Molecularist

Here’s something from that some folks from Nokia are involved in. Sounds really cool. I’m looking forward to see how it develops. It combines many cool elements: mobiles, Web, people far away, people on the ground, the real world, a large display, Web and mobile tools to track the whole thing, sigh, it’s so cool.

Will it fly?

I’ll check it out next week.

Link: Manhattan Story Mashup.

Manhattan Story Mashup is an urban game, taking place on September 23rd 2006 in Manhattan, New York City. During the event, approximately 250 players will move around Manhattan, taking photos which match a given target. Targets are words from stories, written by you and other visitors on this web site collaboratively while the game goes on. The resulting illustrated stories are shown on large public signs in Times Square in real-time and on this web site.

Manhattan Story Mashup is organized by SensorPlanet, a Nokia Research Center
-initiated research program on large-scale sensor networks. We are
interested in combining the physical and the virtual worlds through new
ways of sensing. As it happens, lots of people always carry a mobile
phone with them, making it a perfect platform for this job. This game
is a cool way to test our tools and theories in practice with a large
number of people. Naturally we’re also interested in sharing fun with
other people in the Come Out and Play Festival, which gathers together many games like this in September.

Oh, dang. I just saw that Jürgen Sheible is one of the designers. I interviewed him for an article a long time ago. Geez, I gots to catch up with him.

Here’s a nice short summary of a recent report by the ITU on emerging market take-up of communication services.

There are some interesting items, such as in Bhutan, delivering emails as post. Quite interesting.

I need to get my hands on that report.

Link: Least-developed countries getting connected | InfoWorld | News | 2006-09-13 | By Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service.

Many of the world’s least-developed countries have made "remarkable progress" towards achieving mobile-phone and Internet connectivity goals set out by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
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"The mobile sector in [the least-developed countries] has grown considerably and access to the Internet has also increased," the ITU said. The organization plans to release later today a detailed report on telecommunication and Internet connectivity in the world’s poorest countries.

Seems like the ITU also has a few initiatives in emerging markets. Neat.