It might or might not have been a necessary decision by the director of this second movie, but the general feeling is that in the six-seven years that separate the two, the situation of the mobile phone industry hasn’t very much changed in the US.

While in many parts of Europe it is now taken for granted that literally everybody has a mobile phone, so much so that deeply ingrained social conventions like the detailed instructions previously needed to set up an appointment in a city center have started to change, still the US seemed to be more concerned with issues of coverage, signal strength, and voice quality, more characteristic of emerging, leading edge technologies’ teething problems. Europe very clearly had the leadership not only in the types of phones available in the market, or the 3G technologies deployed, but in the hearts and minds of the people.


But something has changed in the last year, and a half. The widely used form of unmetered data plan that has always been associated with the mobile phone contracts in the US finally started to meet phones that were worth using to surf the web, and to use with applications that assumed you could and would access the Internet, chiefly among them the iPhone. According to Nielsen’s Mobile report as quoted in AlwaysOn, more then 40 million Americans accessed the web in a 30 day period in 2008, almost doubling from 2006. So many mobile data plans in Europe are either metered, or very tightly capped, that such increase for the moment in Europe is unlikely. Not only that, but the developer framework that Apple now makes available for the iPhone, will be able and attract a large number of US web, and pc software developers who will adopt the iPhone as the new development platform of choice.


A long time ago, when the GSM protocol was agreed on, Europe gave a nascent industry a huge opportunity, and its consumers great value, by creating a unified standard, and with its quick deployment of fast 3G networks boosted these into the next generation. Carriers will squander that if their data plans will discourage European consumers from adopting, and European programmers from developing for the new Internet oriented mobile phones!

How can you maximize the probability of excelling with your idea? How likely is that, in the long run, you will be the only one to always make the best decisions, execute them to perfection, and realize the way the future is going to shape up? Because that is what closed source is about: jealously guarding your program’s code, stopping your best employees from ever getting help or discussing the inner workings of what they are writing with anybody. That likelihood is close to zero, and that approach is not the best way to succeed.

There is an area that has long realized this, and it is that of computer security. The ‘security through obscurity‘ approach has been long abandoned: there is nobody who would trust today an algorithm that wasn’t tried out a tested by others. Only by opening up the algorithms to close scrutiny it is possible to trust it, as it will be universally recognized as uncracked, if not uncrackable.

A similar approach is being adopted in the field of operating systems, where Linux was one of the first to make this popular for personal computers. Mobile phones have long appeared to resist this tendency towards openness, given also their vertically integrated approach from spectrum licensing to handset sales. But recently, with the efforts of Google on both spectrum allocation, and of operating system development, things have changed dramatically.

Yesterday Nokia, the worlds largest mobile phone handset manufacturer, announced that they are buying the entirety of Symbian, the company controlling the operating system that runs on Nokia phones, and putting it in open source. This is a great move, one that enables Nokia to embrace a community oriented approach that is necessary today.

So it seems that there are two main camps in the mobile phone operating system markets, who will be fighting it out in the future for the chance of becoming the engine for the next few billion devices. On one hand the proprietary approaches of Microsoft, and Apple. On the other hand the open approaches of Google, and Nokia. It can’t but benefit us all, as these compete to make ever more powerful, and easier to use mobile phones we will all live with!

Tomorrow we will be presenting OpenSpime at TechGarage ‘08. TechGarage enables startups to meet with potential investors, in an energetic and interactive environment, where the exchange of ideas is encouraged. We are glad to have been chosen to be one of the presenters there.

It is great to see how quickly OpenSpime is being adopted by leading technology companies, who perceive its advantages to their customers. We are very much looking forward to being able and use one of these phones soon!

That is why we hope that OpenSpime.org will be able and become, growing from a repository of code, and documentation which it is today, to a place where people, corporations, and organizations can discuss the future of a healthy and desirable development of an Open Internet Of Things. Come, and join the discussion about OpenSpime, and the future of our technologies, and policies!

It is only through the creativity and inventiveness of the community of developers that OpenSpime will succeed! This is why we are excited that so many have already subscribed to the OpenSpime Developer Network.

Together with the launch of the network we also are releasing a first implementation of the protocol in Python, which can be used to quickly prototype applications on a variety of platforms. You can also find explanatory videos that describe the OpenSpime protocol, and the way the PyOpenSpime implementation works.

The Economist has published an excellent article “Open sesame“in its most recent Technology Quarterly about open source hardware, and how different businesses take advantage of it:

“…an emerging class of electronic devices, for which the specifications have been made public, so that enthusiasts can suggest refinements, write and share software improvements, and even build their own devices from scratch. This is not as daft as it sounds. Even if all the details needed to build something are available, few people will have the tools or the inclination to do so….”

In the continuous efforts done in order to ease mashups, please check out the the first ever OpenSpime Twitter authenticated message. More to come.

Interested? Follow us on the OpenSpime Developer Network!

Public debate through presentations of scientific information, and the data collected from distributed open sensor networks complements the policy making process. OpenSpime met Al Gore at the launch of Current TV in Italy, and we asked him about how the community of Current can help evolving, and accelerating the enactment of legislation that implements the desired changes concerning the Climate Crisis. - Watch this video on Current_