Indie Announcement

Transcript

You guys have been awesome, but we are coming to the end of the first Indie Summit, and I did promise you at the very beginning that we would have an announcement about the phone.

Today, there are really two consumer platforms that are battling it out in consumer space. That's Apple and Google right now; two companies that get user experience and are creating some amazing, amazing products that happen to be closed. One of which happens to be leading the way in corporate surveillance, so we need to build a platform that can compete, and to do that, we need to be able to control all of the components that go into the user experience, because it is those components combined that creates the experience. We have to stop conflating components of a consumer product with a consumer product itself; we do that a lot.

So that's why with IndiePhone we're building a whole phone; not because it's easy to, it's actually quite difficult. And the first thing I want to announce, we're not going to actually show you the phone; if that's what you thought, no. But we are going to hold a thunderclap, starting October 24th 2014, also known as UN day or World Development Information Day, that ends on November 8th, and on that day we are going to start our crowd funding, so hopefully with a thunderclap.

I do hope that once we start that, you will join us and make a huge amount of noise so that when we reveal the phone on November 8th, which happens to be Aaron Swartz's birthday, which I also found…well, I realised was Aaron Swartz's birthday when I looked it up, because it's also my birthday, and we're exactly ten years apart in age apparently. And I just watched Internet's Own Boy and I think I'm still getting over it. But it will end…sorry, it will start on November 8th and it will feature a combination of perks and quite possibly revenue based investments, and it will end on December 10th 2014, which is Human Rights Day.

So hopefully, on the day that we signed and we honour a very, very important; very, very important document that protects our fundamental freedoms, we will hopefully see the birth of a new platform that aims to do the same. And that is Indie, and I want to thank you all for coming here today, and I want to thank you all for being part of our story, and I want to thank you for caring.

When I mentioned that we are just a small group of people with the right intentions, I didn't mean we are wide-eyed geeks thinking we're just going to create more technology and that's going to solve it, that we're just going to write more lines of code and that's going to solve it: no. But we need to be optimistic. I prefer the term realistic with an imagination. We need to be that, and we need to create alternatives, because I don't want to live in a world where I don't have the option of owning my own tools and data, because that will be a world where I don't enjoy any fundamental freedoms; it will be a world without democracy, and more than anything else, I hold those two things dear and I hope you do as well, and I hope that you will join us, and I hope that you will make this a reality.

Thank you for making the first Indie Summit, Indie Tech Summit, such a wonderful, wonderful event, and I look forward to seeing what we do together.

Thank you.

(applause)

I also want to say that this is not the work of one person. I'd like to invite everyone who's volunteered, who's taken part and the core Indie team on stage, please, if you guys can come up…yes, you with the red!

(applause)