open sourced stuff, v21 and radiohead

...with Rose, Byron and Ben Finney

General news:

1. ipad 2 release in Australia
2. NBN
1. bill passes in the Senate. What does this change?
2. NBN marketing fail. Shouldn’t this be an easy sell?
3. The Labor governments mixed messages
3. The Freedom Box Foundation 
1. Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net
2. Eben Moglen Is Reshaping Internet With a Freedom Box
3. Freedom Box Foundation
4. R18+ Video game rating federal review

Warren Davies and Kate Kendal for Social Media (see separate post)

Interview: Brad Giblin from the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA). They're organising the V21 conference, happening in Melb on 12th April.

Other News

Mozilla Launches Firefox 4

2. LibreOffice 3.3.2 continues improving, with €100 000 community funding
3. Free Software Awards 2010 announced: Gnash, Tor projects
4. GNU Telephony project   … announces new GNU Free Call … which receives community award of NKR 100 000 (~ AUD$17 000)
5. Google Holds Honeycomb Tight

 

SXSW, UI, and other important acronyms

On this week's show with Georgia, Keren and Byte n00b Kent Humphries (we reckon he did ok!) we discussed the following bits and pieces...

- Could Australia’s NBN be blacked out like Egypt and Libya? Unlikely, says the Internet Society of Australia

- iPad 2 out soon in Australia (Apple confirms availability in spite of US shortages), and ViewPad10 Android tablet in-stores in Harvey Norman in Oz

- Amazon launches its ‘Amazon Appstore for Android’ (US only). Apple sues them for using ‘app store’ trademark

- Firefox 4 Released - even more tab manipulations (video overview) with panorama, app tabs! Using download statistics tool we watched it click over 5,000,000 downloads during the show

- Vimeo launched the Vimeo Video School recently, adding an education/training service to its platform. It’s been up for 2-3 months, so it’s now got a bit of momentum and some great tutorials and almost 1000 user-contributed tutorial videos

- Twitter turned five this week. Gizmodo says: Twitter, you are incredible and horrendous

- Facebook is booting 20,000 under-age users OFF every day

- Homophobic Exodus International iPhone app has been removed from the App Store 
  
Check out the podcast for the full experience, including Keren's report on SXSW and a chat with Guy Walshe, a local user interface designer working on awesome games in Melbourne.

As always, we welcome your emails to byteintoit (at) rrr.org.au - get in touch anytime.

On this week's show...

...with Rose, Georgia and Paul

General News

1. Townsville deemed a ‘smarter city’ and wins $400k grant
2. "Linked in Today" launched
3. ipad 2
1. sales - pretty hefty.
2. 3rd party covers already out and about
3. ipad2 sells in Hong Kong for $1000
4. Internet Explorer 9 launched on Monday, Microsoft says it’s better. Microsoft has also said bye bye to the Zune, says the rumour mill.
5. Facebook party hoax has lead to arrest of NSW teen.
6. Zynga games (farmville) raises cash for Tsunami & US Military switches off YouTube etc to conserve bandwidth for relief effort.
7. E-book loan times reduced from libraries in the US

Interview

Dr Steffen P Walz Director, GEElab (Games & Experimental Entertainment Laboratory)
RMIT University

The GEElab will invent new game and entertainment visions, products, services, narratives and business models, whilst critically reflecting the role of games and entertainment in culture and how play, games, and game mechanics can be used to innovate.

 
At the GEElab, games will be understood as a cross-disciplinary function as well as the engine of entertainment media and Internet innovation. Practice oriented game and entertainment media research will be carried out by the way of cross-medial experimentation and an understanding of science as fiction, and not being afraid to think and design differently and speculatively. GEElab members will investigate how to “gamify“ traditionally non-linear media such as TV, film, radio, developing design strategies, narratives and service prototypes.

The Cyborgs:

Warren Davies and Kate Kendall

1. Crowd-sourcing ad content as shown by Poptent.net Should we participate or is it just unpaid work? Poptent 
2. Path verse Instagram? The case for and against mobile photo sharing.
3. Twitter has just told its third party client devs they’re no longer needed. 

Light News

1. .com.au reaches 2 million
2. pwn to own results
3. Pokemon black and white
4. Early in week the Mortal Kombat RC on appeal, but today permanently refused. Government ‘threatened’ to shake-up classifications system.
5. PEGI respond to misleading We Dare advertising in Europe
6. angry birds doin pretty well for itself!

On this week's show - March 9, 2011

With Georgia, Mike and Jay

The podcast is up here if you'd like to listen back.

During this week's show, we talked about this stuff:

• Skype's new video conferencing service
• Quanp for sending big files
• Adobe releases Flash to HTML5 converter, codenamed Wallaby
• 1000 Charlie Sheen related domain names registered
• iPad 2 - hits, misses and the Australian pricing that we should expect
• iOS 4.3
• Game Developers Conference in the US (Mike recommends the wrap-up at Gamasutra)
The twitter iphone app update and the “quickbar uprising”
• The Million Song Dataset which just been released 

Here are some links from the social media segment. There are lots of interesting ideas going on here. Let us know what you think!

Are we all Cyborgs?

Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

Social media and Slacktivism.

Matthew Ingram

As Facebook and Twitter have come to play a larger role in getting the word out about issues such as unrest in Egypt, much of what is done using these social tools — particularly by younger users — has been criticized as “slacktivism.” In other words, it is seen as just empty gestures such as changing an avatar or posting a status update, rather than real activism around social issues. But a new study from the University of California has found that younger Internet users become more socially engaged in the real world, not just online

Egypt and the utilization of social media

Sam Taute

Here are some of their thoughts on what makes social media such a powerful, unpredictable force in global politics:

• It replaces the need for a charismatic leader. A cause no longer needs a  champion to attract followers. Certainly, there were a number of noble and courageous protesters (and some not so noble, unfortunately), but there was no single face attached to this revolution. Social media has created the possibility of what Ben Scott calls an “aggregate leader,” where the responsibility of advancing a movement can be dispersed.

The cyborg nature of videogaming.

Jim Rossignol:

Videogames are the reason I could be considered a cyborg. Not in the sense that I have had parts of my physical body taken over by electronic or mechanical systems, but in the sense that I often have had my imagination taken over by electronic and mechanical systems. Gaming, particularly electronic gaming, often imbues me with some of the most essential properties of a cyborg.

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