The idea itself is about three years old, but was revisited in late 2009. The goal was to create a cultural flatrate on a voluntary basis. Give people the possibility to easily donate small amounts of money to the author of an article they liked, the photographer of a nice picture or creator of any other kind of content. The conditions: Only the one owning the content can collect the money, and both the donator and receiver have to be users of Flattr.

But isn’t there Paypal for that? It might be an option for others, but not for Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Flattr and previously The Pirate Bay. Paypal was deemed too big and too much of a hassle to give someone a euro for a nice webcomic page, and donating ten seems to be too much. Flattr takes the decision of how much you want to pay somewhat off your shoulders – You charge up your account with as much as you like and then decide on a monthly amount to spend, starting with two euros. This monthly allowance will, at the end of the month, be split equally between every piece of content you flattred. A mere 50 Euro will enable you to go for more than two whole years giving people something in return for the work they usually do for free. And the best part? As a registered user you can install your own Flattr button anywhere next to things you have created, and could get rewarded if other users like it and decide to click this button.

However, it’s not meant to be used as a steady source of income. As a so-called micropayment system, its aim is to make us reconsider the way we think about content on the internet. It is not just about the money – a dedicated blogger, who started out in beta, received about two euros in total from three people flattring an article he wrote  not long after his sign-up. He was very excited to receive actual money for something he would be doing for free anyway, and what’s more, that people thought that his content was worth paying for.

Although it is not primarily meant to be used by corporations, but single persons, some larger german-speaking platforms picked up on it early and have used it ever since, such as taz.de, netzpolitik.org and chaosradio.ccc.de.

Even the infamous Wikileaks has an account, which puts Flattr in an interesting position. It just recently introduced the function to directly donate a chosen amount of money to a specific user, thus enabling its users to support platforms even if they are being cut off from paypal and visa/MasterCard transactions.

Although he played a vital part in founding and publishing Flattr, co-creator Peter Sunde left the startup in October of 2010. The reasons stated are somewhat unclear, but it might seem that they wanted to evade bad press about having a convicted pirate on their board. And indeed, they have reasons to be worried about their reputation: after the initial closed-beta boom the growth of Flattr soothed somewhat, but its userbase increase steadily, rapidly approaching ten thousand.

But flatter is not the first service that handles this kind of micropayment. Kachingle is a service that works in a similar way. While Flattr lets you donate for a certain article or even comment, kachingle counts the visits to sites you mark and bases the distribution of your funds on this. It lack some prominence, though, which is what helped Flattr to spread quickly into a dedicated community of technology-savy internet users.

Considering myself being one of these techies, I joined Flattr just after the public release for the sheer fun it. Giving away the default minimum of 2 Euro a month puts me below the average 3-4, so I try to make my monthly allowance count a bit and not Flattr more than two things a month.  Currently I am consuming a  whole lot more on the internet than I am creating, and dont have a Flattr button, yet.

Conclusions:

It is interesting to see this startup grow, and I am looking forward to discussing questions as:

Could this be an option to evade the copyright/infringement debate?
Flattr could give artists an audience and financial boost. Independent singers, songwriters, djs, authors, photographers and more could greatly benefit from it. The flaw is, that you have to be part of the community to give money and if one just wants to donate a small amount to a certain cause, it’s even more of a hassle than to do it via paypal. The copyright never leaves the artists hold and they get the money directly. But I see a great deal of potential legal steps being taken to take down content that has been re-purposed. The argument that one has no monetary gain of putting something on the internet could easily fall back as with Flatter, its user do gain money. Although the site enforces its copyright rules strictly, its just a matter of time until something with questionable roots finds itself becoming Flattr-famous and drawing the attention of the copyright holders.

What happens if more and more users don’t withdraw their money instantly, but let it instead circulate just within the Flattr system?
In a discussion with Peter Sunde he told that it’s not ruled out, that indeed this could have an impact on society. I highly doubt it, as even bigger reserves of money are stored in shady accounts and funds around the world.

And with the rules as they are now, will only creators of content use Flattr or people, who just consume and create nothing or little, too pay this cultural flatrate?
This is the most interesting question in my opinion. It basically boils down to ‘Will people pay for content they would get for free too?’. There are enough users who are willing to pay for Wikipedia and similar sites that do not rely on advertisement. But I doubt that Flattr will make a big difference in 2011. Sure, it will grow and attract people, but I believe it takes a change in the peoples mindset. Most are accustomed to having things for free and thus many are not aware of the real value behind software. I derive fun from the fact that Linux users paid in average twice as much as much as Windows users for a bundle of indie games [ http://www.humblebundle.com/ ] with Mac sitting in between. Might be coincidence, but I strongly believe that unless the majority of people start to question what they see everyday, not much will change. But that’s another topic.

I see a lot of potential in this startup, and consider it something definitely worth watching. It doesn’t seem to run out of ideas to spread, such as integrating into sites like DailyMotion or YouTube. And with the newfound attention it received by being mentioned on wired and TechCrunch, I see it growing even further, beyond the german parts of the web.

I also see it facing some accusations, like not trying to distribute the payment system. Flattr is just another centralized service that can cut off users due to political pressure. It is necessary to mention, though, that they do not edit the user linked content in any way. Many early beta testers demanded that certain sites which did not match their political views should be removed from the services, but Flattr did not comply. They forwarded every complaint about extremist content to the police to investigate and eventually take down the source instead of just covering up the content.

Another topic that is always worth mentioning: Do we need Flattr? We have already learned that ads alone won’t pay enough to keep really big or really small blogs going. Neither will Flattr buttons everywhere. Sometimes, sending a gift code to your favourite hobbyist journalist is easier than constantly flattring things, but then again, I have my reasons for using Flattr. I prefer to have a ‘flattr this’ over ‘like this on Facebook’, and to cite Peter Sunde: “it’s an experiment”.

Lets watch, and see what we can learn.

Before you run off and order or – buddha beware – try to make one yourself, know at least what they are. Chai is tea. And a chai latte is tea with milk. But not the English breakfast mix with a droplet of milk, it’s a spiced tea from India with lots of milk. I say that as if the English tea wouldn’t com from India. Meh, Anyway! A dirty chai is what you get when you add some coffee. It gets a bit darker in colour, hence the name dirty [this is a lie]. Spiced chai is when you want to get drunk too, but don’t feel like preparing another beverage. I knew all this all along and did not get it from wikipedia[this is a lie too [1]].

There are quite some ways to enjoy this delicious beverage, the easiest being: goto starbucks. Yeah, I know some people screaming ‘This capitalist shack for macbook-shitting hipsters!?’. Yes. That one. They make it good and fast and they should know it by now.
But let’s assume you are a hippie like me and oppose their omnipresent takeover of coffee culture (sometimes). If that’s the case, goto you next beloved coffeshop and order it there. Good luck having an explanation ready when the waiter makes a bedazzled look and stutters ‘but that’s not on the menu’. You’ve been warned.

The final resort is to make it yourself. Because you want to impress your significant other or are one of them crazy d-i-y. Here’s what you need:

• Cardamom
• Ginger
• Pepper
• Nutmeg
• Cinnamon
• Cloves
• Honey
• Milk
• Black tea

Make a cup of strong black tea in a pot big enough for your needs. Then add everything else and make sure to use at least twice as much milk as tea or else it taste cheap and watery. Cardamom is important, don’t use more than 2-3 knife points of it though. Ginger and pepper to make it spicy. Honey, cinnamon and cloves to make it sweeter.

It gets cold pretty fast, so make sure to invite someone over to get rid of it while it’s hot. Or put it in the freezer to call it iced – and that is my business idea for the day,  now go find yourself another one!

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Masala_chai

A mighty program enbles you to connect your computer with your phone and use it’s functions without having to mess with the tiny keys.

The last hackathon I attended my resolutions weren’t overwhelming: sort my stuff and play around with led matrices. But right in the middle of slacking I remembered a program I installed a week earlier: [WG]ammu. It’s in fact a bundle of stuff:

There’s Wammu, a nice GUIded programm to interact with one’s phone. Backup messages, Contacts and even send SMS with it (Usual fees apply). It has a well guided wizard to set up your phone with bluetooth or data cable and handled my Sony Ericsson K530i pretty well. Flawlessly even, as a fellow Hacker next to me had some problems getting SMS-sending to work with his Nokia phone.

Next one is Gammu. Almost the same, but now without the GUI. All command-line interface, it is the backbone to Wammu. Pretty awesome to read and send Messages from your command line. But why would you want that? Mostly because we can, I guess.

Last but not least is the Gammu-SMSD. The D stands for Daemon and that is where the fun begins: it runs in the background of your system and can manage you incoming/outgoing SMS through files, a database or whatever you come up with. The best part is, it has a RunOnReceive setting so that you can run a script or program when it gets a new message.

I called it a day at sunrise when my lolshield displayed the message a friend sent to my phone. One day I’ll hock it up to our thermostat for timed and remote control.

For now, here’s the story all about how..

To play around a bit, get the package via apt-get, synaptic or whatever you are using. Check the version by typing

gammu --help gammu

Wammu works fine at 1.24, but if it is below 1.27 and you want to run the SMS-daemon, get the latest install as tarball from the website. (and a handy howto for people like me who’ve grown up with packages managers)

That’s also where you should start. Wammus PhoneWizard works pretty well, make sure that your phone is connected somehow to the computer and you will find afterwards a .gammurc in a home directory that you can examine. Mine looks like this:


[gammu]
port=/dev/ttyACM0
connection=at
synchronizetime=yes
logformat=nothing


Instead of doing it manually, you can use gammu-config to change settings. There doesn’t seem to be much to it, just set the right port and connection and you are ready to test your setup in the terminal using gammu --identify. If it returns some data about your phone, you are ready to send your first sms from the command line:

echo "hello world!" | gammu-sendsms TEXT +001122334455

Make sure that you dont change TEXT to something else and to play around with the commands, as they are amazing. I don’t know about you, but I honestly imagined it harder to do this kind of stuff.

For gammu-smsd it gets a tad bit trickier. Set up a configuration file for it at /etc/gammu-smsdrc. here’s mine:


[gammu]
port = /dev/ttyACM0
connection = at

[smsd]
service = files
logfile = syslog
debuglevel = 0

inboxpath = /home/name/smsd/inbox/
outboxpath = /home/name/smsd/outbox/
sentsmspath = /home/name/smsd/sent/
errorsmspath = /home/name/smsd/error/

RunOnReceive = /home/name/scripts/alert.sh


I ran into some trouble with the default settings that save the messages in /var/spool or something, so I changed this. alert.sh contains a simple shell script with little more than xmessage "it friggin works!". Type

gammu-smsd --config /etc/gammu-smsdrc --pid /var/run/gammu-smsd.pid --daemon

to run the process as daemon. This should be straightforward. –pid saves the process id it runs under in case you need it later. It’s important to note that once gammu-smsd runs, all of the usual gammu commands won’t. You need special commands to get the SMSD sending your messages out, like

echo "Technologic" | gammu-smsd-inject TEXT +001122334455

My final setup included JPRodgers lolshield that displayed incoming messages, but it’s very dirty coding, so I won’t post it here. Leave a comment if you want to know more

• start small. I though it’d be way better to have a crowd, but five people are just about right
• get a beamer if you don’t have it. or a giant television. ask your university. totally worth it.
• have a backup of your presentation. open office messed up my slideshow, had to improvise

thanks @madnebular for hosting it!

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