Set aside any preconceptions of why businesses engage in corporate responsibility schemes, It is not often an opportunity arises to get funding to help improve the world through the very technologies and services which “SmartMobs” examines and challenges. 

Katrin Verclas of  MobileActive has brought to our attention that the Vodafone Americas Foundation is launching a Wireless Innovation Challenge.  This Challenge seeks to: “identify and fund the best innovations using wireless related
technology to address critical social issues around the world.” 

I encourage you to take the time to visit the Wireless Innovation Challenge website and let your mind go wild with what you would do if you were to submit a porposal.

Innovation | Vodafone Americas Foundation

“Projects must demonstrate a multi-disciplinary approach that uses an innovation in wireless related technology to address a critical global issue in one or more of the following areas: access to communication, education, economic development, environment, or health. The technology should have the potential for replication and large scale impact”

I’m planning to participate in the Future of Technologies Conference in Leicester this Thursday, organized by my friends at De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies. Leicester itself has been undergoing interesting changes, from a classically industrial textile-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, from an entirely white city to a multiethnic population with no racial majority. Linz undertook a similar change from a steel center to a digital arts center, although the ethnic changes are not parallel. Linz and local media companies were smart enough to support Ars Electronica. I hope The Future of Technologies conference will be followed by others in which IOCT and the city work together to bring minds together with new ideas — something every industrial culture needs to do as it transitions to more networked, technology-enabled, knowledge-intensive economic base.

When cars communicate with each other about the traffic they are enduring, their drivers may be steered away from traffic jams. A Wall Street Journal article on the topic is titled Fighting Traffic Jams with Data: Researchers Develop Ways for Cars to ‘Talk’ to Each Other and Send Warnings. The report describes some details of the drive toward smart mobbing cars to avoid jams, and begins:

A symphony of light-emitting diodes, smartphones, global positioning systems and mobile sensors may soon work together to help drivers avoid traffic jams.

Researchers from different universities are working on ways for cars to better communicate with each other and relay crucial driver information such as traffic speed, weather and road conditions. The data could be used to decipher faster routes. In the meantime, there are options for residents of big cities to check out live traffic feeds on their cellphones.

The aim is to address the growing problem of traffic congestion through improved communications between cars. . . .

Obama’s social networking was the real revolution

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social-networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then the Republicans. As a result, when he arrives at the White House, Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern.
Source: David Carr, The New York Times, November 10, 2008

MP3 player headphones may hinder pacemakers

Headphones used with MP3 digital music players like the iPod may interfere with heart pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, U.S. researchers said on Sunday. The MP3 players themselves posed no threat to pacemakers and defibrillators, used to normalize heart rhythm. But strong little magnets inside the headphones can foul up the devices if placed within 1.2 inches of them.
Source: Will Dunham, Reuters, November 9, 2008

Social Media Leads the Future of Technology

Internet-connected televisions, social media, and the power of simplicity were all cited as launch pads for future innovation in technology, according to a panel of experts that convened at Harvard Business School as part of the HBS Centennial Business Summit in October. And though advertisers love the Internet, to what extent they can capitalize on these transformations remains an open question.
Source: Martha Lagace, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, November 10, 2008

Text messaging may help children fight off obesity

A new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that cell phone text messaging could be used to reduce children’s chances of becoming overweight or obese later in life, by helping them monitor and modify their own behaviors now.
Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill news release, November 11, 2008

The Next Step in Health Care: Telemedicine

Imagine a scenario where doctors from different hospitals can collaborate on a surgery without having to actually be in the operating room. What if doctors in remote locations could receive immediate expert support from top specialists in hospitals around the world? This environment could soon become a reality thanks to research by a multi-university partnership that is testing the live broadcast of surgeries using the advanced networking consortium Internet2.
Source: Rochester Institute of Technology news release, November 12, 2008

Search Engine With Roots in Genomics Unlocks Deep Web

A research-focused search engine founded by Human Genome Project scientists is claiming to go where even Google doesn’t tread: the deep web. DeepDyve is designed to search the 99 percent (they say, citing a study from UC Berkeley) of hits not picked up by other search engines, which return pages based largely on interpretations of popularity and work only if a page is findable. Content hidden behind paywalls or that is not linked to enough sites to gain page rank remains obscure, but often contains the source material required for serious research.
Source: Chris Snyder, Wired News, November 11, 2008

The Coming Wireless Revolution

If you believe some radio researchers and engineers, within the next couple of years, high-bandwidth, far-reaching wireless Internet signals will soon blanket the nation. Thanks to a decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week, megahertz frequency bands that were previously allocated to television broadcasters will be opened to other device manufacturers. The frequency liberation means that future wireless gadgets will be able to blast tens of megabits per second of data over hundreds of kilometers.
Source: Kate Greene, Technology Review, November 14, 2008

(Thanks, Megan!)

Several times a day, with increasing frequency and accuracy, one of the people who follows my personal account on Twitter — someone I’ve never heard from before — sends me a specific URL to check out. I check it out. Yes, indeed: this is something I need to know. Within the last couple hours I got one about blogging and the public sphere, and another one about teaching and learning. I try to reciprocate, but not necessarily as a direct quid pro quo — if I see something that someone I follow probably ought to know about, I send a link. A diffuse kind of ad-hoc educational institution emerges from the twittersphere in this way. There is no teacher and no student. We’re all teaching and learning from each other. But that’s just one way people use Twitter as a platform for ad hoc collaboration. This article on great twitter moments put it well, I think:

I believe what makes Twitter so valuable are these moments of connectivity that simply aren’t possible through any other communications tool. I’ve had these “Twitter moments” and I set out to discover “Twitter moments” from others as well. What all the following stories have in common is a Twitter user had a question or a concern, and someone (or many people) responded. Twitter was the connective tissue that made that moment happen in a time of need.

Success in life and as a citizen increasingly depends not so much on access to devices as access to knowledge — knowledge of the skills necessary to use widely available technology to achieve one’s ends as an individual and a citizen. In other words: literacy. This video is only three minutes long, but it gets the point across nicely:

There is a detailed story today in Pajamas Media that reports on various aspects of technology used in the US Presidential election. Starting with some background from 2004, the report analyzes the use by both major parties of new media and social networking. There was activism on both sides in numerous aspects of the campaigns:

Just as the left winning the students doesn’t translate into superior student activism, winning the technologists doesn’t translate into superior technology. Between students and technologists, the left has a much more technologically-savvy community and has clearly dominated high-tech activism. Where the right has translated technology into traditional low-tech forms like call sheets and targeted scripts, they have been as, or even more, successful. . . .

Full article . . . .

I’m heartwarmed to write about GoodGuide, a startup I’ve been observing since it was in stealth mode, which has a team of dedicated individuals I dearly admire (hi Eric, Dara) and took the top prize at the Web 2.0 Summit’s Launch Pad last week. GoodGuide is a gargantuan database of information about the environmental, health, and social implications of products and companies. Its purpose is to help users align their consumer behavior with their values, “shifting the balance of information and power in the marketplace” and enabling what could be referred to as consumer governance.

To date, the team’s focus has been on core capabilities, such as partnerships with data providers and the methodology for rating products and companies. Most recently, they made GoodGuide mobile, allowing users to access product ratings via text messages and through an iPhone app, i.e. access product ratings at that critical point-of-purchase. The information in the database currently comes from research done by GoodGuide’s team (based out of UC Berkeley), along with a network of leading academic institutions, government data sources, non-governmental organizations, and private research firms. But the longer-term vision is to enable users to communicate and form groups around shared topics of interest, rate and comment on the information in the database, and even generate it themselves (think workers and other people who experience the environmental, health, and social implications of products/companies firsthand…). Specific social media features might include: messaging between users; messaging from users to companies; making information tag-able and share-able via digg, Facebook, and otherwise; a social rating system for generating lists of top-rated products; and the ability to contribute to the site’s blog, among other opportunities for user-generated content.

So what does GoodGuide have to do with smart mobs? Well, if smart mobs manifest the emergence of technology-enabled collectively intelligent behavior, then GoodGuide – by helping consumers connect through, form groups around, communicate about, and even create the information they need to engage in consumer governance – may allow for the emergence of technology-enabled collectively intelligent consumer behavior. The un-palatability of this phrase is why I call it “peer consumption” (a reference to Yochai Benkler’s notion of peer production). “Peer consumption” happens when consumers use technology to coordinate their consumer behavior in an intelligent way, in this case, for purposes of alleviating the environmental, health, and social implications of products and companies. This situates GoodGuide with Carrotmob and other emerging phenomena which – if you’ve read this far and want examples of – I’d be glad to share.

Regardless of peer this or that, it will be fascinating to see what happens as GoodGuide unleashes the wrath of social media on its site. And if you become a member, you can partake in the collective action.

Some clever computer scientists at UC San Diego (UCSD) have developed a software that can perform key duplication with just a picture of the key — taken from up to 200 feet. One of the researchers said ‘we built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret.’ He added that on sites like Flickr, you can find many photos of people’s keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. Apparently, some people are blurring ‘numbers on their credit cards and driver’s licenses before putting those photos on-line,’ but not their keys. This software project is quite interesting, but don’t be too afraid. I don’t think that many of you put a photo of their keys online — with their addresses. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

Google has been making headlines recently with its new Online Flu Tracker which, as the Fox News story says today, “will help U.S. federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic.” The new Flu Trends page at Google describes how the tracker works, and includes this explanation:

Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.