20/04/2008 by nicola.

Some interesting points on a TED talk by Yochai Benkler - Open Source Economics

Information produced traditionally - market based or government owned. Enter 2002, lots of publicity surrounding commercial supercomputing e.g. IBM - but lesser known, 4.5 million users contributing to sharing resources to power a supercomputer for NASA to analyse data coming from radio telescopes. Information not less capital intensive or even less expensive but difference in way capital is distributed. With a computer information production, knowledge and exchange is in the hands of up to a billion users, (how about phones with 3 billion ?)

Free or opensource software (e.g. LAMP - Linux (operating system), Apache (webserver), MySQL (Database), PHP (server-side script), visible because its measurable - many examples now across the web. How is relevance as well as content produced - e.g. Open Directory project has 60,000 volunteers - no one owns, free to use, output of sociological & psychological motivations to do something good, Wikipedia another example.

Wireless - traditionally owned by one person, had to be licensed or based on property, now people can own wifi devices with sharing protocol to allow people to build their own network, when they are not using, resources can be used across the network.

So no longer just market based or centralised or decentralised production, emergence of social sharing and exchange but now is having major economic impact - no centralised authority, open to everyone to innovate, now takes less time because tasks are spread amongst larger user/contributor base. Acting as a new form of competition - making inroads into or taking traditional market shares, new opportunities for people to create tools and software, building platforms as a model.

BUT - it is threatened by current commercial infrastructure with IP issues etc. I am interested in this, because I was about to launch a personal project creating an open source mobile application - a week ago, now I’m still no further on in answering questions from a previous post about mobile phones, application development as a way out of poverty. So I guess, the only answer for now is to go ahead - try and create the app and see what distribution issues I run into along the way.

Based on everything I understand about open source models - via some great info from Harold Jarche’s blog and Ajit’s models from Open Gardens, which have referred to in a previous post. Is it producing an economic shift or revolution and if so, what are current market competitors doing about it ? Another question to add to the ever growing pile - if anyone has an answers, would love to hear from you?

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20/04/2008 by nicola.

From Pocketnet - an article explaining Samsung’s mobile phone that is powered by a fuel cell that uses water. Interesting alternative to solar power, but no indication on pricing as yet. Great idea though.

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