pmGraph is a free tool we produce to help administrators monitor bandwidth on networks. Read more about it on our website or watch the video included in the post. Many thanks to Mark for putting the video together!

There's a demand (e.g. from staff at UNFAO and users in Rwanda) for a related service, tuned for low bandwidth environments, that lets users easily collaborate over a text file. I like to think of this as the first addition to the lo* (pronounced lo-star) family of products: lopad. Think of it as a super-lightweight Google Docs with no registration, instant visibilty of other user's changes and fast performane on all internet connections....

On Saturday 23rd of January, Aptivate were out in force at Crisis Camp London which was kindly hosted by the London Knowledge Lab. Björn had a chance to grab some footage on the day and put together a short video explaining what Crisis Camp is all about, what it's like in London and what you might expect if you come along. Crisis Camp London will be a regular event for the next few weeks, one which is going to grow in size and impact.

I'm going to write about four ways to simulate a slow internet connection and a bit of background about why you'd want to do it. Simulation is great but I'll say this now: there's no substitute for testing stuff in the field. However, before you release to the team on the ground or grab your bag and hop on a plane, read this.

Ken Banks often writes about Social Mobile's Long tail - it's a really helpful concept; one that I find myself frequently using when explaining our work to others. Personally, I'm really interested in working with medium-sized organisations trying to make better use of technology. I probably have similar conversations 2-3 times a month. I think there are some common characteristics and challenges for these organisations...

I had an interesting chat with Alan last night about the role of "retrospectives" and it reminded me about the ICT4D Twitter Chat today around "Learning from Failure" being organised by the fine folks at Inveneo.

Translation can be a real headache. Identifying text for translation, finding individual strings and phrases to avoid duplications, contextual exceptions, keeping track of them, revisions, collaborating remotely, reviewing, back-translating, integrating translations back into a finished product - you name it, the translation workflow has got it. But first, a bit of background...

Aptivate (then Aidworld) was founded in 2003 by a group of techies and aidworkers wrestling with the question: how can you make the web usable for relief workers in the field? The problem then was access to bandwidth and the cost of that access. We came up with loband - a free online service that simplifies web pages. It downloads them remotely, trims them down and returns them to the user in a lightweight format. It can offer a 5-10x reduction in bandwidth used. Fast forward 6 years and it's interesting how similar the story is...

Google just introduced Page Speed which looks like it could be a useful tool. Much like Yahoo's YSlow it sits on top of Firebug and tells you when you've done something naughty...