it seems like the longest time.

two months since we recorded anything really in the studio for ourselves we simply hit a place where work for the new year needed planning and well everything just got really hectic as an average december month does anyway.

we have been looking at a production schedule since we started our ‘space’ at lace market house creatively wondering how we could position this idea of a social media studio rather than a ‘pay your money get your video space’ - the actual idea of an empty space creating social capital outside of the building but bringing people into the space really interests me how we connect our services, connection and working rooms into different mood settings in our brain.

it is great to be back making again and we are just putting together a few documents and ideas for a schedule for wednesday and friday each week so we can at least have a filming guide to head for.  we are starting with two days in case the second fibrecamp two starts to get busy and we are required more there each week.  starting with one day a week of course.

new things since two months ago are that cj is building an ammobox 2 with a variety of different equipment in it for her mobility and streaming on the go at various venues and i have been busy behind the scenes building (with a local coder) some interesting social tools which i’m coining ‘tsr’ like the old days of dos and the ‘terminate and stay resident’ approach to having a process running has a faux background task.

we now have two kicker lights above each ‘set’ and started to fully utilize the ipads we have for countdown clocks and notes while we do our shows - we managed to get this one down to ten minutes and it will be a gradual process as we tweak things.  the elgato h264 hd encoder helped a lot too here and i’m looking forward to seeing how well the new macbook pro that cj has can cope with a thunderbolt connection via hdmi.

Related articles

• the flat screen has been installed @lacemarkethouse for .tv (fibrecamp.tv)
• our £600 crowdsourcing project up and running - we did it! - we raised more!! (fibrecamp.tv)
• social media networking new year with fresh new studios and websites makeover (fibrecamp.tv)
• we need your help to crowd source kit for the fibrecamp studio (fibrecamp.tv)
• the audio technica pro45 arrived at fibrecamp today! (fibrecamp.tv)

quicklink | mbr1400.com

CradlePoint’s Mission-Critical Broadband Router (MBR1400) takes the power and flexibility of our industry leading router, and when combined with an active high-speed wireless broadband data connection, gets your business network online in no time.

i’m a lucky boy.

i get to play with some great technology.  cradlepoint have been one of those early adopter supporters with me for a long while now i guess from when i started to use the phs300 three or so years back now.

recently, they bought out a pretty impressive mobile hotspot router that allows for mission criticial fallover in the shape of support for FIVE devices - three usb dongles and two pcmcia card slots allowing for multiple cellular devices.

for instance in the uk you could probably thrown in three, o2, tmobile and orange with a side order of giffgaff if you have a certain data package (still o2) as the fifth service.  alternatively you might want to mix it up and have some of those sim cards with european/american sims in so you can jump from country to country with different sim cards activated for those countries giving you ready to go connectivity without satellite uplinks and messing with expensive hotel wifi costs.

sure, you could use something awesome like xcomglobal (and you such, they rock) but you might want to just go to that uber tech level.  this router is part of the solution to something i’m currently building called the ‘bandwidthinthebox’ - it’s been on my mind for a while and after seeing the ‘freedom tower’ kit in austin this year at occupy austin i’ve been wanting to build a mobility kit that can be picked up and dropped into a venue giving people connectivity in a super lightweight footprint.

just wanted to share with you what awesome kit you can get out there these days! - why rely on one company/brand and cellular network when you can have more than one!

Related articles

• Cradlepoint PHS300 Personal Portable WiFi Hotspot: $40 (9to5toys.com)
• Will a giffgaff SIM work in a phone from Tesco? (mobot.net)
• Drag your office into the technological future (theglobeandmail.com)
• New Cradlepoint Travel Router CTR-500 for 3G/4G USB or ExpressCard Modems - 150 Feet of Wi-Fi Range ONLY $59.99 (kathleensblogspot.com)
• Cradlepoint MBR900 Mobile Broadband N Router With 160Mbps Data Transfer ONLY $49.99 (kathleensblogspot.com)
• giffgaff launches ‘gigabags’ (mobile-ent.biz)

quicklink | the nottingham cleantech centre launches!

The GreenTech Business Network would like to announce the launch of the Nottingham CleanTech Centre (NCTC), the first incubator in the region dedicated to accommodating and supporting start-ups and small companies involved in clean technologies.

exciting!

something very close to my heart is the merging together of social media, ethics, technology and enviromental issues.  we have the ability to make our voices heard, the ability to do the right thing by the products and services we offer and the technology processes advancing and superlative speeds that we can make subtle changes to the way we engage with our enviroment.

my whole ark project is focused around what a single person can do not only to live more sustainable but redefine what a new fresh life looks like whilst still utilizing technology to improve the relations and contacts around us to be able to live in a digitally connected world with those assets around us with the internet doing the heavy lifting between it.

indeed the ark will use a lot of technology but in an optimized way, it will look at power and need over want, utilizing elements of the cloud to interact with at a glance without too much thought of taking time out to focus on the creation of the content but more of a virtual intergrated element of my day to day life — taking social media and using it as a barometer or social ping to the people that lie between the studio and the off the grid enviroment. 

so it fills me with great pleasure to be in a potential hub of startups who are using clean, green technology focus to build out products, systems and ideas.  for me, it feels like a bit of a nirvana space and makes the last year of rounding out ideas with fibrecamp one the catalyst leading up to this new space.

what makes 2012 more exciting is the possibility quite quickly of fibrecamp III located in ghent in belgium as a european headquarters and makes spreading the idea of hyperlocal media based studios servicing the five or six blocks around it’s area a real interesting hot pot of digital outreach with the businesses being more than just a partner graphic on a website.

it sparks regular interaction bringing down the potential ‘head down desk’ mode i see from so many companies when it comes to building out services.  sharing, in the business space is as much a requirement as it is for the social realtime world we live in.

i have a really good feeling about the cleantech centre in nottingham, we are going in at ground level, at the rebirth of a space and a refresh for a building that is already bought, it’s owned — it’s not rented or has potential of being problematic — it’s a blank canvas of sorts with the potential to foster some fantastic green tech stars of nottingham and the midland arena.

best of all we get to help them understand the world of social media and create media around some of the exciting concepts and processes these green tech companies have which will obviously feed a foundation of topics for the ark project in 2012.

it’s a perfect fit.  we can’t wait to get started! :)

Related articles

• Predictions for Cleantech in 2012 (environmentalleader.com)
• A Cleantech VC Who is Unconvinced of Man-Made Climate Change (cleantechies.com)
• Nottingham City Council budget consultation phase 1 (seaadvocacy.wordpress.com)
• Invest in Nottingham train officially unveiled (rail.co)

a few months back when i had problems with my connectivity in houston airport stateside i let boingo know about the issue and they were great in getting back to me about it via social media (twitter) engagement.

as part of a freebie for the month of december (so we could truly see if it was worth the monthly/yearly payment) they gave us an access account that we could use between locations that supported boingo.

we used the boingo login (as a third party provider option) effectively at brussels train station and ghent station without issue and it was a really useful interconnect actually — checking in between points is always good, especially if your travelling alone and need to update family back home.

if you are travelling alone i heartily suggest you give path (now at v2) a go because you can do a lot of private sharing of your location and media between your family members — saves on the expensive phone calls to say you have landed that’s for sure!

i never actually used the boingo application which i should have really to see what kind of coverage they had around the city.

i guess i would have needed a net connection before that however to get the potential places back, would be better if those were on the phone.

you can also see from this picture on this blog post that i used my witopia vpn to lock and secure, encrypt all my mobile data comms, i suggest you do this if your posting a lot of social media from public wifi systems.

as witopia has a lot of vpn services dotted around the globe i also added the local belgium vpn provider to give me speedy local access instead of connecting to america and sending things over the pond for them to come back again! :)

thank you boingo for giving us that month long access test account, it seems that the european networks are super speedy in comparison!

just got on the 10:03 from ghent train station heading back towards brussells to get out midday eurostar train back into london and then another train back into nottingham — i’m hoping if we get back on time that i’ll be able to go and get my poppet tonight as well.

so, dead time! - i’ve got thirty minutes to put together the blog post that i’ve been trying to write since i got here. this was the final job of the year and this pretty much means after next weeks christmas parties a relative downtime and allows me to take ‘timeout’ and space to be able to throw together the new layouts and designs for the .tv domains and projects.

so this job was really awesome on so many levels — firstly the eurostar was a dream to brussels and changing onto a train for a small thirty minute journey away once we go there was super easy.

literally access to ghent and what appears to be the digitally connected heart of beligum only half day away. after getting on the wrong tram (4) instead of the number one we went on a bit of a tour around the city the wrong way around.

fun thou and we got to see the sights — we still made the 4pm venue reccy thou and we were greeted by the theatre team who gave us an audio feed from the desk, fast 100mb wired internet and any other help we needed.

it went super smoothly on the setup side. after setup we checked into our hotel, dropping bags, tech and kit back only five minutes away from the vooruit building. straight forward again, relaxed and easy to find.

after dropping bags we head back to a meal, chat and planning meeting for the next two days with peter and annemaie before getting a guided tour as a group of the 20,000sft building that had three hundred and sixty four rooms.

an immensive building and access points through the whole building, a massive undertaking but it worked flawlessly. the bar seemed to be a popular area with people writing journals, posts and doing general laptop work on the free open wifi network — with proper management it can work.

to give you an idea how popular this venue is they have two six thousand litre containers which get refreshed at least once a week i think i heard — they get through a lot of beer, which is not surprising because it is so good!

next morning we woke early and made sure we were ‘ontheground’ around 8am to get prepared for the day. we had a few problems with audio and cjs laptop overheating through the day but we swapped it out for the next day which ran without problems — the audio feed was brilliant which really lifted the video.

as this was a cultural event crossing in social media, applications and processes and new technology i found it a cultural gap that people were less happy to be recorded and talk about their projects and process.

flemish people seemed very private people and after asking i was told that they really want to get to know someone first before they open up (wise if you ask me) but they still have reservations about ‘putting things on the internet’ which i kind of get based on how the culture interacts with each other.

ghent has a really relaxed but focused attitude and a vibrant opening accessible hipster scene feel to it, people are very interesting and really open about how things function and work.

it was refreshing to see how communication companies worked here and got on together, i saw striking similarity with nottingham but felt back home in the uk we had too much ownership and fixed thinking.

during the trip i used path and foursquare a lot and was looking around for places to eat at, everything was really close together and relatively easy to find — i even found a local pr/communication/social company that was close by that we dropped in on and had coffee and basically told each other what we were working on.

i’m really hoping we can take things further and have a fibrecamp european office in ghent. the twinning of the cities seems a perfect route to develop this on.

having a studio space that we can spend a week at a time in ghent using am airbnb place to relax for the week in the evenings in and get to know the locality and local startups would be a great way to have european content for our fibrecamp bases back in nottingham.

i’m really excited about the prospect of having out fibrecamp ‘popup’ mobility concept used in this way. i’m absolutely certain that i’ll be back to ghent, it does seem to be the digital heart of belgium and seems like a lot of super fast connectivity would be best used by some fast producing rapid social media types like me if i was based there for a while.

with the explosion of connectivity increasing and transportation to foreign lands becoming efficient and speedy, changing your scenery to allow time to reflect on your life actions and future proofing the ability for my daughter to learn another language and try that out live is quite exciting.

guess i need to start learning the language right? want to put a big shout out to cultuurnet of belgium for pulling together the venue and making us feel extremely welcome.

the next one is in april in barcelona which sounds really exciting i do hope we get drafted in for that one, i’m sure fibrecamp will have really moved forward by then and my ark project should have been realised and in full flow.

check out audienceseurope.net for more details and to join the ning website for updates - global cities, local audiences - next event is the 19-20 of april 2012 in barcelona. hope to see you there!

seriously no wonder people dislike all things wifi, internet and slow speeds.

while my hat is tipped firmly tipped in the direction of wifi companies that provide a free period of bandwidth for ‘passing through’ briefly checking in and email scanning digital travellers like myself, the speed, quality and resolution of issues in a timely manner by some of these companies leaves a lot to be desired.

my frustration set in when i had gone over the 40 minutes free that houston international give you to use on the web.  for love or money i could not get the ipad2 working on the service at all.

i signed up for two different packages, the cheaper $4.95 one and after that another for $7.95 - both of these allowed me to login on the website but for me to actually get on the web i needed to have downloaded the boingo application AHEAD of time of me going in the airport!

for someone that does not use a mobile phone i realise i’m a rare case but even if i did the last thing i want to do in the airport is talk to someone on a phone - i’m just not that kind of customer. i use email, twitter and social sites to talk back to companies, you need to have methods of listening in those areas too — you are after my money after all right?

have to say, kudos for support for paypal.  that’s pretty much how i get any funds these days right now so that helped a lot — even if you did take two amounts and not give me the services i wanted.

i did get those payments back in a timely fashion via paypal thou.

so, my suggestion to fix this problem in one masterstroke — work out how to give us limited access to the app store or work on some kind of temporary system of udid sending so we have a temporary application that can be updated once online.  i realise that it’s messy but here i was sitting in the airport trying to get on the wifi and being told that i needed to download your app from the appstore when i had run out of complimentary wifi access to do that.

should i really need your application to get online?

the other thing that needs to be said about boingo wifi in at least houston international was that it was super slow, like i ran a speedtest and everything and while that might have been giving false postives because the firewall is locked down so much it was a terrible experience and needs resolution.

these companies moan about ‘the numbers are not there’ and the ‘mainstream’ are not using these tools and devices to do things on the web, well perhaps if you spent a bit more time on the maintainance and the backhaul of the connectivity of these hotspots in airports you would start to see the numbers going up.

you can’t shoehorn a system into an airport and walk away from it, it needs regular monitoring and someone needs to be on hand to deal with situations, you should be leaving free passes and voucher codes with some of the airlines so that people like me who were a rare case could have gotten on the internet a bit longer to download your app.

because of my experience, i’ll probably never use your service.

i’m a brand advocate you lost simply because you left me with frustration and angst that i could not get the work i needed to do out to the world, you have all these potential brand ambassdors sitting in airports around the world everyday, i’m sure by now you could have invested a little bit of that money into some kind of social media strategy. 

at the moment i’m having all kinds of problems with iphoto11 and it is just locking up everytime i try and open it.  i’m going to go through all my applications briefly this morning to update them just in case something in the last update needs a certain app to function properly.  in the bug report i’m seeing errors with 3ivx so i might need to explore there.

anyway!

so while in austin, texas recently for sxsweco i bumped into day two of the occupy austin movement and met a guy(s) who were operating the ‘freedom tower’ a big box with a ups power unit connected to some clear modems, various breakout boxes and a cradlepoint router.

Oct 7, 2011 | Source: Keek.com

out of this box rose a metal scaffold style tube with six antenna aerials facing in different directions giving both 2.4ghz and 5ghz range coverage.  i recorded three little interviews with a guy that was help run it on the day providing occupy austin with connectivity for the site.  i did ask if they have the plans up but it was a recent build.

Oct 7, 2011 | Source: Keek.com

the missing link for my own ‘bandwidthinabox’ was the ups - i had never considered to use a computer ups before but it makes perfect sense.  i’m not sure however if it should be a two man operation.  i’d prefer to make a more streamlined one person unit that can be pulled along - on top of the existing ‘ammobox’ we had but i need to look at some lightweight cooling if i go that way.

Oct 7, 2011 | Source: Keek.com

it was great to meet someone that was thinking about multiple carriers and cellular drop in hot spot boxes.  i’m sure this area is going to explode in the next six to 12 months.  i’m really interested in learning a lot more about mesh networks too.

now if only cradlepoint would send me that mbr1400 i would have a go at building one myself - maybe i’ll point them to this blog post! :)

<iframe width=”720” height=”405” src=”//app.wistia.com/embed/medias/4096351928“ frameborder=”0”></iframe> so, where do i start.  i’ve jumped three paces ahead and not even told you about the project yet.  i guess i’ll have to record that separately and then change the dates around.  but quickly.  over a year ago i was sponsored by cradlepoint to build an unofficial user group of users that would get the most out of owning a cradle point phs 300 router.  my initial idea was to find community groups in nottingham to get them connected to the internet via the use of a mobile router.

my idea was to connect italians, indians, greeks, chinese and other religions and pockets of communities that met together but were not know about in the grand scheme of things - getting local community talking to each other utilizing the web as the heavy lifting element to re-activate education and community spirit.  then i got busy,really busy - my life was up and down and all around as i transitioned from one thing to another.  i’ve been busy basically trying to find those groups. but i found something better.  people that REALLY need the device in the field to do work, engage and connect with their existing networks.. .

but through that i’ve found some fantastic first people to work with to build up this unofficial posterous blog for cradlepoint users.heck, we don’t even have a design yet but it’s going to come up the fibrecamp community projects pages (which i’m working on new show pages) today we are going to talk to martyn sibley.  i spoke to him at a recent blogging charity drive and PROMISED him a cradlepoint because i thought the wireless wheelchair hotspot and getting people to talk to each other, asking him the wireless code and just generally hooking him up to be connected.  his own private wireless connection was a cool idea because he’s an avid blogger and does already some amazing combinative work in his community.  i want to help him with that with the help of the sponsoring of the device from cradlepoint.

this is getting to be an exciting bunch of people! :)

ok so i’ve already missed out lloyd davis and glenn lesanto who are
two other people that have received a cradlepoint sponsored phs300 
wireless router.

so, where do i start. i’ve jumped three paces ahead and not even told
you about the project yet. i guess i’ll have to record that
separately and then change the dates around. but quickly. over a
year ago i was sponsored by cradlepoint to build an unofficial user
group of users that would get the most out of owning a cradlepoint
phs300 router. my initial idea was to find community groups in
nottingham to get them connected to the internet via the use of a
mobile router. my idea was to connect italians, indians, greeks, chinese and other
religions and pockets of communities that met together but were not
know about in the grand scheme of things - getting local community
talking to each other utilizing the web as the heavy lifting element
to re-activate education and community spirit. then i got busy,
really busy - my life was up and down and all around as i transitioned
from one thing to another. i’ve been busy basically trying to find
those groups.

but i found something better. people that REALLY need the device in
the field to do work, engage and connect with their existing
networks.. . but through that i’ve found some fantastic first people to work with
to build up this unofficial posterous blog for cradlepoint users.
heck, we don’t even have a design yet but it’s going to come up the
fibrecamp community projects pages (which i’m working on new show
pages)

today we are going to talk to martyn sibley. i spoke to him at a
recent blogging charity drive and PROMISED him a cradlepoint because i
thought the wireless wheelchair hotspot and getting people to talk to
each other, asking him the wireless code and just generally hooking
him up to be connected. his own private wireless connection was a
cool idea because he’s an avid blogger and does already some amazing
combinative work in his community. i want to help him with that with
the help of the sponsoring of the device from cradlepoint. this is getting to be an exciting bunch of people! :)http://fibreca.mp/martyn-sibley-the-first-wheelchair-wireless-h by posted email about ok so i’ve already missed out lloyd davis and glenn lesanto who are two other people that have received a cradlepoint sponsored phs300 wireless router. so, where do i start. i’ve jumped three paces ahead and not even told you about the project yet. i guess i’ll have to record that separately and the …