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eriks

eriks

Erik is currently an Innovation Coach at the AT&T Foundry. Erik was the CTO of Spot.us, a global platform for community-funded local reporting (winner of the Knight News Challenge). Previously, Erik co-founded Allvoices.com, where he served as the VP of Social Media and User Interface. Allvoices.com is a global community that shares news, videos, images and opinions. At the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University between 2005-2006, he created the website inthefieldONLINE.net, which drew widespread recognition from major global media including PBS, CNN and BBC, and was featured on Discovery International’s Rewind 2006 as one of the 25 highlights of the Year.

Bill Gates on social entrepreneurship..
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I am listening to Bill Gates on his visions. Incredible to listen to one of the most powerful persons alive mentioning that the future of the world relies on taking care of huge issues such as global health, education and energy.

He is one of the few i have heard being very firm in explaining the policy issues being extremely central to solve in the future, and that foundations (such as the Gates foundation of course) and corporations such as Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Intel will play an important role making change happen. Subsidies for rural areas were mentioned. Very interesting.

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Free cellphones to the people!
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Apparently that is the future according to many and not very suprising Google thinks so too. Here is an article by Eric Auchard at Reuters, with an interview with Googles CEO Eric Schmidt –
INTERVIEW – Google CEO sees free mobile phones, funded by ads.

Amazingly this exist in a new startup, Blyk, with an impressive team. Marko Ahtisaari, the former Director of Design Strategy at Nokia, is their head of Brand and Design. Several similar attempts have been made all with more or less success The free PC project some eight years ago in France for instance.

Lets watch and see. It is a fun approach, but I am sceptical, yet optimistic that it could work. The question is more whether the market is ready or not. It wasn’t nearly ten years ago, but might now.

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YouTube does what?
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I just read TechCrunch to get some updates on what’s going on around the valley and found this this pretty amazing post Huh? YouTube Sends TechCrunch A Cease & Desist. I actually laughed…

They have to be kidding. Regardless if this is part of a legal strategy, it really make no sense coming from an online video source who has enabled millions, and millions of users to upload copyrighted material. All of a sudden they now start to protect their own “copyrights” and claim this material should only be made available via their site.

I think this is pretty interesting. I can understand what they now would like to get control over the flow of the material but I am not sure send Cease & Desist is the right strategy, especially since the trackrecord of copyright violation via the YouTube users are not that short so to say. It makes perfect sense as they probably soon will end up with a lot of disputes regarding copyrights. Personally I think it is pretty naive not to understood it would end up on TechCrunch and later on spread like fire inside the blogosphere.

Personally I actually don’t like any violation of copyright issues, but do very much promote Creative Commons License for content and Open Source licences and even the Free Software License (GPL). I will leave that discussion for another occasion. Their intentions will be questioned regardess of what the reasons are.

Hmmm. Hypocracy or pretty ironic as Michael Arrington puts it.

Of course, the irony of YouTube accusing others of copyright infringement is delicious.

Building communities are hard, but they are easily destroyed. Keep your fingers crossed, YouTube! You are really walking a narrow path!

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Are cellphones the thin client of the World Wide Web or a part of the World Wide Web?
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I yesterday submitted a position paper to the W3c Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries even though the discussion is valid for the whole mobile web discussion. The main conclusion is that we should of policy and technology constraints discuss whether a mobile web really exist:

When these issues – both on the handset, but most of all on the network side – are resolved then we might start to think of “one web”, until then I think it is better to think of it as ‘different webs yet interacting’. Regardless, cellphones will play an essential part in the future, and especially the exploding use of cellphones in the developing world will force this to happen.

As for applications and generally speaking we will see a lot of social media cellphone applications emerge and cellphones will be used as interaction devices with the web, as well as, when the platform is ready, part of the World Wide Web.

You will find the full document here.

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