Accelerometer brainstorming

Here is an example of benefits of open architectures.

The upcoming OpenMoko phone (named 'Neo FreeRunner' or GTA02 architecture) is going to have an accelerometer. Someone started a thread about how one can make use of this new piece of hardware. So far there have been many replies on the thread and they have very innovative ideas.

My favorite one, a suggestion from Crane, Matthew:

... if the device:
- goes from 60km+ to 0 in short order, e.g. high g stop
- while traveling horizontally
- over a road
- an on-screen alert/countdown is not stopped
Then it's likely a vehicular accident so auto-call/sms for help with
some kind of countdown to disable. Only really possible to do that with
a phone + GPS + acell.

Check out the rest here.

Clutter Webkit

Finally I got it working last night.



After watching the demo of clutter at OSiM I got interested in the OpenedHand's Clutter project. More importantly embedding a browser in cairo is of greater interest to me. So when I got it working, I couldn't help showing it off.

OSiM USA 2008 - Day 2

The second day of the conference was awesome.

As I said at the end of my last post, I was expecting more interesting sessions on second day. But I had even more fun than expected. Most enjoyable sessions to me were the 2 demos - one by Soonr and another by Matthew from OpenedHand.

I asked many presenters about what sort of business model do they envision for open source application developers, and I didn't get any conclusive answer from them. However I found partial answer to my question in the demo from Soonr (and also from the talk with funambol yesterday). In short, Soonr allows users to save their data (docs, contacts, etc.) in the cloud (an account with them) and lets them access it using their cell phone or desktops. It customizes this data to suite the browser's capabilities (downsize powerpoint slides etc.). Basically it has the same benefits as having mobile versions of all Google/Yahoo services. However Soonr makes the process seamless. I liked the idea of how they handle the stolen cell phone use-case. If the user looses his cell phone, he can configure his account to disallow access from that cell phone.

I particularly liked the OpenedHand presentation because it was the only hardcore technical presentation in the entire conference. Matthew Allum (CEO, founder of OpenedHand), demonstrated the Clutter GUI his company is working on. The presentation was impressive. I have almost never attended a presentation where the slide show hasn't been done using PowerPoint. I suppose I might have seen OpenOffice presentations, but those were clearly not flashy. Matthew however gave presentation on his Ubuntu laptop and his slides had more fascinating effects than any PowerPoint slides I had ever seen. When I asked him at the end of the session about which software he used, he said that it's one his own little scripts. I know now where to look for, while preparing my next presentation... Back to "Clutter". If the phone has hardware support for graphics acceleration then Clutter gives all the snappy effects that you see in modern iPhone-like phones. See it for yourself. I have dowloaded and built the Clutter from o-hand's svn repository and played with many examples myself. It's very well structured source code and easy to build. Matthew's demo was done on an iPod-touch, but I heard it will also be able to run in upcoming GTA02 version of Openmoko phone.

Among all the people I met at conference, I enjoyed talking to Quim Gil the most. He is the product manager of Maemo project and I have read him on mailing lists from time to time. The discussions we had were very educational for me. I had many questions on Maemo (some of them naive and impractical), but Quim was nice enough to answer all of them with enthusiasm. I am a software engineer by profession and have worked with bunch of smart people; but never have I had such a frank discussion with as senior a person as a product manager. I think that is why we call it "Open" source. Thanks to Quim, Matthew and Hal (Funambol), I left the conference with an inspired spirit.

I was very excited about hearing Sean Moss-Pultz, but I got little disappointed when he couldn't make it to the conference. However Michael Shiloh gave very informative session on Openmoko. I got to handle the GTA02 that he passed among the audience. It was nice to see it, before I actually buy it in next few months.

There were couple of panel discussions on how web 2.0 is different from or similar to mobile 2.0. Among a lot of arguments and opinions I found Fabrizio's (Funambol CEO) comment very curious. It's well known that mobile browsers are lagging in AJAX and flash support as compared to desktop, which impedes the access to web 2.0 from mobile phones. With iPhone's browser interface and n810's microb engine that goal is looking within reach. However according to Fabrizio, mobile 2.0 will be made up with native apps connected to the web, rather than a fancy browser. I have always liked this idea personally even on desktops. But only time will tell how the web will unfold on the phone in our hands.

Ari Jaaski's presentation in the morning was as per expectations. Carolyn Lewko did very good job of hosting today's sessions. Andreas Constantinou also had many insightful comments during various sessions. Dan Morril's Android presentation was also nice. I would have liked to ask him about difficulties in porting android to other platforms because of the closed source binaries at the core of android, but then I changed my mind. My hunch is, Google will at least provide pre-compiled binaries for various platforms in future, even if they won't open source everything. Let's see. I hope someday I will be able to run android on OpenMoko and Nokia tablets.

Overall, this was a successful beginning of the US chapter of OSiM. Congratulations to the organizers. I hope there will be increased participation from the developer community next time. After all, the Open source phenomenon is nothing without the Geeks in the Garage. If big corporations are to involve more in open source, they should get to meet face to face with the real innovators. Conferences like this can play key role in that.

OSiM USA 2008 - Day 1

Today was the first day of the two day conference, at San Francisco. It was packed with many sessions, few demos, networking breaks and food.

Most of the presenters were eloquent and knowledgeable in their fields, so all of the sessions were pretty interesting. At high level, today's sessions covered 4 areas: General discussion on role of Open Source in Mobile, security aspects, communities and licensing.

As an open source developer, I cannot say I learnt anything new about the technology. But I did gather bunch of information about several forces that are driving the mobile industry and how Open Source is going to play key role in it. Here are some highlights.

Most interesting thing of the day was the discussion with the Funambol representative (Hal Steger). Too bad I hadn't heard about them before. They provide push email and PIM syncing services to mobile users. They have developed the whole project under open source. It was pretty interesting to listen to their revenue model, which is essentially advertisements-based. Hal was kind enough to answer my questions on various details.

I also enjoyed talking to the Access developers, who demoed the SDK for Access Development community. It made me aware that Mameo, OpenMoko and Qtopia are not the only ones in that category.

The sessions were driven by Andrew Aitken (from Olliance Consulting Group) whose various comments throughout the day were very insightful on respective subjects.

Among morning sessions, Michael McLaughlin's (Azingo) presentation was very entertaining. Their push for LiMo based application development looks like a strategy. It will be interesting to see how LiMo platform evolves with competition from Android and others. I hope to get more understanding on LiMo tommorrow.

The security session by Bob Guimarin (Motorola's senior director of Security technology) was also neat. It showed how the corporations value open source communities to harden the products by means of code reviews and testing.

There were 3-4 very interesting sessions that discussed Open Source "communities" and various licenses under OS. After exploring so many open source projects in past few years I hardly found anything new in those sessions. However from the point of view of corporations investing into open source projects, it must have been educational. The concepts like typical 3-tier communities (core developers, contributors and users); mailing list conventions are taken for granted by regular source-forgers. Seeing them as part of a formal presentation just underlined what I already knew. However all the speakers were pretty witty and made the sessions enjoyable.

I am very hopeful for tommorrow. The sessions that were my main motivations to attend this conference will be tommorrow - Sean Moss-Pultz of OpenMoko and Ari Jaaski from Nokia. I am also curious to listen to Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco.

Stay tuned...