Cold Constructs Blog

Today is the day Google is supposed to release it’s mobile phone technology, Android (wikipedia entry), to the masses in the form of an SDK. Phones based on this tech should launch sometime next year. (Update: Right on schedule, it’s available for download. Also, they’re handing out a total of $10 million to developers who build something awesome for it.)

Thinking about the possible repercussions of this development floors me. Geeks like me have been waiting for this for a long time: an open, stable, fast software framework for whatever piece of mobile hardware we choose (ones participating in the Alliance, anyway). The thing that gets me most is that this is phase 1 of the augrecon concept I talked about a long time ago. Thanks to Google, it’s going to become reality.

I was expecting Google to pwn punk-bitches in the telecom business, but I had no idea they would do anything like this. Everyone wanted a Google-branded phone, but instead they did something exponentially better: they built a standard software framework for us to build on using any piece of hardware we choose. That last bit is incredibly important because it allows evolution by natural selection to do its thing. With a free OS that anyone can build on, we’ll see some fierce competition in hardware that supports it.

What we need is a single platform to build badass applications with that can be distributed to anyone running the same platform. The problem has been exactly that: there are as many software platforms as they are hardware platforms. We can’t link each other because everyone is floating on a different island, each without a ship to sail to other islands. But with Android, we’re all in the same place, and the only thing that will change is the hardware–which grants us more computing power to build better applications with, all on the same framework.

Anyone (you, me, that dude over there) will be able to create an application for this platform and be able to distribute it to millions, and in time perhaps billions of people all over the world. This is the platform I’ve been waiting for to build a truly useful ZoomWorld with. We could use it to circumvent the broken monetary system we’re running on and create the first mass-produced augmented reality device. It will connect people in ways we didn’t know were possible, just like what happened when the internet came about. This is the next giant leap forward in our struggle to tame the technologies we’ve created. We’re finally coming around to utilizing the full power of the net (this iteration of it anyway).

Hold tight, this is going to be one wild ride.

An extremely intelligent fellow by the name of Peter Norvig recently wrote a nice essay about a better way to hire a president.

We can’t or won’t have that method anytime soon, so for now, let’s use our greatest invention (the internet) to determine who should be president. And why not? The internet is the perfect platform for determining such things because it is unguided and ungoverned. It’s a level playing field that let’s everyone have a say (but if what they say is stupid, it’ll be ignored, as it should be). It’s available to anyone as well, thanks to libraries, and also available anywhere, thanks to mobile devices.

You might have noticed the top runner in Internet Land: Ron Paul. Why? I think it’s because internet users such as you and I have to sift through the wealth of diversity and information that is on the net, and so we’ve gotten good at getting to the heart of the matter. Ron Paul has done just this with regards to governance. He embraces the fundamental concept that made our country great in the first place: capitalism. Free markets. Of course capitalism “allows” bad things–it’s a tool, and as such, it will inevitably be abused. However, most attempts to keep bad people from exploiting free markets have backfired (eg outlaw guns so only outlaws will have guns). So let it be, and that’s what Ron Paul will do (among other things). Check this out:

Awesome.

The most wonderful aspect of the internet as a communications tool is that it has the potential to fix some very broken things that our society has been running on. Namely, the party system. We no longer need parties to tell us who is who and how they’re different. We can all gather information on the candidates quickly and easily from thousands of different sources if we want… effectively making the party system obsolete (as well as the electoral system, but that was out of date since the advent of TV). Well, here’s to hoping, but if TV was any indication of how things will change… we’re fucked (not only did it not get rid of the electoral college, but it boosted the party system).