Aerial maps? (check) Balloons? (check) Beer? (check) The only thing left on our checklist is you. Come meet Jeff Warren and hear about how his work makes it possible for Louisiana citizen mappers to capture powerful images of the Gulf Coast oil spill. WARNING: you may want to make your own satellite and/or join the 108+ backers who’ve given Grassroots Mapping the green light on kickstarter.com. 6:30p – 8:30p – Design Annex – Union Sq, Somerville, MA 8:30p – The discussion & beverages will move next door to Cantina La Mexicana (247 Washington Street, Somerville, MA)

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 →

We’re throwing a party on Friday for our March fellow, biohacker Charles Fracchia. Actually, we’re crashing one. Our good friends at oneforty are having their officewarming party and have kindly offered to host us. So come on out to mix it up with the Boston startup scene and witness the wonders of Charles’ bioengineered inks. Ordinary pens that draw from actual living, growing ink cartridges. Crazy! And in different colors too. You’ll have a chance to doodle with them if you want. You’re invited to the: Awesome Foundation Boston March Award Party Friday, April 23, 7:30-9:00pm oneforty, inc. 614 Massachusetts Ave, 2nd Floor Cambridge, MA RSVP here! Have an awesome idea of your own? Each Awesome Foundation chapter awards $1,000 grants every month, no strings attached, to fund just such a thing. Apply at http://awesomefoundation.org/apply/. https://edpillsbelgium.com

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 →