GrowingPains

Simple is beautiful

Since yesterday, I am the happy owner of an Asus Eee laptop. No, it's not yet another machine with more cycles, megabytes, and features. Rather, the philosophy is "less is more". My version is the 4G-SURF: it has only a 7" display, 512 Mb RAM, and 4 Gb (solid state) harddisk. However, the beauty is exactly in these limitations. It's ultra-portable because of its low weight and comes pre-installed with Linux and a whole range of open source Internet and office applications, including OpenOffice. Look here for some useful links. 

EEE stands for “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play”. Interestingly, Asus seems to have learnt a lesson or two from the "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)" project. The basic idea of that project is that as many children as possible in developing countries should get a cheap laptop, as this would be a crucial catalyst for improving their education and work prospects. There has been a lot of criticism of this project, see for example the recent discussion on the Community Informatics researchers mailing list. One main critique is that spending money on relatively still expensive equipment and the required supporting technical infrastructure would not necessarily be the best investment to help local communities bootstrap themselves.

The jury still being out on the value of OLPC, it is fascinating to see, however, the second-order effects  on major for-profit companies. These are starting to realize that real user needs are not necessarily satisfied by the usual "more complex software-requires more complex hardware-enables more complex software" cycle that has been promoted so heavily and for such a long time by the "Microsoft/Intel-ial complex". The feasibility of this philosophy has been proven by the fact that Asus has totally underestimated  the demand for its EEE subnotebooks.  Other vendors are now also starting to jump onto the bandwagon. Although they seem to be pushing Asus to go (somewhat) more complex again, overall, there is a pressure for vendors to take a "simple is beautiful" strategy much more seriously. As I already wrote years ago, we need less tools, more process, and this -healthy- back to the basics-development seems to fit right in.

Free Access: From Dream to Reality?

Mobile access has been heralded for quite some time as the holy grail of the Knowledge Society. Anywhere, anytime, with anybody. In the glossy ads from the world's telcos it all looks easy and liberating. Reality, however, is different for the 99+ percent of people who cannot afford the outrageous corporate rates to be online 24/7 with sufficient bandwidth. Enjoying a decent conversation or fast enough file exchange for meaningful collaboration to happen is mostly still limited to the office or home. With laptops becoming ever more available throughout society, the main bottleneck increasingly becomes the access points.  Private access through for example UMTS networks being too expensive for most mortal beings, free public access points are becoming a focal point in the battle for a truly democratic access to pervasive communication technologies.

Wifi is one basic technology that can deal with at least part of the public access problematic. Wifi hotspots have a limited range. Many commercial access points are provided by telcos in public places like stations, airports, hotels, and cafes, like Starbucks.  This is nice for occassional usage or when the boss pays, but extensive use is still prohibitively expensive for many. As a result, these paid access-models are increasingly failing.

There are many efforts to create networks of free hotspots, for example Wi-Fi-FreeSpot , amongst many, many others. However, the problem is that many of these hotspots are of low quality, depend on volunteer contributions, or are in less-interesting locations. One major boost to address these issues would be if providing free public access can be soundly integrated into the business models of commercial organizations, like cafes and restaurants. Examples of such business models are slowly emerging.

A very nice case is provided by Free-Hotspot.Com. Today, I am in Brussels without Internet access at home or in the office. As I really needed to be online, I was looking at the options. Through Free-Hotspot, I found that Le Drink, a great, smoke-free cafe on Place Brouckère, one of the liveliest places in Brussels, is a certified member of this Wifi network. Thinking it really to good to be true, I left my skepticism home, and took the metro. I have spent a great afternoon, with good food, beer, and coffee, jazzy music, while answering e-mail, browsing the Web, and skyping with a colleague in Australia. I found a much-improved office, my food bill pays their wifi-bill, and I for sure will be back.  If that ain't a sustainable business model... :-)