Phoneblocks

THE PROBLEM
A phone only lasts a couple of years before it breaks or becomes obsolete. Although it's often just one part that killed it, we throw everything away because it's almost impossible to repair or upgrade.

DESIGNED TO LAST
Phoneblok is made of detachable bloks. The bloks are connected to the base which locks everything together into a solid phone. If a blok breaks you can easily replace it; if it's getting old just upgrade.


BLOKSTORE
It's like an app store for hardware. In the store you buy your bloks, read reviews and sell old bloks. Small and big companies develop and sell their bloks. You can buy a pre-assembled phone or assemble it yourself by selecting the brands you want to support. The choice is yours.


MAKE IT YOUR PHONE

OTHER DEVICES
The platform can be adapted into other sizes to create new devices like tablets, cameras etc.

ACCESSORIES
Keeping your phone also means you can keep your accessories. No new docks, covers or cables.

SUBSCRIPTIONS
Get a subscription so you don't get outdated. Receive a new blok every now and then to stay updated. Install it and send back the old one.

YOU CHOOSE
Looking for a camera blok? Choose the brand you like. Prefer the sharp Nikon, the fast Canon or support a startup company? The choice is yours.

MADE BY THE USERS
Bloks can be developed for specific needs. Solar powered batteries, sensitive screen for blind people, lightweight for travelers etc.

SUPPORT
We need your voice to show the world there is a need for this phone. Join our thunderclap and let's start a revolution.

JOIN THE THUNDERCLAP

Frequently Asked Questions

What is thunderclap?
A crowd-speaking platform. People can join together and let their voices be heard. This video explains it all. It's pretty cool.

Who made this?
I did, Dave Hakkens. Everything, from idea, prototype, website, video to logo, except for the great British voice that's done by my friend Matt and tech help from Gawin.

Why did you make this?
The market of electronic devices is growing rapidly, but it feels like we are building disposable stuff. Every time we make something new we completely throw away the old one. Imagine all the good displays, bluetooths and speakers we have thrown away. I love the connected world that we live in and it's time to set up a universal modular platform that companies work on together.

When is it ready?
Totally depends if companies think there is a market for it, so the more people that are interested the sooner companies start working on it.

Why don't you crowdfund it?
Raising money wouldn't bring it further, setting up this platform is too big for one company. We need to gather partners to work together with us.

Can I help more?
After you've joined the thunderclap, shared it with your friends and followed us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, there isn't much more to do other than promoting your arse off.

Is it profitable?
Easily. The blokstore is set up just like an appstore for hardware. Third party companies can develop and build their bloks for the platform. In the blokstore they are sold and the money is divided between the companies and phonebloks.

Copyright?
No, if you want to set up this platform please do, the sooner the better. Would appreciate it if you would keep us updated though, we might have some ideas for it!

Can I stay updated?

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for the latest updates.

Press
Please send your press requests to press@phonebloks.com, we have press releases and high-resolution images available!

Contact
Drop us an email at hello@phonebloks.com or connect with Twitter, Facebook and Google+.




Visit http://www.phonebloks.com for more information.

Stay updated on:
https://www.facebook.com/davehakkens
https://www.twitter.com/davehakkens

ORIGINAL: Phoneblocks

Popular Scientist. Aydogan Ozcan (LUCAS Inventor)

ORIGINAL: UCLA MAGAZINE
By Robin Keats
Apr 1, 2013


UCLA Associate Professor of Electrical and Bioengineering Aydogan Ozcan is one of the world's "Brilliant 10" scientists, as proclaimed by Popular Science magazine. Ozcan is the director of the Bio-and Nano-Photonics Laboratory at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he leads a team of students in creating breakthrough—and inexpensive—technological devices that bring the frontiers of medicine to ordinary individuals.

Photo by: Clara Richmond.

We could begin with any one of more than a dozen startlingly original inventions to frame the contributions of Aydogan Ozcan, but let's start with the crowd-sourced bio-game he and his team of researchers created to diagnose malaria. One thousand online gamers from around the world were directed to identify, then "kill" or "bank," infected red-blood cells that appeared on their screens as electronic images. Their success rate at identifying the disease was very comparable to that of medical experts. This decidedly non-expert methodology is designed for use in developing nations where hugely expensive diagnostic equipment is unavailable.

And then there is BigFoot, the name Ozcan gave to the monitoring software he pioneered that allows diabetes patients and others with chronic foot ailments to track their conditions at home using a conventional flatbed scanner and a PC.

These are just two of an apparently endless lineup of incredible ideas that spring from the mind of the 34-year-old scientist who already holds 22 patents, with more than 15 pending, for inventions in wide-field and lens-less imaging, nonlinear and fiber optics, critical coherence tomography and nanoscopy.

Ozcan's self-described "prize child," though, is LUCAS, an acronym for "Lens-less, Ultra-wide-field blood Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging." It turns a cell phone into a diagnostic device by clipping on a gadget that combines an LED light, a spatial filter and a slot for a medical slide. Information is gathered by the device, which sends it off to diagnosticians anywhere in the world. Bring LUCAS into the jungle where people get little or no medical attention, and voila! Expert diagnosis.

Through the device, millions of people in such remote areas as sub-Saharan Africa who would otherwise go undiagnosed will be screened or monitored for malaria, and eventually for tuberculosis and HIV. It will also help prevent waterborne illnesses that kill about 5 million people a year. And the cost to clip LUCAS onto your cell phone? Five to 10 bucks.

No 'Aha' Moment
Ozcan was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1978. His father was a government worker, his mother a housewife. His education began in the small, Black Sea city of Sinope, which also gave the world Diogenes, founder of Cynic philosophy. "My family moved around a lot," he says. "Five different schools for the five years of elementary school we have in Turkey ... I think those moves caused me to develop skills that have helped me quickly adapt to things."

Ozcan went to Bilkent University in Ankara for his bachelor's degree. He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. at Stanford University, followed by two years in Boston on the research faculty of Harvard Medical School's Wellman Center for Photomedicine. Ozcan joined UCLA as an assistant professor in 2007.

What turned him onto scientific innovation? "There was," he says, "no 'aha' moment." But as early as his freshman year in high school, "the idea of proving something and learning the framework of proofs was so unique," he recalls. "That's when I said 'I love it' [and] thought I'd be in a profession that allows for the creation of useful things." 

Add caption

For his breakthrough medical diagnostic inventions, Ozcan has been honored by NASA, the U.S. Department of State, the Gates Foundation, National Geographic and Popular Mechanics, among other institutions and publications. In the photo above, he is holding a prototype of his LUCAS device in his lab.

Teaching Invention "Being a scientist and going to the frontier of knowledge requires a lot of dedication, a lot of small things put together," he says. "I insist that my students know that those who are successful in this profession are the ones who learn how to cope with failures. You improve from rejection; you write a new manuscript; you try again. Some people would say, 'It's enough.' I won't play that game."

It has to be that way, Ozcan says of his role as an educator. "Within the school of engineering, the function of a professor is to create new information and new technologies. You also have to train the next generation of engineers and scientists, so that new know-how is continually created to make life simpler."

Ozcan adds, "The definition of engineering, for me, is to make life simpler and better. That's the most important thing that differentiates an engineer's mind from that of a physicist. A physicist is looking at interesting questions, but not how a combination of disciplines could be applied to create things that will enhance life. That's the intersection of science and engineering and I want to be, professionally, at that juncture. Engineers need to be very multidisciplinary. That's what I stress in my lab."

Creating Invention
The man whose world involves complex technologies like optics, photonics and imaging has a simple vision of his own future as an innovator. "It's like a single picture," he says. "You can give yourself 10 or 15 years to paint it, but then it's going to be something you can admire. That's how I take my career. I'm in the middle of that picture now [with] the expansion of the cell phone into an array of telemedicine tools."

Cell phones, he points out, have better graphics processors than IBM supercomputers had in the late 1980s. "There are already 5 billion cell phones in use," he explains. "We manufacture 2 billion of them every year … There will be more of them everywhere on the planet."

With this phenomenal global network of smart gadgets, he points out, computation is almost free.

"Because cell-phone use is so ubiquitous and inexpensive," he adds, "I can rely on it … to design new microscopes and micro-analysis tools that look at bodily fluids using technology attached to the cell phone or running on it."

The "Nano Internet" and Beyond
The young scientist's next challenge is already obvious to him. He foresees spending the next decade or so building the "Nano Internet," which he describes as "the development of these personal micro-analysis tools [that] give us something more valuable than the tools themselves."

What he envisions are millions of his tiny devices interconnecting and streaming personal health information in real time, from brainwaves to blood-pressure counts.

"If my lab and others like it do our work well," he predicts, "then we'll have this kind of Nano Internet. The opportunities that lie ahead of us, with our eyes, with our information, channeled into the micro and Nano worlds."

These and other trails yet unimagined will be blazed from Westwood. "UCLA maintains and extends such vision," says Ozcan. "It's got everything I need to fulfill whatever I dream."

MIT's 2013 Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies - 3: Big Data from Cheap Phones

ORIGINAL: Tech Review
By David Talbot
April 23, 2013

Collecting and analyzing information from simple cell phones can provide surprising insights into how people move about and behave—and even help us understand the spread of diseases.



WHY IT MATTERS
Poor countries lack data-gathering infrastructure; phone data can provide it.

Breakthrough
Creating disease–fighting tools with cell-phone mobility data.

Key Players
• Caroline Buckee, Harvard University
• William Hoffman, World Economic Forum
• Alex Pentland, MIT
• Andy Tatem, University of Southampton

At a computer in her office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s western highlands, representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell-phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town of Kericho has been epidemiological gold.

When she and her colleagues studied the data, she found that people making calls or sending text messages originating at the Kericho tower were making 16 times more trips away from the area than the regional average. What’s more, they were three times more likely to visit a region northeast of Lake Victoria that records from the health ministry identified as a malaria hot spot. The tower’s signal radius thus covered a significant waypoint for transmission of malaria, which can jump from human to human via mosquitoes. Satellite images revealed the likely culprit: a busy tea plantation that was probably full of migrant workers. The implication was clear, Buckee says. “There will be a ton of infected [people] there.”

Caroline Buckee

This work is now feeding into a new set of predictive models she is building. They show, for example, that even though malaria cases were seen at the tea plantation, taking steps to control malaria there would have less effect on the disease’s spread than concentrating those efforts at the source: Lake Victoria. That region has long been understood as a major center of malaria, but what hasn’t been available before is detailed information about the patterns of human travel there: how many people are coming and going, when they’re arriving and departing, which specific places they’re coming to, and which of those destinations attract the most people traveling on to new places.

Caroline Buckee, a Harvard epidemiologist, is using detailed data on population movements—gleaned from mobile phones— to build precise new tools for fighting the spread of malaria.

Existing efforts to gather that kind of travel data are spotty at best; sometimes public-health workers literally count people at transportation hubs, Buckee says, or nurses in far-flung clinics ask newly diagnosed malaria victims where they’ve been recently. “At many border crossings in Africa, they keep little slips of paper—but the slips get lost, and nobody keeps track,” she says. “We have abstractions and general models on travel patterns but haven’t been able to do this properly—ever.”

The data mining will help inform the design of new measures that are likely to include cheap, targeted campaigns of text messages—for example, warning visitors entering the Kericho tower’s signal zone to use bed netting. And it will help officials choose where to focus mosquito control efforts in the malarial areas. “You don’t want to be spraying every puddle for mosquito larvae all the time. But if you know there is a ton of importation from a certain spot, you want to increase your control program at that spot,” Buckee says. “And now I can pinpoint where the importation of a disease is especially important.”

Buckee’s most recent study, published last year in Science and based on records from 15 million Kenyan phones, is a result of a collaboration with her husband, Nathan Eagle, who has been working to make sense of cell-phone data for more than a decade. In the mid-2000s, after getting attention for his work mining data from the phones of volunteers at MIT, Eagle started to get calls from mobile carriers asking for insight into questions like why customers canceled their phone plans. Eagle began working with them. And when the couple spent 18 months in Africa starting in 2006—Buckee was doing work on the genetics of the malaria parasite—he studied call data for various purposes, trying to understand phenomena like ethnic divisions in Nairobi slums and the spread of cholera in Rwanda. Buckee’s results show what might be possible when the technology is turned on public-­health problems. “This demonstrated ‘Yeah, we can really provide not just insight, but actually something that is actionable,’” says Eagle, now CEO of Jana, which runs mobile-phone surveys in the developing world. “This really does work.”

“This is the future of epidemiology. If we are to eradicate malaria, this is how we will do it.”

That demonstration suggests how such data might be harnessed to build tools that health-care workers, governments, and others can use to detect and monitor epidemics, manage disasters, and optimize transportation systems. Already, similar efforts are being directed toward goals as varied as understanding commuting patterns around Paris and managing festival crowds in Belgium. But mining phone records could be particularly useful in poor regions, where there’s often little or no other data-­gathering infrastructure. “We are just at the start of using this data for these purposes,” says ­Vincent Blondel, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Louvain in Belgium and a leading researcher on data gleaned from cell phones. “The exponential adoption of mobile phones in low-income settings—and the new willingness of some carriers to release data—will lead to new technological tools that could change everything.”

Blank Slate

The world’s six billion mobile phones generate huge amounts of data—including location tracking and information on commercial activity, search history, and links in social networks. Innumerable efforts to mine the data in different ways are under way in research and business organizations around the world. And of those six billion phones, five billion are in developing countries. Many of them are cheap phones that can do little besides make calls and send text messages. But all such activity can be tracked back to cell-phone towers, providing a rough way to trace a person’s movements. Throw in the spread of mobile payment technology for simple commerce and you have the raw material for insights not only into epidemiology but into employment trends, social tensions, poverty, transportation, and economic activity.

This map, a product of cell-phone data analytics, shows the most important sources of malaria infections (darker shades)—taking into account the potential for further transmission caused by human travel—as well as the major destinations of people exposed to the disease (lighter shades). It can be used to determine where best to focus warnings and mosquito control techniques.