Lunch over IP

Call for stories and anecdotes: how do you use Skype / MSN / GoogleTalk / etc?

I'm putting out a call for stories and anecdotes: please read on and if you can, do contribute. I'm intrigued by the imaginative ways in which people are using Skype, MSN, GoogleTalk, iChat and the other free Internet telephony and videotelephony services. As with most technologies, they're being used in ways that the engineers never intended and the marketeers never foresaw. Orthodox and unorthodox ways, hi-tech and low-tech. So I'm starting a collection of stories and anecdotes. (There are some on the Skype site, but I'm not really interested in businessmen keeping in touch while travelling: I'm interested in human unconventional stories, like that of the dispersed rock band rehearsing via Skype). Below are the first four that I've gathered over the last few months through random encounters and discussions. If you have or know of such a story or anecdote, please share it by commenting on this post. And please do disseminate this call for contributions further, e-mail it to your friends, or blog about it on your blog (and if you do, send a trackback or add the URL of your post in the "comments" to this post, so I can keep track of it and properly thank you): I will "edit" the collection on the blog and if enough good stories come in, I will turn it into one of my BusinessWeek.com's columns. Thank you! Here the first four:

• A family of immigrant workers from Kosovo, living in Switzerland, has installed a big computer screen in their dining/living room, with a webcam on it. The MSN messenger window is open all day, for incoming messages or calls from family back home or from friends that migrated to other countries. And almost every morning, they have breakfast "with" the husband's mother, who lives in Kosovo and also has a webcam.
• Another couple of immigrants in Switzerland, this time from Spain, with a young daughter. She regularly does her homework with the help of her aunt, who's a teacher and lives in Spain: they work over a free video call.
• A grandfather in New York. He's retired, and his daughter's family lives in California. Several evenings a week, he puts to bed his young grandson by reading him bedtime stories over Skype.
• When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a group of activists from around the world used SkypeIn and SkypeOut to set up a virtual phone bank and messaging center. Collaborating also with ham-radio operators, they relayed emergency messages in and out of the devastated region, let people ask for information, or just let them reach a friendly voice. The phone bank was staffed by volunteers from India, Europe, the Middle East and the US. (A report here)

Federer-Nadal: The battle of the Surfaces

It's probably the boldest tennis match conceived at least since the "Battle of the Sexes" 34 years ago: a Battle of the Surfaces. A match designed around the question: who is the best tennis player in the world? Switzerland's Roger Federer is arguably the best tennis player ever. But while he's been unbeatable on grass courts (à la Wimbledon), another player, Spain's Rafael Nadal, has emerged as the king of clay courts (à la Roland Garros). On May 2nd in Palma de Mallorca, Nadal's home, they will play on a court that's half clay and half grass:

Of course, it is a fabulous marketing coup engineered by the local authorities, who had both the newly built Palma Arena (cost: 50 million euros) and the coming Summer season to promote, and are said to have put 2 million euros into the event. Rules-wise, it will be a normal best-of-three-sets game, with the usual changes of side (and possibly, every time, change of shoes). On his blog, Federer says that "the idea really appeals to me as we each dominate one of the surfaces ... It ought to be interesting to see who chooses the better tactic".

UPDATE 2 May: Nadal beat Federer 7-5, 4-6, 7-6 (10)

links for 2007-04-29

• Low-cost computers: An interview in the new "Le Matin"
  "Le Matin Dimanche", the only Sunday newspaper in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, came out today with a new layout and a new "Business" section. The section's main story, on low-cost computers, is based on an interview with, well, me.
• Wikipedia as Internet news source on the VirginiaTech shooting
  2074 contributors created a polished, detailed article on the VirginiaTech massacre, with more than 140 separate footnotes, a timeline, etc. ""It has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event." (from the IHT)

links for 2007-04-26

• Ritalia: collectively re-imagining a government portal
  Many IT/comm people/bloggers/citizens unhappy with the Italian government's tourism portal Italia.it (45 million euros poorly spent) are joining forces online to re-imagine it. A first meeting (a bit chaotic, I'm told) took place in March in Milan, discussion continues online. It will be interesting to see if "crowdsourcing" a national portal is a workable approach.
  (tags: ritalia portal crowdsourcing Italy)

Love letters

Photographer Rowland Scherman's "Love letters", a kind of natural typeface:

He tells about it in the Typographica blog. Excerpt:

No one got paid. It was just a high-spirited valentine for the eye, but when I realized it might be the first photographic freestanding human typeface ever (it was), I tried for a while to make a coffee table-type book out of it. New York publishers were afraid that the pubes and the Z might offend someone. This was in 1975. Japanese publishers couldn’t do it either because of the pubic hair.

(via Swissmiss)

links for 2007-04-25

• The VirginiaTech assassin: should his tapes be shown in full?
  Jeff Jarvis has some interesting thoughts in favor of the media showing the VirginiaTech murderer's multimedia manifesto in full. "We would see just how dangerous he obviously was ... and ask the hard questions". Good points also in the readers' comments.
• Newly found (exo)planet that could harbor life
  An international team led by Swiss astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system (an exoplanet) with the possibility of liquid water and of life.

BondyBlog: covering the French election via videophone

Regular readers of LunchOverIP are familiar with the BondyBlog, the blog launched at the end of 2005 in the Paris banlieue (suburb) of Bondy by a group of Swiss journalists seeking a better way to cover riots that lasted several weeks, and which they later (using the proceeds of a book to finance their training) passed on to a group of local youngsters. These turned it into the first French "citizen media" outlet covering the banlieues from the banlieues, creating a national network of correspondents (mostly students), scooping the national press, and generally doing a great job (yes, I believe the BondyBlog's is a great story and offers an interesting metaphor for the future of journalism in a p2p world: it is not about either/or but rather about complementarity and hybridization-- follow the previous links to get the details).

Of course, many of the BondyBlog's posts and discussions in the last months revolved around the French presidential election: the banlieues were a key theme. And the team -- composed by amateur journalists (students, workers, etc) led by a teacher -- has been very present also this past Sunday, when the French cast their votes. Teaming up with CanalObs, the online television channel of a national magazine, and with Yahoo!France (which has been carrying the blog on their portal for a few months now), the banlieuebloggers have offered a rare alternative to the stiff and predictable roundtables on public and private TV channels, where top-ranking politicians and would-be ministers supporting one or the other of the top candidates were playing the usual standardized script (the campaign is not over: the two frontrunners, Segolène Royal for the left and Nicolas Sarkozy for the right, will face off on May 6th for the Presidency). The bloggers promoted their initiative through a leaflet (picture) illustrated with a burning car (reminder of the riots that got the BondyBlog started, but also of the still tense social situation in the banlieues) with the slogan "If you want to change things, turn on your computer and don't let anyone think for you". They moved into the tiny CanalObs studio, invited local politicians and lesser-known representatives of associations and other groupings and even the editor of Elle magazine to comment on the election (picture left).  They set up their computers in a corner of the studio so they could keep blogging (also visible in the picture at left), put their correspondents at work and dispatched "special envoys" to key locations -- who reported live using video cell phones (picture right), and compensating with ingenuity ("débrouille", as the French say) their lack of technical and financial resources they did a great job. I like these guys.

links for 2007-04-24

• Evgeny Morozov: Blogs as the new frontier in human rights
  Through the case of Belarusian political activist Denis Denisov, Evgeny Morozov discusses the potential of th Internet to rectify human rights injustices. "A person in an authoritarian country can now fight the system, raise funds, mobilize communities".
  (tags: Belarus blogging activism humanrights)
• Andy Hobsbawm: Small is the Next Big Thing
  My friend Andy Hobsbawm's draft intro to his book "Small is the next big thing" is up for all to download and comment on and challenge. His argument: "small things are the new organising principle that many future big things will be based on".
  (tags: smallthings nextbigthing Hobsbawm book)

links for 2007-04-23

• Irshad Manji: Faith without fear
  Irshad Manji, author of "The trouble with Islam today" and a speaker at TEDGLOBAL 05 in Oxford, travelled through the Arabian Peninsula and Europe making a documentary about reconciling Islam and freedom. PBS just premiered it. Videoclips on the site.
  (tags: irshadmanji TEDGLOBAL islam freedom)
• Al Jazeera English has own channel on YouTube
  The English-language operations of Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera have opened their own channel on videosharing platform YouTube, where they post some of their shows. A way to overcome the fact that US cable operators aren't keen on carrying AJ.
  (tags: aljazeera television youtube)
• GENI: Global environment for network innovations
  A group of scientists around Internet co-inventor Vint Cerf and with the support of the US' National Science Foundation want to create a new "global communications network and related services that will be qualitatively better than today's Internet".
  (tags: internet network research geni)
• Zurich: a petition to reduce outdoors advertising
  An association in Zurich is gathering signatures to cut in half the number of spaces allocated to billboards in the city. Turns out that Switzerland has more billboards per capita than any other European country.
  (tags: advertising Zurich)
• Stickiness and the viral nature
  Interesting thoughts by Erik Sundelof on viral marketing and stickiness. "Viral branding is about letting you users build your brand. If you are uncareful ... they might build a brand you didn’t intend".
  (tags: viral marketing)
• Lessons from a Stradivari in the metro station
  If a great musician plays great music in a metro station, will people recognize greatness? In Washington star violinist Josh Bell played his Stradivari for 43 min; 1100 people walked by, 27 gave a tot of 32$, almost none stopped to listen. (Thanks Isaiah)
  (tags: stunt music dailylife experiment)

The Forum des 100 program is out

I'm producing again the annual Forum des 100 conference, which will take place for the third time on May 31st in Lausanne, Switzerland (in French). Five days ago we put the final touches to the program and sent out the invitations. As of now, 300 people have signed up, taking more than half the available seats.  

The Forum des 100 is an annual one-day conference convened by Swiss newsmagazine L'Hebdo to discuss key issues for the present and the future of Switzerland and in particular of the French-speaking part of the country. After discussing mobility and urbanism, education, and the jobs of tomorrow in the previous editions, this year's Forum will be devoted to two topic: sustainability (morning) and Swiss foreign policy (afternoon). Among the speakers will be the Swiss President, Micheline Calmy-Rey, and the French star environmentalist Nicolas Hulot, as well as Alexander Zehnder who will talk about the "2000-Watts society". Attendance is by invitation only. I will be moderating the whole conference, which will be webcast live via the conference's blog.

The name of the conference comes from a list of 100 personalities that L'Hebdo publishes each year the day of the Forum, portraying men and women from every walk of life for their contribution -- through action or vision -- to the dynamism and innovation in the French-speaking part of Switzerland (they are of course all invited to attend the conference).

A thank you to the partners whose support makes the Forum possible: Loterie Romande, BCV, Tissot, Switcher, MIS-Trend and UNIL; and to the media/network partners Swiss Public Radio RSR, Rezonance, and Kesako.