's Blog

Inspiring Conversations of Change at M4ChangeHFX

After all the planning and promoting for Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Halifax, it was exciting to have the big day finally arrive!

Mobile Tech 4 Social Change and Halifax

I attended Mobile Tech 4 Social Change in New York back in February. It was a bit of a trek from Halifax, Nova Scotia but Jacob Colker (co-founder of The Extraordinaries) convinced me it was good opportunity to meet like-minded people interested in using mobile technologies for social good. Jacob was right, I was absolutely blown away by the incredible people devoting their lives to helping make the world a better place. I was so inspired by the event, I decided to organize the same event in Halifax.

Do Mobile Phones Answer All our Prayers? Guest Blogger Paul Currion on Mobiles in Food Relief

Reposted from humanitarian.info.

Do mobile phones answer all our prayers? I’ve written about the role that mobile telephony can play in humanitarian assistance quite a few times now, without really talking about it directly. The one line I have consistently taken is that cellphone coverage is not reliable or secure enough to be used as the primary means of communication in an insecure environment.

Putting that to one side for a moment, however, it’s clear that mobile telephony really is the key communications technology for the poor - and that means it should be the key communications technology for the humanitarian community.

Using RSS to SMS for rapid notification of emerging information

I have a robot that constantly looks for select information online about my campaign. It sends me an SMS if and when it finds what I need.


The world today is clearly threatened by information overload, but that's far from the worst problem we face. The right tools for dealing with the barrage of information available can help us deal with the long list of other, more frightening problems facing humanity. 

One new class of tools will do just that - by delivering new items in any RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to your mobile device by SMS or to your IM client. (If RSS is new to you, there are intro links at the end of this post.)

NYTimes: Text Hackers Could Jam Cellphones, a Paper Says

From today's New York Times: "Malicious hackers could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam, said computer security researchers, who will announce the findings of their research today." (more)

Interesting research to follow. While it has always seemed that it would be easy to jam a specific phone with many simultaneous messages, the overall networks have always seemed quite resilient to me. I think this research is assuming that the operators don't have a quick way to shut down DOS attacks coming through Internet gateways.

Hopefully, this won't lead to the operators rethinking how open they currently are via SMTP and HTTP, which wouldn't bode very well for us and the type of free and open applications we've all developed and rely on.