The Economist (again!), Fuse, and Chris Blow
Once again the Technology Quarterly section of the Economist has selected a focus on InSTEDD and our work in Asia, this time for sensors, sensitivity, and the use of mobile devices for data collection. The pleasant face you see on the GeoChat screenshot that opens the article is our Vice President for Engineering, Eduardo Jezierski, working within our Innovation Laboratory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. More on the Lab below.
The article (which you can find here) quotes several informed and articulate sources, including staff at MIT and Path Intelligence, regarding the usefulness of mobile devices in general and our approach to data collection in particular. From my reading it's a fairly nice validation of our design and methods.
We'll soon be talking more about our Mesh4x client, called Fuse, that I'm pretty excited about. Mesh4x, the code library, works beautifully (we find a minor bug every few months and fix it) but it's been a developer's tool. Fuse will change that, and we have layers of plans beyond that simple but elegant client. One of the very talented people looking over the design of the interface is the remarkable Chris Blow, who did such beautiful work for our valued colleagues at Ushahidi and who is now working within our Innovation Laboratory in Cambodia. Chris - a very impressive intelligence - is just visiting, but while he's with us he's helping the Cambodian lab students learn techniques that let them design user interfaces that make sense for their Cambodian customers. This Innovation Lab idea is really fascinating and it seems to be working well. So is Chris, for that matter. Take a look at his blog here.
The article (which you can find here) quotes several informed and articulate sources, including staff at MIT and Path Intelligence, regarding the usefulness of mobile devices in general and our approach to data collection in particular. From my reading it's a fairly nice validation of our design and methods.
We'll soon be talking more about our Mesh4x client, called Fuse, that I'm pretty excited about. Mesh4x, the code library, works beautifully (we find a minor bug every few months and fix it) but it's been a developer's tool. Fuse will change that, and we have layers of plans beyond that simple but elegant client. One of the very talented people looking over the design of the interface is the remarkable Chris Blow, who did such beautiful work for our valued colleagues at Ushahidi and who is now working within our Innovation Laboratory in Cambodia. Chris - a very impressive intelligence - is just visiting, but while he's with us he's helping the Cambodian lab students learn techniques that let them design user interfaces that make sense for their Cambodian customers. This Innovation Lab idea is really fascinating and it seems to be working well. So is Chris, for that matter. Take a look at his blog here.
Posted June 9th, 2009 by Eric Rasmussen
