Book: Here Comes Everybody

Hello,

I just read


The theme of the book is organizing without organizations.

In the first part of the book, Shirky chronicles the impact of the raise of a number of key technologies: wikis, blogs, sms. He asserts that as technologies become technically uninteresting they can become social profound. He explores

• Ronald Coase theory of firms in the context of technologies which have hit a critical mass. What happens when new technology effectively eliminates the cost of a transaction?
• What happens when people publish first and filter later?
  
• What happens when it is trivial to create groups?
  

In the final chapters, he evaluates groups on the internet. Breaking them into a promise(why), tools(how) and the bargain(value). What I respect about his writing is he not only talks about the successes but analyzes the failures. In the chapter entitled "Failure for Free", he argues open source has a distinct advantage because people can explore a lot of alternate solutions to a given problem.

-jk

Building a tools team

Hello,

We are looking to hire. There are openings for eclipse, web and mobile engineers. Also, we need a build master. There not all posted just yet but look here. BTW, the positions are under the heading San Francisco Technology. We are actually based out of Foster City.

-jk

Tech tip: installation quirk with Widget

Hello,

Often when downloading a widget to a handset, it shows up in the inbox as a message. Today I was working with an e71. Bluetooth appeared to be working fine but no message was received. Initially I thought it was not support with this rev of the OS but that wasn't it. Turns out it was simply saved to the file system. You can install it by going to the c:\Widget directory and opening the wgz file.

-jk

Seeking Lead Software Engineer

Hello,

The Symbian Foundation is looking to hire a Lead Software Engineer for our Developer Tools group based on the Foster City, California office. It is a cool role. You'll get to work on Eclipse, Mobile OS, etc. Lots of open source stuff. Apply over here.

-jk

Economist on Mobile

Hello,

This weeks issue of the Economist features the Technology Quarterly. While you may learn about some new technology, I find there forte to be insights into business, culture and politics related to it. There are two stories involving mobile technology worth mentioning.

The article called "Taken your medicine?" focuses on patients who need to take medicine for TB over extended periods of time. After the symptoms subside, many patients stop taking the medicine for bacteria is whipped out. MIT developed a new patch which changes color to reveal a code when exposed to a patients urine IFF the medicine is in their blood. They send a text message containing this code and recieve free airtime on there mobile.

"Sensors and sensitivity" is the other piece worth mentioning. It is a good survey of high profile project using mobiles to collect data.

• GeoChat is a tool to help people respond to a crisis. Mobiles can be used to collect location data, broadcast sms messages and coordinate with others.
  
• Sense Networks "wants to use the predictions derived from tracking mobile phones".
  
• Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at CMU, envisions a Citizen Scientist who can "measure and sample their surroundings.

-jk

Tech Tip: extending the reach of your website

Hello,

If you already have a website, what is the simplest way to deploy it as a widget? Given the WRT api, you might be tempted to use the URL as an argument to widget.openURL(). This will go to the desired website but it will launch the web browser. This is a computationally expensive. Also, when the user exits the browser they will need to widget.

An alternative is

window.location = dist;

Now with one click, you can go to the website. If you run this widget, you'll notice a problem. There are no softkeys. Here is the code to fix that.

if (window.widget) {
menu.showSoftkeys();
}

-jk