making
Obama '08 for iPhone
Hot off the press - an iPhone app to accelerate the Obama ‘08 campaign!
Thanks to my friend (and open source guru) Raven Zachary, I had the privilege of beta testing the new Obama ‘08 for iPhone application. The idea, the potential and the implementation is tremendous - create grassroots opportunities to participate at the ’edge’ of the internet. In other words, let people participate in the campaign from their perspective, instead of uploading their data to a central place or getting anonymous instructions from a central place.
How specifically? The key feature is that this iPhone app looks at your address book, sorts your contacts by battle-ground states, presents you with those people and then keeps track of whether you’ve called those people. As the help says:
As you make calls, you can keep organized by updating the status of your contacts.I love this idea because it allows me to help in a more hands-on way, but without having to deal with trade-offs like being a parent and employed vs. spending five weeks in a battleground state. Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored. Only the total number of calls you make is uploaded anonymously.
Additionally, it serves as a nice central place for me to find out more about the campaign.
Kudos to Raven and his team!
"Finding Paths Through the Worlds Photos", Blade Runner & Pseudo-Ghosts?
Finding Paths Through the Worlds Photos (via webware.com) is a stunning example of stitching together collections of 2d photos and navigating them in 3d.I can’t help but be reminded of the scene from Blade Runner where the main character takes what appears to be a 2d photo, enhances and looks around a corner (or similar). I always thought that special effect failed - how would we ever pull that off… But, this demo is creeping up on that idea.Separately, because the demo stitches together lots of different photos from different sources, there are several examples of people quickly appearing & disappearing as the narrator navigates the 3d space. This is another example of an effect I’ve seen where you can visit a place and find traces of who was there before - there are some iPhone applications that let you do this with notes and photos. Are we assembling technology stacks to make our own pseudo-ghosts?
FiveRuns
I haven’t even noted anything different here - but on Oct 1st ‘07, I joined FiveRuns as their VP of Development and Technology. A lot is brewing there, and the fruits of of our work will be visible soon.
Recently, I’ve begun to blog there as well. On occasion, I’ll link through from here to the recent blog posts. This time there’s two posts. My first post was simple look at our product development process in terms of feedback loops: FiveRuns Development - Feedback Loops. As a side note, ever since Tim Tischler and I had a great discussion about scrum and how he saw it as feedback loops, I now see the issue in terms of open and closed feedback loops; one side effect is that I end up abstracted from any particular brand of approach (e.g. scrum), and more able to pick and choose how best to find and close the open feedback loops. The second post was a comment on using CMS’s as part of development: What If: Content Management & Software Development.
Regarding FiveRuns, I’m thrilled to be @ FiveRuns (going on five months now); the team is incredible and I’m glad to be part of it. Stay tuned as we produce some great stuff.
