Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Social Innovator

We have created Social Innovator to bring together the people, experience and issues involved in designing, developing and growing new ideas that meet pressing unmet needs.

This material is intended to guide and support the practice of all those who can contribute to this social economy: policy makers who can help to create the right conditions; foundations and philanthropists who can fund and support; social organisations trying to meet needs more effectively; and of course entrepreneurs and innovators themselves.

iPhone and Android biggest winners in mobile market in 2009

The good news is all in smartphones, as sales were up a whopping 41.1 percent for the fourth quarter and 23.8 percent overall, according to the latest data from market research firm Gartner. Nokia still commands large but declining chunks of smartphone and overall mobile phone sales, while iPhone and Android devices saw big leaps last year.

Gartner told Ars that Apple doubled its share of the overall market from 1.2 percent in 2008 to 2.1 percent for 2009, though it wasn’t enough to put it in the top five.

Innovation – what prat thought this up? would you take a bullet for your innovation? – John Suffolk – Government CIO

But for people to innovate they need the space to think, to dream, to test ideas, to make mistakes, to be protected, to be trusted. Many processes in a business look to ensure each pound spent is put to good use – how can you tell when you are innovating?

Participle – Ten Points for a Social Renaissance

What should a new government do?

At Participle, we believe that public services must provide new ways for people to shape their lives in a more meaningful way. We work with and for the public to make this happen. The current system isn’t working. It is both failing to support people and failing to address the major issues of modern society. This has little to do with money – most of our solutions are cheaper.

Those who have seen our work have asked, what should a new government do to allow these bottom up, low cost approaches to flourish nationally. Here are our 10 points for a Social Renaissance.

Prison works, or at least, it can do | Matthew Taylor’s blog

A shift in the quality of the public conversation occurs only when we see prisons not just as a way of punishing criminals and assuaging victims but as a vital public service that can benefit us all…

Prisoners want prisons to work, and they usually know what needs to happen inside to help them avoid reoffending outside. From the design of prisons to the content of training and employment programmes, prisoners, like all service users, have the best insights into how services can be modelled to achieve the outcomes we all want.

David Bowie and the Grateful Dead: the web’s real visionaries | Technology | The Observer

Bowie then went on to make one of the most perceptive observations anyone’s ever made about our networked world. Music, he said, “is going to become like running water or electricity”. To appreciate the significance of this, remember that he was speaking in 2002, a year after Apple unleashed the iPod on an unsuspecting world. At the time, millions of people were transfixed by the idea that they could carry their entire music collections around with them in a tiny device. But Bowie perceived that this blissful state might just be transitory– that iPod users were, in fact, the audio equivalent of travellers to primitive countries who carry bottled water because public supplies are unreliable or unsafe.