Richard Giles

I love movies. Escaping to a cinema with a tub of popcorn or packet of Maltesers is a favourite pass-time. And, by now, readers will know I love community built projects. So when I found A Swarm of Angels I fell in love.

A Swarm of Angels is about making a £1 million movie and giving it away to one million people in one year. By using the Internet to gather together 50,000 people willing to pay £25 to join an exclusive global online community–The Swarm–the project’s ambition is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film.

I can be involved in a movie making project, from my armchair if I desire. Not only that, it’s all open: DRM free, P2P friendly, using Creative Commons, and remix friendly.

Matt Hanson is the man behind the project. He’s an award-winning filmmaker, and responsible for some short films, among other things. Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing fame, is also onboard, as well as cult comic book creator Warren Ellis, Tommy Pallotta the producer of A Scanner Darkly, and…awww hell…just check out the team.

Now the question is, will he get 50,000 supporters willing to cough up the cash. Well, there is always the 53651 (now over 121,000), proving there are a bunch of early adopters for this type of thing. So, I’ve no doubt it’ll happen. I’ve signed up, and all too easy step to take with a PayPal account.

Now I’m looking forward to being involved in making the movie. Bring it on.

A friend of mine, and ex-Sun employee, sent me a link a few weeks back and asked me to have a look at a personal project he’d been working on. It’s one of those things that you realise you have to throw your support behind, because it’s such a great cause.

A couple of months ago he started thinking about the sad state of affairs the world is in, and how he might help. Not an easy thing to do for anyone, but he came up with a novel idea. One of those wonderfully passive methods that you think might just make for a huge meme, and hence raise a boat load of awareness world wide.

After watching the late night news, and yet another war, Phil spent his nights (till 2am) hacking together a new site to promote peace, by displaying “a single flower to show the world that you are concerned about the needless death and violence that is taking place around us.”

It was on Tuesday night, 18th of July when I was watching the late night news. There were images of children in a hospital. There was this one little girl who had blood on her clothes and this blank look on her face as she stared into the camera. Her eyes appeared so wide and I tried to imagine what this type of event has on a mind that is so young and innocent and free of hatred. She was so small in relation to what was happening around her yet her eyes, it seemed, were taking in the severity even if she did not understand the why or how. If she survived the conflict, how would this event change the rest of her life? I had to turn the television off. That night I lay in bed thinking about what was happening. I was thankful that my children were safe from this but it did not make me feel any better. I had hardly any sleep.

…

Please visit the web site www.asingleflower.com and register your name to show your support. Think about how you can spread the word and help make the world a better place, even if it is just for a single day. If through the combined support we save some lives then we have made a start.

At a recent presentation I was asked what the next big thing was. I covered a few areas, like virtual reality, the death of linear television, citizen media, locality, and mobility.

Today, after a few of Nokia’s announcements, I’m reminded that these aren’t nearly as far away as I thought. As pointed out on GigaOm, the new N95 mobile wraps up almost all of these (bar VR) into one tiny bundle.

The N95 is a slider phone with a 2.6 inch QVGA screen, five megapixel camera, embedded GPS and the ability to automatically geo-tag photos for easy uploading to Flickr. It also has video-out to your television and will be connected via all types of networks, including HSDPA.

In other words, this pocketable device can download television shows from the Internet to view on the move, or plugged into your television.

It can record video with a quality at least as good as an everyday video recorder (some report as good as DVD, but it’s not quite).

It knows where on the planet it is located, using GPS, which currently means you take a photo and it can display it on a map (see Flickr’s new maps feature), but soon there will be a bunch of services providing information specific to your location; imagine a map of your current area with restaurant reviews, or movie times.

It can take photos that are of a better quality than the majority of cameras owned by people worldwide.

So in one fell swoop Nokia has knocked over four of my five predictions, which we’ll see emerging next year.

I know many of these features are already available. However, devices like the N95 will only make these features more mainstream. No doubt the device will be adopted mostly by the cyber-elite, but it won’t take long for these features to flow down to the rest of the world.

Update: And VR in a small form factor isn’t far away.