One of my favorite parts of the June, "Come Out and Play Festival" in New York City was re-experiencing Times Square - a place I walk through several times a week.

Many of Come Out and Play's games started with a big mob gathering in Times Square (see my Flickr set for The Following here). And, as Sarah Williams (Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University) pointed out, Come Out and Play games managed to reactivate this urban space, Times Square, and remake it as public space. As Sarah noted:

"Times Square has a huge density of people who are actually looking for something to be doing. They are not sure why they are there."

And we were certainly a mob with a mission - to Come Out and Play.

Recently Times Square has been closed off to traffic and in the process started to look exactly like Second Life at the peak of its hype cycle with "people sitting around in lawn chairs looking at advertising" (picture below of Second Life camping from Hack It Easy Blog).  Camping in Second Life became a popular occupation because you could earn money based on the population density of a sim, so people would park their avatar in chairs and get paid a few Lindens for doing so.

When Frank Lantz, area/code, quipped during the Saturday morning panel of Come Out and Play, "Sim City and Second Life are the two biggest influences on Urban Design," I cracked up.  Frank is spot on - see this set of photos I took the weekend of Come Out and Play.  I finally got a moment to upload them to Flickr.

When I saw someone lying down in a lawn chair (photo attached here) reading "Outline of a Theory of Practice," by Pierre Bourdieu, I couldn't resist striking up a conversation. And I was right in assuming he shared my amusement in the whole scene.

It turned out Jordan - my new lawn chair acquaintance, works for - terrapartners.com - a very interesting company.

"As of January 1, 2009 Terra Partners Group managed over 130 million USD in three funds..... the targets will include many Emerging Markets, an area where some countries have experienced high volatility...."

I got the feeling in my brief chat with Jordan that Terra Partners may specialize in something like the kind of transactions between Favela Chic and Gothic High Tech that Bruce Sterling described in his recent look at the what the next ten years will feel like. For more on Favela Chic and Gothic High Tech see my interview with Bruce Sterling here, and Bruce Sterling's keynote at reboot11.

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Sim_City_and_Second_Life_are_t.zip (747 KB)

I arrived a little late at New York Tech Meetup last night (I was busy finishing up my Ugotrade post "Location Becomes Oxygen at Where 2.0 and WhereCamp." - hope you enjoy!). But fortunately I arrived in time to see Bre Pettis (@bre Twitter), founder of Makerbot and NYCResistor, demo Makerbot to a delighted and excited crowd. Bre got mobbed by Makerbot admirers afterwards (see my pic below).  The energy and excitement was at rock concert levels in the auditorium.

I also caught Jason Calacanis (@jasoncalacanis twitter) introduce Mahalo 2.0. Jason worked the crowd brilliantly in what he pointed out was a difficult spot in the program:

"Wow! I have to go on after the guy who created the Holodeck!"

The vibe at NYC TechMeetup, as Jason noted, reflected a level of energy for internet innovation not seen since the early nineties in NYC.  Creativity is booming in NYC after the fall of the bankers (Umm, Jason used much earthier and entertaining language to express this sentiment).

Mahalo 2.0 described succinctly by @mashable in Twitter:  "Mahalo 2.0: Search Result Pages Built on Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter - http://bit.ly/tjBo1"

Mahalo 2.0 also "offers payments to users that can provide the best answers" which may be welcome in tough economic times.

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Wow_I_have_to_go_on_after_the_.zip (11.27 MB)

The ITP Spring Show, 2009 last Sunday was an interaction riot, jam packed with brilliance and off beat explorations of locative media (for more on the topic of locative media and my upcoming trip to Where Week 2009 - Where 2.0, and WhereCamp, see my post, "Creating the Information Landscapes of the Future: Locative Media, Loose Interaction Topologies, and The Shape of Alpha.")  Also see some of my ITP Spring Show favorites in these pictures up on my FLickr stream.

Most projects boldy went where none have gone before and some did so with a lot of panache. Alexander Reeder's S Ring (picture below) as NYC Resistor Bre Pettis put it, is "an elegant and beautiful design."

Alexander Reeder, writes about S Ring :

"S Ring facilitates communication in new and unspoken ways by releasing a pleasing scent accented with pheremones."

Or as Alexander explained when I talked to him, S Ring is:

"Seducing people by talking with your hands."

Uber Geeks and luminaries were everywhere and the show got massive press coverage - see here. 

Elizabeth Fuller's face as Clay Shirky checks out her "exploration of the interplay of order and chaos," Moire Dress, see the picture below, reminds me how I felt when Robert Morris, my tutor during my MFA - back in the day, came to my studio to give a me crit!

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Seducing_People_by_Talking_Wit.zip (880 KB)

The Playpower team gave by far the most dynamic on the spot demo I saw at ETech 2009 - for more pictures see here, and for more about their presentation here:

"Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and has minimal access to education. The Playpower Foundation is using a radically affordable $12 computer, based on an old video game console technology (now in the public domain) as an 8-bit platform for learning games. Global poverty meets 8-bit design constraints--with only an open source community of 8-bit hackers in the middle?"

Also check out this excellent Wired article on Playpower by Priya Ganapati.

"Come to ETech; Experiment with Physical Computing and RFIDs" said Brady Forrest in this post. I did. And it was very exciting to actually get hands-on with the Arduino opensource electronics prototyping platform, and Processing - a very accessible language to do dynamic and interactive graphics for screen-based media, in Tom Igoe's, Hands-On RFID for Makers workshop. You'll know how much I love to write and theorize about these things if you have checked out my long form blog Ugotrade.

 Unbelievably, in just three hours, I made my first RFID to web interface that could read Brady's elegant RFID tags (also see my photo set on Flickr to get a glimpse of the action in the workshop). Amazingly it worked perfectly first time (full disclosure I did have help from the very patient executive editor of Maker Media Books, Brian Jepson. And Tom Igoe's step by step instructions on his website are invaluable.

See the photo of my build here. It is sitting on the right of my workshop neighbor Ahmed Riaz's laptop. We shared power supplies and a great discussion on User Experience Design sketches - see Ahmed's blog here and his flickr stream. I have reposted here one of my favorite UX sketches done by an eight year old, especially for Ahmed.

If you look closely at this picture you will see that Ahmed's RFID to web interface has read my Etech RFID tag and pulled up my Etech conference profile, including picture.

In the evening, Tom Igoe announced during his Ignite presentation that an Arduino MEGA will be available next week - more pins, more ports, more memory.

I think I've gotten hooked on Maker culture - I can't wait to check out the Etech Maker Shed that opens today. I got a feel for the excitement of rapid prototyping in the morning doing the LilyPad Electronic Fashion workshop with Leah Buechley, a brilliant and patient teacher.

There was some mega talent in the Lilypad workshop. The Wattzon team, Raffi  Krikorian and Jeremy Cloud, and Wattzon-phile Tom Igoe stitched and ironed (see my Flickr stream here), and helped out noobs like me. Possibly we will see some programmable T-Shirts displaying carbon footprint data. But certainly you can use Wattzon to compute the embodied energy data of all the Lilypad components.

 I was a little hampered by my appalling needlework skills. But Maker culture came to the rescue when I twittered about needlework phobia and Lilypad love. @dpentecost replied in seconds inviting me to "sew and tell" at a NYC Lilypad meetup when I return to NYC.

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Making_a_RFID_to_Web_Interface.zip (2.17 MB)

I found this drawing on the Clear Night Sky blog. Igor Gasowski saw this picture by a second grader at an art exhibit at one of his kid’s schools. To get a feel for the possibilities for change please take the, “What You Want Machine,” for whirl. Gasowski suggests:

Just pour yourself a drink, light up a cigar and ponder the implications of the “What you want machine.” Can you even imagine how your life [and the world] would change?

Gasowski also notes:

I also want to compliment the artist on the user interface. Given the benefit it delivers… It’s an exercise in restraint.

This week I am at O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference.  There is a passionate bunch of people in the publishing field interested in social tools here. Many are working in very traditional companies and some are hacking out new trails.  And I have already met a couple of people who signed up for this conference with one mission. But, recently laid off, they are here with a new mission - to reinvent themselves. This is a good place to do that. Chris Brogan's, "Blogging and Social Media," workshop was an A to Z from the best of the best.  And with Cory Doctorow in the front row asking astute questions, that is as good as it gets.  And to top this experience off, Chris Brogan gave me a 30 minute interview on the topic of  "Mobile Meets Social."  I will share this on my long form blog Ugotrade soon. Oh I nearly forgot to mention how chuffed I was when Chris named checked me during his talk for my 9000 word Ugotrade posts.

One example of many of Chris Brogan showing his stuff as THE social media business strategist was his reply to a question about corporate firewalls and social tools.  I asked him to recap his response for me after his talk.

There is a passionate bunch of people who want to use these social tools who aren't being allowed to do so by way of their corporation's firewall rules and policies.  My opinion is that people are already through those walls. But they are going another way. They are using their smart phones. So in the world of New Blackberries, and iphones, the Chocolate Phone and the Storm and all that, there is now a gateway toy right in everyone's pocket that they can bypass all of that technology blocking and do it on their phone. It is not ever as good as the desktop experience but it gives them a voice out into that world.

I think it is important for IT departments to be aware of that in a positive sense. To say, oh well this isn't going to impact my technology and yet this is going on. Are there ways I can facilitate it? Can I be helpful? If they are going to do it anyways, is there someway we can do it to even measure and be aware?  Because then if it is on the phone then it is also not being monitored. As an HR manager, there is that other negative question of how long are you using this all day long? If you are on your phone and not doing your real work, I can track that too.

But I think it is an opportunity though.  I think it is an opportunity for companies to take a guarded step into a new space by allowing that opportunity to happen on a phone.

Turning a blind eye, perhaps, for a little while and see what the real impact is because I don't think we can predict that.

But, if you are out on your own and no longer have corporate firewalls to worry about  (there was more bad news today, Anderson News Suspends Operations), the excitement is tangible in some areas. There was a huddle of ebook publishers in the media room with a very buzzy energy field around them, including Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords and Paul Biba, of teleread.org, gpspassion.com, and palmaddict.typepad.com.

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Smart_Phones_-_The_Gateway_Toy.zip (5.44 MB)

Last Thursday I attended the launch of the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project by my friends Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts (see picture below). As I twittered shortly after the event, this was the best presentation re the usefulness of virtual worlds, and the clearest demonstration of the role VWs can play in positive global development, that I have seen. And I have seen a lot of virtual world presentations in the last couple of years! 

See Dispatches from the Imagination Age for a complete write up.

 As Rita pointed out in her presentation to the audience at the Carnegie Council, Virtual Worlds are not only good for the kind of sensitive cross cultural dialogue the Understanding Islam project explores, virtual worlds are ideal.  In fact they may be one of the only places people feel emotionally and physically safe enough to explore potentially incendiary topics in.

Three products have come out of the, "Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds," project: policy recommendations, a mini-documentary video filmed inside virtual worlds and a graphic book that chronicled the project.

The policy recommendations, "Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds" which will be submitted to the Obama Administration can be downloaded here.

Joshua and Rita are THE great explorers of new possibilities/media for public diplomacy.

For the graphic book click here to download the pdf.

For the short documentary machinima produced by Dancing Ink Productions and ILL Clan Animation Studios see here.

 Click here for high resolution (warning: 1gb file) (see photo of Frank Dellario, ILL Clan and Rik Panganiban, Global Kids below).

This machinima is really a standout.  At the Carnegie Council event last week there were many people who had never heard of a virtual world before, let alone tried the experience out.  Again and again people said that after seeing the machinima they really, "Got it!"

Thursday night's presentation concluded with an awesome performance from Yas (photo below), Iran's Hip-Hop Sensation.  Also see Yas in "LIVE FROM DOHA," (produced by Dancing Ink Productions with the Brookings Institution from the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar last February).  I attended Live From Doha virtually in Second Life.  It was an amazing experience.

Thursday night was also a Metaverse Meetup and both the founders, Jerry Paffendorf, Wello Horld and Annie Ok, were there.  I got a chance to chat a bit with Jerry whose start up Wello Horld is still on stealth but getting close to beta. I am really looking forward to the launch - Wello Horld is very, very cool (I was in the early alpha). Now they have a power house team putting the polish on the experience.

There is a photo below of Jerry talking with Bruce Wallace (the father of Wello Horld's co-founder, Mark Wallace).  I also snapped some pictures of the  Brooklyn is Watching team. I think they will get me to make one of my much too infrequent trips to Brooklyn, some day soon!

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Understanding_Islam_through_Vi.zip (3.18 MB)

I was pointed to this pic by @sdague on Twitter, brilliant!  See ToothPaste For Dinner for the original posting and more great stuff.

I have been thinking about some of the projects from the ITP Winter Show again lately. And I have been meaning to post more pictures for while. But I became absorbed last week in writing this VERY long post, "Is it 'OMG Finally' for Augmented Reality: Interview with Robert Rice." Its a whoppa for my long form blog Ugotrade.  But as I link to the Twitter Baby debates in that post,  I thought I should at least post a couple of pics of my own, showing the  KickBee team.

Also. perhaps, I will get another chance to find out about the dude with the bubble wrap brain who was ubiquitous at the ITP Show and yet somehow I seemed to miss the opportunity to chat with him and ask: What, where, and why kinds of questions.

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Twitter_Baby_Debates.zip (90 KB)