building the banned handset…

So much of what has fueled the work that Desi, the team and I have done with respect to ASN has been a slowly building frustration with how slow innovation seems to happen in exactly those places where it seems so obvious that some is needed. Of course, this is the same kind of passion that drives most startups, so we’re probably in pretty good company.

However, over the last few days, the truth of this statement has come into sharp focus for me, and so I decided to drop a word or two about it here. Some background: when I was a mere lad, there was a song I listened to everyday for days on end, while I studied in school (yeah, I went to a school where we could wear headphones and blast music during study periods). The song, by a band named Daniel Amos, was titled, “(It’s The 80’s, So Where’s Our) Rocket Packs?”

Despite the title, the theme of the song isn’t at all obvious, and if someday you want to look it up, ping me here via email and I can point you in the right direction.

But the title is what is germaine to this post. It implies a sort of ironic consumer frustration with the lethargic forward motion of human technical progress — an assessment of the current state of things, and how they rarely meet up with what we have been promised.

And we have been promised so much, haven’t we?

I could launch into a bit of a rant, here, about what’s wrong with the collective industries of which ASN considers itself a part, but I’ll restrain myself to just three points:

1. Despite how amazing the Web 2.0 vision of the future is, it’s a future that’s tethered to the desktop.
2. The mobile future, as delineated by the telcos and MNOs, doesn’t look much better - it’s cookie-cutter, corporate, closed, and exclusive.
3. The best thing about Open Source isn’t the free code; it’s the enthusiasm and cooperation of the innovators to build something that doesn’t have to make a financial killing to be successful.

So what does any of this have to do with a banned handset?

Plenty.

If you haven’t otherwise figured it out by now, ASN is a company trying to build something that hasn’t really existed before - a device and a network that knows who you are, and can be extended by you to do things that only someone or something with intimate knowledge of you, can. It’s open, and inclusive. It’s mobile, and its features are limited only by what you allow it to know about you, and what your imagination can create from what it figures out.

For the sake of this post, I’m going to call the device the “banned” handset, but over the lifetime of ASN, I suspect it’ll be called many other things, if only because the ideas behind it extend far beyond anything you could hold in your hand. It’s “banned” because of the great many forces that seem to be aligned against it ever existing - all those self-interested folks in mobile and internet and software and hardware and finance, who have good reason to be suspect of a future that won’t necessarily depend on them as the primary sources of innovation. Because, when the “banned” handset finally exists, all the markets these people care about will change, and there will be one fewer excuse for the lethargic forward motion of human technical progress.