http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2006/07/21/howard-rheingold-interview/ Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom Sun, 12 Oct 2008 03:25:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2006/07/21/howard-rheingold-interview/#comment-24493 Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility » Blog Archive » One Something Per Child Thu, 27 Jul 2006 09:03:17 +0000 http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/?p=158#comment-24493 [...] Before I thought things through that way I had said the same thing about handseta and the OLPC project a few times. That the OLPC project should be using handsets not laptops, it seemed obvious. I would like to publicly retract that statement. Cellular networks are a horrible place to try to build new, novel, well-situated solutions. The the networks and hardware are not open, the communications subject to regulation and restrictions, and the solutions fundamentally tied to someone elses business model. Fuck, experienced entrepreneurs in developed countries can’t manage to get their applications out. If we really want to help out other countries in terms of building out their infrastructure do we want to lead them into tying their solutions to carrier networks? Do we want them forced to do Symbian C++ programming if they want access to non-JSR mediated functionality? Should they need to have to send their handset in for test enablement before they can try to use their own apps on real hardware? [...] [...] Before I thought things through that way I had said the same thing about handseta and the OLPC project a few times. That the OLPC project should be using handsets not laptops, it seemed obvious. I would like to publicly retract that statement. Cellular networks are a horrible place to try to build new, novel, well-situated solutions. The the networks and hardware are not open, the communications subject to regulation and restrictions, and the solutions fundamentally tied to someone elses business model. Fuck, experienced entrepreneurs in developed countries can’t manage to get their applications out. If we really want to help out other countries in terms of building out their infrastructure do we want to lead them into tying their solutions to carrier networks? Do we want them forced to do Symbian C++ programming if they want access to non-JSR mediated functionality? Should they need to have to send their handset in for test enablement before they can try to use their own apps on real hardware? [...]

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