Idea Lab

Mobile Projects Shouldn't Overlook 'Dumbphones'

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, CityCircles (formerly Daily Phoenix) attended a lunch event at Arizona State University that allowed us to have one-on-one conversations with college seniors who were interested in our project. (The event is summarized here.) This was a crucial event. ASU has a huge footprint in the Phoenix area because it has 69,000 students. They buzz around the Valley in cars, on bikes, on foot and yes, on light rail. This makes them a huge group for us as potential users and collaborators. As we talked to them, we realized that an assumption we made early on -- one that...

• September 14, 2009
• 2 comments

Help Us Rename the Daily Phoenix Light-Rail Publication

by Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been 42 days and counting since the Knight Foundation announced that Daily Phoenix, our hybrid platform to deliver news and information to urban audiences by light-rail stop, won startup funding. Back here in the scorching confines of Phoenix, the interest was immediate. Local TV station KTVK-TV Channel 3 interviewed us on their signature program, Good Morning Arizona. It was an incredible opportunity and an enlightening experience that really helped us out. For those of you who are thinking about doing a new media project or are already working on one, the TV interview format can be a boon as...

• July 31, 2009
• 4 comments

Strategizing Media Software Development: Some Lessons Learned

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a story showing the extent of complications in getting a system going, so I'll tell it simply. It's my non-geek experience of work for a community newspaper that aims to produce world-class code for community papers that is singing-dancing, super-portable and open-source. The history started in the buzz around the World Summit on Information Society which helped to move OSS into the mental horizon of non-techies like me. When the Rhodes journalism school where I work acquired Grocott's Mail, the local newspaper in 2004, we had to install a load of new PCs to accommodate students who would now...

• February 5, 2009
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Freedom Fone Interviewed on the BBC

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Read the article, or listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services....

• December 17, 2008
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Freedom Fone Goes on the Road

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Freedom Fone had its first public debut at the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) 2008 Forum in Cape Town, 14-17 November. The event was a great opportunity to deploy Freedom Fone -- even in its software prototype state. We prepared different content for each of the four days of the conference, and ran four "channels," or options which users could access when they phoned in: Highlighted Sessions, Interviews with Presenters, Culture and Inspiration, and the Feminist Tech Hunt, which was run in association with Take Back the Tech. We took advantage of South Africa's deregulated VoIP and rented...

• December 1, 2008
• 1 comment

Mobile Reporting Gave Raw View of Political Conventions

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The most dramatic example of how our mobile coverage played out was on the final night of the Republican National Convention. While thousands were preparing to cheer McCain’s speech inside the convention center, our Wisconsin reporter, Charlie, was hot on the trail of an anti-war protest gearing up outside. His “tweets” began…

• September 23, 2008
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Start with the Low Hanging Fruit with Software Development

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A key component of Freedom Fone is the software development we will undertake over the next two years. Last weekend Brenda and I met with a handful of people who have experience with open source development projects like those we'll be undertaking. We got to share our ideas and experiences to date developing the Freedom Fone prototype, and we benefited from their contributions and suggestions. Much of what they recommended resonates with some of David Cohn's blogs and the importance of being iterative. See for example: Eliminating the Fear of Being Open Growing a Community and The Importance of Being...

• September 15, 2008
• 1 comment

The Travails of Taking a CPU Tower from Zimbabwe to France

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brenda and I went to Paris recently for a development launch and brainstorming meeting for Freedom Fone. In addition to picking the brains of a small handful of experts in the field, we thought it would be a good opportunity to have some of our equipment assessed. So in my bag I packed my own laptop, and digital audio recorder, a Voice Blue 4-SIM card GSM Gateway, and a full sized CPU tower, as well as the various power cables and USB connectors for this equipment. The tower didn't fit in the elegant, cabin sized roller bag we'd hoped it...

• September 15, 2008
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Listen and Learn: Recording in Harare's Cafes

by Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Even though we're still a few months, and a telephony server with a PCI slot, short of our first deployment, the Freedom Fone creative team has been hitting Harare's arts scene. In an effort to train our ears and give our digital audio editing fingers a work out, we've been recording some audio at a few public events. A few lessons we've learnt along the way: 1. If you're at a public event with a sound system, make friends with the sound engineer At a discussion evening at Harare's Book Cafe on 21 August, we were able to get right...

• September 3, 2008
• 3 comments

Virtual Voting: Finding Our Audience Where They Roam

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now that we are several months into the project, we thought we had conquered, or at least tackled, most forms of new media. Our Street Teamers’ work appears regularly on mobile video carriers, a mobile wap site, several websites, and on-air via MTV’s broadcast networks.

Then, a few weeks back, I was approached by an MTV colleague about a whole new area of distribution that, I have to admit, I had hardly considered before: THE VIRTUAL WORLD. I’m talking about something right outta web 3.0: a 3-D, interactive, virtual reality experience where one can have a “second life” via their avatar persona—a walking, talking, digital version of their better selves--online.

• July 18, 2008
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Life in a Failed State Certainly Isn't Boring

by Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's hard to convey how important it is for those of us "left behind" to vicariously experience the richness of these networking opportunities.

• July 7, 2008
• 1 comment

Swimming Lessons for Journalists

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday on the Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits blog (which I edit), contributor Alan Abbey posted an item about the latest spate of newsroom layoffs. He noted: "For media workers, these aren't necessarily bad times. For every job shutting down at LA Times, there is probably one (albeit less well paid, less prestigious, and more nose-to-the-grindstone) opening up in new media. However, for media veterans, this downturn does feel similar to the widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago. What can we do with our outdated skills?" That's pretty blunt talk, and I'm glad that Abbey had...

• July 4, 2008
• 7 comments

Empowering Poor Communities through Mobile

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is one vision of the mobile future aimed at one of the most (technologically) overlooked segments of the U.S. population...low income and ethnic communities. Imagine a Latino youth living in East Oakland, California - one of the toughest urban neighborhoods in America: "My name is Jose Gutierrez. I am 18 years old and live in East Oakland, off of International and 24th Streets. We don't have a computer in my house, and other than Spanish language TV and radio we get all of our information on our mobile phones on LOCOBEAT (fictional). -On my cell phone I have my...

• June 22, 2008
• 11 comments

Early Adapters Don't Conform to Conventional Use

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a recent meeting, a representative from Verizon and a former BET executive were discussing the seeming contradiction between the fact that African American males were early adapters of mobile technology, yet have a very low rate of posting videos on internet sites such as BET.Com and Youtube. BET tested the waters with two experiments. One involved fashion/entertainment and the other involved politics. Neither resulted in a flurry of posts, such as the ones MTV receives when it puts out a call for videos. What makes this interesting is that by all accounts African American males are not only early...

• April 8, 2008
• 1 comment

Fire Eagle and the Future of Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Buenos Aires Leads the Way Two months ago I was back in my old stomping grounds, Encinitas, California. It had been several years since I last coasted along Highway 101 as it sucks in its asphalt belly between San Elijo Lagoon and the near-perfect surf break, Cardiff Reef. I pulled off the side of the highway, rolled down my window, and inhaled the salty air tinged with the sweetness of coastal sage scrub. More than anywhere else, this was home. I still knew the names of the best surfers bobbing up and down in the Pacific as they waited for...

• April 7, 2008
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Maps That Bring Issues & Places to Life

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent seminar I helped to facilitate, health organizations and online mapping experts came together to discuss how mapping could be used to address health disparities in California and the U.S. Some current examples of useful online mapping tools in the health arena include: Healthy City: Gathers census and other locally relevant data in Los Angeles and overlays that information on maps to provide insight on health, education, and social issues. Health Map: Tracks global outbreaks and provides up-to-date information on diseases via a mapping tool Whoissick: A user-generated site that allows anyone who has the flu, etc. to...

• April 6, 2008
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My Brief, Torrid Affair with the Nokia N95

by Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mobile media isn't just the future -- it's the present, big time. Recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life project shows that mobile devices (especially cell phones) are already the can't-do-without-it media tool of choice for many US demographics, especially among Hispanics and Latin Americans. (Read more analysis of this research, and what it can mean for community media at the Knight New Media Center.) Mobile is becoming a key channel for all kinds of content and communication -- so it should be a key focus for anyone providing news and information to almost any community. So why...

• April 2, 2008
• 5 comments

Going Beyond Point A to Point B

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Phones use one of two methods to figure out where they are (and if you happen to be carrying it, where you are). The first is built-in gps. Nokia is leading the way with these smart phones, having announced four new phones earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress 2008, where 50,000 people (including keynote Robert Redford) gathered in Barcelona to talk all things mobile (but mostly about devices and less-than-innovative uses of these devices). The second way to locate your device is how Apple is doing it. Late to the game and experimenting with workarounds, location-based applications found...

• February 26, 2008
• 1 comment

How Do You Know When to Take Mobile Seriously?

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How does mainstream media know when to take mobile seriously as a distribution platform? 1) When the New York Times unveils a mobile-to-PC application? The NYT's new ShiftD application allows you to move its content from one device to the other, insead of having to save and move them separately. A bit of a time saver perhaps, but not all that exciting really. 2) When key online social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook develop their own mobile applications? We're getting warmer here. When we can seamelessly do all the social stuff on our cell phones that we really like...

• February 25, 2008
• 2 comments

Wearing Your Media on Your Sleeve

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some really interesting experimentation is being done with "wearable media" these days. Wearable media is simply clothing or other accessories that allow for the transmission or display of digital information. Some examples... Wearable Resistance a dress adorned with LED that can be programmed to depict images or text. Check out some of the other work being done by Dutch artist collective De Geuzen, "a foundation for multi-visual research". The Internet of Things: The University of Washington is conducting an experiment to understand the next step in social networking by connecting objects and people in a wireless, monitored network. Beginning in...

• February 17, 2008
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