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!

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!

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!

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:

• Root access to a linux machine
• Download the flasher utility

enabling the R&D mode:

• Turn off the device and unplug it from mains charger
• Plug USB directly into the computer (no USB hubs)
• As root user execute ./flasher –enable-rd-mode –reboot
• “Suitable USB device not found, waiting” is displayed on the console
• Turn on the 770 using the power button [while holding down the home button]
• It should give information like:
  USB device found at bus 001, device address 004
  Found board Nokia 770 (F5)
  NOLO version 0.9.0
  The device is now in R&D mode
• Unplug from USB
• Reboot

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.

• Download the three .deb packages
• Become root : sudo gainroot
• Install packages with : dpkg -x packagename /

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!