Here is a look at the website:
to view and old preview of the game: Download Skoble
SUMMARY
My work career began during the Summer of 1990, when I took a job at Disney Imagineering in Los Angeles, helping to design and build models for their various theme parks, including the Alien Encounter.
While at UCLA, work and travel began with a summer job in Japan at ASCII where I worked with a Game Development team for San Rio’s Tabu Game.
On receiving my undergraduate degree in Industrial Design from UCLA, I moved to Milan, Italy for a Masters Degree at Domus Academy. At this point design played an important role in my life and I felt that Italy offered the most interesting study and work experience available. I learned to speak and read Italian, as well.
Remaining in Italy after graduation, I first worked for Video On Line, Europe’s first large-scale Internet service provider, started by a Sardinian newspaper and media owner, for whom I served as personal assistant and technical advisor. The company was later bought by Telcom Italia. (Please see more about Italian work experiences under heading: Work.)
In 1997, I participated in the creation of a foundation and coined the name: 2B1. Its purpose was to accelerate a more connected planet by opening the digital world to children who would otherwise not have access to it. The goal was to provide, software, computers, Internet access and education to the world’s poorest and most remote children. This work took me to Africa and included helping to organize the Jr. Summit at MIT in 1998.
Shortly after the Summit, I started a computer animation company in Milan with three people. Its two-year history ran into the bursting tech bubble and was unable to attain late-stage funding. The disappointment was nonetheless a learning experience, after which I returned to the mission of 2B1.
This took me to Mumbai, India (Media Lab Asia) and subsequently Cambodia where I established two Internet-connected schools in villages without electricity; to areas so primitive, one of them did not have a road. Nonetheless, the kids now take home laptops that among other things are the brightest light source in their houses.
I realized at this time that in the computer world one’s skills can quickly become obsolete and decided to return to the US to pursue a second Master’s degree in Professor Red Burns Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. I will complete this course by the end of May.
Disney Imagineering, USA
1990 Design and model building of rides for the various theme parks around the world. Projects ranged from Splash Mountain, Florida’s external design to splash mountain Tokyo’s internal model. As well as the Alien Encounter’s audio seat
ASCII Corp, Japan
1991 Game development team for San Rio’s Tabu game. Research of the future of virtual reality games. and development of multimedia magazine
Mozart, Italy
1994-1995 Graphic design and User Interface development for CD-ROMs
Matrix, Italy
1995-2001 Consultant for web development. User needs and interface for Virgilio, Italy’s first and primary search engine. Conducted preliminary brainstorm sessions for website development for various clients.
Video on line, Italy
1995-1996 Helped develop the first public ISP in Italy. Working directly with the owner, bringing him up to speed on various technologies. In the middle of 1996 the company was bought by Telecom Italia Net, and my contract was carried over.
Telecom Italia Net, Italy
1996-1997 I was a concept designer for online projects. My job was to come up with new ideas for the company each week and propose them each week. Projects were evaluated and some were developed. Most notable at the time were: HOW, an online help system, and C6 the Italian version of ICQ.
2B1, USA
1996-1998 The 2B1 Foundation was created by a group of professors at MIT Media Lab and myself, with $1M of funding from two Japanese benefactors. The mission is to bring computers and the Internet to children in the poorest and most remote parts of the world. In the early stages I looked at feasibility in African countries including Mali, Kenya and Senegal.
Jr. Summit, USA
1998 As a joint project 2B1 sent an MIT undergraduate student along with myself to install computers in 12 countries in Africa, for a Childrens’ Summit to be held later that year.
First Thought, Italy
1998-2001 I founded a start-up in video game development. Our primary goal was to design and build a game development platform, that would allow game development across platforms, easily and rapidly without loosing valuable assets built over time. We also worked on game titles. The company folded under the pressure of financing.
12net, Greece
2000-To the Present I helped set up a Greek ISP, the first wireless ISP in Europe, and today the largest per capita wireless usage (bandwidth), from a remote place, in the world. I work on wireless hardware deployment. Recently we developed and are using a floating wireless AP and created a 15 miles wireless connection from one island to another. This connection allows a small school to have Internet access as well as a marine biology lab. The lab will now do real-time underwater dives to show video to high schools around the country.
12Net is also supported in part by 2B1
2B1(revisited)
Media Lab Asia, 2001-2002 I went as an employee of 2B1 through the MIT Media Lab to help work on rural development in India. In the end I spent a great deal of time evaluating projects and visiting sites. I spent a large portion of my time in the main office as the acting as a CIO of sorts.
Cambodia, 2001-2003 Cambodia is an on-going project which sums up the true focus of the 2B1 mission statement. It is based around a primary school in rural Cambodia. The school has a satellite connection that gives connectivity to 20 laptops on a wireless LAN. The computers are used for learning English, Computing, and gaining information via the Web. Recently we added a 2-mile wireless link through jungle, to a second school that is the area’s only available secondary education and set up another local wireless LAN connecting another 20 laptops. The villagers have no electricity and the schools provide the power by generators to charge the computers. At night the children may take the computers home with them for homework and projects. Most have a chance to connect via the few hotspots that are set up.
Talks and Teaching
Domus Academy
1994 I was invited to work as a TA for a class on user interface in product design.
Domus Academy / Interval Comp.
1995 I Coordinated students on projects and ideas for the Interval Research Project Competition
Milano Lawyers Consortium
1996 I was invited by a group of lawyers to speak about creating presence on the web, and how to network using the Internet.
DA/Media Lab Wearables Competition
1997 As the MIT Media Lab liaison for an international competition on wearable computers, I ran workshops and helped students prepare projects.
D-Link Keynote
2000 Invited as the keynote speaker, the focus was on Products of the Future and How Wireless is Their Goal.
IIT Kanpur
2001 I guest lectured on Wireless Layout, Trick and Realities on Design and Deployment of 802.11b.
Microsoft Design Expo
2004 With a team of three other students, from NYU’s ITP, we designed a concept product, AWAIRE, which won best project at our school and continued on to Microsoft where it was recognized as the top project of all participating schools.
EDUCATION
UCLA
1989-1993 B.A. from Design Department with an emphasis on Industrial Design.
Domus Academy (DA)
1993-1994 M.A. in Industrial Design thesis project: Interactive Play Park for Children with Multiple Perception Based Concepts
ITP at NYU
2003-2005 M.P.S. Information Technology for Future Development Projects. Thesis proposal: Physical Blogging Interface for Infants.
The Awaire music service and the Aura were created as tools to link people together, through aural as well as visual experiences.
Ideally, this will enable people to establish relationships with others, in the course of doing something they enjoy and are comfortable with. Awaire respects the privacy of people, while at the same time attempts to create an environment that enables sharing, communication, and a feeling of belonging. We hope that people will explore what others in the world around them have to offer.
Food!
The Food Project, is a cellphone and webbased system. I find when I go out to eat I like to pictures of the meal before I start. The idea was to take the picture and tag and send it. The tag then goes to a Perl script which uses the Google API to search epicurious.com and brings back the first result.
BE[AM]
BE[AM] projects –and intermittently lets the public control– moving visuals from a data base of American pop culture to point to the ambiguity among entertainment, military, and ideology.
NSK
Italian art project using space to control music. In this project I know as DiMix. During this time I was create fashion show music for Moschino and small columbian fashion house. Deborah Ligorio is a friend who at the time was working on spastial photography and ask me to help build out an idea, after a few meeting she walked off and came back with this project
Personal Site
While it is full of various and strange dead-ends, the idea of a personal site is so I have a place to leave thoughts, images and ideas.
]]>The Awaire music service and the Aura were created as tools to link people together, through aural as well as visual experiences.
Ideally, this will enable people to establish relationships with others, in the course of doing something they enjoy and are comfortable with. Awaire respects the privacy of people, while at the same time attempts to create an environment that enables sharing, communication, and a feeling of belonging. We hope that people will explore what others in the world around them have to offer.
]]>
Here is a look at the website:
to view and old preview of the game: Download Skoble
Taken from the Executive summary of the Business Plan
First Thought is a one-and-a-half year-old company which makes both development tools and content for electronic games. It has been seed funded and is now looking for a … round of funding to bring it to cash positive. The use of proceeds will be to develop six to eight micro-games, an epic role-playing adventure, and a suite of development tools.
The Gamelets serve as a short turnaround, technical and marketing test-bed which provides an initial income stream as well. The epic game is built around a character called Nano Nick, designed by First Thought and critiqued by industry professionals. The development environment, known as FARM, is a simulation, graphics and I/O engine with a visual and scripting interface.
By being both a technology and content company, First Thought’s technology team enjoys the fruits of immediate feedback from its artists. Concurrently, artistic content benefits from early access to unique tools. The company will market both the stories and the tools, making it less of a “hits” business and allowing it to maximize market opportunities. Break-even is planned for thirty months out, but could be considerably sooner.
Nano Nick!
Nano Nick pulling the umbrella Ink Protection Move:
6 months of project research
24 months of treads for sevices / technology
24 months of service development
48 months of hardware development
12 months of BETA testing
present idea at SMAU 2003
Present Project at SMAU 2004
In use for SMAU 2005
On Sale for SMAU 2005
Work with proceeding Olypmpic events for beta
involve
- MLE
If the project were to be research and developed in agreement with the Media - Lab Europe, the imediate resources open to the project would give the project a strong start.
- Swatch / Motorola
A hardware partner would be needed. I mention Swatch because they are the official timekeepers for the Olympics and may find the project in itself interesting.
- TIM / UNI TIM
It would be useful for both parties to set and agreement for service research.
- Piemonte / Torino
Getting the community or province involved with help us to network with the city's and province's needs.
- Zagat / TimeOut / Access
a guide to the area will be indispensable. what is around me will blume with a guide structure applied. a customer recommendation system would help people know what they where getting involved with for dinner.
- Crossplatform
It makes the project open to more clients, but it may not be possible but these are all thoughts which will need to be rethought a few times with the change of technology over the next few years. Below is a list for today, but the list maybe completely different in the future.
- Our device
- palm pilot
- 3G
- WAP
- HTML
Technology
Since there is no standards yet for devices, it will be important to follow the trends for a while before starting to make a choice. Therefore technology mentioned is a point of reference as to which technologies we should follow.
Communication near and far
- Near
Today people and objects are communicating at shorter distances, but yet not by cable, but through the ether. also there are times when we need someone in your area to deal with a certain task, there are also times when you would like to pass information. Some will want to play games, chat and communicate at short distances.
- Far
There will always be someone somewhere that will have information you need and high speed lines will help to make any form of media accessible. Also if the phone is a sort of dumb terminal, and everything lays on the server side, band width could be also be used for transfer of processes letting the application run on the other side and send just the wanted information.
locator (GPS)
- Where am I?
More importantly what is around me? This is usually the next question after where am I? This technology will be an important aspect to developing services.
- Where must I go?
Since your device knows where you are and where you need to go, it can draw you a route. One could follow it or not, but the device will warn you when you are head away from your goal. At which point the device could be programmed tell you which way to go. If one wants to stand on their own, one can make it into an adventure and if one feels lost at some point, one can ask the device and be sure to get the right directions.
Services
What will be important to this project is services and their user interface. Services over the next few years will develop and a darwinistic envolution in interface will emerge. Following the trends on online, cellulare, land line services we can direct and focus. An instesting point of reference is 89 24 24.
- Position
When we are in a place which we don't know there is always the question how do I get there from here. Sometime more importantly is where is here. At the moment one can use mappe.virgilio.it to find a point on a given street. in the past the site had the added function of how to get from point A to point B. In this primative version of the service one could get directions but, the road direction was never accounted for. This makes it hard if you are a driver. In the case of Torino and the Olympics, people will most likely be on foot or with public transportation. mappe helps us to get an edge up on the research, but there is also the side of Private transportation, which we will need to address.
This Service is a vital part to the day being duing such a confusing event. The Service is also a test bed for a standard UNITIM Service.
- calendar
During the Olympics, people will want to coordinate which events one would want to go to and where they are and the possibility to make it to each event. The calander can be used to organize meetings with others in a large group or family members. The calander could contain other events in Torino so that people could also visit a bit of the cultural side of the city.
In other situations the calander system could easily become a sort of mobile assisant, which could be sold off to large companys to help develop systems of efficiency.
- Resturants
As if finding a resturant for diner isn't hard usually, imagine what it will be like when the city is over flowing with people. Also imagine not knowing much about the town. A newtork of resturants could work with us to make available a certain number of tables dedicated to people organizing via our system.knowing where you are one can bring up a list of tables in the area, maybe even a short menu. A voting system could be developed with the Zagats or someone else.
The service could easlily be transfers to an everyday service, or even a spinoff company.
- Messaging
In Italy messaging is a very important form of communication. At an event like olympics messaging is a useful to for people to communicate and for the event to communicate with the invitees.
- Taxi
one button order system. Due to gps they know where you are and needs to just send the verifing number for the taxi. Since taxis will be in great use during the events, and taxis are vonerable to attacks, there could be a payment system to protect them from robbery, on the other side of the coin the distance, time, and cost would be registard so the client could feel safe that he or she is not being cheated.
time line of portable objects
date of birth for each protable object and a vague number of how many are around today.
Work in chair design was something I continually think about:
Ergonomics was the buzz word, and this chair was s look into how to hold the human body by specific point and making the user feel light and comfortable:
During my final term at UCLA I worked on a chair design which could be created out of quick roles on sheet metal leaving little waste. Using the flex of the metal I was able to create a surprisingly comfortable chair. Found similarly in Ron Aarads work, whom I was later pointed to and insired by his work.
We also created many videos of local skaters:
We also made a advertisement:
ABSTRACT
Today more people are image blogging. The idea of taking digital
pictures and posting them on the web has been implemented by two popular systems: flickr.com and TextAmerica.com. The former is an elaborate online system allowing images to be uploaded in multiple ways, while the later TextAmerica aims primarily at the mobile user. These services have given rise to new creative ideas for using this developing technology.
AN INTRODUCTION TO PUFFLE: A networked camera. No need for memory cards. It’s not just a modern day point and shoot, but now it’s point, shoot, send and more. This child friendly device enables young children to take photographs that are automatically uploaded on the Internet. The Puffle has also been devised as a child monitoring system that would get to know and be with the child from infancy, keeping a visual record of the child. Then as the child grows, the use of the Puffle changes from a familiar child’s object with monitoring capabilities into a device that the child controls when he starts to record his own world.
CONCLUSION
The Puffle will open up a world for children in a way that lets them not only have a way to look back on their lives, but will also allow them to look at the world they live in. This is meant to be a children’s platform.
But of course the changing concepts of Blogging might not stop with children; there is a whole market for these sorts of device, which might include an adult or two!
More images can be found on my site: dimitri.negroponte.com
Shortly after the Summit, I started a computer animation company in Milan with three people. Its two-year history ran into the bursting tech bubble and was unable to attain late-stage funding. The disappointment was nonetheless a learning experience, after which I returned to the mission of 2B1.
This took me to Mumbai, India (Media Lab Asia) and subsequently Cambodia where I established two Internet-connected schools in villages without electricity; to areas so primitive, one of them did not have a road. Nonetheless, the kids now take home laptops that among other things are the brightest light source in their houses.
Some Images from the experience:
Work done in Cambodia
Here Is a distance test done in India:
Sometimes we need to invent cheap answers, below is one. Due to lots of rain, we created a water proof housing for our hotspots. We took a cheap electrical fuse box and created the ins and outs needed, and re waterproofed it.
It work can be great fun!
From the drawings are there are meny more, I started coming up with ideas. I took their ideas and started to sketch my own:
This is the model I came up with in the end to show my ideas and the childrens dreams:
After presenting before the school, I presented before my true critics... The kids... their only questions where? and when?
]]>The Concept was to bring the people closer to nature. and to do this what better wat then through there livingspace. Modular because a facet which I wanted in add making the landscape of Branzi's Box not too monotinous.
]]> Below are some sketches which show modularity of the idea:
These images below show the project's space in nature and the model as it sit in the box:
