Posts tagged “mobile social”  

Rocking the Google Maps t-shirt for the Mobile Socia SXSW. See you there

The Mobile Social @sxsw is next weekend and it’s El Guapo, the Mucho Moso, where we do bike culture Texas style. We’ll ride around Austin arriving at Mellow Johnnys for a BBQ and Variety Show. If you’re not riding, that’s ok, just show up at Mellow Johnnys around 4 PM when all the MoSo magic goes down.

Details

• Event: SXSW 2010
• When: March 13, 2010, 2pm-6pm
• Where: Austin, Texas
• Who: SXSW Attendees, Austin Locals, cyclists
• RSVP now at Upcoming or Facebook
• Add to your SXSW Schedule

Part of the Amsterdam experience, besides all the bikes, is the street art like this Party Ballon with Marilyn Monroe and Michael jackson.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.

Nice backdrop for an urban bike.

We’re en route to Amsterdam for the first Mobile Social of 2010 during the FITC conference. We’ll ride with Marc from Amsterdamize to a reception at Work Cycles.

Then on Tuesday I’m talking about changing the world with bikes.

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes for the NYTimes that

there is a deeply pleasing randomness about the campus cyclists, as though one morning university officials had assigned a bicycle to every member of the Stanford community, come as you are, without considering for a moment matters of fit — or fitness.

We’ve ridden in Santa Barbara past a campus with thousands of bikes assembled in a bike parking area. That was nearly as much as we saw in Beijing at the attended bike lots. Where Verlyn sees the indivdual on a bike, we notice the bike as a connector in a global community.

Traveling often shifts your worldview, changes perspectives, and the way you look at things. Back from the Mobile Social Worldwide, I’m just starting to parse all those thoughts into posts. I’ll get to stopping for a Holy Man and riding a Bubble of Curiosity in Delhi later.

Reading about Living Streets in Colorado, reminded me of the ride and talk I had with Brian Deegan in London. He expressed the struggle it was to get to this point with Camden’s bike lanes, bike tracks, and lights. Camden is a model for cities elsewhere, but Brian and his firm still fight politics and also public awareness.

Designing with Web Standards 3rd Edition arrived while cooking dinner last night at Hugga HQ. Much of what we do at Bike Hugger and for our clients at Textura Design is done with web standards. It’s not something I talk about everyday anymore — used to when I was a member of the Web Standards Project and lecturing about blogging in the early days. Have you been to a website or blog lately that looked like crap in one browser and not in another? Unlikely and all that standardized code is being read just fine by iPhones, Google phones, and the next whatever mobile device.

The arrival of the book reminded me about the importance of web standards, how far we come, HTML5, fonts on the web, mobility, accessibly, and so on. Back in the day it was a fight for standards and a good one. I’m sure our readers wish the bike industry had better standards …

I’ll start reading the book after dinner and post about it. My team has read, cited, and referred to the 1st and 2nd editions. More importanly, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with the authors: Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte.

Earlier this year we had a Mobile Social while An Event Apart was in town.

Where we hang out in front of coffee shops and pubs, these two chill at a roadside market in India. Ya know watching the world go by and the occasional tourist with a camera.

More photos from the India stop in our Mobile Social Worldwide are in this photoset. Scroll down to the bottom photos. Videos and huggacasts to follow.

In our travels and Mobile Socials, we’ve seen bikes used as transportation, but not to this extent. Bikes at India truckstops are used to deliver goods and services and form a trucking ecosystem. They build trucks with bikes.

Truck Parts

As we walked around the stop, various bikes would pass us with their loads. Need a new pair of pants or have your pants ironed? The merchants with bikes and carts have it.

The truck stops in India form an ecosystem that builds, repairs, and services trucks. They also provide community for the drivers. The parts for the trucks, including body steel, are delivered by bikes like this Premium Gold Appl.

The owner added a lucky charm to the front fender. He makes his living with this bike.

NGOs work very hard at teaching the drivers and sex workers at these stops about preventing STDs. I’ll cover that in another post.

Read more about the Mobile Social Worldwide and view the photos.

Freeriding in India is when your bro on a scooter pushes you along to the market.

A still from riding in Delhi video shot yesterday. We’ll publish the video and other huggacasts from the Mobile Social Worldwide once we’re back in the States.

Riding in Delhi was safer than it looked because of a curiousity bubble around me. A folding bike and helmeted rider was a spectacle with cars, scooters, buses, carts following to get a closer look. Wasn’t my intent to create a scene, but then felt I’d added something to India. Bikes aren’t status symbols in India or something a business person would ride to work.

That’s an opportunity for change here and the businessmen I talked to in the hotel lobby were very curious about the bike.

Like riding in China, I just rode right into the flow. Wish I had a huge horn though. That’s what they do in India: honkity honk, honk.

Daily Transport

Note this is another in a series of posts from the Mobile Social Worldwide.

Building materials are delivered by bike in India — brick, pipes, steel girders anything you can imagine.

Note this is another in a series of posts from the Mobile Social Worldwide.

While Prague and the Czech people comprise a culture of resistance, it’s not to the car. Cyclist there ride mountain bikes for the cobbles, hilly terrain, and to make quick escapes onto trails when the hostile drivers turn violent. As a symbol of westernization, the car dominates. They proudly make Skodas.

The first stop on our Mobile Social Worldwide was London and we connected with local cyclists, the fixie scene, and a traffic engineer. We rode haphazardly on city streets, a hot lap in Richmond, and calmed roads with cycle tracks.

Typical Commute

Riding in London is aggressive and not for the timid. The photo sequence below demonstrates a commuter crossing a congested road into Hyde Park.

Stop

Wait

Cross

In Prague, multiuse paths include men in hats who escort girls with bows and bikes that are separated.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.

It’s a Miele with pedals — spotted this in a Meile Boutique across the street from our hotel in Prague.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.

While at WorkCycles to pick up bikes for the Amsterdam stop of the Mobile Social Worldwide, @amsterdamized showed us his photos. This collection was recently included in a NYT feature, the NY 400 celebration, and he was hanging them on the wall for a party.

Mark will sell these soon.

You see whole families on bikes in Amsterdam, including babies like this. We think she is happier than a car-seated child in a minivan with a DVD player.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.