Pocket & palm photography: New frames of social witnessing

Just over a month since I last gave a public presentation at the American Centre, I spoke today (along with Anush and Iromi from The Picture Press) around the evolution of smartphone photography – calling it ‘Pocket and palm photography’ (download high quality PDF here). I quickly went through a history of photographic technology from …

Media Innovation at the World Editors Forum 2013

Innovation and paywalls were the buzzwords at the  20th World Editors Forum (WEF) and the 65th World Newspaper Congress, held recently in Bangkok, Thailand. There was hardly any panel which didn't address the ostensible merits of establishing a paywall, or how innovation - proposed and perceived mostly as mobile app development, responsive web design or changes …

ICT without agency?

Cross-posted from my blog featuring my regular newspaper column. ### There is in Sri Lanka an Information and Communications Technology Agency. There are also Ministries of Science and Technology, Mass Media and Information, Telecommunication and Information Technology and incredibly, Technology and Research. In addition, we have the Department of Government Information. Finally, there is a …

Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice | A Treatise on Technology and Dispute Resolution

Till I received a PDF of the chapter I wrote for Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice: A Treatise on Technology and Dispute Resolution as it appears in the tome, I had entirely forgotten about it. Ethan, Daniel and Mohamed are three of the finest minds in ODR today, and writing this chapter for them was …

Oil slick reporting through mobiles

The potential of Oil Reporter, a new mobile application from Crisis Commons, goes far beyond its intended application to monitor the fallout of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on the Gulf Coast. In a blog post written four years ago (Content without wires), I hinted at the potential for meaningful peacebuilding through similar applications, running on smartphones …

South Asian Media Cultures: Audiences, Representations, Contexts

South Asian Media Cultures: Audiences, Representations, Contexts is finally out. Edited by Shakuntala Banaji, the book features a chapter written by me titled Expanding the Art of the Possible: Leveraging Citizen Journalism and User Generated Content (USG) for Peace in Sri Lanka. It is one of two essays in the tome dealing with media in …

Learning from failure: FAILfare

Katrin Verclas from Mobileactive.org writes on what I have for years strongly advocated in Sri Lanka - openly discussing failures so that we may learn from them. As the email promoting the event, called FAILfare, notes, While we often focus on highlighting successes and gains in our industry, it's no secret that many projects just …

Mobile phone security redux: Tigertext

Days after I had blogged about FlexiSHIELD, a mobile phone security product created after the infamous incident with professional golfer Tiger Woods, comes news of Tigertext, another application touting to keep SMS communications private. As Time magazine notes, Called, coincidentally enough, TigerText, it allows users to set a time limit for a sent text to …

Using mobiles to teach English

Developing Telecoms has a very interesting story on how in Bangladesh, mobiles are being used by the BBC to teach English. Mobile users in Bangladesh have accessed more than 1 million English lessons using a new service, BBC Janala (‘Window’), which is promising to transform the way people learn language through m-technology in the developing …

An election monitoring SMS template

I was speaking with David Kobia from Ushahidi today and remembered that my post on election monitoring in Sri Lanka (Election monitoring using new media: Notes from my experience in Sri Lanka) had forgotten to mention the SMS template that I had developed for election monitoring in Sri Lanka. The template can be seen here. It …