Welcome to a new installment in the Mobile Freedom Project series. I just got the charger for my recently ebay-acquired LG VX 6100, a 6-year-old Verizon flip phone. Sure enough, the phone holds a charge, and I just switched over service from my Palm Pre and downgraded my service to $20/month. Just as a reminder, [...]
Entries Tagged as 'thoughts'
Sent from my Verizon Flip Phone
August 31st, 2010 No Comments
Tags: mobile freedom project · mobile service
Global Services for Local Good
April 11th, 2010 No Comments
Bridge into Beacon is an application to encourage economic growth in Downtown Beacon by providing context to visitors and tourists. I began the project with a post about resilient communities, and an intention to create an app that promotes resilience. From the beginning, I’ve tried to keep the application simple, not just for the end [...]
Tags: api · beacon · cloud · resilience
Mobile Freedom Project – iPhone returns!
March 1st, 2010 No Comments
Exploring a couple of new options for my carrierless life. Datajack + SIPDroid on the G1 is treating me well (minus a nagging echo for the other caller). I have been missing the iPhone some, so went scrounging and found acrobits softphone. I was excited to see that it allows calls over 3G (whereas Skype [...]
Tags: fu_att · iphone · mobile freedom project · mobile service · sip
Community App – Custom vs 3rd Party
February 7th, 2010 No Comments
Thanks to encouragement from Mark Frazier at Open World, I’m more seriously exploring existing platforms and content management systems as digital hubs for local communities. I had been thinking along the lines of a fully custom app that I could open-source, but the development and documentation overhead would be high on a project like that. Right [...]
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Thesis Focus: Resilient Communities
February 6th, 2010 2 Comments
For some time, I’ve been mulling over John Robb’s portrayal of “resilient communities“. This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. Robb believes that resilient communities [...]
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ITP Thesis Ideas – Application Prototyping
January 23rd, 2010 No Comments
I’ve been considering ITP thesis ideas (see also “Social Tech Under the Radar“), and I keep coming back to the idea of prototyping. Based on my work with BeeMe and at Etsy, I’ve seen the value of using prototypes for product discovery and refinement. I’d like to experiment with and improve upon existing approaches: agile development, rapid [...]
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Social Tech – under the radar
January 10th, 2010 1 Comment
In Brooklyn it’s clear that the market is inundated with tools and services to support community and commerce: Craigslist, Browstoner, and Etsy to name a few. I’ve been thinking about new tools for commerce and community development, but as the proverb goes, you can’t fill a cup that is already overflowing. I just returned from [...]
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Good Riddance, ATT
December 15th, 2009 2 Comments
I just made the move to drop ATT, after a ridiculous conversation with a support representative. The upshot was that they refused to cancel my data plan on the iPhone (told me that the hardware wouldn’t update without the data connection, which is utter nonsense). I ported my number to Number Garage, forwarded it to [...]
Tags: mobile freedom project · mobile service
Getting Shacked on Google Wave
December 3rd, 2009 No Comments
My first experience with Google Wave proved to be entertaining and Wave seems promising as a useful collaborative tool. I was on a wave with 4 other people, and I think the more the merrier. We weren’t doing anything obviously meaningful, but as a backchannel for class it proved entertaining. I can see more constructive [...]
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Etsy Internship recap
September 6th, 2009 No Comments
Friday was the last day of my summer internship at Etsy. I met some great people and worked on awesome projects while I was there. My main focus was prototyping, both creating actual prototypes and documenting a process to promote ongoing prototyping there. The tools I explored were balsamiq mockups, Adobe Dreamweaver (templating and libraries), [...]
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