February 2012 Archives

With the recent release of the Xoom tablet from Motorola comes the first barometric sensor available in a mobile device.  The barometer was added to the Android operating system by Google as a way to support faster GPS access by estimating the elevation of the user when accessing the satellites.  But this new sensor opens up a new range of possibilities (just as we saw with accelerometers and light sensors) including predicting local weather patterns.  Imagine the possibilities of a weather grid with thousands of users picking up local barometric readings.   Continue Reading...

In 2009, a Network Challenge by DARPA placed 10 red weather balloons in random locations around the US and awarded a $40,000 prize to the team that located all 10 the fastest.  A team from MIT managed to do this in less than 9 hours using a combination of multi-level rewards, crowd-sourcing, camera phones, and data mining http://archive.darpa.mil/networkchallenge/darpanetworkchallengewinner2009.pdf). The MIT solution was a powerful illustration of leveraging the ties of social networks with the ubiquity of mobile device and their sensors (camera, etc.).  We are beginning to see the "power of the crowd" show up in more everyday examples such as idea sourcing (Brainstorm, Spigot, etc.), problem reporting/tracking (SeeClickFix, CitySense, etc.), Social Search (Evri, Quora, etc.).   Continue Reading...

In 2009, a Network Challenge by DARPA placed 10 red weather balloons in random locations around the US and awarded a $40,000 prize to the team that located all 10 the fastest.  A team from MIT managed to do this in less than 9 hours using a combination of multi-level rewards, crowd-sourcing, camera phones, and data mining http://archive.darpa.mil/networkchallenge/darpanetworkchallengewinner2009.pdf). The MIT solution was a powerful illustration of leveraging the ties of social networks with the ubiquity of mobile device and their sensors (camera, etc.).  We are beginning to see the "power of the crowd" show up in more everyday examples such as idea sourcing (Brainstorm, Spigot, etc.), problem reporting/tracking (SeeClickFix, CitySense, etc.), Social Search (Evri, Quora, etc.).   Continue Reading...