They plan to publish technical standards for the development community by early next year and any device that meets the minimum technical standard will be activated on the Verizon Wireless network.

Verizon is calling their new policy “any apps, any device”.

According to Verizon Wireless President and CEO Lowell McAdam:

“This is a transformation point in the 20-year history of mass market wireless devices one which we believe will set the table for the next level of innovation and growth.”

This could be good news for consumers and especially for iPhone users currently locked in contracts with At&T.

With a portion of the spectrum to be auctioned starting in January 2008, consumer groups and some U.S. lawmakers have called for the FCC to require wireless providers to open up their networks to outside devices and applications.

Technorati Tags: cellular phone, Verizon, wireless

The impact is real and I think we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

I have been thinking in how this transformation in the way we use the Internet can also make an important impact in the daily lives of common people in the developing world, particularly in Latin America.

For example, after reading this article about the rise of women in Latin American countries, I thought that it would be cool to figure out a way to use social media to empower women in remote places by providing them with tools to communicate, collaborate and learn from each other.

Many women across Latin America are doing interesting local projects that have great potential to benefit not only their communities but similar communities around the region. Imagine the power of sharing these ideas and collaborating in a social network to make these projects successful.

Add to this idea the participation in the network of women in leadership positions around the continent and I think you a have a winner.

These women leaders would provide an enormous source of expertise, guidance and business savvy which would complement the work being done locally and improve the chances of bringing projects to fruition.

The tools for setting up a network like the one I propose are already available. Sites like Change.org and Ning allow people to create their own social networks and provide many tools for efficient communication and collaboration. In addition, Change.org was created specifically for non-profits to develop their social networks.

Some limiting factors would be the low technology literacy and minimal penetration of Internet access that exist in many countries in Latin America.

However with the introduction of newer devices such as the XO computer developed for the One Laptop Per Child project, the growing availability of mobile smartphones, and the improving network infrastructure in many countries, I think that these limitations will be gradually becoming less of an obstacle.

A network of women conducting local community projects (hyperlocal sites) linked to the growing community of rising women leaders in Latin America seems to me would be an interesting social media experiment with great potential for empowering women.

Anybody ready to work on something like this?

Technorati Tags: Latin America, OLPC, social network

Don Hopkins, the man responsible for the original multiplayer Unix port of the game, is also responsible for porting SimCity to the OLPC laptop platform.

According to Hopkins,

“The goal is to enable the open-source community to renovate SimCity and take it in new educational directions, by applying Seymour Papert’s ideas about constructionist education, Alan Kay’s ideas about interactive user interfaces and object-oriented programming, Ben Shneiderman’s ideas about direct manipulation and info visualization, and many exciting ideas about multiplayer games, blogging, storytelling, game mods, player created content, and lessons learned from World of WarCraft, The Sims, Spore, etc,”

SimCity can really be a great learning experience, and with the open source community and educators from around the world now behind the project I expect it will bring children many new fun and valuable educational experiences.

Technorati Tags: education, OLPC, puppy, SimCity, simulation

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google, advertising, search engine

Doerr, whose greatest hits include initial investments in Netscape, Amazon, and Google, will join the advisory board of Generation Investment Management, the $1 billion investment company Gore started three years ago in London.
The goals of the new venture:

“nothing less will be required than a makeover of the $6 trillion global energy business. Coal plants, gas stations, the internal-combustion engine, petrochemicals, plastic bags, even bottled water will have to give way to clean, green, sustainable technologies. “What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project, and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally.”

Gore adds, “It’d be promising too much to say we can do it on our own, but we intend to do our part.”

I wish them good luck since nothing less will be required to clean the current environmental mess.

Technorati Tags: climate change, energy, environment, global warming, venture capital

Founding partners of the project include: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

And today “MySpace”, the world’s largest social network, announced that they are joining forces with Google in the launch OpenSocial. The partnership spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications.

OpenSocial’s three APIs will allow developers to access the following core functions and information on participating social networks, referred to as “hosts”:

* Profile Information (user data)
* Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)
This is a huge development in the social networking space. Developers will be able to write applications once and use the same code (based on HTML and Javascripit) in many of these platforms instead of having to write and port the same application for each network.

This is different from Facebook which uses a proprietary language (Facebook Markup Language or FBML) in a walled-off environment.

It is also a big development for Google who hopes to capitalize on the efficacy of placing ads within the applications themselves. It has recently become more apparent that placing ads in applications within social networks like Facebook is a more effective way of promoting a product that placing ads in personal pages.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google, MySpace, Orkut, Web 2.0

Nate and Viss are using the hashtag #sandiegofire. Twitter users can enter “track sandiegofire” in SMS or IM and receive notifications whenever a tweet goes out with that tag in it.
Viss is also uploading photos to Flickr.

This is another excellent example of Web 2.0 tools being used effectively by citizen journalists to report breaking news in a disaster situation, similar to what we recently saw during the earthquake in Peru.

Technorati Tags: California fires, Flickr, twitter

The narrative brings us from the times of catalogs and shelves to the revolution of links and universal ubiquitous information sources that is Web 2.0. We are the real links to information.

The first video of Wersch’s view of Web 2.0 is here.

Technorati Tags: information, markup, tags, Web 2.0