ARMING UP FOR THE PATENT WAR
Obviously this acquisition is related to the ongoing patent wars between Apple and Google (with their hardware partners HTC and Samsung as the primary proxies for litigation). Motorola has a deep, broad collection of intellectual property. Not only did they invent the cellular telephone and have years of creating popular consumer mobile hardware (StarTAC!), but they also have created their own Linux+Java mobile OSes in the past, which could provide support for Google in the case vs. Oracle.

GOOD FOR DEVELOPERS FOR NOW
I don’t think this will change much for developers in the next few years, as Android has great momentum that won’t end anytime soon. It may be a boon ultimately, as Google must work harder to maintain the image of Android being open now. The more transparency and code they release, the better for all.  I would also hope Google uses this to support and/or indemnify its app developers from worrying about being sued by patent trolls like LodSys.

PUTTING THE NAIL IN THE RIM COFFIN
Motorola has a “Pro” category of devices, with enhanced security in the OS to meet enterprise and gov requirements, as well as Blackberry style keyboards. This device could be a “Nexus Pro” sold bundled with Google Enterprise services to take on RIM directly as complete business tack. Google is having a lot more success in this space than people realize, taking on IBM, Microsoft and RIM all in one swoop. This is an area that Apple cannot compete in.

COMPETING WITH YOUR PARTNERS
It will be a tricky task to manage Android and Motorola business units of Google. While not entirely comparable, there are some good lessons to learn from Palm and Apple’s own failed attempts at licensing an OS while producing their own competitive hardware. I was at Palm when we had the PalmOne (Hardware) and PalmSource (OS) divisions, when there were still Palm licensees such as Handspring and Sony, and it was a really difficult mess. PalmSource had to treat us like a separate company, in order to appease partners, but at the same time, we didn’t have the freedom those partners would have to implement their solutions because we had to maintain unity with the Palm vision. Eventually, all the licensing ended, Palm bought Handspring, and the whole company unified again, and then ultimately failed, and was acquired by HP.

Here’s a brief summary of what we’ll be covering:

Join us for this important on-line dialogue featuring Documenting Violations: Choosing the Right Approach from January 27 to February 2, 2010. This dialogue will feature practitioners that have developed database systems to document human rights violations, organizations on the ground documenting violations, and those that are training practitioners on how to choose the right approach and system for their documentation. We will look at options for ways to collect, store and share your human rights data safely and effectively. If you are trying to figure out the best documenting system for your work – or if you have found something that works well, please join us for this conversation to share your questions, ideas, resources and stories!

Featured Resource Practitioners
Featured resource practitioners for this dialogue include (click here for more biographical info):

• Vijaya Tripathi and Megan Price work with the Martus database developed by Benetech
• Agnethe Olesen, Daniel D’Esposito and Bert Verstappen work on the OpenEvSys database developed by HURIDOCS
• Jorge Villagran and Sofia Espinosa of the Guatemalan National Police Archive Team
• Patrick J. Pierce, head of the International Center for Translational Justice – Burma Program
• Oleg Burlaca, utilizes HURIDOCS methodology and working on websites for World Organisation Against Torture and SOVA Center for Information and Analysis
• Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at Duke University and Seth Shaw, Duke’s Libraries’ Electronic Records Archivist
• Jana Asher, M.S., is the Executive Director of StatAid
• Agnieszka Raczynska of Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos, Mexico
• Daniel Rothenberg is the Managing Director of International Projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) at DePaul University College of Law

Read on:
http://www.newtactics.org/en/blog/new-tactics/documenting-violations-choosing-right-approach

Thanks to the open-source movement and the hard work of many Tibet supporters and typography experts, I am happy to announce that  rendering of Tibetan characters is now supported on the most fantastic of mobile smartphones, Google Android!!!

Tendor’s Yarlung Raging blog viewed on a T-Mobile myTouch3G Android Phone

While it only has a small alphabet of characters, the Tibetan language has been notoriously difficult to support on Mac, Windows and Linux due to some complexities in how one character can modify the next. Dedicated academics, volunteers and software engineers have stayed focused on solving this and the most recent versions of all major operating systems are able to render Tibetan and provide Tibetan character input tools. Google Android is based on Linux, and fortunately is able to support the use of the GPL-licensed Tibet Machine Unicode font.

However, by default Android only has a small number of fonts built-in, and doesn’t support the easy addition of new fonts or locales. It does however have something called the “fallback” font, which is used to render any encoded text it comes across that it doesn’t quite know what to do with.

What I realized is that you could replace this font with a Tibetan unicode font compatible with Linux, and that this would then enable Tibetan support in all applications on Android, including the web browser, email apps, instant messaging, and short messaging (SMS), among others.

The steps below outline the technical how to for Android users.


WARNING: This is not for novices. However, it isn’t rocket science either. Your average neighborhood mobile phone enthusiast should be able to figure out how to do this, and potentially help their friends do it too. Down the road, I hope we can make this process easier and/or Google will allow for the addition of any font to the system.

Step 1: Get Root on your Android device. You don’t need to mod your phone with a custom firmware, you just need root access to change system fonts. Here’s some places to start looking on how to (this changes weekly, btw, and differs for each type of Android phone):

• CyanogenMod: How To Root
• Android 1-click Root
• Android InstantRoot

Step 2: Download Tibet Machine Unicode font. You can learn more about the variety of Tibetan fonts available here.

Step 3: Make the system font folder writeable and backup the existing font
This can be done using desktop ‘adb’ tool from the SDK or the Android terminal app on the device

# su
# mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
# chmod 777 /system/fonts
# cd /system/fonts
# mv DroidSansFallback.ttf DroidSansFallback.ttf.bak
# exit

Step 4: Write the Tibetan unicode font as the new fallback font:
Using ADB Desktop tool with Android connected via USB

adb push TibMachUni-1.901b.ttf /system/fonts/DroidSansFallback.ttf

Using on-device terminal app:

#cd /system/fonts
#wget -o DroidSansFallback.ttf http://tinyurl.com/tibfont /system/fonts/DroidSansFallback.ttf

Step 5: Reboot your Android phone

Step 6: Point your Android browser at http://yarlungraging.blogspot.com, http://lobsangmonlam.org/ or http://tb.tibet.cn to verify the Tibetan font support is properly installed.

What’s Next

Two big steps from here… this is a call to action for Android developers out there:

• Develop a one-click app that can install Tibetan (or any other third-party language) font for any rooted device
• Port an existing Java-based Tibetan input utility into Android as an Input Method Editor so that you can have a way to write Tibetan character emails, SMS messages and blog posts.

It all begin with an innocent tweet about how I spent the weekend: “MC and I were sick all weekend, so we watched the entire first season of “Mad Men”…. time to start wearing my fedora again!”. My wife Micaela and I have been avidly watching the second season of AMC’s Mad Men, and took the $20 plunge on iTunes to catch up on the first season.

A few minutes later I received an email notification from Twitter that bettydraper was now following me. I laughed, and thought it was cute that some person out there loved “Mad Men” enough to a) impersonate one of the main characters, b) notice my tweet and c) actually then follow my feed. I followed Betty in return, and noticing she referenced @don_draper in a recent tweet, I followed him as well.

Now, I quickly realized this must be some sort of viral marketing campaign, or at the least an obsessed group of fans, role playing and recreating these characters in Twitter, hoping to tap into some of the magic of infamous twitterers such as DarthVader or Fake Steve Jobs. Then, however, something strange began…

Within minutes, I was also being followed by jane_segel, Ken_Cosgrove, and harrycrane, all characters from the show. Not that intrusive, but obviously my twitter account was being glommed onto by more make believe twits… how many more should I expect? The whole Mad Men crew?!

What to make of this? Well, considering the timing, either there is a dedicated staff of trained twitter monkeys, or someone has built a bot engine using some combination of Twitter Search and the Twitter API. Nothing mind blowing here, but interesting to come across it in the wild and to see how multiple twitter identities are weaved together to create, or perhaps recreate, the relationships of the show in this online environment.

What did bother me, was the speed at which I was picked up and followed by all of these other characters… just because I was interested in Betty and Don’s tweets, doesn’t mean I want to also know that Cosgrove and Harry Crane are out there, too. Now that they’ve got me hooked, perhaps the bots could monitor the frequency at which I mention Mad Men, and follow me, draw me into, their twitterweb over time. That would be more natural, and reveal the truth of itself in a much less obvious way.

The obvious irony is that this whole post is about viral marketing for a show that is all about the greatest era of marketing that ever existed… the era that created much of how we think about mass marketing and advertising. While digital campaigns such as this pique my imagination for a few moments, they unfortunately don’t have the staying power of an Oscar Meyer weiner tune.

The popular conception has been that the music industry is an evil bear that takes over 70% of the dollars an artist generates and locks artists up in a contractual prison. In many cases though, artists maintain control over lucrative merchandising and touring revenue streams. In this model, incentives for the artist and label should, in theory, be aligned. The more a band tours and pushes merchandise, the more money they make from touring and merchandising. AND the touring and merchandising acts as a fantastic marketing vehicle for album sales, benefiting the label (and the artist).

Now introduce digital music into this industry “balance”. At first, digital music seemed like another (though frightening) distribution and retailing model that could, in effect, conform to the physical distribution model, but with lower packaging and inventory costs. There would be online distributors (with a diminished role given the absence of physical inventory) and digital retailers. Apple’s FairPlay Digital Rights Management made it at least palatable for labels to try digital music retailing. In the meantime file sharing networks were doing two things at once. #1.) they were making it possible for people to access and sample music on an on-demand basis at no cost (to the downloader). #2.) they were removing the incentive to actually purchase legal physical or digital instances of desired music. The music industry chose to battle file-sharing on the face of their copyright, rather than evolve their business model to take advantage of this new way to interact with fans. (Here is a great piece on the value of “free grazing”. http://www.bubblegeneration.com/?a=a&resource=musicrisk1)

Labels are now seeing the power that social tools like MySpace, YouTube and distributable widgets have in getting artist’s work in front of more people in more contexts. Lots of albums “leak” onto file-sharing networks, but widget / embedded player models are offering a more controlled way for labels to let fans “graze” for free. The ability to sample wider varieties of music, without breaking the law, promises to grow music publishing revenues. But much of the value may be transferred to the businesses adjacent to music publishing since all of these free ways to interact with songs can begin to provide a disincentive to music sales. So touring and merchandising revenue streams stand to gain from more liberal online promotional models.

Artists should want their labels to use new technologies to market them without hesitation. Labels should want to push every button to get an artists band in front of their target market. 360 contracts, which give labels participation in the entire revenue cycle of an artist open up this type of creativity. For 360 contracts to take hold, the entire industry will have to acknowledge their importance and introduce them to the next generation of emerging artists.