Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Clay begins a segment on tech and education.

He says he thinks of his group at NYU as "The Department of the Recently Possible." A few years ago they noticed that students were increasingly integrating phones into their apps. So they started looking into it. One experiment: PacManhattan that mates the urban grid and the game grid. The runners are controlled by people in a control room via mobile phones.

DodgeBall was an experiment in mobile social networking. "Mobile phones are the first things since keys that everyone carries," Clay says, citing Marko Ahtisaari. DodgeBall alerted him that there was someone one degree removed from his social circle in a bar he was in. The system initially suffered from "the ex-girlfriend bug": She would still be in your circle friends of friends so it would keep suggesting you meet up with her, so you need a way to "denominate" links. [Apparently this was a problem with ex-boyfriends as well.]

Phones are not becoming PCs because: Only the minimum platform is widespread. There's no "ocean of practice." Manufacturers don't understand the benefits of allowing hacking. The US carriers work against ubiquity. So, phones will continue to augment PCs. E.g., upload from phone and view on PC (e.g., flickr).