As I've written before, the cell phone is the computer for majority of world's people. Google's new set of SMS services for Africa follows this idea in an interesting way:

...mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes Google Trader, a SMS-based “marketplace” application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs.

This brings my earlier "solving the logistics of mamona" post to mind.

Now, how about making maemo support SMS? That would be another step to turning our tablets into universal communicators.

Technorati Tags: google, maemo, africa, sms

Workstreaming means collecting activities of geographically dispersed team members into a consistent news feed, enabling managers to track process and colleagues to stay up-to-date with the day-by-day happenings. As maemo.org is a distributed project worked on by a group of both volunteers and paid employees, some sort of activity monitoring is quite necessary.

For a while this has been done in wiki pages, but since that is not very flexible or connected, better ways have been discussed. The current approach being tested is workstreaming via a Qaiku channel:

Qaiku is a conversation-oriented microblogging service that suits workstreaming quite well:

• It has both a web view and a mobile view, meaning you can workstream on-the-go
• Channels support means activity log entries don't need to "spam" normal microblogging contacts with workstreams
• Private channels means you can track workstreams of confidential projects too
• API and RSS feeds enable us to integrate the workstreaming feed to the wiki pages or where ever we want to
• Separation of comments and actual activity log entries make it easy to discuss things related to the activities

In near future there will also be support for additional machine-readable "Qaiku Data" (like hour amounts, bug numbers, whatever). This is inspired by the Twitter Data initiative, but keeps the data separate from actual message contents to keep Qaiku human-readable. Once that is done, we could possibly build some more workstreaming-oriented UI for this on maemo.org.

So, if you're doing anything on maemo.org, sign up on Qaiku and start posting your updates!

Technorati Tags: microblogging, qaiku, workstreaming

Bugzilla isn't really the best place for contributing and discussing new ideas for a software project. Like Ubuntu and openSUSE before us, the Maemo community now also has a better tool for this: Maemo Brainstorm.

Maemo Brainstorm, developed as part of our efforts to the April 09 Sprint is a new web service that follows the model of Drupal's IdeaTorrent, but with a particular Maemo flavor.

Users can propose new ideas:

Users can also comment and propose solutions for ideas:

The ideas then enter "Sandbox", from where moderators can put them through the Brainstorm workflow:

After voting, popular ideas may then be chosen to be implemented by a team of moderators.

In addition to normal IdeaTorrent-like functionality as described in the Task page on Maemo Wiki, there are some adaptations for the maemo.org environment, including:

• Posting popular or implemented ideas will give Karma to the user (and posting duplicates will take it away)
• Promoting and demoting solutions, or commenting an idea will give Karma to the user
• The system follows the new Maemo visual style everywhere
• Users and permissions are managed using normal Midgard groups system

Some work is still being done on Brainstorm, including a dedicated search for this area of the site. In the meanwhile, please go and submit your favorite ideas, and vote for the ideas others have submitted. You can also follow the categories you're interested in via their RSS feeds, or the progress of your own ideas via the Dashboard.

And be sure to report any issues or ideas you have about Brainstorm itself!

Technorati Tags: brainstorm, maemo, midgard, moderation, ideatorrent

In our various GeoClue presentations we've been arguing that location comes in many flavors, of which GPS is only one. In many cases cell tower position or even WiFi connection can provide quite "good enough" location. On Mozilla Hacks they write about an OpenStreetMap-based browser location demo. I'd say the results are quite convincing:

This is just a gentle reminder to allow other location sources that just GPS. By using GeoClue you get that for free.

Technorati Tags: firefox, geoclue, openstreetmap

Some very interesting developments in desktop wiki land: Tomboy, the popular note-taking application for GNOME and OS X now supports web synchronization.

The developers of Tomboy have launched Snowy, a web service that allows you to synchronize and access your notes online. As the API is documented, I decided to add support for it in Midgard too. This way the Tomboy notes will become regular objects in the content repository.

At the moment there is only the sync service, provided as a component for the MidCOM3 MVC framework. However, a web user interface will also be coming soon. Here's how synchronization with Midgard looks like:

In addition to Tomboy, the Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend also showed new advances in mobile Midgard2 land: We launched a Midgardized version of Conboy, the maemo port of Tomboy. Both Midgard2 and Conboy were also built for Fremantle and tested on a developer preview machine. Very promising!

With the Midgard storage back-end Conboy will gain all the regular benefits of using a content repository:

• The data format is immediately scriptable with any language that there are Midgard2 bindings for
• Midgard's MVC framework makes it very easy to build web interfaces for managing and sharing the contents
• D-Bus signals are automatically fired for all changes to the content, allowing multiple applications to work on the data and still stay up-to-date with what is happening
• Contents can be stored to SQLite, MySQL, or any other backend libgda supports
• All content benefits from a set of standardized metadata

While there are plans to add web synchronization to next release of Conboy, the Midgard version will also be able to synchronize via XMPP in true peer-to-peer fashion.

Technorati Tags: midgard

I've got no information on the validity of the claimed Harmattan screenshots that are floating around, but anyway wanted to comment on a part of it:

Having your today's meetings on a map would be really cool.

This is something I've wanted to do with OpenPSA ever since the days I spent motorcycling around office districts of Helsinki giving Midgard demos. I'd often have only 15 minutes to move from one presentation to another, and at that pace figuring out the locations was a pain in the ass.

Geocoding meeting and TODO item locations would be a problem, but if that was solved this would be a killer feature. Maybe something we could do with GeoClue and libchamplain?

Technorati Tags: maemo

GUADEC will be arranged this year together with aKademy as the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit on July 3rd - 11th. The event will be an excellent opportunity to learn about some new technologies for the Linux desktop:

• GeoClue and libchamplain presentation (Sunday morning):
  GeoClue is the position information service, and libchamplain is a very nice Clutter map widget. Together they provide a powerful framework for making the Linux desktop location-aware. We will present the projects together with Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, the guy behind libchamplain and Empathy's location-sharing features
• Midgard2: Content repository for desktop and the web (Tuesday afternoon):
  Midgard2 is a generic content repository that enables you to develop mobile, desktop and web applications that synchronize their data together using D-Bus and XMPP. It can be used anywhere from Maemo handhelds to proper data centers.

I will probably also have to defend my title in the Ice Cream Deathmatch. See you there!

Technorati Tags: geoclue, gnome, midgard, libchamplain

After the long wait, Midgard2 was today released to the world. This marks a big change in the scope of what Midgard is. Instead of building a CMS, we've built a generic content repository that can be utilized in web, mobile and desktop applications.

As MDK wrote when announcing the Objective-C bindings for Midgard:

...it provides an objectified view to the data and services surrounding it. At the basic level it abstracts the database access (SQLite, MySql, PostgreSQL) but this is only where it all starts. Serialization & replication, managing own storage objects, multi-process access to data are all covered. The fully object-oriented (GObject-oriented) API allows you to focus on the data, not the database syntax.

For many desktop software developers, database technologies belong to where they belong — the web alone. This is not necessarily true. As the software & services en masse move to the web, the need to integrate the cloud with the desktop becomes indispensable.

This is indeed a big step for our project, as suddenly Midgard moves from the realm of PHP-only web development to the area where Midgard applications can be written for mobile devices, replicating their data with a social web app.

As Piotras is fond of saying: You could write Drupal on top of Midgard, but you couldn't write Midgard on top of Drupal.

Learn more about Midgard2 via the Eight best Midgard2 posts.

The first stable release of Midgard2 coincides with the 10th anniversary of the project, to be held in Helsinki, Finland next week. Come and join the celebration!

Technorati Tags: midgard

FON is a shared WiFi service. Couple of years ago they gave their routers for free in Finland, and since then I've been sharing my home connection with other FON users. And occasionally I've even roamed using FON connectivity provided by other users, using Devicescape to log my Internet Tablet automatically to the network.

Now FON has released Fonera 2.0, which can support OLPC's mesh networking technology. This means that the FON routers can share each other's connection so not each of them has to have a direct connection to some ISP. Also it means that peer-to-peer connections within the mesh network can happen directly, bypassing the wider internet completely.

If mesh networking became popular, it could provide an important part of a free software -compatible cloud:

• Mesh network for internet connection sharing and direct connectivity between users
• XMPP and Telepathy for enabling peer-to-peer collaboration in applications
• Content repositories for replicating data between application instances and users

Meraki is another WiFi access point provider that supports mesh networking.

Via Boing Boing.

Technorati Tags: mesh, p2p, fon

CloudAve reviews the CrunchPad browsing device, and concludes that these days, a single computer is just not enough for all our needs:

A tablet for lazy surfing, a netbook for travel, an iPhone for when we don’t even want to carry that much, a full laptop for everyday work, and even a full desktop as the multimedia workhorse: at these price levels we may very well have 5-6 or purpose-designed computers, situational devices. Pick up one, continue on the other as you move around – the switch should be seamless, our computing experience is becoming to device-independent.

While the idea of a universal communicator is appealing, the multi-device situation is more practical. However, pick up one, continue on the other is still more wishful thinking than reality. Even if you keep all your data and applications in the cloud, you still face the issue of having to find and open the various browser tabs when you switch devices.

Mozilla Weave is a browser synchronization tool for the upcoming Firefox 3.5 that will hopefully help here, at least on all computers where you can install a browser:

Weave Sync, a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop, and mobile phone can all work together. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs.

Having solved this, we still face the problem is that cloud locks your data behind proprietary software run in data centers of multinational corporations. While data portability and standardization slowly help giving users control of their own content, the better free software response would be relying on data synchronization and peer-to-peer connections.

Via Internet Tablet Talk.

Technorati Tags: crunchpad, dataportability, midgard, weave, synchronization