Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Heard About The Mass Spying Industry Yet?

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Wikileak’s founder, Julian Assange, made headlines around the world this past week with his presentation on the release of tens of thousands hundreds of documents (with more to be released) outlining that “Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries.”

So that you are able to stay informed about developments that may positively or negatively impact your application development or personal use of technology, you should know about an emerging global industry focused on mass-scale spying on mobile devices, social media, or other internet-based use and so you are encouraged to view the video below and then visit Wikileaks – The Spy Files.

In case you are ready to immediately dismiss this as a “foreign country” problem and that it wouldn’t or couldn’t affect you or your organization, remember the “inadvertent” collection of U.S. citizen’s communications when domestic warrantless wiretapping ensued. In addition, it has been revealed that in January 2011, the National Security Agency broke ground on a $1.5 billion facility in the Utah desert that is designed to store terabytes of domestic and foreign intelligence data forever and process it for years to come.

While it is an imperative that our government intelligence agencies can stay on top of the exponential explosion in online communications and technologies, we’ve quickly learned this week with the CarrierIQ “rootkit scandal” how much we don’t know about what software is on our devices, how the carriers are using their ability to track our location within a few feet of our mobile phones is being used, and whether or not they are automatically storing ALL of our data with open, non-warrant-based analysis by intelligence agencies.

The flip side of this is another issue, one that certainly justifies U.S. expenditures and an acceleration in intelligence agency capability. It is how the stakes are rising QUICKLY on everything happening in cyberspace. As more and more of us shop online, map our businesses and processes to the web, interact socially online and can instantly (and for free) talk with anyone, anywhere on the planet, ensuring that the bad guys in other countries aren’t able to mass vacuum up our data and use it against us is critical to our national defense.

Stop the Internet Blacklist

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I normally don’t harvest content en masse from a website, but I honestly didn’t think the SOPA/Protect IP bills would actually make it to the floors in Congress.

It has and the hearings are going on right now but, according to Tim O’Reilly (the tech publisher) on Google+ a moment ago, “This is really important. They aren’t even hearing testimony from opponents of the bill. The “hearings” are a sham, with testimony from supporters only.”

A veritable Who’s Who of tech giants—including Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Mozilla—explicitly came out against both SOPA and PROTECT-IP in a letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees

To get you up-to-speed quickly, here’s why this is bad:

Good infographic is here too.

The following came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet Blacklist Legislation as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: Under SOPA’s provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the “U.S. authorized version”).

WHAT CAN YOU DO? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on the Senate version of the bill, taking a principled stand against a very dangerous bill. But every Senator and Representative should be opposing the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA. Contact our members of Congress now to speak out!

Senator Office Phone Fax Email
Senator Amy Klobuchar (D- MN) 202-224-3244 202-228-2186 http://klobuchar.senate.gov/emailamy.cfm
Senator Al Franken (D- MN) 202-224-5641 202-224-0044 http://www.franken.senate.gov/?p=email_al


“Thank You” for the Books for Thai School

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Back in September I wrote a post called, “English Books for Thai School – Can You Help?” and was so pleased people jumped in to help. We collected well over 250 books for the school and delivered them when the students and teachers arrived at the Mall of America at the outset of their time here in Minnesota.

I cannot express enough my thanks for all who helped out:

Lerner Publishing: Kathleen Clarke responded to a blind email request of mine and she put together a big box of brand new, amazingly high quality books, perfect for the English program at Strisuksa school

Meg Knodl

Meg Knodl: As senior librarian in Communications and Community Engagement with Hennepin County (Minn.) Library, Meg had great suggestions on buying surplus books from the library system (a sale was just ending and she connected me with the right folks).

Paul Schroeder

To show the power of social media, I’d placed a plea and link to that Minnov8 post mentioned above on my Facebook wall. Two people responded immediately with a third who joined in:

Paul Schroeder:  A fraternity brother of mine who read about my plea on Facebook responded by collecting several dozen books and even cajoled a friend of his in participating with some novels. These novels, while not perfectly targeted to the students, surprisingly were very welcomed by the teachers!

Sherry Collins: She had several ideas I took advantage of and then recommended a site I’d never heard of, FreeCycle, a kind of “Craigslist for free stuff” and I placed a post in the Minneapolis Group

The very generous donation by Beth Sullivan, volunteer for The Women's Prison Book Project

Beth Sullivan: She responded with 75 classic (and new!) books that were extras from a non-profit she volunteers for, The Women’s Prison Book Project.

As these great volunteers were putting forth such kind efforts to gather books, I’d been interacting with my contact at the school, Lynn Brown. Mentioning the phenomenal work of Project Gutenberg, I asked her to go through the books there and make recommendations and we’d download the books for her (since their internet connections are pretty minimal at the school).

What happened next surprised even me and set me on a course I hadn’t expected. …  [Read More…]

Something Amazing Happened at #EduTechMN Yesterday – Steve Jobs Was in the Room

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[This post was originally published earlier today on Tech~Surf~Blog.]

I felt it. I didn’t know it then, but it may have been at the precise moment Steve was passing. I was sitting in a room of about 100 people, mid-afternoon, listening to a panel of educators at the EduTech MN conference at the University of Minnesota. I was actually finishing a blog post on my MacBook Air, and hadn’t even intended to stay for the panel (the startup pitches were over).

But I was surprisingly drawn in by the discussion. I was blown away by what these people, senior educators, were saying — showing so much passion, speaking from the heart, talking about how kids are learning today. They just lit up as they described how the new tablet and mobile technologies are opening up worlds for these kids like nothing they’d ever seen before. The iPad, the iPod Touch, and all the great software these Apple devices have engendered.

I found myself beaming from ear to ear as I listened to them describe their real-life experiences, with such excitement in their voices.  These aren’t boring educators, I thought!  These are really dedicated, committed people who work on the front lines, whose worlds revolve around how our children learn, and how they can make that process better for them, every single day. And, thanks to technology and a certain company named Apple, they have more and more amazing tools to help them do that. It was a special experience for me, as someone not involved much in the world of education. I’m so glad I stayed.

I sat there and thought to myself — right at that very moment — “Wow, would Steve Jobs be proud to be hearing this right now.”

I like to think he was.

Steve, you didn’t just change technology, media, music, and retailing forever.  You changed education, too — in a big, big way. We thank you. We will greatly miss you.

But we know we’ll see the mark you made on this world for a long, long time to come, in the eyes of children everywhere.

 

[Left to right on the panel: Jesse Thorstad, technology specialist, Fergus Falls school district; Dave Eisenmann, director of instructional tech, Minnetonka school district; Jennifer Sly, MN Historical Society; and Jay Haugen, Superintendent, Farmington school district. The panel was moderated by State Senator Terri Bonoff.]

Predicting Human Behavior through Games

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Every week, people from around the world spend more than 3 billion hours playing video games. Professor Jaideep Srivastava of the University of Minnesota and Professor Dmitri Williams at the University of Southern California find this number too large to ignore. Their software company Ninja Metrics relies on social analytics to make sense of human behavioral data from these games.

Their startup coincides with a rising trend in game play and specifically an explosion in online games. Further, promotional forces like Dr. Jane McGonigal, an influential author and occasionally controversial visionary from U.C. Berkley believes that games can solve real-world problems through increasing the amount of time spent playing games to 21 billion hours per week by 2020. There is little doubt that gaming will continue to be an extremely important global activity.

The introduction of platforms like the Nintendo Wii, the Apple iPad, and the Sifteo Cubes has opened up a variety of new options for games. The social-gaming company Zynga has been steadily building innovative games delivered over social networking platforms like Facebook. The MIT Technology Review reported last week that Zynga is planning to produce a drastically more complex, strategic, and socially interactive gave than ever before. In a TechCrunch article last year, it was estimated that half of all Facebook users play games and that 40% of the time spent on Facebook is devoted to social games like those developed by Zynga. Clearly, there is an extensive amount of activity and data being generated through these evolving social interactions in massively multiplayer online games (MMO). …  [Read More…]

FCC: 68% of Broadband Connections NOT Broadband

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just released an 87 page report entitled, “Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2009” (PDF). What this report reveals—that 68% of so-called “broadband” internet connections don’t meet the FCC’s new minimum standard of 4 megabits per second (mbps) download and 1mbps upload—should be taken in to consideration whether you’re an internet or web-based developer, a company delivering ever-richer and more robust services (i.e., bandwidth intensive ones) or are just curious about the true state of broadband in the United States.

Though many people who have commented here on Minnov8, through Twitter to our account (or our personal ones) seem truly excited when reports in 2007 showed the U.S. exceeded 50% of households had broadband. Then that excitement is tempered with reports like this one stating “U.S. Broadband: Still Expensive; Still Underwhelming” compared to the rest of the world.

But it wasn’t until this FCC comprehensive analysis appeared this week that a clearer picture of the true state of broadband penetration appeared. Take a look at Figure 1(a) from the report (after the jump) and you’ll note that over 92 million of the 133 million U.S. households with broadband have download speeds between 6mbps and 3mbps with 58% of the total having less than 3mbps download speed!

…  [Read More…]

Innovative Social Networking with a Purpose

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The Table Project is a non-profit, pre-launch, remarkably innovative social networking service for churches of any denomination being delivered right here in Minnesota. The project’s mission is to, “…help churches “Live Church Together” through community-building software.” They do this by going beyond traditional social media through their platform called “The Table,” one which enables churches to custom tailor a solution for their congregation.

Recently I sat down with the executive director of The Table Project, Ken Finsaas, to learn more about the project, their mission and get some more background. I have to admit that I was more than a bit skeptical about YASN (Yet Another Social Network) being developed when I was introduced to Ken by a guy I know who specializes in placing senior leadership in tech organizations (Kevin Spanbauer, a Senior Partner at VTL Search in Eden Prairie).

My skepticism came from the fact that there are so many other social networking, group collaboration and other similar platforms already in existence. Since Ken has a senior leadership background in I.T. systems, consulting, and outcome-based project delivery, it wasn’t until meeting him and understanding more about their approach—and mostly because Ken later provided me with login credentials so I could poke around inside The Table and actually experience what they’re delivering—that I completely changed my mind and realized that YASN for churches was not only needed, but perfectly positioned for the next phase of growth and meaningful connections by church-going youth.

(Click for larger image)

An non-profit organization called YouthWorks is the parent organization spearheading The Table Project. YouthWorks’ purpose is to, “…provide life-changing, Christ-centered youth mission opportunities. This is our reason for being. We create extraordinarily fun and significant mission adventures, targeted to the needs and capabilities of youth, ages 12-19.” That organization sprung forth due to a recognition that outside-the-U.S. mission trips were incredibly costly and beyond the reach of most youth and their families. Besides the positive impact on youth who engage in these mission trips, YouthWorks saw a great need right here on U.S. soil for youth to help communities and individuals in a myriad of ways.

Experiencing the acceleration in the always-on, always-connected, increasingly-mobile, and socially connected young people that comprise the core demographic YouthWorks serves, The Table Project was begun to empower churches to deliver a platform to connect their members together, while simultaneously extending their respective ministries in to the online and social realm, and to be where young people are increasingly congregating, connecting and socializing….and that’s online.

So is it likely that YASN for churches will work?

…  [Read More…]

Without Any Sense of Irony, Almanac Hosts a Panel on New Media

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l-r: Co-host Erik Eskola; McKenna Ewen; Julio Ojeda-Zapata; Co-host Cathy Wurzer; Shayla Thiel-Stern (none of whom probably yet see the irony that this Almanac 'new media' segment won't later be shareable)

This past Friday night on Twin Cities Public Television’s (TPT) “Almanac” program, frequent contributor to Minnov8, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, made his first appearance on the show to talk about new media and I thought he knocked it out of the park. He was joined by two other delightful and very knowledgeable panelists, Shayla Thiel-Stern of the University of Minnesota (where she is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communications) and McKenna Ewen from the StarTribune where his focus is on new media work.

Co-host Cathy Wurzer began the segment by saying, “About once a month we gather a group of people to chat up media…old and new” and then went on to introduce the three panel members and jump in to the meat of the conversation. Julio did a fantastic job on the segment (fun video Julio!) and I was eager to create a post this morning here on Minnov8 and embed the Almanac segment, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write that I discovered that TPT is still living in an old media world:

TPT does not enable or allow video to be embedded in a blog!

“Wait a second,” I thought. “You mean that if I want to embed the “new media” segment with Julio in it I have to click on this link to load a new page and pop up a window just like an “old media, we gotta protect our content” company!?!” Sadly, the answer is “Yes“ and the irony is obviously lost on TPT.

Here is what you need to do, TPT….  [Read More…]

Accelerating Change

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Every day I scan hundreds of blog posts, articles and tweets having to do with technology. Included in that scanning is a 4-5 times per day viewing of Techmeme, the technology ‘conversation tracker’ that connects key articles and posts with those who’ve linked to it, enabling you and I to see what the hot stories are at the moment and at-a-glance.

What’s become clear over the last several years is one key shift: the rate of technological change is accelerating. Almost daily there is some key feature announced, a new product or service, or some new insight, which almost instantly makes its way across the internet and raises the consciousness and awareness levels of those of us paying attention.

The scientist Ray Kurzweil is arguably the #1 thought leader in the area of accelerating change after the publication of his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” and the creation of his subsequent Singularity Conference.

The premise in Kurzweil’s book is the coming technological singularity and how we will be able to augment our bodies and minds with technology. He describes the singularity as resulting from a combination of three important technologies of the 21st century: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (including artificial intelligence).

Having attempted to read the book three times until finally succeeding on my fourth try, it’s tough to refute Kurzweil’s arguments that we’re living not only in a time of accelerating change, but that that change is exponential. That said, there have been several prominent thinkers and scientists who criticize his speculation and approaches.

What does accelerating or exponential change mean to you? Here is Ray Kurzweil telling you about the singularity in less than 7 minutes:

When you consider the technology shifts and changes your great-grandparents, grandparents, parents (and even you) have experienced already, I can only imagine the things we’ll see over the next several decades. Hang on to your hats…it’s gonna be a heckuva ride!

MPR: Where is innovation in Minnesota?

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Minnesota Public Radio has a subsite called MPRNewsQ with an online poll for ‘select’ Minnesotans: Where is the innovation in your field?

At the head of the poll they state, “Innovation: The health of the economy depends on it. Our schools are meant to encourage it. But innovation isn’t a widget that can be stamped out on the assembly line. It’s the product of a delicate recipe of education, technology and entrepreneurship. We’d like your help exploring where innovation is happening, and where it’s not, but should be.”

When I received an email invite today to respond to the poll, I was initially excited since I assumed (wrongly) that this was open to general public and/or MPR members at large. As it turns out I received the invite since I’m one of a select number of “Public Insight Network” contributors to yet another subsite on MPRNewsQ called “Minnesota Today“.

Minnesota Today is a crowdsourced article input site from a number of people who (hopefully) have insight in to important and interesting we all come across daily while reading online. We submit links to a moderated queue and they’re looked at and posted periodically throughout each day. I’m expecting this connection might enable me to obtain the results of this poll early—or at least be able to publish them quickly here on Minnov8—and I’ll try to let you know what people say as soon as possible.

Though I’m a contributor and fan of MPR, the website has so much going on and is so layered and nuanced, it’s a real challenge to find anything…including my modest contributions at Minnesota Today. In fact, I’ve talked to about a dozen hard-core MPR and Twin Cities Public Television members who had no clue Minnesota Today even existed and for a couple of others who did, had no idea I contributed. Others are taken aback that there are “special” polls like this that are not open to the public at large and I’d have to agree.

Still, this is a good start on an innovative use of the web and crowdsourcing and I applaud MPR for the effort.