I picked up a few new books from the MIT Press bookstore and will be sharing my thoughts and impressions of them as I finish them.

First in the queue this weekend was The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done.

Thanks to the subtitle, you’ve got a good grasp of the book’s premise. The author, Peter Miller, is senior editor of National Geographic, and wrote the book very much like a solid long read from the publication. The only thing missing was the vivid photography.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and how Peter weaved together various research findings from the study of ants, bees, starlings, and fish. As I read the book, it triggered insights into the Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street movements, while also making me realize what’s been driving behaviors I’ve seen come from people using online and mobile technologies. Anyone wanting to improve what they’re doing to mobilize people will benefit from these insights, too.

Here is a collection of notes I took while reading this 269-page book:

Read the rest of this entry »

#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:
Sensors inside mobile devices create large amounts of data that can be useful to cause leaders.

A More Detailed Exploration:
While most people want to ignore this fact, the mobile devices in our pockets can be used to track our movements and gather other environmental data when properly outfitted. If you’re living in a blissful state of ignorance about mobile data, you will not want to explore this post by Ben Kunz that introduced me to a website detailing a mobile data experiment. If it doesn’t give you Big Brother nightmares, going to the original website will.

In reading the post and playing around the website, my mind went back to the ideas Ayesha Khanna shared at our Crisis and Media event about the Hybrid Reality and the rising role of sensors in our world. It certainly supports the ideas Robert Kirkpatrick shared at the UN Population Fund summit about data exhaust.

Let’s assume this mobile data is anonymized and made available on an open data platform. What insights and services could be built on top of them? Imagine how this data could help. A few I have seen mentioned elsewhere are:

• drive detection of radiation, toxic chemicals, viruses, and other dangerous things
• chart traffic patterns and migrations over time
• provide insight into human behavior in relationship to other data overlays

These don’t even scratch the surface of what’s possible. What are some ideas you can think of?

Try sitting at a restaurant and not follow the over-the-bar TV. Try taking your office building elevator and not focus on the in-car monitor. Even at my local barber shop, a sizable flat screen TV is constantly running, with videos routinely cutting into if not suppressing actual conversation.

Add to that screens at home, at work, inside stores and your favorite local bodega. Frankly, I probably encountered plenty more digital screen today if only I hadn’t been busy, well, looking at another screen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Listen, the day your mobile network dies and you find yourself amazed how much that upsets you, that might be the day you realize – your wireless devices, and the networks they are tied to, by now are of utmost importance in your live.

To that point, earlier this week, part of T-Mobile’s US network suffered interruptions for the later part of a single day. The resulting outcry was significant.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have to admit I’ve been more than a bit skeptical of recent reports touting mobile video as The Next Big Thing.  Yes, it’s something a lot of people (especially younger people) seem to want, it’s a great use case for us mass-transit users, and with Moore’s Law apparently still in effect, current hardware can now support an excellent user experience.

My issue, though, is with the network.

Read the rest of this entry »

Having a blog is a lot of work – even if we hadn’t customized our template to the point we ended up knowing a little more about CSS and PHP than we ever cared to, there’s always a post to write, spam comments to delete, and readership to try and grow.

So when we get something right months before it happens, you’ll have to forgive us if we rub it in a bit.

Last September I speculated about the prospect of Howard Stern coming to an iPhone near you – not only due to Sirius’ troubles, but also due to the troubles of the auto industry, which the satellite radio business model was seriously (sorry about that) dependent on.

Well it took a little longer than I had thought, but this just in (from a Sirius conference call earlier today): Howard Stern is coming to an iPhone near you (this spring).

What’s strangely missing from all the press coverage, though, is whether Sirius will be available from iTunes as well from the iPhone.  That would be huge, because I don’t know about other iPhone owners, but the new NPR radio app drains my full battery in no time at all – in fact, the real world usefulness of every iPhone radio app I’ve tried so far is severely limited by the battery drain issue.

Still, it’s good when the future behaves itself and matches our predictions.

Mel, call me.