More Android apps

There's a list of Android apps floating around that reminds me of those thousands of open source projects on SourceForge: niche apps that appeal to geeks, with unpredictable overlaps and mediocre logos and bad names. But then there's this great list of "10 Android Apps We Will Actually Use." They look outstanding, and should really change the way people see phones.

Frolicking on the Internet

Omar Gallaga, a technology writer for the Austin American-Statesman's Austin360.com and avid Twitter user, prints a letter he received from a reader. The letter excoriates him and others for using social networking sites instead of working, lauds Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, and suggests that time spent online is time spent away from volunteering and making the country better.

Gallaga welcomes readers to post their comments online, and promises to "print out the responses and mail them back to her." Want to mount a counterargument?

More on Enkin, the Android killer app

AndroidGuys blogged yesterday about Enkin, an Android application that overlays data on Google Maps and Street View. Today, Wikinomics has a demo. They explain it pretty well:

Using the camera and screen, with labels injected, the Android powered mobile device becomes something of a magical lense [sic] that can be used to provide us with digital information about the world, overlayed on the world itself, as intermediated by the device. So far the Enkin guys have set this up to work with locations that have been tagged in their map view, but imagine the possibilities if it could integrate with all of the Geodata that’s tagged in Google Earth. You could also integrate this with social mobility services, and set your name to public, then strangers on the street could take a look at you through their phone and see your name floating above your head like in a videogame. Businesses could also geotag deals that they are running, and you’d set your Enkin-enabled device in “deal hunter live mode” where you’d see overlays on businesses including distance and deal. The list goes on and the possibilities are great.

No kidding, the possibilities are great. Enkin has the promise of fundamentally changing location-based services. The "magic lens" metaphor is a good one, since theoretically you could select one or more frames to overlay on the world. For instance,

• if you're visiting a city as a tourist, you might select a frame that has pretagged tourist attractions
• if you're there strictly for a conference, you might instead select (or create) a custom frame with only the conference buildings
• if you're more interested in a historical tour, you could load that frame
• if you're working on infrastructure, you could see metadata on streets and bridges, or normally invisible features such as underground cables. Imagine being able to tap into a database of traffic accidents to instantly spot dangerous intersections, or being able to detect cables so that you don't snap them with your backhoe when starting a construction project.

But forget these sideshows, because the real killer app will be when you cross Enkin with a location-based social networking system like, well, Google's Jaiku.

• if you're at a conference, and you want to see where your acquaintances are, you can scan the building and look for concentrations of friends
• if you're coworking, you can find out which coffee shop has your collaborators
• if you're on campus trying to find a colleague's office, you can look through your "magic lens"

Jaiku is currently being migrated to Google App Engine and should relaunch soon. Coincidentally, the first Android phone will probably be presold from T-Mobile in September and delivered in mid-October. I expect the Jaiku relaunch will include the ability to pull data from your Android phone's GPS chip.

Mozilla Ubiquity

Although it's only at release 0.1, Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity promises to be a game-changer, and ensures that Firefox will continue to be my desktop browser for some time. One part Yubnub, one part Quicksilver, Ubiquity allows you to hit a key combination to bring up a command window where you can type abbreviated commands and get instant feedback. Some examples:

• map university of texas at austin (Brings up a Google map)
• youtube cookie monster (Displays video stills search-as-you-type, defaults to Youtube search results)
• g spinuzzi (Brings up Google search results for Spinuzzi)
• word-count (Counts number of words in your selection in the main Firefox window, or counts words that you type after the command on the command line)

The command list is fairly long, but it's also extensible, like Yubnub.

Use dollar coins

The US Mint is piloting a program in Austin to promote using the $1 coin. Great, I like dollar coins. But maybe they should start a campaign to get rid of pennies too?

Mobile phones monitor elections

Smart Mobs points to a CNN report that African observers are using mobile phones to monitor elections at the district level.

Some Android speculation: What if the killer app already exists?

AndroidGuys has some sharp speculation about how Google could leverage its considerable resources and exclusivity to help its mobile platform leapfrog Apple. Yes, it involves StreetView and more, and it threatens to obliterate the standalone GPS industry.

Jaiku upgrades?

Jaiku appears to be upgrading to Google App Engine, doubtless in preparation for the upcoming rollout. They have about seven weeks to be up and rolling by the time the first Android phone gets to consumers.

Good idea, poor execution

Obama's idea to text supporters his VP pick was a good idea, but in execution, it got scooped by the MSM.

Breathless Android coverage; phone is simply a feature

Rumors are "confirmed" that the HTC Dream, running Google's Android OS, will be sold by T-Mobile starting on my birthday (Oct 13). That's some clever niche marketing, T-Mobile. Anyway, here's what really struck me about this post: the feature list. Check out the order.

What does my 200 bucks get me?
- Touch Screen
- Full Qwerty keyboard
- 3G/ WiFi
- Full HTML internet capabilities
- Easy access to all Google applications (Gmail, Gtalk, search)
- Maps
- Street view
- You Tube
- Phone
- IM/Text
- Email
- Camera 3.0mp
- Video (playback only, no recording)
- Music player & 1GB memory card pre-loaded
- Applications, all available in Google marketplace (icon on the homescreen)

Yes, the function phone is stuck somewhere in the middle of the list. Just another feature, not nearly as important or exciting as the others. And yes, that does indicate where mobile devices are heading.

The nexus-state

David Ronfeldt and Danielle Varda write in the summer 2008 issue of RAND Review that they expect a new sort of state to emerge:

From this, we predict the emergence of the “nexus-state” — something quite different from the traditional nation-state or recent notions of an approaching market-state or network-state. The nexus-state will integrate multiple modes of governance. It will be stronger than the nation-state but also more embedded and circumscribed. It will revolve around a new kind of administration in which officials remain concerned about what is happening in their offices but become increasingly oriented by the new sensory and sectoral networks into which they are plugged.

This notion fascinates me. It's different from the network state discussed by Castells. To me, in fact, it sounds familiar:

Government and business will benefit from [pervasive information and surveillance] technology, for good and ill. Less noticed, but we think equally likely and significant, is that these tools will help spur the rise of a new social sector — distinct from the established public and private sectors — by providing networked nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations with tools not only for checking on the behavior of governments and corporations, but also for collaborating with them. We can already find evidence of these transformations in health care, integrated social services, and environmental and consumer protection.

Sure, but we are also seeing this work happening to some extent with Google, which has become very active in public policy, energy, and telecommunications. Google is a corporation, of course, but it is also functioning to some extent as an NGO and is subsidizing nonprofit projects such as Android with its earnings from its core business (and yes, those nonprofit projects are strategically key to its core business).

Check out this short and interesting article, and the rest of the issue while you're at it.

Coworking and business

NotAnMBA has a roundup of businesses and business models built around coworking.

Reading :: Discourse, Technology and Change

Discourse, Technology and Change
By Brenton Faber

I've been meaning to read this book ever since it came out, but UT's library doesn't have it. So I finally bit the bullet and ordered it via interlibrary loan. I'm glad I did. Brent is a great guy and a sharp researcher, and in this book he brings rhetorical and discourse analysis together with Latourean and Foucauldian theory to provide a strong account of technological change. The book is really quite well researched, and every chapter provides a model of how to conduct and theorize research (with one exception, about which more in a minute).

The book revolves around a case of technological change, described in Chapter 2: a small college campus, dealing with a faltering IT department, decides to outsource IT. The energetic new (corporate) director of IT recommends a unified email system, so after a search, the university partners with "a multinational computer firm" to implement a new software system pseudonomously called "WorkWare." The system includes web-based email but also a calendar and other components. But the IT director quickly realizes that he has no real leverage as he attempts to get people to migrate to WorkWare. Meanwhile, WorkWare turns out to be a beta product with some bugs that discourage migration.

Brent examines this case in a variety of ways. He examines the different emails sent out by the IT director, "Martin," and Martin's assistants. He interviews Martin after the project ends in disaster. And he looks at other documents to contextualize the case. He does all this by drawing heavily on theories involving technological change, particularly Latour's notion of assemblages and Foucault's archaeology of knowledge.

The discourse analysis in particular is interesting, since Brent ties a close reading of the email -- examining given-new structure, clausal dynamics, sentence-clause ratios -- into a sophisticated rhetorical analysis. In doing so, Brent shows us how the sorts of things discourse analysts do -- what many rhetoricians regard simple word-counting -- can result in deep insights that complement rhetorical analysis.

Those insights lead Brent to an interesting and valuable conclusion about change studies. He argues that "with the postmodern fragmentation of narratives, traditions and foundational beliefs, we do not have a systematic way of examining, critiquing, or resisting non-narrative forms/events of change" (p.154). The loss of narratives, he says, results in the loss of the classical understanding of change (p.158). Indeed, "in technocratic networks, change is not a temporal space or a moment of opportunity within the continuity of narrative and it is not tied to notions of continuity, fortune, or nature. Instead, change has become a technology and a tool, a means for achieving human agency" (p.158). Brent concludes that studies of change must examine how agency is achieved (p.159).

So this book is full of interesting insights in terms of change as well as research methodology. My only problem with it is in Chapter 5, in which Brent attempts to draw a connection between Martin's evangelical beliefs and his attempt to get people to "convert" to the new system. Brent seems to be fascinated by the fact that Martin is a real live evangelical who prays and reads the Left Behind series, and he zeroes in on the term "convert," arguing that Martin subconsciously understands his project in the same terms as Christian evangelism. He substantiates this account by pointing to similarities that Brent perceives between the two domains. However, he does not confirm this connection through triangulation:

• He doesn't perform a member check (floating the interpretation and getting Martin's feedback)
• He doesn't turn up any artifactual evidence (e.g., showing a document trail in which the project and evangelism are explicitly compared)
• He doesn't turn up evidence of this relationship in his interviews with Martin. In fact, Martin gives a crisp and perfectly sensible explanation of why he used "convert" in the emails, and that explanation does not point to evangelism; rather, it seems to be more or less how the IT industry uses the term.

Instead of triangulation, Brent relies entirely on internal consistencies that he perceives between the Christian evangelical literature and Martin's emails, not external confirmation of their tie-in. Brent even argues that Martin may not be aware of such consistencies -- such "references do not need to be intentional or even conscious" (p.121), so perhaps he didn't think it would be worthwhile to perform member checks. But that's not a good move, because without triangulation, it's easy to overdetermine the data. In other words, we are left asking: is the connection between the email project and evangelism in Martin's mind -- or Brent's?

Brent seems to sense that his analysis is vulnerable on this point, and he hedges a bit (p.123), but essentially decides that it's too good a story not to use ("much of Martin's rhetorical project at Northeastern can be better understood when articulated through this evangelical framework," p.124), so he drops the hedge later and simply asserts the connection as fact ("Martin used intertextual references to ideological discourses (evangelical Christianity)," p.125; see also p.126). I don't really understand how Brent moves from his initial hedge to his later certainty; I have a hard time believing that Martin thinks of evangelism every time he buys converted rice, gets his catalytic converter serviced, converts Fahrenheit to Centigrade, buys an AC-to-DC converter, or sees a conversion kit for a Honda, any more than Brent thinks of Foucault whenever his power goes out.

In any case, this is a weak spot in an otherwise strong book. Brent is producing some of the best work to come out of professional communication. If you get a chance, check it out.

Android SDK is out; Android phone gets FCC approval; is all forgiven?

Google has gone through a rough patch with Android. Developers have been angry that the SDK has not been updated in a while. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal and others have speculated that Android phones will not come out in the fourth quarter as promised.

Now we hear two big pieces of news on consecutive days. First, we hear that the FCC has approved HTC's new Android device, code named "Dream." Then Google announces the latest SDK is available to all.

Will developers, who were excited about the platform but discouraged by the SDK delays and the threat of late hardware, forgive everything? And is the Dream still going to be launched on my birthday?

Qualitative data analysis on the cheap

SAGE Publications is advertising a new book called Doing Qualitative Research Using Your Computer: A Practical Guide by Chris Hahn. The idea behind it is that you can do qualitative data analysis on the cheap, using familiar tools such as Microsoft Office:

Doing Qualitative Research Using Your Computer is a practical, hands-on guide to using commonly available everyday technology, including Microsoft software, to manage and streamline research projects.

The author discusses using Word, Excel, Access, and so forth to perform these analyses. This is a great idea. Cheryl Geisler did something similar in Analyzing Streams of Language, although that one was more narrowly focused on text analysis.

Me, I'm currently using HyperResearch, but I managed my data for Network entirely in a MySQL database with an open source front end. Honestly, I'm not sure whether HyperResearch adds significant value for me. I do know that it's entirely possible to conduct solid qualitative data analysis with commonly accessible tools, though. Will have to check this book out soon.

We were cyborgs before we were human

That's the implication of this article, which claims that the invention of cooking stimulated a big leap in human cognition. From the original article:

For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.

To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism.

The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature.

The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.

The extra calories may not have come from more food, but rather from the emergence of pre-historic "Iron Chefs;" the first hearths also arose about 200,000 years ago.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning.

To put it another way, our ancestors found a way to pre-digest food outside the body. Biologically, we only have one stomach; prosthetically, we have two. And the authors tentatively suggest that this shift is what allowed us to develop more complex cognition:

Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and burn 20-25 percent of their calories running their brains. For comparison, other vertebrate brains use as little as 2 percent of the animal's caloric intake.

Does this mean renewing our subscriptions to Bon Appetit will make our brains more efficient? No, but we probably should avoid diving into the raw food movement. Devoted followers end up, said Khaitovich, "with very severe health problems."

The raw food movement and other health food movements tend to focus on "natural" foods and diets. But if we were cyborgs before we were human, does the idea of a "natural" diet even make sense? Second question: is there anything more natural to human beings than a good cookbook?

Riding the Torch

"Riding the Torch" is a novella by Norman Spinrad. The premise is that humanity has destroyed the Earth via nuclear war, and centuries later, humanity's remnants are still traveling in a convoy in search of another world to inhabit. Eventually, the realization sinks in that Earth was unique; there are no other worlds that can reasonably support life, there is no other life in the universe except humanity.

I think of that novella from time to time, particularly today, when I read that according to computer models, solar systems like ours are rare:

The researchers ran more than a hundred simulations, and the results show that the average planetary system's origin was full of violence and drama but that the formation of something like our solar system required conditions to be "just right."
...

The simulations suggest that an average planetary system's origin is extremely dramatic. The gas disk that gives birth to the planets also pushes them mercilessly toward the central star, where they crowd together or are engulfed. Among the growing planets, there is cut-throat competition for gas, a chaotic process that produces a rich variety of planet masses.

Also, as the planets approach each other, they frequently lock into dynamical resonances that drive the orbits of all participants to be increasingly elongated. Such a gravitational embrace often results in a slingshot encounter that flings the planets elsewhere in the system; occasionally, one is ejected into deep space. Despite its best efforts to kill its offspring, the gas disk eventually is consumed and dissipates, and a young planetary system emerges.

Now don't you feel special?

Reading :: Mobile Communication and Society

Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective
By Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Araba Sey

Mobile communication -- specifically mobile phones and pagers -- is impacting work, leisure, and public participation globally. But the implementations are so different in different countries -- due to differences in culture, society, regulatory and legal environments, economic conditions, technologies, infrastructures, and other factors -- that it's hard to summarize the impact of mobile communication or make predictions about new arguments. To better get their arms around these changes, the authors survey mobile communications globally. This book is framed as a strictly analytical account of the current state of mobile communication across the globe: "What we intend to do in this book is to construct an empirically grounded argument on the social logic embedded in wireless communication, and on the shaping of this logic by users and uses in various cultural and institutional contexts -- an argument whose analytical value should stand by itself" (p.4, italics in original).

It's a huge project, but a timely one. As the authors note, "Wireless communication networks are diffusing around the world faster than any other communication technology to date" (p.1). And as they diffuse, they change possibilities across multiple activities. How can these be generalized? The authors approach the task systematically, by analyzing extant empirical studies, but with the caveat that this sector is changing so rapidly that any conclusions are transitional.

First, the authors study the diffusion of wireless communication, looking at factors such as subscriber growth and penetration rate. They note, as others have, than in many ways we in the US are a mobile communications backwater: The US has encountered relatively slow mobile growth, partially because universal service obligations slowed AT&T's efforts in mobile (p.14). In contrast, the Philippines have very high penetration rates, partially because of low prepaid mobile prices (70-90% of phones are prepaid). "The Philippines is reportedly the world's highest texting nation, with the average user sending over 2,000 messages a year" (p.25), while "Japan, on its own, has consistently had wireless-phone Internet access levels exceeding those of North America and all of Europe" (p.25). The US, on the other hand, leads in wifi deployment (p.27) and has the highest penetration of laptop computers (p.28), suggesting that wifi deployment and laptop adoption have retarded adoption of the wireless web here. Surprisingly, two-way pagers were also going strong in the US as late as 2002 (p.60). Elsewhere, such as East Africa, prepaid mobile cards have begun to be used as currency (p.62) -- the gold standard has been replaced by the minute standard.

Interestingly, mobile technologies have increased quotidian, mutual surveillance. One example is caller ID, which was once a security feature but is now used to identify undesirable calls (p.120). Other examples include parents' surveillance of their children by calling them and demanding their whereabouts or by tracking them with GPS (p.120). In Hong Kong, caller ID helps sex workers to separate business and personal lives (p.122), while in South China mobile phones help sex workers to evade police and maintain customers (p.122).

In terms of family, the authors assert that

communication technologies materially allow the post-patriarchal family to survive as a network of bonded individuals, in need of both autonomy and support at the same time. As people rebuild and extend their lives along their networks, they bring with them into these networks, and into their networking devices, their values, perceptions, and fears. (p.126)

The authors are specifically interested in youth culture: their hypothesis is that

there is a youth culture that finds in mobile communication an adequate form of expression and reinforcement. Technologies, all technologies, diffuse only to the extent that they resonate with pre-existing social structures and cultural values. However, once a powerful technology is adopted by a given culture because it fits into its pattern, the technology grows and embraces an ever-greater proportion of its group of reference, in this case young people. (p.127)

Tentatively, the authors assert that a mobile youth culture is emerging with the following characteristics:

• The management of autonomy vis a vis security. The older population needs the emotional support of the young, while keeping them economically dependent. Youth feel autonomous early (partially because of mobile technologies), but need economic security until relatively late in their development (the parents pay for those mobile technologies). (p.143)
• The construction of a peer group through networked sociability. These break "the organizational and spatial boundaries of relationships" and are instead "based on choice and affinity" (p.144)
• The emergence of collective identity. Youth cultures develop codes of social recognition. (p.144)
  
• The strengthening of individual identity. Youth culture prizes personalization. (p.144)
  
• Consumerism is an important dimension of the culture. Consumption is one avenue of personalization, but patterns of consumption and valuation are "modeled in patterns of signs that constitute a fashion" (p.145)

The authors also note that, as with computer technologies, we are in a transitional phase in which the youth teach their elders about these technologies, something that erodes the patriarchal model and impacts education (p.151).

Moving along, the authors argue that in mobile communication, "the space of the interaction is defined entirely within the flows of communication" (p.172); thus "places are individualized and networked along the specific networks of individual practices" (p.174). One characteristic of the networked society, "timeless time," is enhanced by mobile technologies: "The availability of wireless communication makes it possible to saturate time with social practice by inserting communication into all the moments when other practices cannot be conducted, such as the 'in-between' time during transportation, in a waiting line ... or simply during free time" (p.174). (Timeless time -- though not under that name -- should be familiar to anyone who has read David Allen's Getting Things Done.)

The authors go on to examine several incidents in which mobile technologies enable loose, lightly coordinated political action. (No wonder the Russians, when invading Georgia, bombed cell phone towers.)

Finally, the authors conclude by discussing some of the characteristics of the mobile network society. Just a few of their points are:

• Relentless connectivity. Connectivity, not mobile communications per se, is "the key feature in the practice of mobile connectivity" (p.248).
  
• Instant communities of practice. The authors note "the emergence of unplanned, largely spontaneous communities of practice in instant time, by transforming an initiative to do something together into a message that is responded to from multiple sources by convergent wills in order to share the practice" (p.249). This description reminds me of Engestrom's recent discussions of knotworking and mycorrhizae.
• Users are the producers of content and services. If you've read Clay Shirky or others in this vein, you have an idea of what the authors mean.

Overall, a terrific book for anyone who is struggling to understand mobile technologies and their impact on work, leisure, and education. I've only scratched the surface in this review. What impresses me is that the authors deliver on what they promised: They stick to a principled, relatively rigorous analysis based on empirical research. I'm going to return to this book often, I think, as I work through the issues of mobile communications.

Twellow

Twellow is a mashup that makes Twitter more like LinkedIn.

Twellow is an automatically generated directory of Twitter users, organized by occupation. It offers to help users quickly ramp up productive use of the popular microblogging service by finding people with common interests. New features were unveiled on the service today that will make it even more useful.

Obama will announce VP via text message. Smart idea?

Yes, but that's because of the implementation, not just the technology.

Last night, in a cell phone text message that was quickly followed by an e-mail linking back to a new page on his Web site -- my.barackobama.com/vp -- aides to Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) campaign wrote: "Barack will announce his VP candidate choice through txt message between now & the Conv. Tell everyone to text VP to 62262 to be the first to know! Please forward."

As Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu, and Sey note in Mobile Communication and Society, Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi send 13 million "personal" text messages to cell phones on the eve of regional elections on June 12-13, 2004. In other words, he spammed people's cell phones. The text messages backfired, annoying many people, and "Berlusconi lost the regional elections by a larger margin than anticipated." The authors hasten to add that "although it cannot be proved that the cell-phone incident aggravated the defeat, as many observers claim, we can say at the very least that in this case wireless communication did not help the successful reception of the message sent" (p.211).

Why not? "Berlusconi did not understand that the key to the success of the Spanish messages [grassroots messages sent about the Spanish election a few weeks before] in prompting mobilization was that people received them from someone they knew, from the address book of someone who had their name, not from a central register obtained from some company" (p.211).

Notice the last part of the Obama text message quoted above: "Please forward." The strategy is to send the text message to those who have opted in, and have them send messages to others who they know.

Of course, the moment the text messages are sent to those who have opted in, they will be forwarded to Twitter. That's part of the plan, since those who use Twitter are following friends and acquaintances. Whether you find out by text, Twitter, Facebook status message, FriendFeed, etc., it'll be from someone you know and someone who has established a relationship and social capital with you. Smart.