With the help of some class mates I wrote an extensive post about Recalling RFID at the Masters of Media weblog. It is well worth the read for anybody interested in RFID, ubiquitous computing, and privacy.

Recalling RFID was held on Friday the 19th and Saturday the 20th of October at de Balie. This unique event included presentations on RFID, debates and digital connectivity scenarios by industry representatives, academics, artists, privacy advocates, programmers and consultants. Recalling the current state of affairs and looking to the future, it turned out to be a very interesting, high quality conference.

Speakers included Katherine Albrecht (CASPIAN – Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering, USA), Bart Schermer (privacy lawyer and coordinator of RFID Platform Netherlands), Rafi Haladjian (founder of Violet company - known from the Nabaztag Rabbit, tech entrepreneur), Melanie Rieback (Ubisec researcher who invented the first RFID virus, VU University Amsterdam), Stephan Engberg (Priway/Copenhagen Business School), Christian van ‘t Hof (researcher, Rathenau Instituut), Willem Velthoven (designer and director of Mediamatic), interaction designer Timo Arnall, and many others.

On September 25th - 29th, the cross media week picnic07 took place in Amsterdam. I was invited by Mediamatic to participate in a RFID hacking workshop. The goal was clear: put a bunch of hackers, t(h)inkerers and interaction designers together; let them play with rfid chips and readers and make an installation for the picnic event.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. Together with David Kousemaker (Blendid.nl), Don Blaauw, Dirk Oosterbosch, Vlad Trifa, and Esther Weltevrede we tought up and made iTea. iTea is an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. (more…)

As part of Open-Search, I was invited to participate in the Forum on Quaero at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie in Maastricht, September 29 and 30, 2007. The purpose of the forum was to question and investigate the European intentions to build a search engine and, broader, to investigate the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to information search and access. It turned out to be a critique on centralized search engines and a plea for systems like Open-Search: decentralized, open and privacy respecting. My elaborate report and impression of the two day forum on Quaero can be read at the Open-Search Blog.