We just built a popcorn remote control to handle the links we’re going to embed into TPB AFK. Yep, you’re gonna get curated links related to the film on your phone while watching it from your sofa.

Building this we actually won the first prize in the super inspiring To Be Done hackathon. Thanks again Petter, Patrik, Kaj and all the great Chinese children at Foxconn for building this revolutionary remote. We call it the linkontrol!

It also means that we can start planning the release of TPB AFK.

There is still much work left however. Right now we’re half way through the edit. We hope to have a roughcut ready by summer and do the post production, sound editing and music after that.

Hopefully we can premiere the film on a film festival and on the internet simultaneously, probably sometime late 2012.

Thanks for your patience!

/Simon

I have a bipolar relationship to html5 and video.

As a curious film consumer I love the way embedding links into online video can broaden and contextualize – not just documentary storytelling – but all kinds of storytelling. As a filmmaker however, I think links in the middle of a movie frame are a distracting threat to the story as well as to the cinematography.

So. We came up with a way to munch the cake and stash it too. We connected a dual device – your smartphone, tablet or second computer – so you can sit in your sofa and get all the links in your lap – synched to the film you’re watching full screen. That way you can check out the links after or during the film and you won’t have to see them blinking all over that fabulous cliffhanger end scene.

The first part of our Augumentary demo (try it yourself!) was made using popcorn.js by the great team of Henrik, Greg, Nick and the remote controlled part by Jon and David. Also thanks to the entire Mozilla team for putting us together!

I didn’t until now.

How to Start a Revolution is the first film production I’ve given 30 bucks. The pleasant surprise of having contributed to a strong film on the humble, opressed people’s hero Gene Sharp and his From Dictatorship to Democracy (download pdf) makes my first experience as a backer a wild one.

I bumped into Chris K at #net4change last month, where a bunch of bloggers, hackers and human rights folks like Maryam Al-Khawaja (in the video beneath) got together. Here’s a couple of thoughts from the Swede of the Year 2011.

Press the image below and try out the demo yourself.

- Set your browser to fullscreen (e.g. in Firefox & Chrome Command Shift F)
- Mouse over the links and the video pauses.
- Press a white title to jump to that frame in the clip.
- Press a green URL to take you to the web page in a new tab (the video pauses).
- Switch the Augumentary layer on/off with the +/- in top right corner.

(press image to try the demo!)

Thanks Henrik, Greg, Nick and the entire Mozilla team for making this work!

Some design and bugs to fix, but after two days of coding and brainstorming at Mozillas Media Freedom and the Web-festival, this is as far as we got.

This has crazy potential. Please feedback!

/Simon

Sure. I guess you don’t put your phone on the floor when you crash on a night train. Even if it’s 10 cm from your pillow. Naturally, you go to bed with your gadget. Still, fat dude on bunk 82, wagon 5, did you strategically snore all night so you could snatch my phone when I was down and out? Or was that just a convenient coincidence?

I was travelling to Stockholm to film a TPB AFK scene around the seminar Internet and Democratic Change where a bunch of hacktivists and people from human rights organisations got together “to discuss strategies and possibilities for the future”. Network nurturer Marcin de Kaminski of the Julia Group and one of the Pirate Bureau founders, had curated an inspiring line up of speakers.

One of them was the super cool Egyptian democracy activist and blogger Salma Said. “I didn’t use twitter in the revolution” she said “I used rocks”. You can tell her frustration is for real when she talks about how Western media constantly exaggerates the role of Twitter and Facebook in the Egyptian revolution. “It’s not just inaccurate” she says “but insulting. Yes, we used the internet, but to exclude the elements that led to the revolution and only focus on a communication tool is wrong and misleading. It points to one class and one social background, making people think that the revolution was carried out by middle class, English speaking girls. These conferences are good but instead of talking about empowering people with the internet, you should pressure your governments to stop empowering the dictators. People will use the internet anyway. And, no, I’m not gonna thank Gramham Bell for the Egyptian revolution either.”

After the seminar we hung out with her friend and equally sharp videoblogger Sarrah Abdelrahman who just won the Swedish Edberg Award.

Hacker and TOR-developer Jake Applebaum started his talk by pointing to the paradox that to many Western governments, including the Swedish one, building open internet infrastructure in the Middle East makes you a hero while building the same infrastructure in western countries makes you a crook. A crook like Peter Sunde.

Applebaum emphasized that the internet in itself is a system for surveillance and that the network should be treated as hostile. He encouraged people to work towards developing communication tools with built in, default encryption instead of the way it works today.

When he asked the audience to recontextualize their smart phones as their own personal tracking devices, constantly surveilling you – for a second – I felt relieved that that dude stole my phone.

If someone knows how to go back to a life with a dumb phone, holla back! As pathetic as it sounds, I’m in serious cold turkey mode whenever I’m not carrying the interwebs in my pocket.