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Today my mobilist carnival #96 edit got a mention on the popular and award-winning web site Worldchanging.com (thanks Emily!).

WorldChanging covers global innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future. From consumer consciousness to a new vision for industry; non-toxic homes to refugee shelters; microfinance to effective philanthropy; socially responsible investing to starting a green business; citizen media to human rights; ecological economics to climate change; it’s a really great resource! Bruce Sterling calls it “The most important web site on the planet.”

This summer I started reading the book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, brought together by Alex Steffen, co-founder of Worldchanging.com. FYI: It’s a big hardcover book - not a book you want to take while travelling, but it’s great having it at home for evening and weekend book reading and great as a resource for your children. Here’s what Al Gore says about the book (he wrote the foreword)

“To build that future, we need a generation of everyday heroes, people who – whatever their walks of life – have the courage to think in fresh ways and to act to meet this planetary crisis head-on. This book belongs in the library of every person who aspires to be part of that generation.”

The Worldchanging book contains over 600 pages, divided into 7 sections which include a vast range of topics. The book is packed with the information, resources, reviews, and ideas that give readers the tools they need to make a difference.

What are you waiting for?

My next Amazon book order:

“Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder” by David Weinberger

“The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture” by Andrew Keen

“The New Influencers” by Paul Gillin

“The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman

“Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present” by Cory Doctorow

Let me know if there’s a book you can recommend.

I’m delighted to announce our next MobileMonday Barcelona event, on July 2: we are celebrating our first MoMoBCN anniversary at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). For this occasion we chose one of my favorite topics at the moment: Mobile Web 2.0.

I’m looking forward to finally meet Ajit Jaokar, co-author of the Mobile Web 2.0 book in a session together with Lucia Garate from Vodafone Group Research and Development - to talk about the recently launched Betavine platform; Patrick Lord from Mobiluck, and Carlos Domingo, General Director of Telefonica I+D to present and discuss their ideas on this topic. I will moderate a short panel discussion afterwards.

This next event will be held at the CCCB Auditorium and there’s a celebration drink at the wonderful “Pati de les Dones” inside the CCCB complex.

Check the MobileMonday Barcelona website for all details on place, timings and bio’s of the speakers. NOTE the new event place and timings!

For people like me swamped everyday in convergence (if you might wonder, it’s still happening), I suggest to read Convergence Culture (where old and new media collide) by Henry Jenkins. You might start twinkling hearing the word ‘convergence’ over and over again but this book describes, in a very clear way, the complexity of the process of convergence in media, technology and culture surrounding us. If you might doubt, here’s what Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution writes on this book:

“Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan I’ve been waiting for. With all the fuzzy generalities, moral panics, and gloomy pronouncements from industry spokesmen and social critics, Jenkins’ clearly communicated and nuanced analysis is sorely needed. The world McLuhan foretold back in the age of ‘electric media’ has become immensely more complicated in today’s many-to-many, converged, remixed and mashed-up, digital, mobile, always-on media environment. If you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, an entrepreneur, or a media industry executive, you need to understand convergence culture. And you will only after reading Henry Jenkins.”

Probably the best book I read on media, culture and technology changes since Smart Mobs.

This morning my last order arrived from Amazon.com. I am all excited since the package includes some of the books I’m really looking forward to read this spring like Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield, Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins and Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen.

Wonderful coincidence when Fabien pinged me yesterday evening if I was in for a drink with Adam who was on a brief urban transit in Barcelona, inbetween a flight from Sevilla, where he assisted Microsoft’s HCI 2020 conference, and a flight back to NYC. We went for a drink in Pipa Club, once the social gathering place for tobacco fans, now the mood setting for urban creatives, loungers, movers and groovers and people like us.

We talked about Agharta and Pangaea, some of the finest recordings from the least-understood period of Miles Davis’s career, Richard Horowitz who worked with Brian Eno - coinciding with a installation I went to see this week of 77 Million Paintings, about Paul Bowles and Jean Genet in Tangier, about Douglas Rushkoff and Psychic TV, and the link to Throbbing Gristle (hadn’t heard that one in a while!), about our network of people we happen to know both, including Kelly Goto, Yasmine Abbas and Nicolas Nova - the latter will be present at the next MobileMonday Barcelona on Mobile Gaming and Beyond.

In short, too much to discuss in such a short time, so we promised to continue the discussion somewhere soon. Maybe XTech 2007: “The Ubiquitous Web” on 15-18 May 2007 in Paris, France might be another occasion… Yasmine? Meanwhile I’ll start reading Adam’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, for sure, I’ll cover more of the book and its topics here soon.

Early 2004, I read his Open Source Democracy (a free downloadable PDF under Creative Commons license), he created for the UK thinktank Demos, which led me to his participation to the groundbreaking Merchants of Cool.

You can find a good overview of his writing, interviews and articles at his website and the disinformation.com page dedicated to his work.

Don’t miss his excellent TV documentary “The Persuaders“, his behind-the-scenes look at the influence industry, and how the techniques of marketing have migrated into politics to create the “citizen consumer.” You can view the whole documentary online here.

Now his new book “Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out” is available on Amazon here and it looks like another excellent reading…

Rushkoff’s first book explicitly for a business audience contends that American enterprise is at a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with acquisitions, tactics, efficiencies, and ad campaigns, many businesses have dangerously lost touch with the process - and fun - of discovery. But those who come to understand the current moment as a renaissance, and who are willing to embrace the possibilities it offers, have an unprecedented opportunity to engage with what they do from the inside out.

To me, Douglas is one of the brightest minds out there, who sees clear within our current media and technology chaos; I’m ordering now, what are you waiting for?

Next weekend you can find me at the ArtFutura, the digital art and new media festival of reference in Spain. The festival offers a wide range of activities between October 27th and October 30th - workshops, conferences, performances, special presentations and a powerful audio-visual program. Last year, I had the chance to hear Howard Rheingold explaining his Smart Mobs.

I am specifically looking forward to the conference of Bruce Sterling: Living Objects, Sensitive Spaces about his new book “Shaping Things”.

Cyberpunk icon Bruce Sterling is without doubt one of the most important science-fiction writers in the last twenty years. He is currently “Visionary-in-Residence” at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.

His new book, Shaping Things, is a treatise on how location and wireless technologies (RFID, wireless) with online database promise to redefine completely our vision of everyday objects.

Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of “gizmos.” New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object — we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable — that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable.

Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers — and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation.

What are you waiting for?

Soon writers are gonna find out everything about their readers…

Got this one through Stuart Mudie’s -always good to read- weblog called Blethers.com. Here’s my first socialbooklist on ConnectviaBooks.

Check also the SocialBooks Lab, the book version of social bookmarking:

“Get recommendations for new books from people who share your taste in books.”

I met François and Sabine from Minifizz last year in Brussels. They develop mobile games focused to meet the interest of young women/girls. Simple, smart, focused… I like that. They licensed their game portfolio allready to the USA and Japanese market.

But this post wants to focus on a new idea Fraçois developed this winter and that is worth the attention: bringing classic novels to the mobile phone.

There have been articles before on the use of novels on the cell phone and the reading on cell phones trend in Japan but François does it through the use of a technology called TXM: “TXM is located at the crossroads of our shared cultural heritage and the rewards of modern technology. Access to books (all books) has now become possible by using the one electronic device that we carry with us everywhere, all the time: our mobile phones. And that is quite revolutionary.”

I tried it and it works fine though I was quite sceptical when I first heard about. An easy interface lets you navigate through the chapters and pages, you may also adapt the fonts. You can use it “on the train, waiting for the subway, in the twilight of your bedroom or under that big maple tree in the countryside, devour new novels and the greatest classics.”

Many classic novels are allready available for immediate download on their website. With a simple click I can download a new book; it’s amazing how many classic novels you can store on a 16Mb memory card (!)

I think the idea is really great and it’s another way of keeping classic literature available for everybody on many media. I don’t see myself finishing the complete “1001 nights” on my mobile but I think it can work well for short stories and magazine articles.

Despite the marginal succes of eBooks and reading on PocketPC’s, much more people have acces to the mobile… I’m really curious to see how this idea is going to develop in the future.