Posts Tagged ‘software’

A Mobile App Maker In The Extreme

{ Posted on Nov 23 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the office
The Extreme North of Cameroon is aptly named for a variety of reasons, apart from being the remote northern terminus of the country. It is, in many respects, a land of extremes with a vastly different character from the ...Read More »

Avoiding the Zone of Suck with the 80/20 Rule

{ Posted on Sep 21 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the home office
Most people are familiar with the concept behind the 80/20 rule or Pareto Principle. It generally states that 20% of a population consumes 80% of the resources. It’s attributed to a 19th century Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who ...Read More »

iYam.mobi – Africa’s Mobile Directory

{ Posted on Apr 09 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the home office
It’s no secret that mobile phones are firmly entrenched as the predominant mode of telephony in almost every African nation. In a continent of one billion people, the number of African mobile subscribers today is estimated to be around ...Read More »

The Virtues of Small Software

{ Posted on Mar 09 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the home office
Essayist, poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had this to say on the subject of beauty: We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of ...Read More »

Kiva and the Case For Nonprofit Open APIs

{ Posted on Feb 10 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the home office
Recently, Kiva announced the official launch of the Kiva API and a new developer website, build.kiva.org. This is a smart move for them, as freely opening up their micro-lending database both increases data interoperability with their partners and fosters ...Read More »

Announcing the Village Diary Project

{ Posted on Feb 07 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the home office
We’ve been hard at work for the past couple of months laying the groundwork for a new free and open source software (FOSS) initiative. I alluded to this in an earlier post, Gearing Up for an Offline Application. Around October ...Read More »

Hacking the OLPC v2

{ Posted on Jan 27 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the home office
There’s been a veritable bevy of blog posts and rebuttals lately debating what went wrong with the OLPC and what sort of device should follow in its wake. Like a lot of other technology devotees, I’ve watched from ...Read More »

How-To: Pocket-Sized Maps for the iPod

{ Posted on Jan 23 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the workshop
This is the result of an experiment to put a topo map of Mt. Cameroon on my iPod nano. I’m hardwired with a fascination for maps of all kinds (my post Crowdsource Mapping Cameroon is but one example) so ...Read More »

Gearing Up For An Offline Application

{ Posted on Jan 14 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the home office
We’re in the early stages of building a web application with a big requirement: the ability to work seamlessly in an offline and online mode. The Internet and cloud computing are great, but you can’t always be plugged ...Read More »

Top Twenty Tools for 2008

{ Posted on Jan 09 2009 by Bill Zimmerman }
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Categories : From the home office
This began as a post specifically about TiddlyWiki, but seeing as many bloggers do retrospective “year in review” posts around this time, I thought I’d chip in my own. I may yet reprise the TiddlyWiki how-to I started around ...Read More »