Last but not least, we have Vishal Shah’s MEng report on his Fair Tracing Facebook application. Vishal has done a really good job in exploring the social media potential of fair trade — looking at how users can discover new ethical products through friends’ recommendations.
Vishal has been working with the project for two years, previously as an EPSRC summer student, so he deserves special thanks!
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Ivan Antipov has been working on some Fair Tracing software for his BSc Computer Science degree. He has written an Android application both for accessing information on the consumer end, and to allow producers to upload information into the FT database. This is a great demonstration of how small-scale farmers could interact with this kind of ethical product information system. You can read more in his report — thanks Ivan!
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Junaid Haq has been working for the last year on a Fair Tracing application for the iPhone as part of his MEng computer science degree at UCL. You can now see the results of his work in his report — well worth a read. Thanks Junaid!
Ever wanted to know where your Dole Organic Banana comes from?
Consumers can “travel to the origin of each organic product” Dole produces. By entering the three digit Farm Code located on the sticker of their fruit. You can visit the country, the farm, view photos and learn more about their products and people.
However, read the comments on TreeHugger to see how some consumers feel about tracing goods from companies such as Dole, who have dubious ethical backgrounds.
Just what can you achieve with a weekend of Social Innovation? After 24 hours of simultaneous hacking, designing and user requirement gathering, our Barcode Wikipedia team came up with a basic prototype system: WIBI.it. This is a simple user interface to a wiki-like system that lets anyone look up a product by its barcode and add information. The system also grabs related tagged photos from Flickr and automatically links to Amazon, price comparison sites, and related blog and review articles.
Tom and Fred managed to integrate some open source code to recognise photos of barcodes taken using Nokia phone cameras, allowing users to look up information directly using their mobile. One of the killer apps we envisioned for this type of system would be in-store price comparisons. If you are looking around shops for say DVDs or a flat-screen TV, wouldn’t it be useful to see what online prices were available at the same time — and click to order? This has the potential to turn most of the world’s shops into exhibition spaces, with the real commerce happening on the Internet.
Thanks to David Wilcox you can watch our team’s presentation at the conclusion of the weekend:
Currently, I am playing with a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. The cool thing about this device is that it is running a linux operating system and already has a large community. I haven’t played with a device like this before so it took me some time to figure things out. Here are my experiences so far (No guarantees, that these things work for everybody!)
Ok, before you can really work with the device, you need to enable the R&D mode. Thanks to Manish for this little How-To:
pre-requisites:
enabling the R&D mode:
Ok, the next thing I did, was to install xterm. The easiest way is to download the package from the maemo website using the browser of the Nokia 770. You can then install it with the Application Installer (Control Panel). The xterm should then be installed in Extras -> X Terminal.
So far, so good. Now let’s try to get Java running. There are several Java Virtual Machines (VM) that you can install like Sable, Ewe or JamVM. Either you find a pre-compiled package for the Nokia 770 or you need to compile it yourself with the scratchbox environment. Apart from the Java VM you will also need the libraries, for example the GNU Classpath. Luckily, someone already compiled JamVM, Classpath and even the Jikes Java Compiler packages for the Nokia 770. You can find them together with the instructions here.
If you have trouble to find the packages you downloaded, try /home/user/MyDocs/.documents. This was my default directory.
Note, that the GNU Classpath provided there is version 0.19, the official site already provides version 0.92, so it is probably worth to get a newer version of it. However, the infamous “HelloWorld” program should run perfectly 
Any comments, suggestions, corrections, etc. welcome!
