One of the most interesting discussions I’ve heard on Open Source for some time is the interview with Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun, on the FLOSS Weekly podcast.
Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Open Source - this goes beyond the level of the usual debates.
We’ve posted a news update on the Ndiyo site.
Take a look if you’d like to find out what’s been going on…
The latest episode of This Week In Tech has some interesting discussion of the trials, tribulations, successes and achievements of the OLPC project.
If you haven’t seen Hans Rosling’s 2006 TED Talk, I strongly recommend it.
If you have, then here’s another treat - he did a follow-up at TED 2007. Fabulous stuff, and very relevant to Ndiyo.
There’s a piece about the history of Ndiyo in the Technology supplement of today’s Guardian. More details here.
Michael and I got a couple of new toys for the Ndiyo office. We took them out of the box and plugged them in, ran some of our experimental software, and they just worked.
So we decided to point a camcorder at them and make a little movie…
We’re biased, of course, but we think this is pretty cool. It doesn’t have the range and reliability of a standard Ndiyo system, but it could be very easy for anybody to put together. We’ll work on it.
While upgrading the underlying software, we’ve moved the location of this blog slightly. It used to be at ndiyo.org/blog, and it’s now at blog.ndiyo.org.
I hope nobody will notice, because all links from the old location should redirect automatically to the new one, but please let us know if you see problems!
Last month I was invited to give a talk about our work at the GOVIS conference in New Zealand.
The video of the full talk is now available from the news pages. If you want to know all about where Ndiyo came from and why, this is a good introduction!
At Ndiyo, we have a standard chicken-and-egg problem.
We’re starting to get Nivo devices in a form that we could actually sell in the fairly near future, but we’re only making them in small prototype quantities, which makes them rather expensive. To sell them at anything like the price we’re aiming for, we’d need to be building them in batches of a few thousand at a time, and that requires the type of capital that, as a small not-for-profit, we just don’t have. But we won’t get those numbers if we tried to sell them now, even at a price that would just cover our present costs.
So we need to find organisations who might, in due course, be interested in placing orders for hundreds or thousands of units to get the ball rolling. And with this in mind, we’re launching a Starter Kit (which might be better named an Early-Access Kit) which will allow interested parties to get their hands on some Nivos, try them out, and help guide their progress towards wider commercial availability.
This is being done in conjunction with our new sister company, Cambridge Visual Networks, and you can find out more about the kit on their site. Please consider whether your organisation might be able to support the ongoing work of Ndiyo by signing up for one of these!
Microsoft researchers in India have been experimenting with splitting a screen in two so that two people could share a computer simultaneously.
We had a similar idea a few years ago, as evidenced by this work of art from my Ndiyo notebook:
It makes greater sense now, with the growing popularity of wide-screen monitors.