You can also listen to individual stories below.

Additional Links

• APM music used in this episode
• Main page photo by harakiri

Podcasts

Making wearable computers? A booster for your iPhone made out of a mint box? It doesn’t get more DIY than this. Limor Fried is the founder an lead engineer at Adafruit Industries. She’s one of the leading forces behind the maker movement – people who like to alter technology to better it, or make electronics at home from scratch. And she’s particularly interested in making hardware that is open source.

You can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 19:30]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

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You can also listen to individual stories below.

Podcasts

We recently heard about a new initiative called the “Cool Japan” project. Run by the Japanese government, the idea is to have leading creative lights in Japan post questions or problems to a site called Mazer, and crowdsource the answers. The winning ideas will be bid on by businesses to make them a reality. It made us wonder how far an idea like this could go. What could this mean for the future of problem solving? Nora speaks with digital culture writer Don Tapscott about whether Mazer could be a bellwether for how governments and citizens build the economy or design public policy.

You can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 17:00]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? It’s a podcast feed full of additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes]

Rebecca MacKinnon is an Internet policy researcher, and co-founder of Global Voices, the international blogger network. She’s also formerly CNN’s Bureau Chief in Beijing and Tokyo. Her brand new book is called Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. She argues that just as democracies have ‘consent of the governed’ so the Internet requires that private corporations and governments have ‘consent of the networked’.

You can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? It’s a podcast feed full of additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes]

You can also listen to individual stories below.

Spark contributor Jonathan Gifford brings us the story of creative convergence in Berlin, Germany – a place that people have had their eye on for the past while as being “the next Silicon Valley”. (Runs 7:27)

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation who has a long history in working to build open, collaborative, creative environments, talks about using the open principles of the web to create truly creative tech communities. (Runs 11:08)
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

• Mark Surman
• Mozilla Foundation
• Full uncut version of interview with Mark Surman

Additional Links

• Anshuman Iddamsetty’s new tech podcast Bandwidth



• Main page photo by Nathan Beier

Spark Podcast

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During all the recent debate about SOPA, it was hard not to notice how much we as Canadians can be affected by legislative decisions made in the U.S., particularly when it comes to the globalized realm of the Internet. That’s why I wanted to talk to Byron Holland. He’s President and CEO of CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. As he described it to me, CIRA is responsible for “all things .ca” and that “one of our roles is to promote .ca’s interests in the global Internet ecosystem”. I wanted to get his take on managing copyright, and what we as Canadians can (and can’t) do in this international ‘ecosystem’.

You can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 18:57]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? It’s a podcast feed full of additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes]

The Next Silicon Valley. It’s almost a cultural cliche – the quest for a dynamic, innovative, creative tech hub contained in a specific geographical area. Is it something you can create, or is it a phenomenon that happens organically, when the right set of ill-defined features come together in a alchemy of innovation?

Mark Surman has had a long career in fostering innovation, and looking at ways of creating open collaborative spaces for people. He’s currently Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox.

You can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 15:46]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? It’s a podcast feed full of additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes]

The black outs of Dark Wednesday are over and the United States Congress has listened, shelving the contentious anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA indefinitely. Now, you would think that the internet was finally safe from corporate control. Huzzah! Bring on the cat gifs!

You would be wrong. Sort of.

Sci-Fi author, journalist, and Happy Mutant at large Cory Doctorow believes the copyright wars are just the opening salvo in a much larger conflict. This time it’s not just the internet; what’s at stake is the fate of all computing.

From rendering game worlds to managing insulin pumps, computers do almost everything. Think about that. Computers are devices that can be set upon any task and we’ve readily embedded them in every aspect of our daily life. To most of us, that’s been the chief boon of the digital age. But that same universality is also a threat — corporations, governments, every vested monopoly is worried about the disruptive power of computing.

And according to Doctorow, this fear means general computing has a giant bullseye on it.

You can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 29:03]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? It’s a podcast feed full of additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes]

You can also listen to individual stories below.

Additional Links

• APM music used in this episode
• Main page photo by Samuel Eichner

Spark Podcast

You can receive Spark automatically by subscribing to any of our totally free podcasts.