Category — Fun

The UK’s Guardian newspaper ran an interesting photo gallery last week showing mobile phone masts ‘dressed’ up as trees. For a while it seemed these might catch on as increasing numbers of people complained about the appearance of ‘ugly’ metal masts in their neighbourhoods. While inner-city masts can be hidden, in the country there are fewer options. Disguising them as trees is a favourite.

More images and descriptions on the Guardian website gallery here.

After months – maybe years - of badgering by good friend Erik Hersman (he of White African fame), late last December I finally moved my blog over to WordPress. I actually began blogging in February 2006, but started with a plain-old HTML page on the kiwanja website. Shortly after I moved over to Blogger before finally seeing the light and moving to the king of blogging platforms. (Erik – you were right). 

It’s been great seeing the readership grow, and with a neat calendar year of invigorated blogging behind me I thought it would be fun to throw together a list of the top twelve most read posts of 2009. These posts are the most read, rather than most popular (usually measured by number of comments, Tweets, etc):

1. Bones for mobile phones (1466 reads)
2. Anthropologists! Anthropologists! (946 reads)
3. A mobile database that brings it all together (806 reads)

4. The making of an SMS icon (727 reads)
5. The Million Dollar Homepage (639 reads)
6. Dispelling the myth? (603 reads)

7. Time to eat our own dog food? (564 reads)
8. Mapping medicine availability via SMS (547 reads)
9. FrontlineSMS: Now with Forms (540 reads)

10. Step inside the laptop bank (538 reads)
11. Grameen’s AppLab comes of age (533 reads)
12. Radios. Batteries. Solar. Implications (529 reads)

And three personal favourites which didn’t make it to the list:

13. “Inappropriate” appropriate technology?
14. Why does this picture trouble me?
15. A glimpse inside social mobile’s long tail

Interesting that three of the top six posts are anthropology-related (as is one of my favourites). Anyway, happy new-year-blogging to everyone! Thanks for reading. Here’s to 2010!

Standing proud, but with only each other for company, I spotted these on my way home earlier today.

It got me wondering the last time I used a public post box, or a payphone. Or how many children today have ever used one? How times – and “technologies” – change.

Eleven days and 8,500 miles ago I stepped on a plane to Washington DC (I’m about to do a final 3,500-odd miles back to London). It’s been a hectic but very productive few days.

To kick things off, I spent a couple of days with the Institute for Reproductive Health helping them design a prototype “standard days method” texting service using FrontlineSMS. It was exciting and interesting work, and I’m looking forward to following their future progress.

The following day saw me speak to around 150 leaders from Latin America who had gathered for a workshop at George Washington University. It was the first time I’d spoken to an exclusively foreign audience accompanied by a live translator, but at least I now know my jokes translate well. Next I headed to the west coast and spent the weekend working with an interesting bunch of computer scientists who had gathered at Berkeley. You can read my thoughts and reflections on that in a blog post here.

After spending a couple of extra days catching up in Palo Alto and San Francisco (one of my favourite places for taking photos, incidentally), I headed back to Washington DC to speak about innovation on a panel at the UN Youth Assembly. It was the first time I’d been to the UN, let alone spoke, and it looked and felt exactly as I’d expected (see photo, above). It was a great experience, and after the short talk I was totally cleaned out of \o/ badges by the delegates.

Today saw a final – and slightly random – parting event when I featured on the BBC “Test Match Special” cricket website, which had earlier in the day been discussing the demise of Tophill Joe, a championship breeding sheep. The image (below) comes from an earlier tweet of mine in the week when I saw what can only be described as a “niche” publication in a bookshop in Palo Alto, California.

It was a nice way to end a fun and productive – if not tiring – eleven days on the road and in the air. Next stop Cambridge, i.e. home.

The San Francisco Bay Area. Open your eyes to a world of [photo] opportunities…

More images on kiwanja’s Flickr pages. Mobile-related images are available in the Mobile Gallery.

Some of the best ideas are so incredibly simple that, after-the-event, we’re all left wondering why we never came up with them. When I first heard of The Million Dollar Homepage back in October 2005, that’s precisely how I felt (like millions of others, no doubt).

Alex Tew was a student trying to figure out how to pay his way through university. Short of money and short of socks, he scrawled “How can I become a millionaire?” on a notepad and, twenty minutes later, The Million Dollar Homepage was born. The concept was simple – create a website and charge people a dollar-a-pixel to place an image on a grid a thousand pixels wide by a thousand high. ‘Selling’ all million pixels – if he could pull it off – would net him a cool one million dollars.

Launched towards the end of August 2005 the idea was so novel, quirky and brilliant, the least I felt I could do was part with a little of my own hard-earned cash and buy up a few in a show of support. At that time the site was far from full, and it was still unclear whether or not all the space was going to sell. Today, the completed image is something of an internet icon.

Around the same time Alex was raking in the dollars, I was putting together the final touches of a little project of my own. Somewhere in those million pixels you’ll find a couple of hundred dedicated to FrontlineSMS (no prizes, but see if you can spot them). Like Alex, I had no idea back then whether my idea was going to get any serious traction.

Looking back, neither of us needed worry.

All great journalists immediately put you at ease. Clark Boyd, someone I’ve been extremely fortunate to have spoken to on a number of occasions, is one of them. Interviews feel more like chats over cups of coffee in the dentists waiting room than recorded interviews set to go out over the airways in the US (and beyond).

Clark recently got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in giving a little careers advice – not to him but to people interested in mobile, technology, Africa and so on. Never one to turn down the opportunity, we recently sat down for coffee at my village dentist and chatted over coffee. Since these are the kinds of questions I regularly get asked by students and others interested in my work, it seemed sensible to re-post it. So, here you go. Apologies for Clark’s choice of picture. The original post is here.

Ken Banks: Cell Phones on the Frontlines

I’ve done stories on a number of Ken’s efforts in the past few years. The one that really grabbed my attention is a project Ken’s been working on called FrontlineSMS. So, for this Wide Angle Podcast, I begin by asking Ken to describe FrontlineSMS in his own words:

(Picture comes courtesy of Ken’s friend, another guy with a cool tech job, Erik Hersman)

Running social mobile tools through the global branding machine might not seem like an obvious thing to do, but done right it can lead to some surprising – and unexpected – results. This is our story.

“Branding was the last thing on our minds. It was October 2007 and we were knee-deep building out the alpha version of the revamped FrontlineSMS. I’d just taken a phone call from Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), a global branding giant with the likes of Nokia, Nike and Google on their books. Renny Gleeson – W+K’s Creative Director – had stumbled into what we were doing via our Social Mobile Group and wanted to see if they could get involved. I’ll never forget the first five words he said to me (they sadly can’t be repeated here).

We were still evaluating tenders from a range of web design companies in the Bay Area, but Renny was insistent that the job of building the FrontlineSMS website and brand had their name written all over it. It turns out he was right.

I never expected in my wildest dreams to end up working with some of the most talented brand experts in their field. If we’d gone our own route then our logo would likely have ended up as a picture of a mobile phone with the words “FrontlineSMS” underneath (this accurately describes our first effort, although it did help as a starting point for the W+K team). Early ideas – straight off the bat – looked like this.

It was a fascinating and evolving process, and one which eventually lead to a short list of keywords which we felt best described what lay at the heart of the software. One stood out – one which not only happened to be central to the early FrontlineSMS thinking, but one which came through strongly time after time in email messages from the growing community of users. And that word?

Empowerment.

Empowerment is hugely personal and emotive. It’s also something often expressed physically, and how to graphically represent this ‘physical expression of empowerment’ became a key theme as the logo continued to evolve. The neat concept of a ‘textable logo’ was also beginning to emerge, something which was to later prove something of a masterstroke.

According to Kelly Wright, a member of the W+K team:

We collectively focused in on the ‘textable logo’ concept because it spoke to the FrontlineSMS technology, and being purely visual, could be language independent.  The challenge then became how to convey ‘empowerment’ through this pared down form

The ‘\o/’ form had history, as Renny learned when he first shot the concept through to me on Skype.  Check it out for yourself – it’s a Skype emoticon shortcut, and when we saw what it generated, we were both sold on the unexpected – but hilarious – additional layer of meaning.

Renny had this to say about the overall design experience:

Ken built FrontlineSMS out of love, faith in human potential, and an inspired application of mobile technology.  And you can feel it when you talk and work with him.  At W+K, while we have the privilege to work day in and day out on some pretty impressive brands, the chance to help craft the visual language and web experience for Ken’s creation was uplifting.  From our first conversation with Ken, W+K has felt like a part of the extended FrontlineSMS family

And talking of family, something else very interesting has been happening. Something quite unexpected.

Today, as the FrontlineSMS software finds its way into more and more pairs of hands – currently 2,452 and counting – users have started sending in pictures of themselves, their teams and their community members replicating the FrontlineSMS logo, just like the ones above. I’m not quite sure what this means, but perhaps it’s yet another sign that we’ve been able to take engagement and ownership to an entirely new level.

A few of the earlier (staged) photos are available on Flickr, including this one by Erik Hersman, below, which has become something of a “poster shot” for the icons phenomenon.

Branding social mobile tools is a relatively new concept – there is no manual, after all. Many people are still learning on their feet – us included – and what has happened here is just one of the many reasons why we, and others, are finding this space so exciting to work in.”

“Few companies innovate with the intensity and frequency of those working in mobile, and today’s present is a future that only a handful of people would have predicted just a few short years ago. While most of us happily soak up rampant innovation as mere consumers, a handful of people in the hallowed corridors of mobile R&D labs are already working on the next big thing – the phones we’ll be carrying around in our back pockets in 2012 and beyond”

Check out my latest PC World column for a few off-beat, random, fun thoughts on the future of mobile.