it’s mandatory. Integrity must be baked into your bones. Transparency allows others to build trust in you for you.
• IBM shared IP with linux, saved billions in upkeep costs, came up with solid platform
• World isn’t flat, it’s a skewed binomial. Look at east asia’s growth. Japan disproportionately contributes.
• New principals on how to run company: peering, openness, something, act globally
• Harnessing mass collaboration, 50 year old mining company peers, opens, shares data. Used to keep throwing money at prospecting. Frustrated by lack of results. “If I don’t know where gold is, who does?” Published geodata on internet, held contest, gave $500k to contest for “Do I have gold? If so, where is it?” Found $3.4 billion when 77 contestants used new ways of analyzing data to tell him.
  • peered: let anyone submit
  • open: told people he doesn’t know where gold is
  • acted globally: opened to the world
• What can you create in a way like linux and wikipedia? Linus Torvalds doesn’t know. DBs are boring, who would create an open one?
• Second Life’s content is 99% user generated
• Compare unauth mashup of Grey Album to hacking of Lego Mindstorm. Lego didn’t sue children, Lego opened up mindstorm. Lego made prosumers.
• Biggest new development is the amazon cloud. 200,000 people building apps on it. Mom and pop can use its open api to create value.
• Don forgot to turn his smartphone off, got a call an hour into it.. Then another 30 seconds later. :)

I can’t stay for questions and answers, have to rush to DNS security presentation.

The announcement list has a bunch of urls. Additionally, new email lists have been created: announce, buglog, commitlog, distro-devel, framework-devel, gsmd-devel, openmoko-apps, openmoko-devel, openmoko-kernel, openmoko-uboot.

For chat, hit irc.freenode.net’s #openmoko.

Update 2: The source is out! Announcement here, subversion #1, subversion #2. I’m not sure what’s in subversion #2 as I can’t connect right now but it’s linked from the announcement. I imagine it’s just a mirror.

Another disruption to the cellular phone market is on its way. This one isn’t just a phone, it’s a framework. I wrote about openmoko earlier and now the first deadline is nearly about to hit.

From #openmoko on freenode …

13:14 < aloril> a day 11:45:25 (1.490 days) for source for *all* developers and devices for selected developers (2007-02-11); a month, a day (29.490 days) for devices for *ANYBODY* for $350 (targeting developers) (preorders: not yet) (2007-03-11); 7 months, a day (213.490 days) for mass market (2007-09-11): see topic for more info (206)

That’s right, just under a day and a half for the first openmoko phone to be shipped. The FIC website still doesn’t have a page set up for their Neo 1973 yet but linuxdevices does.

The project is about to enter phase zero. Phones will be given to free to select developers, a few others will be able to buy them, and the source will be available for all. I expect news of early ports to start filtering out by the middle of next week and the project to have some polish on it by the first phase. It’s certainly a system to watch.

Interest has piqued ever since Jobs announced that users won’t be able to put just any application onto their phone, and that developers will have a walled garden. OpenMoko will be entirely open save for the GPS software. Developers will be able to add to even the basic applications such as the dialer, although much more work will be done on other applications. Details surrounding OpenMoko have been sparse but last night the OpenMoko team released their roadmap.

2007-02-11 Phase 0: Developer Preview
We will give away free phones to selected members of the developer
community. At this point, the full source code to the OpenMoko Linux
Distribution will become publicly available. We are committed to
cooperating with the community in the interest of making the
official developer launch a smooth experience.

…

2007-03-11 Phase 1: Official Developer Launch
We will sell the Neo1973 direct from openmoko.com for US$350 plus
shipping. Sales and orders will be worldwide. We are specifically
targeting open source community developers.

2007-09-11 Phase 2: Mass Market Sale
Online sales will continue. We will also be available in a retail
stores and selected carriers around the world. At this point, we
hope your mom and dad will want to buy a Neo1973, too.

The 2nd generation OpenMoko device will also be introduced at this
time. We have something special in the works, but again, you will
help shape this device.

The first generation phone looks sleek and has all the features I want except for WiFi, which appears to be doable as an addon. Since the phone is so cheap for a smartphone I’m tempted to buy it anyways. I just wish GSM providers in Canada had better data plans.