David Harper’s Different Things

Howard Rheingold, World-Renowned Author, Futurist, And Digital Guru, Joins Wireless Ink's Advisory Board

COLD SPRING HARBOR, NEW YORK, DECEMBER 30th, 2003. Wireless Ink, LLC, the mobile publishing solutions company, today announced the addition of Mr. Howard Rheingold to its Board of Advisors.

Mr. Rheingold is one of the world's gurus of cyberspace and digital culture. An author, journalist, and editor, he is also a visionary, a futurist, and a synthesizer of today's ever-changing telecommunications applications.

In addition, Mr. Rheingold was the founding executive editor of HotWired; the successful commercial webzine launched by Wired magazine in 1994, and was its first editor. He was also the author of the weekly multimedia newspaper column, “Tomorrow,” which was distributed to dozens of newspapers across the country by King Features Syndicate.

For more than 15 years, Howard Rheingold has been on the leading edge of the cyberspace revolution, as a participant and an observer, and his forecasts, advice, warnings, and dreams have been shared with audiences around the world, eager to stay abreast of developments in this fast-moving field. His books have been published in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese.

While knowledgeable about the technical and commercial possibilities of these merging communications media, Howard Rheingold is especially interested in the human and the policy issues that inevitably result from the adoption of new inventions. He has a proven track record of being able to identify the way our lives, businesses and institutions are going to change tomorrow as the result of technologies that are emerging today. In the 1980s, he forecasted the rise of the Internet. In the 1990s, he wrote about virtual communities. Now, he is looking at the astonishing changes that are going to take place as the result of today's mobile communications, ubiquitous computing, geographical position sensing, and social reputation technologies.

Howard Rheingold has shared his excitement, concerns, and solutions with dozens of prestigious organizations, associations and corporations worldwide. He has written about computers and their implications in such best sellers as The Virtual Community (1993), Virtual Reality (1991), Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind (1988), and Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Amplifying Technology (1984). In 2000, MIT Press reissued revised editions of Virtual Community and Tools for Thought. Howard's present forecasts about what he calls “Smart Mobs” are the subject of his current book. Perseus published his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, in Fall 2002.

In 1996, Howard Rheingold launched his own electronic business called Electric Minds, a second-generation web publishing company. In 1997, he sold it to Durand Corporation and is at work on a new book exploring future technologies.

Rheingold Associates, his latest enterprise, is a consulting network (www.rheingold.com/associates) that helps commercial, educational and nonprofit enterprises build online social networks and knowledge communities.

Howard Rheingold lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. He was educated at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Adam Greenfield, Internationally-Recognized Information Architect And Coiner Of The Word “Moblog,” Joins Wireless Ink's Advisory Board

COLD SPRING HARBOR, NEW YORK, DECEMBER 30th, 2003. Wireless Ink, LLC, the mobile publishing solutions company (WINKsite), today announced the addition of Adam Greenfield to its Board of Advisors.

Adam Greenfield is an internat ionally-recognized information architect and user-experience consultant, whose clients have included Toyota, Sony, Amway Japan and Nippon Express. He was most recently the lead information architect for the Tokyo office of Web consultancy Razorfish; prior to that he worked as senior information architect for marchFIRST, also in Tokyo.

Adam graduated NYU with an honors degree in Cultural Studies, worked as a rock critic for SPIN Magazine, and later served in the US Army - Special Operations Command as a PSYOP sergeant before entering the Web industry.

A frequently sought-after speaker for events in the information architecture and user-experience communities, Adam has spoken or presented papers at SXSW Interactive, the annual IA Summits, and the Ubicomp conference. Additionally, he organized the First International Moblogging Conference, and is attributed with coining the term “moblog,” or mobile web log. His award-winning personal site, v-2.org, enjoys a weekly audience in the tens of thousands.

It's not every day you get to announce something like this…
Quote from Adam Greenfield via-2.org (quote source)

“I've been asked to join the Board of Advisors of Wireless Ink, LLC, the company responsible for the WINKsite moblogs I've been so enthusiastic about in the past, and I am happy to say I have accepted this kind offer.

What excites me the most about this - aside, that is, from getting to work alongside Howard Rheingold, whose work has been inspiring me since I was a 9th grader cutting class to read the Whole Earth Catalogue - is the opportunity to help a truly accessible and engaging product find its widest possible audience and deepest possible utility.

When I first started thinking and writing about moblogs, one of the very first things that occurred to me is that as influential and useful a force as blogging itself has been, as a simple matter of scale it pales into insignificance compared to the potential community of practice that might be able to coalesce around a mobile-phone-based selfpublishing tool. WINKsite is one of the first ways I see that beginning to become a reality, and Wireless Ink definitely has the energy and the initiative to open up these particular vistas. Like I say, I'm delighted to join them, and hope you'll check out what it is that they offer and let me know what you think.”

The moblogging world is overflowing with ingenious ways to send information - text, photos, geographical data - from a mobile device to a conventional Web Site. But what is blatantly missing and quite critical is a product or service that provides a space where individuals can meet then share and interact with content from mobile device to mobile device - “closing the loop.”

WINKsite provides a tool for creating true moblogs: sites both publishable and accessible via phones and other mobile devices. Taking that much deeper, WINKsite integrates this content with mobile-to-mobile networking features, transforming your mobile device into a powerful publishing, collaboration and coordination tool, increasing its utilitarianism.

WINKsite offers a feature-set unusual in the mobile space: user-configurable chatrooms, standard-issue blogs, RSS-to-Mobile aggregation, form wizards for audience surveys, and more. Navigating a WINKsite will be familiar to anyone who's ever used menu-driven iMode sites - or voicemail, for that matter: it's a simple matter of paging down through screens of options. Simplicity is key to its appeal. No programming knowledge or software skills are necessary.

What Makes A Moblog Useful?
The concepts of networking analysis and socially translucent systems are critical to the creation of truly useful mobile communities. After all, it's really all about providing features that support the needs of various networks (as described in Ross Mayfield's “Ecosystem of Networks”): (1) the “Me” network, consisting of one person who needs personal productivity tools, (2) the “Creative” network, in which a dozen or more people collaborate on a project, (3) the “Social” network, in which hundreds of people share a common interest need to communicate, and (4) the “Political” network, in which thousands of people need to access breaking news and calls to action.