So,  a project I have been mulling on for years is finally beginning to come to fruition.  Called there.rooting collaborative, it is an initiative to combine the efforts of alternative economy practicioners, stakeholders and motivated software developers to begin a concerted, community effort to imagine, develop and extend open source software to enable everything from various types of co-ops, buying clubs, local food systems to microlending and community currencies.

Yes, there are already many projects underway.  We will be featuring these projects and others, and offer an aggregated space for raising capital to develop specific functionality, and a space for combining ideas and documenting needs to better accomodate the wide array of businesses, organizations and efforts underway.

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Early on in the rise of the Android mobile OS (which isn’t very old), many critics expressed concerns that Apple had an insurmountable advantage with its App Store, and that the sheer number of available apps for the iPhone would ensure its dominance. Notably, though, Android Market teems with useful applications and is a very viable competitor after a few short years of life. If you don’t happen to have an Android phone or tablet but still want to use useful Android apps, you can do so on a Windows computer. BlueStacks App Player is a free download for Windows users, and is coming soon in a Mac version.

It should be noted that BlueStacks App Player is only in an alpha version at this point. It comes with a pre-installed set of Android apps and you can add many others, but not every Android app.

So how does BlueStacks pull this off? The apps run in a virtualized instance of Android. CNet has a very interesting story up about BlueStacks, including a video.

If you use any compelling smartphone or tablet apps, you have probably already noted that many of them can be perfectly useful on a computer. What’s really surprising is that Google hasn’t delivered its own truly robust way to easily use Android apps on alternative devices. After all, the more Android app users there are, the more users eventually feed into Google’s lucrative search/ad ecosystem.