by Imran Ali
April 13, 2008 at 9:51 pm · Filed under iPhone, Twitter, Crowdsensing, Activism, Tibet, Flashmob
Seems like last week’s pursuit of the Olympic Flame through San Francisco, by pro-Tibetan protesters, was aided and abetted by local Twitter users.
A digest of Twitters from last Wednesday illustrates how residents of the city torch-spotted and crowdsensed the Renegade Receptacle across the city, helping protesters zero-in on the Combustable Contender. Sadly, the flame Hot-Footed it to safety and the protesters were unable to extinguish the Fiery One.
Flamegate has however ignited global repercussions with various European leaders beginning to decline attendance of Bejing’s opening ceremonies…though our very own Gordon Brown *will* have be around for the closing ceremonies, in order to accept the flame for London 2012.
I did wonder about the irony of the San Franciscan Twitterati standing up for Tibetan freedoms with their Chinese-built iPhones…
by Imran Ali
January 29, 2008 at 10:18 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Games, Crowdsensing
Back in October 2006, I started to track stories and developments in an emerging field I termed Crowdsensing; the use of mobile devices and networks to create adhoc sensor networks for applications such as weather forecasting, air quality and road traffic services.
Indeed, developments such as the Participatory Urbanism project and Intel’s Ergo underline how mobile sensor networks are manifesting themselves in useful, real world services.
Philippe Kahn’s Fullpower Technologies promises to equip handsets with multiple sensors that may enable a groundswell of crowdsensing innovation. Though, Kahn’s namechecks sensors such as accelerometers and cameras, it’s unclear whether Fullpower is working with handset manufacturers, networks, looking at developing software stacks, UI innovations or creating reference hardware designs.
However, Fullpower’s site does allude to an ‘inference engine’ capable of ingesting motion, imaging, proximity, light, pressure and GPS data alongside very specific medical data such as heart rate and blood glucose; implying some intriguing mobile medical applications.
Curiously, the company is hiring a games development team, so perhaps the first Fullpower deployment will perhaps be some form of an alternative reality game…
Nevertheless, this is an area and a company that may have some profound implications for the nature of messaging and hence an emerging technology worth tracking.
