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This is a Chumby (the thing with the screen, not the cof­fee cup). And, out of the box, it doesn’t do a hell of a lot. OK, it does come with a clock/radio and – this is the import­ant bit – a wire­less inter­net connection.

The inter­net con­nec­tion gives you access to an ever increas­ing range of Flash-based wid­gets that you can use to add extra func­tions to your Chumby. Using the touch-screen or squeeze-sensor, you can view pho­tos on Flickr, the latest news from Digg or your day ahead on Google Cal­en­dar – and in future, who knows what else. Of course if that was all, it wouldn’t be that inter­est­ing (wid­gets are not exactly new news).

The really inter­est­ing thing is that Chumby is com­pletely open source. The people behind it have released soft­ware and hard­ware developers’ kits and are act­ively encour­aging users to hack, mod and gen­er­ally pimp their creation.

Essen­tially, if you have the skills, you can do what you want. Write new wid­gets. Tear out the innards and install them else­where (the tele­tu­b­bie is par­tic­u­larly scary). Or lit­er­ally re-skin the unit (in leo­pard­skin if you like).

This com­mit­ment to co-creation and open source think­ing is so smart. The engage­ment that Chumby is receiv­ing through their blog, for­ums and devel­op­ment wiki is price­less. They will end up with a bet­ter product with more inter­est­ing fea­tures and a com­mit­ted com­munity of users who get the chance to show­case their own skills through the product.

While the open source approach is becom­ing more wide­spread, it is still the excep­tion rather than the rule. But it is the future – for tech com­pan­ies, for cus­tom­ers and for agen­cies. Per­son­ally, I can’t wait.

Sources: Tech­Crunch, psfk, Christine.net

This year, Ban­ner is once again involved in Byte Night, the IT industry’s annual sleep out in aid of young home­less people in the UK. The event involves people from many lead­ing IT com­pan­ies sleep­ing out for a night to raise money for NCH, the children’s charity.

The date for this year’s Byte Night is Fri­day 22^nd Septem­ber and will prob­ably coin­cide with the first Autum­nal storm/frost/blizzard (ok, maybe not blizzard).

We have a team sleep­ing out and would love any addi­tional spon­sors to help Byte Night reach its tar­get of £300,000. You can donate online. Thanks.

OK, so it’s not exactly new. GPS has been help­ing people dis­cover where they are, where they are going and where they made a wrong turn for some time. But really, that was just the start.

For one thing, GPS has now emerged from the car/boat, got way smal­ler and become port­able. I run most days (hard to believe if you know what I look like) and use a Garmin Fore­run­ner to tell me how fast I’m going (not fast enough), how far (not far enough) and how many cal­or­ies I’ve burnt (just enough for a guilt-free break­fast). It wasn’t so long ago I was reli­ant on a piece of string, a map and a stop­watch to plan and track my runs (BTW check out MapMyRun for a nice Google Maps-based app for work­ing out your run in advance).

Earlier this week, Flickr announced its new (non-GPS) geot­ag­ging fea­ture. This allows you to tag a photo with its loc­a­tion (using a mash up with Yahoo Maps). On their blog, they say they expec­ted to hit a mil­lion geot­agged pho­tos in the first month. They actu­ally hit 1.2m in the first 24 hours. Of course, geot­ag­ging relies on the user telling Flickr where the photo was taken (which, admit­tedly, is pretty easy). But what if it was sim­pler than that?

Which brings me back to GPS.

Earlier this month, Sony announced the GPS-CS1.

This is basic­ally a clip-on GPS receiver for pho­to­graph­ers. Attach it to your belt and it’ll record where you go on your pho­to­graphy trips. Then, when you upload pho­tos from your cam­era, you can sync them with data from the GPS unit and, using a Google Maps-based app, show when and pre­cisely where you took each photo. Very clever indeed. (And this is just the start – with Flickr releas­ing the API for their geot­ag­ging, expect to see some inter­est­ing hacks in the very near future. Also check out Zoomr for a photo shar­ing site that already uses geot­ag­ging and which might be the nat­ural exten­sion of the Sony system.)

For us in mar­ket­ing, GPS-based activ­ity is an intriguing pro­spect. This could be (as is already hap­pen­ing) digital bus-sides show­ing con­tex­tual mes­sages based on loc­a­tion. Or it could be around facil­it­at­ing user com­munit­ies – find oth­ers like you, near you. It could be around geocach­ing–style treas­ure hunts or a whole host of things no one has thought of yet.

This could get very interesting.

At the risk of con­firm­ing the wide­spread sus­pi­cions that (a) any­one into tech­no­logy is a Star Wars obsessed geek and (b) people in advert­ising have too much time on their hands, if you’ve got a Apple laptop you have to check out Mac­Saber.

Like many new laptops, Macs have a bunch of motion sensors in them. It’s these that recog­nise when you’ve man­aged to elbow your machine off your desk and which brace its innards for impact. But of course where there’s a sensor, there’s input. And this can be used to trig­ger other events. This is pre­cisely what the geni­uses behind Mac­Saber have used to turn their Macs into some­thing far, far more interesting.

Thanks to Chee in our inter­act­ive team for point­ing me to this one (and open­ing the door to more child­ish fun than a man my age has any right to).

For the curi­ous (and those without Apple laptops) see the Mac­Saber in action below.

Nor­mal ser­vice will resume shortly.

Singa­pore will have wall-to-wall WiFi by the end of the year. No more look­ing for a friendly Star­bucks or try­ing to leech off an unpro­tec­ted wire­less router, simply boot and go (well that’s the plan). This ini­ti­at­ive is part of a wider effort (the Intel­li­gent Nation pro­gramme) which extends into many gov­ern­ment ser­vices and which is look­ing to line Singa­pore up with the world’s tech élite nations.

Now, all they need is a sub­scrip­tion music ser­vice and some WiFi-enabled play­ers.

Source: news.com

The choice for digital music fans has got wider again with the announce­ment by new entrant Spir­al­Frog that it will begin a free (ie ad-supported) music down­load ser­vice that will give users access to Vivendi’s Uni­ver­sal Music Group’s cata­logue (if you are in North Amer­ica that is). Uni­ver­sal is back­ing the new start-up and, as the world’s largest music com­pany, should be able to offer a reas­on­able selec­tion. And the magic word ‘free’ never hurts.

This is, of course, just the latest attempt to chal­lenge iTunes’ dom­in­ance in the (legal) down­load mar­ket. But for me, it kind of misses the point.

The future isn’t about down­load­ing. Sorry, it just isn’t. The sooner iTunes wan­nabes work that out, the better.

Rather than see­ing the future as a ver­sion of the online music store (even if the products are free), a more inter­est­ing meta­phor is the juke­box. Fast con­nec­tions, wide­spread WiFi, boun­ti­ful cheap stor­age — it all adds up to the mother of all jukeboxes.

It’s not so dif­fi­cult to pic­ture the future scen­ario. I have a WiFi/WiMax/3G enabled player (at home, in the car, in my pocket) and a sub­scrip­tion account with an iTunes-like on-demand ser­vice. Then I simply pick and choose what to stream as my mood takes me. It’s not rocket surgery.

Some ser­vices (eg Rhaps­ody) are already head­ing off in this dir­ec­tion. What’s cur­rently lack­ing is uni­form WiFi cov­er­age (although in many coun­tries, 3G appears to offer an inter­est­ing option). Once that’s in place, why would I want to down­load music (free or otherwise)?

Sources: Reu­ters, BBC, Jupiter and a whole bunch of others.

UPDATE: take a look at MP3tunes for some­thing a little more interesting.

Any brand who’s name enters the lan­guage has to have got some­thing right. Of course, Google has got a whole bunch of things right again and again. It now seems a very long time ago that I’d reg­u­larly change my search loy­al­ties as the next big thing came along. And media agen­cies the world over have scrambled to get their Google accreditation.

It appears at times that Google is an unstop­pable force. As much as there’s been the occa­sional back­lash, it often seems more sour grapes than any­thing else. And while Yahoo and MSN are sig­ni­fic­ant forces (as well as oth­ers in other geo­graph­ies) the argu­ment tends to be around how many X mil­lion res­ults you get in under a second. That and gen­eric ‘gate­way to the Inter­net’ or news portal positionings.

But most people never get past the first page of res­ults. This fact alone keeps SEO con­sultan­cies in busi­ness. And with paid for res­ults creep­ing into organ­ics, user scep­tisim will only grow.

So what does an altern­at­ive look like?

Well, social book­mark­ing seems to provide a good start­ing point. A search on del.icio.us tends to turn up more inter­est­ing res­ults than tra­di­tional search (and without the oblig­at­ory ebay ads claim­ing you can ‘Find “your search term” on ebay’ even when you plainly can’t). Like­wise StumbleUpon deliv­ers up rel­ev­ant res­ults that aren’t the same old, same old. And newer hybrid tagged search + tra­di­tional search (see Wink whose new ver­sion should be out this week) may hold a longer term solution.

The key here is trust. People trust people (more than they trust brands and cor­por­a­tions). We are social creatures, far more inter­ested in what other people are book­mark­ing than what paid search encour­ages us to look at. It’ll get inter­est­ing if and when the likes of Myspace for­get deals with the Googles of the world and focus on tagged search. I’d lay money on com­munity mem­bers hav­ing more faith in what other mem­bers recom­mend than what even pos­it­ively regarded brands such as Google serve up. Until then, the vast major­ity of us will keep on Googling.

You can now tell pre­cisely how nuc­lear your Mac is get­ting with the Tem­per­at­ure Mon­itor wid­get. A quick F12 tells you exactly how hot your bat­tery is (mine is 32 degrees cen­ti­grade as I type). In fact it’ll take read­ings from a whole bunch of tem­per­at­ure sensors on your Mac.

Now if only it would do some kind of James Bond style count­down when your bat­tery hits crit­ical so you could get to a safe distance…

Another day, another work:life study.

Accord­ing to some research for headhunters Korn/Ferry Inter­na­tional, 80% of exec­ut­ives are always con­nec­ted to their work – whether through mobiles, PDAs, laptops or whatever. And 77% of these believe that the tech­no­logy behind all this enhances their work:life bal­ance. The study covered 2,300 exec­ut­ives in 75 coun­tries (which when you do the maths is just over 30 per coun­try – so not the most robust sample ever).

Sadly I don’t have the break­downs per coun­try but our exper­i­ence at Ban­ner has shown that these atti­tudes vary rad­ic­ally by geo­graphy. In research we’ve done over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a vast range of res­ults from enthu­si­asm in the US and UK through to out­right rejec­tion of the idea in Ger­many (and Itali­ans simply find the devices too ugly to contemplate).

In a related piece of news, Rut­gers Uni­ver­sity has ques­tioned whether employ­ers may be leg­ally liable for their employ­ees’ crack­berry addic­tions. Gayle Porter, asso­ci­ate pro­fessor of man­age­ment at Rut­gers has been work­ing on a study that exam­ines the impact of this tech­no­logy on work­ers’ lives and which looks at the employer’s respons­ib­il­it­ies for pro­tect­ing them. A flavour:

“There are costs attached to excess­ive work due to tech­no­logy,” says Porter. “Inform­a­tion and com­mu­nic­a­tion tech­no­logy (ICT) addic­tion has been treated by policy makers as a kind of ele­phant in the room – every­one sees it, but no one wants to acknow­ledge it dir­ectly. Owing to ves­ted interests of the employ­ers and the ICT industry, signs of pos­sible addic­tion – excess use of ICT and related stress ill­nesses – are often ignored.”

On a basic level, I’d ques­tion whether this is some kind of jum­bling of cause and effect – the employee works too much so it must be the tech­no­logy that’s caus­ing it. Porter goes on:

“Employ­ers right­fully provide pro­grams to help work­ers with chem­ical or sub­stance addictions…Addiction to tech­no­logy can be equally dam­aging to the men­tal health of the worker.”

Are employ­ees really addicted to the tech­no­logy? I’m not so sure. They may be addicted to the exper­i­ence of being in con­trol. They may covet the feel­ing of elev­ated self-esteem (look Ma, I’ve made it, I’ve got a Black­Berry!). But equat­ing this with a sub­stance addic­tion feels wrong-headed.

Over the years, I’ve sat behind the glass of many focus groups and have talked to the kinds of people both these stud­ies are refer­ring to. For the most part, they are not the air-punching go-getters of the first study, nor the hope­less addicts of the second. They are by and large prag­matic people who use the tech­no­logy at hand (quite lit­er­ally) to nav­ig­ate the world around them. They often see using these devices as a way of using dead time bet­ter, get­ting out of the office earlier, see­ing more of their kids.

Of course there are some toxic com­pan­ies who are happy to over­work their employ­ees. And yes, crack­ber­ries (of all makes) are one more way of doing this. But the symp­tom is not the cause.

Work:life bal­ance, I believe, is largely a fal­lacy. It sets up a way of think­ing that’s at odds with how many of us in inform­a­tion work exper­i­ence our days. Work is life. Like­wise, life is work. Today, it’s less about bal­an­cing and more about blend­ing. Pro­gress­ive com­pan­ies real­ise this and hand over the tools for employ­ees to blend it the best they can.

I’m writ­ing this at home on a Sat­urday night. But the same tech­no­logy allows me to take my daugh­ter to school at least once a week, it means I can respond to my team when they need me and, of course, I can always find the off button.

Good night.

Sources: Reu­ters, Rut­gers (via CrunchGear)

Microsoft announced on Fri­day that it’s launch­ing ver­sions of Win­dows and Office in the Incan lan­guage in Bolivia. This prom­ises to help close the digital divide between the 2.5 mil­lion Quen­chan speak­ers (about a third of the pop­u­la­tion) and the bet­ter sup­por­ted Span­ish speak­ers in the country.

If we are to see tech­no­logy as a force for good (which per­son­ally I do) then open­ing up access is fun­da­mental to suc­cess. This is an area where open source has prom­ised so much (and delivered reas­on­ably well all things con­sidered). Because users have access to the code, they can tweak it for spe­cial­ist use and port it into new lan­guages (if they have the skills them­selves of course).

But, of course, Microsoft’s soft­ware isn’t cheap. This was high­lighted in a quote from Bolivia’s For­eign Min­is­ter, David Choquehuanca:

“We con­grat­u­late Microsoft for hav­ing facil­it­ated the use of com­puters in our own lan­guages, but we have to advance toward sys­tems that are more open because we still have to pay a license fee (to use the soft­ware) to Microsoft.”

Bolivia is not a rich coun­try. It’s some $6b in debt. Almost two thirds of the pop­u­la­tion live beneath the poverty line. And the Quen­cha are among the poorest groups. Given these factors, pay­ing out for expens­ive licenses (even if they are in your nat­ive lan­guage) is unlikely to be an option.
You have to applaud Microsoft’s ini­ti­at­ive. Its soft­ware is still the dom­in­ant force in busi­ness and giv­ing minor­ity groups access to it can only help improve their oppor­tun­it­ies. All we need now is a free devel­op­ing world edi­tion that deliv­ers enough func­tion­al­ity to make a dif­fer­ence without bank­rupt­ing the user in the pro­cess.
Source: Reu­ters