Learn in the information linked here about new technology applications that are being moved into place to mitigate human crises. Mobile local information gathering and digital mapping are collaborating. A post at iRevolution titled Flood Warning, Mobile Phones and Dynamic Mapping of India describes the goals and methods being tried in the Monsoon Project:

In Mumbai and Ahmedabad, we will see what kind of qualitative data people have reported. The next step is to to expand the data collection exercise to discreet objective data points that may expedite rescue and response in real-time. Can farmers sitting atop roofs in the flooded villages of Orissa use their cell phones to transmit simple, discreet, data points that would help plot a real-time map of events as they unfold? Can such a platform be created? How far are we in terms of technology and collaboration? At HHI, the Crisis Mapping Project is well underway, with small projects at multiple locations in different stages of development. . . .

The Conflict Early Warning and Crisis Mapping projects at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative is supporting these smart mob era endeavors that are essentially brand new opportunities of the 21st century:

HHI is currently engaged in a multi-disciplinary research project sponsored by Humanity United that seeks to advance crisis mapping and early warning efforts worldwide by:

- Identifying lessons learned and best practices in the field of crisis mapping and early warning;
- Assessing viable community-based conflict early warning and response strategies;
- Analyzing innovations in and increasing uses of information communication technology (ICT);
- Outlining future trends, gaps, and opportunities for collaboration among organizations.

Turning Visitors into Customers

Business websites often encourage visitors to leave contact information so that sales staff can get in touch, but this only rarely works. “How do you leverage otherwise anonymous traffic?” asks Martin Longo, chief technology officer of startup Demandbase, based in San Francisco. Last week, his company released a tool, called Demandbase Stream, that aims to answer this question. It digs up information on Web visitors in real time, helping salespeople follow up on a visit with a cold call and a pitch.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, September 2, 2008

When LinkedIn knows where you are

Within two years, I believe mobile social networking will become the most valuable business application since e-mail. [...] As we speak, the convergence of social networking and mobility is starting to grow worldwide among teenagers and young adults. ABI Research predicts that mobile social networking will reach 90 million new users over the next four years and rake in $3.3 billion.
Source: Mike Elgan, Computerworld, September 2, 2008

Ice Age lesson predicts a faster rise in sea level

If the lessons being learned by scientists about the demise of the last great North American ice sheet are correct, estimates of global sea level rise from a melting Greenland ice sheet may be seriously underestimated. Writing this week (Aug. 31) in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geologist Anders Carlson reports that sea level rise from greenhouse-induced warming of the Greenland ice sheet could be double or triple current estimates over the next century.
Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison news release, August 31, 2008

Solar Powered Desalination Farm to Bring Life to the Sahara

The ingenious plan, known as the Sahara Forest Project is simple: combine huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP) and plain old seawater. The solar power provides electricity for the farm of greenhouses, the desalination of the seawater provides both the freshwater and cooling required to grow a wide variety of crops.
Source: Mark Selfe, Red Herring’s Blog, September 2, 2008

Intensifying the Sun

A new way to concentrate sunlight could make solar power competitive with fossil fuels.
Source: Kevin Bullis, Technology Review, September/October 2008

Wi-Fi Nets Come to Vehicles

You could think of this as the Tarzan protocol for Wi-Fi. The goal is to improve interactive Wi-Fi connections dramatically for moving vehicles. Dubbed “Vi-Fi,” the protocol lets Wi-Fi clients keep in touch with several access points at once. In a sense, Vi-Fi lets overlapping access points coordinate with the moving client, minimizing the disruptions that can zap interactive applications. The tests, published in a recent technical paper, showed that Vi-Fi doubles the number of successful short TCP transfers and doubles the length of disruption-free VoIP sessions compared to an existing, more fragile Wi-Fi handoff protocol.
Source: John Cox, Network World, September 6, 2008

This post’s headline is the title of a story by Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. Thompson describes the experience of Twittering, explores several theories about the impact of continuous sharing of daily details, and includes comments from several viewpoints derived by interviews. This interesting article touches on things that are good, bad and ugly. My own point of view is summed up in this paragraph from the article:

“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”

Justin Oberman posted on techPresident the personal Democracy Forum about the usage of mobile phones in this year’s election and writes us: “Even though it doesnt mention Smartmob in the article that is essentially what it is talking about”

The difference between mobile’s original political roots and what we are seeing in this years election comes down to one word: “organic.” While the Clinton, Edwards and Obama mobile campaigns have had their savvy moments, they are all generally the same thing, that is, “campaign orchestrated.” And, as David All points out, the text messages smell like it.

According McKenzie Wark, Professor of New Media at Eugene Lang College, “This process of commoditization ends up polluting the very channels of communication it relies on in the first place to make the market efficient.” And these are all things that we, apparently, signed up for or thought we wanted. Junk mail, Spam email… mobile will be next. We may get excited about political campaigns going mobile in the beginning but as the interaction and messages remain stale so will our excitement eventualy become.

MoMoment: Momo #7 - Yme Bosma
posted by Sam Warnaars, filed under MoMoments
more about Yme Bosma

In this 35 minute video Yme Bosma gives his personal view on mobile, value creation, and social networking. Yme uses practical examples taken from his work at Hyves, the largest social network in The Netherlands. According to Yme, Hyves functions as a switchboard communication hub for the users of the social network. The emergence of mobile networks and mobile phones have enabled a lot of new ways of social interaction. How can these new forms of social interaction be used to create value?

Yme shares screenshots of the mobile Hyves application which is due to be released shortly. The mobile application will mainly focus around creating value around the user’s contactlist.

Video + slideshow are in Dutch. Recorded at MoMo Amsterdam on September 1st, 2008

MoMoment: Amsterdam MoMo #7 - Rudy de Waele
posted by Sam Warnaars, filed under MoMoments
more about Rudy DeWaele, founder at MobileMonday Madrid

In this insightful 23 minute keynote Rudy de Waele gives 15 tips to create value for mobile. He shares his view on the various drivers in the mobile value chain. Each tip is accompanied with an real world example. The tips range from “The power of openness” to “utilizing the address book”. It’s a must see if you want to get an quick and clear overview of the value drivers in mobile.

Video + slides are in English. Recorded on MobileMonday Amsterdam on September 1st, 2008.

Thanks to University of Washington (UW) computer scientists, hearing-impaired users might soon be able to use sign language over a mobile phone, like in Japan or Sweden. The research team received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to start a 20-person field project next year in Seattle. Of course, deaf people were already able to use text messages for communication. But as said the lead researcher, ‘the point is you want to be able to communicate in your native language. For deaf people that’s American Sign Language (ASL).’ Now the researchers have to convince a commercial cell phone manufacturer to integrate their MobileASL software before this service becomes widely available. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

Today’s top story in the New York Science Times is about a new digital game where the action is not blowing things up. In the new game Spore, things evolve.

. . . Spore [is] one of the most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. After years of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies. It is among the best-selling video game franchises of all time — an impressive achievement in an $18-billion-a-year industry that is now bigger than Hollywood.

Spore, produced by Electronic Arts, promises much more than the day-to-day adventures of simulated people. It starts with single-cell microbes and follows them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures that can build civilizations, colonize the galaxy and populate new planets.

Unlike the typical shoot-them-till-they’re-all-dead video game, Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology. . . .

[Note: I was unable to publish this weekly column last Sunday because of a software problem -- which is now solved. Roland.]

Virtual Worlds Get Real About Punishment

A virtual world for mobile devices, called Cellufun, has established a courthouse, where rule-breakers are indicted by their peers and tried by a jury of other community members. If found guilty of a charge, such as using profanity, users must carry out varying levels of sentences, from being mute for 20 minutes to being banished.
Source: Kim Hart, The Washington Post, August 20, 2008

How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People

If you live in a state bordering Canada or Mexico, you may soon be given an opportunity to carry a very high tech item: a remotely readable driver’s license. Designed to identify U.S. citizens as they approach the nation’s borders, the cards are being promoted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to save time and simplify border crossings. But if you care about your safety and privacy as much as convenience, you might want to think twice before signing up.
Source: Katherine Albrecht, Scientific American, August 21, 2008

Satellites track Mexico kidnap victims with chips

Affluent Mexicans, terrified of soaring kidnapping rates, are spending thousands of dollars to implant tiny transmitters under their skin so satellites can help find them tied up in a safe house or stuffed in the trunk of a car.
Source: Mica Rosenberg, Reuters, August 21, 2008

VoIP Goes Mobile

Scott Goldman uses his mobile phone to call friends and business contacts all over the world, from Britain to Australia. But the Southern California-based consultant doesn’t pay a dime in international tolls to his mobile-phone carrier, AT&T, the biggest in the U.S. Instead, Goldman places the international portion of the calls — roughly 100 minutes a month — through a service called Gorilla Mobile that relies on Internet-based technology to route wireless calls virtually toll-free.
Source: Olga Kharif, BusinessWeek, August 26, 2008

Road Tolls Hacked

A researcher claims that toll transponders can be cloned, allowing drivers to pass for free. Drivers using the automated FasTrak toll system on roads and bridges in California’s Bay Area could be vulnerable to fraud, according to a computer security firm in Oakland, CA.
Source: Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review, August 25, 2008

The Internet’s Biggest Security Hole

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency. The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.
Source: Kim Zetter, Wired News, August 26, 2008

Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master ?

In Vernor Vinge’s version of Southern California in 2025, there is a school named Fairmont High with the motto, “Trying hard not to become obsolete.” It may not sound inspiring, but to the many fans of Dr. Vinge, this is a most ambitious — and perhaps unattainable — goal for any member of our species.”
Source: John Tierney, The New York Times, August 26, 2008

Novelties - Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text. At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
Source: Anne Eisenberg, The New York Times, August 30, 2008

Sheila Scarborough of Every Dot Connects highlights the usage of social media in preparation for Hurricane Gustav.

“The Web 2.0 world right now is doing what it does best; sharing information, passing links and exchanging ideas as we prepare for Hurricane Gustav to hit the US Gulf Coast.
A sample of some pertinent social media activity can be found here: Social media prepares for Hurricane Gustav “