~A year ago I released my first Sci-Fi novel under a Creative Commons license. Five emails and a few short weeks later I had an international distribution deal with Amazon.com and 12k downloads a month. Online creators are increasingly co-opting existing brands, creating massive opportunity for multiplatform content for pre-established audiences. The Roo'd Challenge combines the two and lets anyone submit derivitive scripts for any platform and vote up the ones they like best. The winners get prize money - and access to predefined contracts with major media producers.
Status: Currently seeking sponsors unaffiliated with media production as well as panel judges.
The SEED/BED project takes an Airstream trailer - an icon of American luxury and mobility - and recreates it as a vehicle of sustainability. The SEED will tour the US, videoblogging conversations about sustainability with high profile and ordinary people together. On its return, the SEED is placed on a rooftop in New York - the BED - which is converted into a green roof and vertical farming community for the betterment of the entire building.
Status: In discussion with NYC Renewable Energy Dept.
The Millenials (people born after 1980) are coming - and they don't work the way you do. Hacking Work aims to prove it, and more importantly to define what we can all do about it to combine the best of the new with the best of the old. A series of several hundred conversations between randomly paired Boomers and Millenials, electronically mediated and analyzed, Hacking Work is a book on where employment is going, where it needs to go, and what we need to know to get there.
Status: Research is almost concluded, and the Hacking Work Council's first meeting is pending next month.
A single application platform with an open API/SDK for the top Telco's in Africa, covering 30 countries and roughly 250 million people. But more than supporting organically generated solutions to localized, situational, and cultural needs, MMV provides free training for its applications, creating a virtuous cycle of education and employment.
Status: In development, with our first workshops slated for December in Johannesberg.
It's all too easy to make a website to test out a concept, and increasingly the best way to see if an idea will stick is to try it out. A few friends of mine and I are arranging for a team of web developers in India to produce a website a week using existing frameworks, like Ruby on Rails. Each of us gets to submit an idea a month, and if an idea takes off we simply bud out a separate team to pursue it to profitability.
Status: Looking for capable team manager in Argentina, India, or other highly educated, very cheap country.
Past Projects
A Vending Machine for Crows
Beware of conversations started at cocktail parties. That's what started this idea, which took hold of my brain almost ten years ago. What makes this project so wild is that it has such a high chance of success - in working on it I've conferred with many of the world's leading experts on Corvids (the family crows belong to), and they're all confident it'll work - it's just a matter of how long it will take the birds to learn it. Aside from the potential for gathering enormous amounts of lost coins, the device is that it would be a great way to test intelligence in different bird populations as there is no human intervention to pollute the test. We've done initial tests in Ithaca and are deploying an iteration at a zoo in NY state, so stay tuned!
Hey, I wrote a sci-fi novel and released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Even cooler, it was chosen for release for the eBook reader for the iPhone - the first modern novel released for the platform, and the second available after Tarzan. Woot!
Sugarcandy allows people to custom tailor their mobile SMS-based communications to their own needs - it was based off an earlier project experimenting w/ SMS networks. We offer the ability to SMS in ad-hoc mobile chat groups and send and receive SMS messages via a web interface. We also offer a simple RSS-based API to allow users to make their own Sugarcandy-based mobile tools. The software was designed to allow new mobile apps to be built upon the Sugarcandy mobile infrastructure.
A good example is Casablanca - a big mobile game about figuring out who to trust and who not to. Players are secretly assigned teams and must use their wits - and their mobile phones - to figure each other out. Casablanca was awarded a grant from mtvU and Cisco and has been extraordinarily well received - check it out!
Conferences, Radio, and TV Engagements
I've been privileged to speak at conferences like TED, BIF, Gadgetoff, and the SBC Smartphones conference as well as at businesses such as TechnoPol, Johns Hopkins and Nokia.
The Sundance Channel has interviewed me, as well as La Monde, and I've done pieces on NPR and other radio shows. If there's something I know about that you'd like me to wax lyrical on let me know.
Komposite's Wearable Computing Fashion Show
This project grew out of a desire to present wearable and mobile technologies in a truly public-facing light to increase the exposure of current research and development efforts. Having worked with wearable computing for the last six years, I knew that the time was right for an actual Fashion Show at the premier wearables conference itself. Through the assistance of Dr. Bruce Thomas and others at the ISWC (International Symposium for Wearable Computers) we were able to obtain funding, equipment, and time from many talented companies and individuals in presenting the Komposite Wearable Computing Fashion Show. From the results we think it made quite a splash, being reported by Wired Magazine, MSNBC, The Associated Press, and many others. The materials generated (video, slides, documentation, and flash pieces) have since been made available to educational institutions the world over.
The Upstate Medical Center of New York's Remote MD Program
This complete project demo was one of the first of its kind in the medical community. Incorporating redundant networks, it allowed an MD to communicate with an EMT remotely to provide support in an emergency situation through collaborative imagery. The system uses a redundant network architecture and web-based UI. The actual hardware used Java on a laptop with a mobile computer camera for the demo, with more ruggedized hardware scheduled for the second stage demo. Both demos fed to a web client for the MD with a Java applet for interaction.
A friend of mine calls me an efficiency pervert, and I guess it's a little bit true. My wife's a professional organizer, so together we made a site that enabled us to track everything we own. The basic premise is that having both quantitative and qualitative metadata about your things allows you to more closely examine your relationship to those things. It's been our experience that this maximizes the quality and lowers the quantity of your stuff (and thus reduces the time, expense, and attention that stuff demands.) Right now this seems daunting as we've had to enter in everything by hand, but as RFID technology gets more pervasive this sort of examination is going to become available to everyone - whether we like it or not.
This is a concept piece myself and three others put together on how a mesh-networked assemblage of mobile devices could preserve privacy and intelligently assign permissions to all the media created about you. Mesh networking is already becoming a reality, and mobile devices are steadily becoming more ubiquitous. As they do, the need to be able to dynamically (and automatically) have privacy preserved is only going to grow.
Everyone knows the old legend about Einstein having a closet full of matching suits. The guy figured out relativity, quantum theory, and the atomic bomb. I'm not much for bombs, but I figured that the matching clothes might be something to try.
This is a fun one - a hoodie that pulses mini-LEDs in the hood in tune to your music. This proof-of-concept was for an ITP winter show and folks loved it. It's 100% geek bling, but we had *lots* of kids asking when they could buy one and what colors it came in.
AT&T has been my cell phone provider for years, and for the most part they haven't given me any problems. I work a lot with the telcos and their customers, though, and know that most people hate them. At one point AT&T started giving me the runaround and I decided to find out what it would take to get justice. The results were completely satisfying, but also phenomenally time-intensive to achieve. Want to know how to whip your telco into shape? Read on.
The King County Library System suffered from an unusual conundrum; the computers they provided were being used the majority of the time by those accessing functions other than the library catalog, and yet the majority of users had catalog access as their first goal. Their existing research indicated that mobile technology might be a good solution, presenting a convenient way for users to access the catalog while wandering the library on the wireless LAN. It would also provide a solid platform for future mobile applications (wayfinding, remote access, etc.) However, their first priority was to test the waters. This Proof of Concept (POC) was designed to do just that, leveraging their existing technologies through XSL transformations to present their existing catalog on small form factor devices, such as PDAs. (Note that this site is designed for said devices, and will look silly when viewed through your regular computer's web browser).
I had the good fortune to run into Mark at Cliqk when he was first starting out. He had the idea of deploying a media center and file server along with any high-end components (stereo, plasma TVs, sound systems, home-automation controls, etc.) his clients needed and wanted a way to access them remotely for updates, maintenance, and content delivery. I talked him into including a firewall and designed a system to use dynamic DNS, internal/external VPN access (for clients to access their media and automation controls from handheld devices or remotely), and wireless subnet bridging with bandwidth throttling. He's since grown the company substantially and done some amazing projects. Nice to see things take off!
While I was in Iceland recently I discovered that none of the coffee shops in my area were offering 802.11 access. The catch is that Icelandic ISPs are currently charging substantial fees if you use more than one gigabyte of transatlantic traffic per month. So I set up a firewall/router that throttled all such traffic by 1000ms. The owner (and subscribers, if she wants to add them) VPN over the WLAN to get unthrottled (and secured) access. By using M0n0wall I kept all the configurations on a separate, write-protected disk and run the firewall without a hard drive. The result is a very quiet, secure, inexpensive box which the owner can simply power off / on at the first sign of trouble. Even if it were compromised by a hacker their changes would disappear on reboot, making for a very worry-free solution!
The Backdoor Delivery Project
Given that I live in NYC, it's easy to have anything delivered, which can mean a lot of saved time. But that time becomes a cost if you have to wait around a three hour window during which the delivery might come - I'm talking to you, UPS. So I rigged up an automatic webcam and electronic lock to allow me to be home whenever the deliveries came. Virtually.
Projects!!
