Mobility and Crowd-Source
“(…) People are using their cellphones to review restaurants, share their favorite hometown hangouts, discover new jogging routes, even dodge speeding tickets. ‘The Internet is about the long tail,” notes Rajeev Chand, a managing director and wireless analyst at Rutberg & Co. “Mobile is about pushing that even further out to the ultimate edge: an individual, at all times, with his device.’ Such crowd-sourced applications point up the power of mobile networks to relay data in real time. “Nearly everyone has a mobile that they carry with them all the time,’ says Hugh Bradlow, chief technical officer of Australian operator Telstra. ‘Phones are perfectly suited for this type of automated reporting, and potentially a much more pervasive device than the online Web.(…) ‘We see phones as becoming less phones and more a bridge between the analog world we live in and the digital world of the Internet,’ says Nokia Chief Technical Officer Bob Ianucci. (…) The next step, says Telstra’s Bradlow, is to apply crowd sourcing to reservations, commuting and shopping–any activity that involves a shared resource. Crowds could share information about seating at football games, waiting times at airports and special sales at local stores. Once mobile payments become more popular, phones could even transmit sales data to let users know where they could buy a particular item for the lowest price. (…) ” (via Forbes.com