REVOLUTIONARY RADIO
While staying with friends over the festive season I was very taken by their Freeplay radio.
The clockwork radio isn't new. It's been around for almost a decade and more than three million of them have been sold. Still, as someone who makes a living from making radio programmes, I was struck by the power of the idea.
With a wind-up or solar powered radio -- especially one with shortwave reception -- anyone can enter the world of ideas.
With just a few cranks of the handle, news, sport, vital health or weather information or language courses can be accessed by the most remote and inaccessible village.
In many parts of the world, radio is still a hugely influential medium. Unfortunately, like any form of media, it has been used to spread hate as well as knowledge -- such as in the case of the infamous Rwandan radio station Radio Milles Collines.
Freeplay is using self-powered radio technology to fantastic effect through the Freeplay Foundation.
Like all the best ideas, its mission is brilliantly simple -- to supply parts of the developing world, where electricity is often non-existent and batteries are unaffordable, with wind-up radios.
The Foundation's Lifeline radio looks like it has been made by Fisher Price -- but that's exactly the point. It's designed specifically for children living on their own and is made to withstand the harshest conditions and climates.
Media doesn't get more grassroots than this.
Wind-up laptops, anyone?
While staying with friends over the festive season I was very taken by their Freeplay radio.
The clockwork radio isn't new. It's been around for almost a decade and more than three million of them have been sold. Still, as someone who makes a living from making radio programmes, I was struck by the power of the idea.
With a wind-up or solar powered radio -- especially one with shortwave reception -- anyone can enter the world of ideas.
With just a few cranks of the handle, news, sport, vital health or weather information or language courses can be accessed by the most remote and inaccessible village.
In many parts of the world, radio is still a hugely influential medium. Unfortunately, like any form of media, it has been used to spread hate as well as knowledge -- such as in the case of the infamous Rwandan radio station Radio Milles Collines.
Freeplay is using self-powered radio technology to fantastic effect through the Freeplay Foundation.
Like all the best ideas, its mission is brilliantly simple -- to supply parts of the developing world, where electricity is often non-existent and batteries are unaffordable, with wind-up radios.
The Foundation's Lifeline radio looks like it has been made by Fisher Price -- but that's exactly the point. It's designed specifically for children living on their own and is made to withstand the harshest conditions and climates.
Media doesn't get more grassroots than this.
Wind-up laptops, anyone?
posted by Stuart at 13:09
1 Comments:
The wind-up laptop was created about seven or eight years ago. Apple had a small machine based on its Newton technology called the eMate. I remember quite clearly reading reports of a demonstration in South Africa with Trevor Bayliss in attendance where Apple and Freeplay demonstrated the use of a first-generation Freeplay radio to power the eMate.
That's a lovely looking radio, incidentally. I've got one of those first generation Freeplays, and it looks like a horse. I may have to buy one of these....
--ralph
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