Spring Design Challenge from Mozilla
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
Mozilla Labs – the ideas and inspiration space for all things Firefox (…and many other things too) are having a Spring burst of inventive madness. Or rather, they’re looking to you for ideas.
Today we’re announcing the first of a series of Design Challenges as part of the Mozilla Lab’s Concept Series. We’re inviting design-focused students from around the world to develop new ideas & prototypes for the future of the Web.
Mozilla are looking for twenty students from around the world who are prepared to answer the following question…
What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.
This first Design Challenge is looking to accept and mentor twenty students from around the world, with that cohort mentoring the next round of participants in order to ‘scale the design effort’.
Mozilla Labs will take the best and help deliver interactive prototypes.
Get your pencils and notepads…or paper napkins ready – the submission for initial ideas is March 1st 2009. You can read more detail on the Spring Design Challenge 2009 here.
Change your idea into a reality – change the world with web concepts. Good luck!
You can find the Third Sector Web home page here.
Qt – a small, well formed browser
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
The new version of the Q t web browser has a executable footprint of only 4MB, with support for Japanese. Korean and Chinese languages added to its features, along with the ability to disable Flash and Quicktime etc., if required.
Being so small it will run from a CD or a USB memory stick, which is very useful for mobile workers who use remote machines but do not want to interact with existing settings.
Users can turn on private browsing and instigate a full reset after using the browser too. The customisable interface allows users to see how programs and web sites look under different versions of Windows and Unix.
Users can also undock the navigation and bookmark bars, putting them on your desktop if you wish. See the Q t web browser screen shot pages for illustrations.
Small, light and fast – Q t is also Open Source software, based upon Nokia’s Qt framework and Apple’s Webkit rendering engine.
To install and run Q t on a CD or USB use the ‘stand-alone executable’ from the Q t download page.
You can see the Third Sector Web home page here.
A history of the internet…
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.
This is a very elegant visual storyline about the background of technical developments that have given us the internet we have today.
This is a superb piece – taking months to create.
Clear explanations of a complex phenomenon. What the best knowledge transfer should be.
You can visit the Third Sector Web home page here.
Not technology – but heart felt
If you have spent time on the Northern Line at 5.45pm on a Friday, or rushed to get the 158 to BlackHorse Road and had to wait for the next one in the rain because it was full – this set of images from IanVisits will touch a nerve.
They remind us a bit of the city as a film set for one of those science fiction movies.
Entitled Abandoned London – we just had to share them.
Sometimes empty can be good?
IanVisits profile and portfolio is available from Flickr.
You can visit the Third Sector Web home page here.
Open Source – defining education?
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
The US ‘free education for all’ blog - Open Education – has recently been featuring a debate on how Open Source software will impact upon education in the coming century.
A key feature of a recent blog article was the work of futurist Mark Pesce at The Human Network. In essence Pesce believes that educational access to the web and information technologies should be unfettered. The mantra derived from the work and how it should impact on education might be stated as ‘…capture everything, share everything, open everything’.
The Open Education position is based upon a global argument for the ‘…potential of a shared and connected, opensource educational environment‘. Whilst this position is argued for FE or HE educatonal sectors, or their US equivalents, we feel that there is a model also emerging that is relevant to other education institutions, community information access and business development and knowledge sharing.
Pesce argues that the bottleneck to such expansion and realisation of potential, unlike the generation of so much ‘mental waste’ is the management of fear and control issues. Breaking free into a fully ‘open’ environment is key to closing the distance between learners in the classroom and the real world. The world of the mediated imagination, jobs and practical, effective relationships.
The Open Education piece cites Moodle as a good example of how educational institutions can build flexibility and expansion into their dialgue with learners.
Pesce argues that you must go further to achieve potential – that the argument is not so much technical as cultural. Pesce mentions recent e-culture surveys about how young people access information and each other in the e-environment. You can download one such survey from our sister site – http://www.smithmartinpartnership.com/downloads/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf
Pesce argues that open means ‘… open, fully open – thus filtering must be eliminated’. Whilst not sure that we fully agree with the extension of this argument, we do think there is much to be done with existing information frameworks and transmission systems that can be done to effect change.
We are currently working with clients and technology partners to help busy schools, children centres and other community settings to transform their existing print outputs into strong web output and broadcast media. Key to the process is encouraging everyone to take part in the feed back and collaborative response mechanisms we are building into our publication processes.
Our broadcast creative matrix
Does fear and control stop you reaching your full organisational potential? Is education a limited or limiting experience in your view? Let us know what you think!
Is it possible for a web company to fluidly integrate such ‘traditional’ media strands into a new paradigm?
You can find the Third Sector Web home page here.
Apple reaches 25th birthday
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
Apple reaches a quarter of a century of design, development and product innovation. The video above is the original Apple Mac advertisement from 1984. Not a keyboard in sight.
We have traditionally argued that we cleave to a PC based work environment because so many of our clients use Microsoft and Windows products.
Recent debate in the office has made us realise how redundant this argument is now. Macs have synchronicity with Windows and clearly, in our creative output as a business, being Mac based would be no drawback to efficiency.
We are rethinking our position this year as we review our technology needs for 2009.
Apple continue to be news makers, perhaps too strongly for their iPod and iPhone creations, whereas their core computing experience clearly and quietly goes from strength to strength. You seem not to hear such a debate about the failings of Mac OS, as opposed to WIndows Vista’s faltering or the hype surrounding the forthcoming Windows 7.
Apple as a company continue to be cutting edge, despite their principals being in their 50′s. (We think there’s still hope then for small outfits like Thirdsectorweb, where our team contribution is generated by practitioners from their early twenties to their fifties too).
Wired Magazine have recently published a great timeline review of Apple product history. There’s also a great graphic of the timeline too. Worth checking out if you are interested in seeing a great visual capture of Mac history.
You can find the latest Mac products on the Apple pages here.
You can find the Wired Magazine article here.
Our Third Sector Web home page is here.
What the future holds…the bigger picture
The Edge Foundation holds an annual intellectual fest to draw from contributors ideas and visions for the future of science and technology.
You can see this years review here – World Question Centre: What will Change Everything.
The first concept we were struck by was that of the Malthusian Information Famine, a premise put forward by Charles Seife, Professor of Journalism at NYU.
His argument is that digital media, its availability and pervasiveness, has begun to change humanity and its relationship with information. For centuries we have laboured under a lack of information to stimulate true human potential. Within a generation or two we will now move to a state where we have a deluge.
A consequence of this, Seife argues, is that ‘noise will drown out signal’.
With over one hundred million blogs, including the one you are reading, and some several hundred million emails, much of which may be spam, as ‘…information grows exponentially…useful information grows only linearly’.
We will eventually, according to Seife, be engulfed by our own ‘mental refuse’.
A couple of comments. First, this mental ‘waste mountain’ can be seen as a luxurious by-product of technology rich, industrialised societies.
For those of us deep in web and communication technology, so cheaply delivered, this may be true, but the old technology divide’ has yet to be crossed by the bulk of human society.
(We have written before on the importance of One Laptop per Child and the need for its success as a program, to stimulate the very electronic potential described by Professor Seife).
Second, the potential to harness so much information perversely brings back the old argument about the difference between information and knowledge.
The current debate in Europe about ‘super databases’ and the ‘total knowledge’ of a society and its members held by an all-knowing government are also exposed as specious by the Malthusian Information Famine.
To capture all information is not the same as turning it into useful knowledge. In the very vastness of the snared data may lie our own protection.
When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge. (Confucius (551 BC – 479 BC), The Confucian Analects)
You can see the Wikipedia page for Thomas Malthus here.
This post was created by Tim Smith – a partner at SmithMartin LLP.
Storage device image by craigPJ.
You can find the Third Sector Web home page here.
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