Rigid vs Elastic Web

I woke up this Saturday morning to the chatting on Twitter about Instagram and other popular (entertainment, sharing, productivity) services being down. A major server went down in one area of the US due to a storm, and that took out a number of sites (or at least diminished the performance of those sites) with it. You even had folks like Forbes talking about it:

The Extinction of Being Platform Agnostic

I was just sitting here thinking about the week’s computing news, Google I/O Conference’s Nexus 7, Nexus Q, and Project Glass’s demo/developer availability ($1500, not bad). I thought about earlier news, Microsoft releasing the Surface tablets, the killing of Windows Phone 7’s upgradability to Windows 8, and the continued positive impressions from those spending more time with Windows 8 and the Metro UI. And then there is Apple with iOS 6, thinner and sharper-screened laptops (don’t ask about upgrading those), and refinements in the operational aspects of the company that keep them trucking. You know, there is almost nothing major to note of those initiatives that are not vertically integrated like these. I mean yea, you’ve got your Kickstarter projects (Pebble, Tricorder Project, etc.), but largely speaking, if you aren’t in any of the major computing nations, you might as well not even exist.

The Shift As Commented

Saw this via Twitter over at GigaOm. This is indeed the reality of the digital space we’ve cultivated, now the players are reforming themselves towards the consequences we did or didn’t want to solve outselves:

…Silicon Valley titans Apple, Facebook and Google have recently revealed the first part of an operational business shift. Declining growth rates, reduced social networking engagement and receding confidence from Wall Street and global brands like GM have led these companies to rethink their ‘walled garden’ approach. The Big 3 can no longer continue to solely focus on honing their existing products and competencies in order to monetize their offerings, specifically in the arena of mobile.

Recent product introductions and acquisitions reflect a shift to a ‘city state’ model: a brand-contained mobile monetization chain where all components are either developed or acquired by the brand, or resources are shared with as few partners as possible. For consumers, this approach solidifies brand preference by offering more seamless search-and-sale experiences. For Apple, Facebook and Google, vertical integration facilitates greater engineering alignment and compatibility, veils intellectual property of code and cell phone design, and protects the relationship data derived from countless search-and-sales executions…

Read the rest of the comment at GigaOm; the other comments and host article are worth a thinking cap moment too.

A History of Prose, Slightly Formatted

Given some events this week, I’ve been given some extra time to learn a few things new. One of those new(ish) items on my plate has been to explore a bit more the use of TiddlyWiki for my personal use. After stumbling upon a working PAMP server for my Nokia N8, I next got to work relearning TiddlyWiki and how I could best utilize it as a notebook. What’s been most interesting so far is that I’m finding that there are pieces of my life that I’ve not done the best job of keeping organized. At this moment, that happens to be my collections of poetry. Besides stumbling onto the fact that I’ve really got a lot written, that much of it is in a document format that isn’t usable on most devices without a MS Word viewer is pretty discouraging.

Comment/Post at The Mobile Perspective about Apple’s Passbook and It Mobile Opportunity

The other day my good friend Jeb posted an article at his website (The Mobile Perspective) talking about Apple’s Passbook being the next big thing for mobile payments and mobile wallets. I took a slightly different perspective to Apple’s play (comments and actions from Jobs’ leading my thinking) and wrote what became a post alongside his there. Nice to have two perspectives happen like that. If mobile payments is your space, what are your thoughts on this and other activities in is space?

Presentation from 2012 Biola Digital Ministry Conference

Earlier this week in the Carnival of the Mobilists, I pointed to my presentation from the 2012 Biola Digital Ministry Conference that I attended a few weeks ago. The video of that presentation (Making Ministry Websites Mobile) went up and that was something that I also wanted to share.

Making Ministry Websites Mobile – Slides | Sketchnote:PDF, JPG

Feedback is always welcome; as are questions/comments. My work in this space sits at Mobile Ministry Magazine (usually); but you never know where else I might pop up 😉

Carnival of the Mobilists No 274

Keeping up with the major stories in mobile is the job of mainstream and larger niche publications. Keeping up with off-shoots on those stories, as well as notable smaller points that sometimes gets missed by those larger sites is what the Carnival of the Mobilists serves towards. The Carnival of the Mobilists (CoM, @themobilists) is a weekly collection of writings from around the web speaking on whatever was notable in the past week in mobile technology. This can take the form of posts, interviews, and even the occasional video blog. In addition, each week sees the CoM hosted on a different website. This week, its my turn, and I’m sure that the collection of posts will not only get you thinking a bit more critically about mobile, but will also provoke you to contribute your piece for a future CoM.

With that said, let’s get into the contributions that made it into this week’s collection.

Is the Internet An Unfinished Demo

These are the kinds of reads that I like on Sundays (a day I set aside to read deeper and find those thoughts which are challenging). This was found on Saturday, but still fits my flow. Am hoping that my second and third reads push my md even further.

The aim of this paper is to look at the deficiencies of the current Internet architecture, consider a deeper understanding on why the current architecture is failing to provide solutions and contrast the traditional beliefs on networking with new ones, coming from a network architecture based on the fundamentals. First, we briefly introduce the early history of packet-switched networking to provide the reader with background for the discussion that follows. We highlight the main issues that the current Internet faces and expose the architectural decisions that lead to these problems. Next, we present RINA (Recursive InterNetwork Architecture), a network architecture based on fundamentals among which is that networking is interprocess communication and only IPC. We show the fundamental principles from which RINA is derived, the core elements of the architecture and give a simple example of communication. The adoption of RINA as the architecture for the future networks would enable enhanced security, inherent support for quality of service, mobility, multi-homing, offer new market opportunities and decrease the complexity of the current technology by an order of magnitude.

Is the Internet An Unfinished Demo (PDF), via @martingeddis on Twitter

Enjoying CoM 273 at Tego Interactive

Always a delight seeing the weekly Carnival of the Mobilists, a collection of mobile-focused writings around the web usually including insight, interviews, and perspectives that sometimes are missed in more mainstream conversations. This week, the 273rd CoM is being hosted at Tego Interactive, and probably is a bit more the mosaic of mobile than in times past. Having already dug into a few of these, I can say that you will definitely be challenged to think more holistically about mobile, and perhaps add your perspective to the voices.

Check out the Carnival of the Mobilists at Tego Interactive.

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

“…That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new…”

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars/

Am not even through this (long piece) and its right. Besides inventing my future, I also need to call to t carpet those before who never moved forward towards what was dreamt, or what their actions prevented.

When ifttt Meets Mobile You Get on{X}

Found this late in the night when I should have been letting my body stay with the east coast time zone. Pretty neat actually, its basically ifttt being grafted onto a mobile device directly. The beta project is called on{X} and is essentially a means of automating actions on your smartphone using recipies. This is the kind og smartness that mobiles need to have by default right now.

Now, Microsoft, put this out there for every Windows Phone device you’ve ever made. Making this Android-only speaks to something too easy about doing this for Android that should be much easier for your people to do with Windows Phone, IE, web workers, etc. Otherwise, this is very nice. ifttt – you didn’t go mobile first, now you must respond.

Reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, My Smartphone is A Near-Robot

While on my way to the Biola Digital Ministry Conference, I finally started reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. So far, am finding it more or less a perspective on technology and relationships that sits nearer to my generation and modes of thinking that many other reads. A few things got to me as I read thru the many chapers on robots and our associations to them. In a fair amount of respects, what I’ve been wanting from my smarpthone/PDA/feature phone/calculator has been for it to be a robot. This opened a door I wasn’t expecting.