Google once developed a simple environment called Google App Inventor for easy development of native Android apps. After they announced that they would discontinue support and open source it in 2011, the MIT Center for Mobile learning picked it up, so it’s now the MIT App Inventor. (Its Wikipedia page has a nice summary of its history.) I played with it a bit and found it pretty easy to build apps for my phone, even an app that used an RDFS model to drive a user interface. My simple…

In The cheap commodity eBook reader of the future, I wrote about how I look forward to a mass-market ebook reader created from an e-ink display and an inexpensive commodity processor. The folks at MOTO have taken a very cool step in this direction by hooking up a processor running Google’s Linux-based Android ( the mobile phone operating system that underlies T-Mobile’s G1 phone) to an e-ink display. MOTO’s announcement about it includes a short video demo.