in which the lack of an open hardware ecosystem for hobbyists and experimenters is described and bemoaned; radical ideas espous'd; and a solution to the world's mobile woes is consider'd.
we were active for about 2 years between 2006 and 2008, and were, in fact, able to make a home-brew system that could place and receive phone calls and text messages. at least 90% of the credit should go to Craig Hughes and Gordon Kruberg at gumstix. while i was busy getting divorced, Craig, Gordon and Adrian were doing real work.
after demoing our hardware at the Maker Faire 2007, we more or less moved on to other interesting projects. mostly 'cause the iPhone, Android G1 and FIC / OpenMoko Neo 1973 seemed to be doing a MUCH better job at opening up the potential for mobile applications.
i think a lot of us felt we had accomplished our task. we demonstrated what could be done with off the shelf hardware and software and (i hope) we tweaked the "big guys" into realizing there was a huge ecosystem in end-user selectable apps for mobile devices. remember, this was before the iPhone or Droid; the most successful application phone s'til then were the Palm Treo and various WinCE devices. realistically, we were a small amount of gasoline on an already growing fire.
but after a couple years, i'm still mildly disappointed. sure, we have some GREAT application platforms: iPhone, WP7, Android. heck, even BlackBerry looks good.
there's enough competition between the major mobile OSes that we're bound to get an increasing number of cool software features. but mobile hardware is still dominated by a small handful of companies: Apple, HTC, LG and (for the moment) Nokia.
this is an understandable situation. most people buying mobile phones use it to talk and text. whomever can deliver that simple feature set the cheapest will win large markets. an increasing number of people are experimenting with smartphones (iPhone, Droid, etc.) but it's still reasonably small compared to the number of people who just want to gab and text. and sure, as full feature smart phones get cheaper and cheaper, you'll see a lot more people adopting them.
but this isn't the market i'm talking about.
i'm talking about people who want to try out new things with mobile devices. like integrating RFID / near field communication with mobile devices. or adding a DECT radio module to a phone. or experimenting with eInk displays. or stuffing a mobile phone into a small wearable pin shaped like a star-fleet insignia.
and then i read this article: "Meshnets, Freedom Phones and the People's Internet." if you wanted, you could interpret the article as "yet another utopian pipe-dream by a young anarchosyndicalist," and maybe you would be right. but i think there are some pretty important social and business ramifications in this article.
i think what i realized after reading chris' article is that gilmore's quote about the internet applies to mobile phone companies as well. the internet does interpret censorship as damage and does route around it. we learned this in egypt. so my corollary to gilmore's quote would be something like this: "local economies interpret market domination by remote actors as damage and innovate around them."
"local" in this sense can be either geographically local or "local" to a vertical market or local to a concept.
throughout the middle-east right now, we see grass roots movements resisting and toppling repressive and allegedly corrupt regimes. the mubarak government did a reasonably bad job of cutting off the country from the outside completely, but they did cause some turmoil amongst opposition organizers "on the ground."
in about a year, we are told, we'll see a multi-party democracy holding elections. informed opinion is there'll be no one group holding majority power. in this environment, i believe it will be politically difficult for the emergent government to maintain a regulatory regime restrictive enough to include an "internet off switch." my suspicion is the fear of other political actors in the new egypt will trump fears of a second grass roots movement that can take down the new government.
i'm enough of a techno-anarcho-syndicalist to think that's a good thing.
but i wonder, is there an equivalent situation in the mobile marketplace? will the desire to shake off the yoke of Apple's oppressive app review regime lead to an iPhone uprising? will the info-proletariat revolt if/when Google eventually starts being evil and tracking mobile devices to deliver you targeted ads?
okay... maybe i'm overstating it a bit.
but right now we have a mobile infrastructure that's top-down. you want 4G? great. you have to wait for verizon to think your market is important enough. you want to add an RFID reader to mobile device. it sure as hell won't EVER happen on a Verizon phone, so you'll have to wait for T-Mobile to notice your market, add some limited support, then realize there's not enough cash there and abandon you.
for the past year i've been toying with the idea of trying to setup a company to provide LTE or WiMAX support in the San Lorenzo Valley. There's waaay too little ROI to justify this as a commercial entity, but there are enough geeks in the valley that a co-op might be doable. The cost of the equipment is falling rapidly, thanks to Huawei kicking the collective asses of the entrenched players (Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens, etc.)
i think i could convince a few peeps to sign up for VoIP over LTE if there were an off the shelf handset that would support it. but none of the majors will make such a handset if there's a market of less than a million phones.
and this gets me back to thinking about mobile handsets. wouldn't it be fun if there was a "handset kit" you could buy for a couple hundred bucks. think if it like LEGO for mobile phones. you want GSM? fine, you add the GSM brick. you want an OLED display? fine, you add the OLED brick. you can sort of already do this if you're handy with a soldering iron. (just go to sparkfun.com and search for cellular devices.)
but wouldn't it be fun if we had something "for the rest of us," who wanted to mix and match features of our mobile devices, but didn't want to design a new PCB every other week?
if we had something like that, we could experiment with all sorts of crazy "last mile" wireless concepts up here in my valley. protesters in repressive regimes could easily change from a centrally managed SMS/GSM system to... heck... use your imagination here... twitter over wi-fi to iridium uplinks to the interwebs.
the point here is, in terms of technology, protesters in egypt have the same interest in affordable tech experiments as 4G customers in the mountains. the centralized "powers that be" will not offer what we need either for economic or political reasons. maybe it's time to think about a "post-carrier" world?
why? 'cause every time Verizon and T-Mobile tell me they can't do something, it makes me start looking for a way to route around them.
