What you’re seeing to your left is VillageTelco’s Mesh Potato, the prototype for a lightweight, low-cost, and low-power unit that is a building block for rolling your very own decentralized P2P phone network. We’re thrilled to announce that this month’s Awesome Fellowship from Boston goes to Paul Gardner-Stephen, post-doctoral fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Paul’s perhaps most known worldwide for his creation of the much-touted innovation of the shoe phone, and for this project, he’s turning his formidable skills to a new project. Specifically, the plan is to get the mesh potato to work with mobile telephones so that so that mobile telecoms can be deployed rapidly, cheaply and robustly into disasters, developing and remote areas, and plain old remote places where the huge cost of mobile telephone towers makes it too expensive to provide coverage. A neat hack that Paul’s building into the plan is that these P2P phone networks will work with your regular old phone number, without requiring access to the internet (seriously). The entire thing will be prototyped over Android, and step-by-step instructions will be made available so you can start up a mobile telcom right in the comfort of your own home (some… read more →

Slightly delayed news as we get all the various logistics together for the award event, but we’re very excited today to announce that the trustees over at AF-Boston have officially chosen the MIT Media Lab’s Jeffrey Yoo Warren as our April Awesome Fellow! Jeff will be using his fellowship to pursue his projects into Grassroots Mapping, a series of experiments that launch low-cost community satellites built from balloons, kites, and inexpensive digital cameras to create gorgeous aerial maps that have more than 100 times the resolution than those offered by Google. The idea is to broadly democratize the technology for mapping, and help communities understand the landscape around them. In other words, it completely rocks. You can learn more about Jeff’s work on Grassroots Mapping here and see the latest photos from the project. Their latest, an ambitious idea to track the spread of the Gulf oil spill by engaging local communities on the coastline, is seriously amazing. The data will be released into the public domain, where it will assist legal and environmental efforts in the years to come. Stay tuned for the award ceremony and presentation details in the next few weeks! [UPDATED 6/1/10 — Also, it’s been… read more →

Things have been quiet from Boston for a little bit: we’ve been swamped readying the new, improved, and expanded Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences website — and been repping it up at conferences and the like. But, to all those who have been asking, yes, yes, we’re still in business. Extremely proud today to announce that our March Awesome Fellow is Charles Fracchia (that guy above). His idea? To create pens that draw from actually living, growing ink cartridges. Excerpting from his proposal: “I want to develop a set of bioengineered inks to be used with various pen types ranging from gel pens to fountain pens. As an intern at ginkgo bioworks and avid DIYbiologist, I have access to a number of bugs engineered with proteins that result in colour production. I want to make special cultures that can then be packaged as ink cartridges to be used with ordinary pens.” For all you science dorks out there, there’s some neat little possibilities when you start growing your own ink: “This would allow artists and enthusiasts to draw with awesome engineered inks. The great thing about using bioengineering to produce the colour, is that you can engineer them in… read more →

Awesome Foundation for Arts and Sciences and dorkbot-boston Present: Lauren McCarthy: Tools for Improved Social Interacting DATE: Fri, Jan 15, 7-9PM (Free and Open to the Public) VENUES: The talk will be at sprout’s offices (339R Summer Street, Somerville, MA – just outside of Davis Square T). It’s set back from the street, down the driveway to the right of 339 Summer Street (the “R” stands for “Rear”). Reception to follow at The Spirit Bar (2046 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA – near Porter Square T) on Mass Ave and Creighton across the street from the Hess station. TOPIC: Lauren McCarthy will present her latest work of wearable devices. Funded in part by The Awesome Foundation, her Tools for Improved Social Interacting are items of clothing that use sensors and electronics to train the wearer to better adapt to expected social behaviors. The Tools for Improved Social Interacting are a “Series of wearable devices that use sensors to condition the behavior of the wearer to better adapt to expected social behaviors.” Guests are encouraged to bring their own projects to participate in OpenDork after her talk, a show-and-tell of people doing strange things with electricity. Art and technology projects at all stages… read more →

Happy New Year! The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is thrilled today to kick off 2010 by announcing that we are officially launching a new chapter of the Foundation in New York City. Additionally, we’re honored and seriously pumped to be welcoming a simply stellar cast of micro-trustees steering this project and forwarding the interest of awesome in the universe, including: * Catherine White * Caterina Fake * Chris Dixon * Sam Lessin * Clay Shirky * Colin Nederkoorn * Jesse Chan Norris * Douglas Repetto * And, AF-NYC’s Dean of Awesome, the Honorable Lee-Sean Huang Since it’s January 1st, this means that applications are open once again on the main grant submission page. And if you’re in New York City, this means that it’s officially open season to grab a chance to become the city’s very first Fellow! Grants close once again promptly on January 15th, so it’s worth not delaying and submitting your project ideas as soon as you can. You might notice that we’re short a few of our micro-trustees (the usual board is ten, to create our $1,000 grant). We’re still sorting out the details with the remaining slots, and we’ll be announcing them as they confirm in January! Stay tuned, dear readers.