The lottery of where you are born, and therefore what information you have the rights to access, will eventually be canceled out by Outernet,” said Thane Richard, Outernet Publisher and COO.
Kampala, Uganda (PRWEB) July 17, 2015
Outernet (http://www.outernet.is), the ambitious company working to connect every human to free data, today released their first piece of hardware in the Outernet online store (http://store.outernet.is/) and announced a fully global signal to back it at the Mozilla Festival East Africa 2015.
As orders for the hardware begin, Outernet is hosting a Creative Commons content edit-a-thon (http://editathon.outernet.is/) during the four-day festival that brings together educators, innovators, learners and makers from East Africa and beyond to share experiences and build the web together. Both Creative Commons and Flickr community members will join in person and on the web to curate and grow a library of CC-licensed and public domain content that will serve as part of the first publicly built Outernet broadcasts.
The Lighthouse receiver, available for sale on July 16 ($99 with 4 GB of storage and $149 with 128 GB of storage), receives Outernet’s free datacast of web content when pointed at an Outernet satellite. Outernet is now broadcasting 100 GB of content per day over Africa, including Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and a collection of copyright-free e-books. For a live demo of the Outernet experience, which includes exactly what the content will look like in real-time, visit http://librarian.outernet.is/en/
In addition to the sale of Lighthouse and Edit-a-thon, Outernet is announcing:
--Complete Global Coverage--
Outernet is now available on six satellites covering 99% of humanity (parts of northern New Zealand, the tip of South America, bits of northern Russia, and scattered islands are missing). The six satellites are: Galaxy 19 (North America down to Colombia), SatMex 6 (South America), Hotbird 13E (Europe, Middle East, North Africa), Intelsat 20 (Africa), ABS 2 (South Asia, from Iraq to Taiwan and south to Malaysia), and AsiaSat 5 (nearly all of Asia).
--5x Increase in Data--
Outernet is now broadcasting 1 GB of content per day up from our previous data allotment of 200 MB per day.
--Live Demo of Outernet Online--
The Outernet homepage will be a mirror of what an Outernet user would see when using an Outernet receiver. This experience will be constantly improving with expanded capability, but right away it will be clear that Outernet’s datacast maintains most of the digital experience we are accustomed to on the Internet.
--Broadcast Your Twitter Feed--
For $3 per month, anyone will be able to have their Twitter feed added to the Outernet datacast. We chose tweets because they are small file sizes that carry large amounts of meaning. Photo tweets will be supported, though video will be added in the future.
Currently only two out of every 10 humans have access to an open Internet connection. Outernet broadcasts a signal from space in multiple frequencies and blankets nearly every corner of the world with a data signal. No contracts, no recurring fees, no cell companies, just free content. The completion of the edit-a-thon at Mozilla East Africa will mark a next chapter of content freely available through the technology.
“The lottery of where you are born, and therefore what information you have the rights to access, will eventually be canceled out by Outernet,” said Thane Richard, Outernet Publisher and COO. “For most people on Earth, the way we share information via the Internet just doesn’t work, so we have to create a new system.”
For more information visit http://blog.outernet.is/lighthouse-by-outernet/
or contact
Ryan Sommer
Director, MaintainPR
(646) 220-4256
ryan(at)maintainpr(dot)com