Travel Blog

via adoyle on #geo Verizon is opening its network to allow any device that passes ‘qualifications’ to be allowed on the Verizon cellular network. The concept was best summarized by Dick Lynch, Verizon Wireless’ CTO:

“If someone has the technical capability of building something in their basement on a breadboard … have at it,”

This is really exciting, and smart for Verizon to go the way of, well, the internet. You don’t have to be using “approved” hardware to go onto the ‘net. You just have to match certain protocols. Albeit Verizon will probably be a little more strict, but then again they are just the first. They build the network, you bring the concepts.

Of course, you have to wonder how they’ll charge when devices show up that don’t have a concept of “minutes of talk time”. From the PC World article: “Officials declined to discuss pricing details, only saying prices would be “competitive.” More pricing details should be available after a developers conference early next year, they said.”

Now I’ll have a much better justification to pick up that Cellular Quad Band Module with GPS and onboard Python interpreter.

Amazon released their digital book reader today, Kindle. It’s an ebook reader built using the same eInk technology found in Sony’s eReader - and also sports SD memory slot, EV-DO data access, and a keyboard.

I, like many others, have wanted the ubiquitousness of digital books in the same way that the iPod ‘revolutionized’ the music industry and made it easy and common to carry your entire audio collection in your pocket. Digital books aren’t new, I’ve read entire series of books on my old iPaq using Microsoft’s Digital Library and really enjoyed the experience.

It seems rather humorous that Amazon named a “book replacement” after something you burn. Are they implying a Fahrenheit 451 future? To its credit, Amazon used Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age” in the initial screenshots of Kindle - implying a utopic vision of digital literature access.

Another funny comment was the beginning of Amazon press release:

“Why are books the last bastion of analog?” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asked an audience at New York’s W Hotel in Union Square as he unveiled Amazon Kindle, the online-retail giant’s new electronic book reader.

Probably because so far, book publishers have felt justified charging full, hardback pricing for what is an entirely ephemeral medium. Why should anyone want to pay $20 for a digital book? Apple was one of the first to identify, and more importantly strong-arm the labels, into the pricing sweet-point of $0.99 for a song. Cheap enough for consumers to find it a better value than scouring music sharing applications and services.

Books are priced at $9.99, still more expensive than a mass-market book, but perhaps an expected pricing, commensurate with the price of an audio Album. Newspapers are about $9.99 / month, and magazines a reasonable $1.99 / month. However the licensing isn’t clear (can I resell my digital books when I’ve finished them?) iTunes tracks aren’t, so I would assume books aren’t either.

The demo video says Kindle has access to “hundreds of blogs”. Aren’t there actually millions of blogs? Assumedly they are only providing access to a select number of blogs with quality content. Also surprising is that you have to pay a monthly fee of approximately $1.99 each (some more, some less) to access these blogs. Are they sharing that revenue back to the blog owners?

It does have built-in access to Wikipedia. But will I be able to add access to my own portals, perhaps via an API? You can send PRC, Mobi, Word or Text documents, but what about PDF’s? Also, there is a small fee, 10¢, for “converting” these documents.

A couple of really additional good looking things about the Kindle. The screen refresh looks quicker than the first generation Sony eReader. The wireless EV-DO access if free, assumedly covered as a percentage of your purchases, but you don’t have to directly pay for it.

Overall, Amazon’s Kindle does look rather compelling. Wireless access is especially powerful for accessing online information and easily downloading information from wherever you are. Perhaps a death-toll to Airport book stores? The price of books is probably reasonable and cheaper than the physical version.

Surprisingly, Amazon didn’t play up the environmental benefits of buying digital books instead of large amounts of paper and glossy magazines or newspapers. This could have a huge impact on consumer paper usage and waste and should probably get some more attention. Of course, it does mean “yet another device” to add to your bag.

Mapstraction, the mapping abstraction library (write once, use any map provider) recently added increased support for OpenLayers, the very powerful, open-source Javascript mapping library. With this support Mapstraction users can now easily use the open-source OpenLayers API that is free from potentially restricting terms of service, or even use in offline and intranet applications.

You can see a demo of OpenLayers here or grab the latest revision here (r163 as of this posting).

This effort was headed up by Henri Bergius (aka Bergie), of Midgard fame, and now Mapstraction-OpenLayers will be supported in the Midgard CMS. Read more on Bergie’s blog.

In addition, by default the Mapstraction-OpenLayers creation uses the OpenStreetMap tiles, therefore no longer requiring a Google Maps API key just to use OSM in Mapstraction.

Why wrap one wrapper in another?

At conferences and get togethers, the devs and users of Mapstraction and OpenLayers frequently ask the question “What’s the difference between Mapstraction and OpenLayers?”

The primary distinction between the libraries is a difference in objective. Mapstraction seeks to provide a simple wrapper to meet the primary needs of a mapping user. The purpose being to make it easy for a user to read a single API and then easily switch to any of the major providers. By contrast, OpenLayers provides a very powerful, but potentially complex, interface that allows for bringing in content from OGC services, data feeds, overlays, and tile servers.

With Mapstraction generally targeting the ‘lowest-common denominator’ of all the API’s there isn’t built-in support for the additional capabilities of OpenLayers for layers, drawing, and services. However, Mapstraction goes provide a simple mechanism for gaining access to the underlying mapping provider such that a developer can utilize Mapstraction for the 80% of their development, and then access the remaining 20% provider specific capabilities directly.

All you need to do is call getMap() on the Mapstraction object to get the underlying OpenLayers object and go to town.

With this new support, it now brings Mapstraction up to 9 supported map interfaces (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Map24, MultiMap, MapQuest, FreeEarth, OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap). If you are a map provider and would like to find out how to be the 10th provider feel free to email the dev team - mapstraction@lists.mapstraction.com.

I live in the MidWest, specifically South-East Michigan. For four years I lived in a sleepy small town in the Commutershed of Metro Detroit. What this means is that there is little to no “Geek Community”. For years (decades?) the Metro Detroit area has seen a brain-drain of its brightest to sunnier (or at least better connected and funded) climes such as San Francisco & Boston. Almost anyone interested in technology is usually either locked up within a big corporation (or somehow affiliated with such), or has just left. The remaining live in the star of South-East Michigan, Ann Arbor. Did you that 4 of the Google Management team went to the University of Michigan - including Larry Page?

I moved to Ann Arbor in March and have since found a really great, if small, tech/entrepreneur community in the town. I’ve been wondering why there aren’t more tech groups, communities, hack-sessions, and whatnot. There are some, but they’re disjointed - and typically focused solely/primarily on ‘enterprise’ more than ‘cutting-edge’. Therefore, I was excited when initial talk came up around having a BarCamp in Ann Arbor.

However, when the actual details of ArbCamp were announced, things immediately seemed odd. $15 admission fee and a $50 keynote speaker, and only 9-4 schedule. There was immediate discussion within the community about the appropriateness of a keynote speaker and hefty fee for a BarCamp styled/themed/named event. From my perspective this is exactly what I’ve felt is wrong with the South-East Michigan Tech area. It has a lot of potential, interest, and energy, but is very quickly (and sometimes subtly) wrapped in corporate shroud, commercialized, officialized, and repackaged to appeal to suits - and at the expense of the truly innovative tech community.

I’ve been to several BarCamps, all of which have been incredible (if hot, stuffy) and free. I’ve also been to FooCamp, from which BarCamp itself derived its name, but retained the concept. The concept is terrific and given the option between attending a professionally run conference and a BarCamp (assuming both free/low-cost) I would take the BarCamp.

Where am I going with this?

My point - besides a small rant - is that I still think its great a small group of people have taken the initiative effort to put together a community event and tried to garner interest. I am still going to attend and have encouraged others to do so too - and do our best to ensure it truly is an open, interesting, innovative, collaborative, provocative event. And I’m also trying to get people to go out after the ‘official’ event ends at 4PM (and the expensive, book-toting keynote speaker begins) and continue the geekage.

However, I think the entire debacle brings up the question of how to ensure community-driven brands maintain their level of quality and expectation. How does the ‘BarCamp’ community make sure that events that use the BarCamp resources, concepts, and good name follow the general tenants that the community prescribes (and no, that does not mean making everyone happy, the loudest are not the majority). The same holds true of other community standards. What would happen if there was a Microformats+, or GeoRSS 2.0 (ok, there is that, but just a confusion caused by Yahoo documentation).

There isn’t really legal recourse - and I really hope it wouldn’t have to be that. The community probably doesn’t actually hold trademark (though in some cases they do, like OSM I believe). Is it just public ranting? Black-ball by the community? Counter-action?

I’m not sure. I don’t think there have been a large number of challenges to these brands yet - but there probably will be in the future. Forking of communities, and not code.

I really do want the local community to succeed. However I think the suits, and geeks, need to really look at what the underlying problem is and why there is a such a brain/talent drain to the coasts. And no, its not because you’re missing some key ‘Java training course’.