This is a Chumby (the thing with the screen, not the coffee cup). And, out of the box, it doesn’t do a hell of a lot. OK, it does come with a clock/radio and – this is the important bit – a wireless internet connection.

The internet connection gives you access to an ever increasing range of Flash-based widgets that you can use to add extra functions to your Chumby. Using the touch-screen or squeeze-sensor, you can view photos on Flickr, the latest news from Digg or your day ahead on Google Calendar – and in future, who knows what else. Of course if that was all, it wouldn’t be that interesting (widgets are not exactly new news).

The really interesting thing is that Chumby is completely open source. The people behind it have released software and hardware developers’ kits and are actively encouraging users to hack, mod and generally pimp their creation.

Essentially, if you have the skills, you can do what you want. Write new widgets. Tear out the innards and install them elsewhere (the teletubbie is particularly scary). Or literally re-skin the unit (in leopardskin if you like).

This commitment to co-creation and open source thinking is so smart. The engagement that Chumby is receiving through their blog, forums and development wiki is priceless. They will end up with a better product with more interesting features and a committed community of users who get the chance to showcase their own skills through the product.

While the open source approach is becoming more widespread, it is still the exception rather than the rule. But it is the future – for tech companies, for customers and for agencies. Personally, I can’t wait.

Sources: TechCrunch, psfk, Christine.net

This year, Banner is once again involved in Byte Night, the IT industry’s annual sleep out in aid of young homeless people in the UK. The event involves people from many leading IT companies sleeping out for a night to raise money for NCH, the children’s charity.

The date for this year’s Byte Night is Friday 22nd September and will probably coincide with the first Autumnal storm/frost/blizzard (ok, maybe not blizzard).

We have a team sleeping out and would love any additional sponsors to help Byte Night reach its target of £300,000. You can donate online. Thanks.

OK, so it’s not exactly new. GPS has been helping people discover where they are, where they are going and where they made a wrong turn for some time. But really, that was just the start.

For one thing, GPS has now emerged from the car/boat, got way smaller and become portable. I run most days (hard to believe if you know what I look like) and use a Garmin Forerunner to tell me how fast I’m going (not fast enough), how far (not far enough) and how many calories I’ve burnt (just enough for a guilt-free breakfast). It wasn’t so long ago I was reliant on a piece of string, a map and a stopwatch to plan and track my runs (BTW check out MapMyRun for a nice Google Maps-based app for working out your run in advance).

Earlier this week, Flickr announced its new (non-GPS) geotagging feature. This allows you to tag a photo with its location (using a mash up with Yahoo Maps). On their blog, they say they expected to hit a million geotagged photos in the first month. They actually hit 1.2m in the first 24 hours. Of course, geotagging relies on the user telling Flickr where the photo was taken (which, admittedly, is pretty easy). But what if it was simpler than that?

Which brings me back to GPS.

Earlier this month, Sony announced the GPS-CS1.

This is basically a clip-on GPS receiver for photographers. Attach it to your belt and it’ll record where you go on your photography trips. Then, when you upload photos from your camera, you can sync them with data from the GPS unit and, using a Google Maps-based app, show when and precisely where you took each photo. Very clever indeed. (And this is just the start – with Flickr releasing the API for their geotagging, expect to see some interesting hacks in the very near future. Also check out Zoomr for a photo sharing site that already uses geotagging and which might be the natural extension of the Sony system.)

For us in marketing, GPS-based activity is an intriguing prospect. This could be (as is already happening) digital bus-sides showing contextual messages based on location. Or it could be around facilitating user communities – find others like you, near you. It could be around geocaching-style treasure hunts or a whole host of things no one has thought of yet.

This could get very interesting.

At the risk of confirming the widespread suspicions that (a) anyone into technology is a Star Wars obsessed geek and (b) people in advertising have too much time on their hands, if you’ve got a Apple laptop you have to check out MacSaber.

Like many new laptops, Macs have a bunch of motion sensors in them. It’s these that recognise when you’ve managed to elbow your machine off your desk and which brace its innards for impact. But of course where there’s a sensor, there’s input. And this can be used to trigger other events. This is precisely what the geniuses behind MacSaber have used to turn their Macs into something far, far more interesting.

Thanks to Chee in our interactive team for pointing me to this one (and opening the door to more childish fun than a man my age has any right to).

For the curious (and those without Apple laptops) see the MacSaber in action below.

Normal service will resume shortly.

Singapore will have wall-to-wall WiFi by the end of the year. No more looking for a friendly Starbucks or trying to leech off an unprotected wireless router, simply boot and go (well that’s the plan). This initiative is part of a wider effort (the Intelligent Nation programme) which extends into many government services and which is looking to line Singapore up with the world’s tech elite nations.

Now, all they need is a subscription music service and some WiFi-enabled players.

Source: news.com

The choice for digital music fans has got wider again with the announcement by new entrant SpiralFrog that it will begin a free (ie ad-supported) music download service that will give users access to Vivendi’s Universal Music Group’s catalogue (if you are in North America that is). Universal is backing the new start-up and, as the world’s largest music company, should be able to offer a reasonable selection. And the magic word ‘free’ never hurts.

This is, of course, just the latest attempt to challenge iTunes’ dominance in the (legal) download market. But for me, it kind of misses the point.

The future isn’t about downloading. Sorry, it just isn’t. The sooner iTunes wannabes work that out, the better.

Rather than seeing the future as a version of the online music store (even if the products are free), a more interesting metaphor is the jukebox. Fast connections, widespread WiFi, bountiful cheap storage - it all adds up to the mother of all jukeboxes.

It’s not so difficult to picture the future scenario. I have a WiFi/WiMax/3G enabled player (at home, in the car, in my pocket) and a subscription account with an iTunes-like on-demand service. Then I simply pick and choose what to stream as my mood takes me. It’s not rocket surgery.

Some services (eg Rhapsody) are already heading off in this direction. What’s currently lacking is uniform WiFi coverage (although in many countries, 3G appears to offer an interesting option). Once that’s in place, why would I want to download music (free or otherwise)?

Sources: Reuters, BBC, Jupiter and a whole bunch of others.

UPDATE: take a look at MP3tunes for something a little more interesting.

Any brand who’s name enters the language has to have got something right. Of course, Google has got a whole bunch of things right again and again. It now seems a very long time ago that I’d regularly change my search loyalties as the next big thing came along. And media agencies the world over have scrambled to get their Google accreditation.

It appears at times that Google is an unstoppable force. As much as there’s been the occasional backlash, it often seems more sour grapes than anything else. And while Yahoo and MSN are significant forces (as well as others in other geographies) the argument tends to be around how many X million results you get in under a second. That and generic ‘gateway to the Internet’ or news portal positionings.

But most people never get past the first page of results. This fact alone keeps SEO consultancies in business. And with paid for results creeping into organics, user sceptisim will only grow.

So what does an alternative look like?

Well, social bookmarking seems to provide a good starting point. A search on del.icio.us tends to turn up more interesting results than traditional search (and without the obligatory ebay ads claiming you can ‘Find “your search term” on ebay’ even when you plainly can’t). Likewise StumbleUpon delivers up relevant results that aren’t the same old, same old. And newer hybrid tagged search + traditional search (see Wink whose new version should be out this week) may hold a longer term solution.

The key here is trust. People trust people (more than they trust brands and corporations). We are social creatures, far more interested in what other people are bookmarking than what paid search encourages us to look at. It’ll get interesting if and when the likes of Myspace forget deals with the Googles of the world and focus on tagged search. I’d lay money on community members having more faith in what other members recommend than what even positively regarded brands such as Google serve up. Until then, the vast majority of us will keep on Googling.

You can now tell precisely how nuclear your Mac is getting with the Temperature Monitor widget. A quick F12 tells you exactly how hot your battery is (mine is 32 degrees centigrade as I type). In fact it’ll take readings from a whole bunch of temperature sensors on your Mac.

Now if only it would do some kind of James Bond style countdown when your battery hits critical so you could get to a safe distance…

Another day, another work:life study.

According to some research for headhunters Korn/Ferry International, 80% of executives are always connected to their work – whether through mobiles, PDAs, laptops or whatever. And 77% of these believe that the technology behind all this enhances their work:life balance. The study covered 2,300 executives in 75 countries (which when you do the maths is just over 30 per country – so not the most robust sample ever).

Sadly I don’t have the breakdowns per country but our experience at Banner has shown that these attitudes vary radically by geography. In research we’ve done over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a vast range of results from enthusiasm in the US and UK through to outright rejection of the idea in Germany (and Italians simply find the devices too ugly to contemplate).

In a related piece of news, Rutgers University has questioned whether employers may be legally liable for their employees’ crackberry addictions. Gayle Porter, associate professor of management at Rutgers has been working on a study that examines the impact of this technology on workers’ lives and which looks at the employer’s responsibilities for protecting them. A flavour:

“There are costs attached to excessive work due to technology,” says Porter. “Information and communication technology (ICT) addiction has been treated by policy makers as a kind of elephant in the room – everyone sees it, but no one wants to acknowledge it directly. Owing to vested interests of the employers and the ICT industry, signs of possible addiction – excess use of ICT and related stress illnesses – are often ignored.”

On a basic level, I’d question whether this is some kind of jumbling of cause and effect – the employee works too much so it must be the technology that’s causing it. Porter goes on:

“Employers rightfully provide programs to help workers with chemical or substance addictions…Addiction to technology can be equally damaging to the mental health of the worker.”

Are employees really addicted to the technology? I’m not so sure. They may be addicted to the experience of being in control. They may covet the feeling of elevated self-esteem (look Ma, I’ve made it, I’ve got a BlackBerry!). But equating this with a substance addiction feels wrong-headed.

Over the years, I’ve sat behind the glass of many focus groups and have talked to the kinds of people both these studies are referring to. For the most part, they are not the air-punching go-getters of the first study, nor the hopeless addicts of the second. They are by and large pragmatic people who use the technology at hand (quite literally) to navigate the world around them. They often see using these devices as a way of using dead time better, getting out of the office earlier, seeing more of their kids.

Of course there are some toxic companies who are happy to overwork their employees. And yes, crackberries (of all makes) are one more way of doing this. But the symptom is not the cause.

Work:life balance, I believe, is largely a fallacy. It sets up a way of thinking that’s at odds with how many of us in information work experience our days. Work is life. Likewise, life is work. Today, it’s less about balancing and more about blending. Progressive companies realise this and hand over the tools for employees to blend it the best they can.

I’m writing this at home on a Saturday night. But the same technology allows me to take my daughter to school at least once a week, it means I can respond to my team when they need me and, of course, I can always find the off button.

Good night.

Sources: Reuters, Rutgers (via CrunchGear)

Microsoft announced on Friday that it’s launching versions of Windows and Office in the Incan language in Bolivia. This promises to help close the digital divide between the 2.5 million Quenchan speakers (about a third of the population) and the better supported Spanish speakers in the country.

If we are to see technology as a force for good (which personally I do) then opening up access is fundamental to success. This is an area where open source has promised so much (and delivered reasonably well all things considered). Because users have access to the code, they can tweak it for specialist use and port it into new languages (if they have the skills themselves of course).

But, of course, Microsoft’s software isn’t cheap. This was highlighted in a quote from Bolivia’s Foreign Minister, David Choquehuanca:

“We congratulate Microsoft for having facilitated the use of computers in our own languages, but we have to advance toward systems that are more open because we still have to pay a license fee (to use the software) to Microsoft.”

Bolivia is not a rich country. It’s some $6b in debt. Almost two thirds of the population live beneath the poverty line. And the Quencha are  among the poorest groups. Given these factors, paying out for expensive licenses (even if they are in your native language) is unlikely to be an option.
You have to applaud Microsoft’s initiative. Its software is still the dominant force in business and giving minority groups access to it can only help improve their opportunities. All we need now is a free developing world edition that delivers enough functionality to make a difference without bankrupting the user in the process.
Source: Reuters