The Knight News Challenge — we need your support

In the past month, we’ve been featured in GigaOm, Fast Company, and tech.eu, where we were included in the list of The 50 most exciting lean hardware startups in Europe.

People are excited about what we’re doing and my main effort at the moment is to find enough funds to complete bootstrapping the initial design of the phone and prepare the crowdfunding campaign. As you may know, I am selling a family flat that we have in Turkey to raise the funds for this. The flat has been seeing some interest but we haven’t had any serious offers in the past month. I will be flying to Ankara at the start of April to give a talk on Indie Technology at Bilkent University and I will use the opportunity to see the flat myself and to talk to the agents. Once the flat sells, we should have roughly a £70K budget to complete the initial designs and take the project to crowdfunding.

The Knight News Challenge

However, I’m not hedging our bets on just that: we’ve also entered the Knight News Challenge. In June, they will award $2.75million to ‘projects that make the Internet better.’ Given that the central role of Indie Phone is to empower people to own their own data, thereby helping to decentralise the Internet and protect peoples’ privacy, we feel we’re a perfect candidate.

If you’d like to see us get some funds from them, please support us with applause and comments on the site:

Support Indie Phone at the Knight News Challenge

The Net Awards

Also, the voting period for The Net Awards closes in seven days. We’ve been nominated for three awards and your votes are essential for us to make it to the finals. If you haven’t done so, please vote:

• Game Changer of the Year: Indie Phone
• Entrepreneur of the Year (for Indie Phone): Aral Balkan
• Conference Talk of the Year: Digital Feudalism and How to Avoid It

A win any of these categories will mean greater exposure and publicity for our cause.

Indie Tech Conference and upcoming talks

Finally, we are planning on organising an Indie Technology conference in Brighton, UK towards the middle of the year to bring together a diverse group of people working on indie tech, politicians, representatives of various NGOs, etc. to communicate, coordinate, and chart a course for our greater movement.

In the meanwhile, I have a number of talks coming up — including one at the RSA that will be announced this week — where I will continue to raise awareness of Indie Phone and Indie Technology in general.

Today, I am off to Bratislava to talk to the folks at Insafe, a European network of Awareness Centres promoting safe, responsible use of the Internet and mobile devices to young people, on the dangers of corporate surveillance and the advantages of open and indie technologies.

As always, I appreciate your ongoing support and I hope to have good news on the bootstrapping front soon.