FN: Frederick Noronha’s blog

Colin <jazzgoa@yahoo.com> sent this note (together with copies of the two music videos):

 

Obligato-Goa’s sensational latino band has launched two music videos in Goa. A sizzling Spanish song called ‘La Paranda’ and a kicking Konkani kantaar called ‘Goa Amchem’. The band has decided to get together again after a two year break. The video DVD has been released for promotional purposes and is available free of cost. Call Carlos in Goa for your copy on cellphone 9822382824.View a low resolution clip of ‘Goa Amchem’ here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_aq6uSElyc4

goamusician : Message: Obligato launches music video

technorati tags:music, Spanish, Konkani, Obligato

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We are a network of activists,academics and development practitioners working toward stronger alternative,participatory and people centered communications.(This) group will focus on demonstrating that development communication is an indispensable ingredient for meeting contemporary development challenges….

DevelopmentCommunicationInSouthAsia : DevelopmentCommunicationInSouthAsia

technorati tags:media, communications, india

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We are a network of activists,academics and development practitioners working toward stronger alternative,participatory and people centered communications.(This) group will focus on demonstrating that development communication is an indispensable ingredient for meeting contemporary development challenges….

DevelopmentCommunicationInSouthAsia : DevelopmentCommunicationInSouthAsia

technorati tags:media, communications, india

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Jan 27, 2007 - 10:45:52 AM Several million pages of web content use Creative Commons licenses. This makes tonnes of text, video, music, photos and educational content sharable to those with Net access.

By Frederick Noronha, IANS, [RxPG] Mumbai, Jan 27 - India’s entry into the global Creative Commons network that works to expand the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share has been welcomed by Joichi Ito, chair of the non-profit organisation.

Ito, chair of Creative Commons -, a 2001-founded non-profit organisation, told IANS:’India was probably the most significant country we had left out -. It is important - from an IT perspective and from a growth perspective. It is a large country, with a significant intellectual community, and a potential economic power.’

On Friday, the Indian Institute of Technology –Bombay saw the launch of the Creative Commons - licenses and project.CC has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses, the latest being one suited to Indian legal requirements.

These licenses, depending on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights - of the work.I think India is not yet polluted with bad intellectual property thinking. Young people are more open to the possibility of accepting Open Source - here. Like Brazil, he said.

Said the US-educated Japanese campaigner, venture capitalist and Net entrepreneur: In the US even the kids think in terms of mainstream media metaphors. They say they have to ’steal’ music.

The words they use also assumes they’re committing some crime.He stressed to see the Creative Commons license as something more than an act of rebellion.

Said Ito: Four years after its launch, Creative Commons has become more mainstream, getting acceptance from - companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. -In India, we’d like to see - license being used for a very broad range of uses, whether it’s university producers and courseware, villagers with local content, or even Bollywood, he told IANS minutes prior to the launch of the project for India.

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing about the needs of professional producers to mass-produce content. But one of the main businesses on the Internet today is to create opportunity to share their own work. It’s a multibillion dollar market even today. It’s growing, said Ito.

Ito is himself also the general manager - for the Internet search-engine for blogs Technorati, chairman of Six Apart Japan, and Socialtext.

He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. He is on the board of ICANN -, the Open Source Initiative, and Mozilla Foundation.Later he called on Creative Commons supporters to help make it ubiquitous.

We don’t win the argument until your grandmother can use Creative Commons - without having to install some fancy thing -, he said.He argued that even commercially-driven Bollywood, India’s mainstream films sector, could gain a lot from Creative Commons licenses.In markets where it was little known, like Japan for instance, it could allow its older films to be shared among viewers, allowing for its popularity and demand to be built up there, he argued.

In Brazil, one of the largest - record label has opted for allowing non-commercial copying of its music under the Creative Commons license, he argued. The ability to influence cultures beyond borders works well if you can legally share it, he said.

He advocated the license for documentary filmmakers - growing fast in India but still struggling to find their audiences.

Non-commercial, non-derivative licenses are what is needed. Quite a few documentary filmmakers use that. They want viewers to be able to copy their work, but don’t want it to be commercially reused -, said he.

Ito said Creative Commons’ developing nations license was one of those which was not doing well. We thought book publishers might have been interested in using it, to license their work in countries where they didn’t have a market -, he said.

But, others were doing fine, he added.Several million pages of web content use Creative Commons licenses. This makes tonnes of text, video, music, photos and educational content sharable to those with Net access.But the project has its share of critics as well, with some questioning how well it was living up to its perceived values and goals.

India joins Creative Commons camp of building sharable knowledge

technorati tags:creativecommons, india, knowledge, copyrights, copyleft

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A cyber-network being built to promote discussion on toys in India — traditional and modern — and network people working on this issue. This list was inspired by a chance meeting with Sudarshan Khanna, a man committed to this idea, after many years, at the IIT Bombay’s TechFest, Jan 2007. –Frederick Noronha

toys-for-tomorrow-india : ToysForTomorrow(India)

technorati tags:toys, mailinglist, india, nid, nationalinstitutefordesign

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Simputer project struggling to keep afloat

IANS,January 30, 2007

The Simputer is dead. Long live the Simputer. India’s most high profile IT hardware project has been fighting to keep afloat, but some pleasant surprises could still come the way of this handheld computing device. ‘

The Simputer was greeted with much optimism globally when plans for it were announced and prototypes put out to show its workability. But this didn’t work as smoothly as expected.

Now the production of the Simputer has ceased. People are still buying the “couple of thousand” computers available in his company’s stock, said Atul Chitnis, Geodesic senior vice-president (product technology and strategy).

Geodesic, with its offices at Andheri in Mumbai, has recently taken over part of the Simputer initiative.Chitnis argued that what was “interesting” was the huge amount of technology that “came out of the project” but never got used.

“This is still going into devices now itself. I can’t tell you more about that. But the Simputer is far from dead. This year itself will see (some of the fruits of that),” Chitnis told IANS.

Chitnis said the takeover of one of the two Simputer firms by Geodesic had given it the “added advantage” of global capital and market reach.He said the lack of applications developed by external hackers for the Simputer-as is done generally in the Open Source world-was another letdown to some users.

But the interface used for development, Picopeta’s Alchemy, has now been turned into the openalchemy.org interface.”It has now been picked up by a whole lot of developers. (Prominent German Open Source developer) Harald Welte demostrated in Bangalore recently how he’s working on this stuff. You should take a look at the promise of tools such as the open embedded distribution.

Soon, there will be no shortage of tools for the Simputer,” Chitnis guessed. Chitnis, long known as an evangelist for the Open Source approach to computing, said the Simputer was one reason why he moved on from his own consulting firm to being part of the Geodesic team, which now owns the Amida brand of the Simputer. “I’ve long been interested in the mobile space,” he said.

But, he felt, what went “wrong” with the Simputer was that it was given the “wrong image” as a “poor man’s computer”. Rather, he argued, it was meant to be a device meant to bridge the digital divide.”All sorts of promises were made. The government committed itself to deploying Simputers in its departments. But this never happened.”

Chitnis pointed to the superior nature of the Simputer design. When he went to the Wizards of Oz event in Berlin recently, a casual display of the Picopeta-sold Amida Simputer saw geeks “dropping everything and playing with the features of the Simputer”.

“They were almost all Western geeks, impressed with technology that came out of India five years ago. It’s amazing what Indians could achieve.”According to him, the “problem” was that Simputer efforts were led by an “innovator company, not a marketing company”.

Also, the two Simputer licensee companies, Encore and Picopeta, took very different stances on the role of the Simputer. One marketed it to commercial markets, while the other saw it as a tool to bridge the digital divide, he said.

ZDNet India > News > hardware > Simputer project struggling to keep afloat

technorati tags:simputer, digitaldivide, BytesForAll, india, Geodesic

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Joichi Ito is talking about the right for political free speech while remixing… this is at the launch of Creative Commons (India) at the IIT Bombay. He showed a few secs of a great footing of George Bush and Tony Blair… singing a … love duet together!

technorati tags:CreativeCommons, Joichi, Ito

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Here’s the place for sharing pics from Techfest@IIT Bombay
Techfest Photographs (techfest.picsquare.com)
just dropped in to check out the launch of CreativeCommonsIndia.

technorati tags:creativecommons, iit, iitbombay, mumbai, bytesforall, photos, photosharing

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Fun, robotics, videoconference talks from someof the planet’s big names in science and tech, and a drastic re-lookat alternatives to the copyright model are on the menu for this year’sTechfest2007, the student festival of one of India’s premiertechnology training centres, IIT-Bombay.
“In a little while, there will be something like 20,000 people takingpart here,” said Asst Prof Shishir K Jha, of the Shailesh J. MehtaSchool of Management.
Draped in a sea of banners that indicate the support from affluentindustrial and other sponsors to this event in a prestigioustechnology training-grounds, the IIT-Bombay was busy with students andothers thronging the three-day evening that begins on Republic Day andgoes on till Sunday (January 28).
Organisers project it to be a mix of fun, technology and brainpower.Technoholix, an “after dark” festival, will showcase “robowars” where30-pound and 60-pound robots will “fight it out” in a specially builtantenna.
Said organisers, “You may have seen it on TV, but we promise to demoit live for an altogether different experience.”
“Illusions” is the name for a virtual reality park, with French artistMiguel Chevalier projecting a special interactive wall mural.Chevalier is known internationally as one of the pioneers of virtualand digital art.
Playmotion! will let visitors play games like ShufflePack and socceron a screen — with their shadows!
One of the prominent speakers is Dr John Nash, eminent mathematicianand Nobel laureate. He was popularised by the Academy Award winningfilm ‘A Beautiful Mind’, a 2001 film inspired by the life of Nash andhis experiences of schizophrenia. Nash is to deliver a lecture viavideoconference on game theory and other mathematical concepts.
Thanks to videoconferencing, another of the world leading cyberneticsexperts — Prof Kevin Warwick, also known as the Human Cyborg — willtalk on coming Sunday evening about neural implants and its impact onthe human body, drawing on his own experience of having a chip implanted in his arm.
Giving the festival a social thrust, a debate on the “responsibilityof being an IITian” will also be focussing on “India’s most-hyped”students. Taking part will be IITian-turned-editor Sandipan Deb, LokParitrana president Tanmay Rajpurohit, Mastek CEO Ashank Desai, andWebaroo’s Rakesh Mathur, among others.
Others offering lectures include former Bell Labs president Dr ArunNetravali (via video conference), Centre for SETI (Search forExtra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Research Dr Jill Tarter, India’sleading astrophysicist Dr Jayant Narlikar, Skybus and anti-collisiondevice rail pioneer Rajaram Bojji (formerly of the Konkan RailwayCorporation), and political activist Dunu Roy on how society isclosely interlinked with science and technology.
The Royal Society, Britain’s oldest existing scientific society, willexhibit its Summer Science exhibition for the first time outside theUnited Kingdom, at Techfest 2007, IIT Bombay organisers said.
Exhibits will include a life-sized model of the winged dinosaurPterosaur, mind-reading machines, systems to forecast unpredictablenatural disasters (like tsunamis and earthquakes), and specialstructures that can be used for construction in space, apart formalternative sources of energy.
IIT Bombay’s own R&D exhibition will focus on a “silicon locket” tomonitor cardiac disease, “virtual surgery” and prosthetic designsystems, and an urban disaster management plan, among others.
If you want updates of the events, you can get them via SMS. And toadd to the “fun” there are events of juggling and others taking place,of all places, in the swimming pool, apart from promises of “sandanimation”.

technorati tags:iitbombay, iit-bombay, mumbai

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technorati tags:media, journalism, goa

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