Now real-time info for mobile users, courtesy NRI
Press Trust of India
Monday, June 23, 2008, (New York)
A new software system which enables mobile phone users to obtain location-specific, real-time information, either actively or passively, from other users across the world has been developed by a team led by an Indian-American professor at Duke University.
The rapid convergence of social networks, mobile phones and global positioning technology has given Duke University engineers the ability to create something they call "virtual sticky notes," site-specific messages that people can leave for others to pick up on their mobile phones.
"Every mobile phone can act as a telescope lens providing real-time information about its environment to any of the three billion mobile phones worldwide," said Romit Roy Choudhury, an assistant professor at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering.
It will be as if every participating mobile phone works together allowing each individual access to information throughout the virtual network.
Interested in trying that new Indian restaurant? Tap into the virtual sticky notes floating in the ether within the restaurant and find what other network users thought of it.
Heading to the airport and need to know where the traffic jams are? Sensors in the phones detect movement and can relay back to the network where traffic is the heaviest.
The potential of this new application, which has been dubbed micro-blog, is practically limitless.
"We can now think of mobile phones as a 'virtual lens' capable of focusing on the context surrounding it. By combining the lenses from all the active phones in the world today, it may be feasible to build an internet-based 'virtual information telescope' that enables a high-resolution view of the world in real time," Roy Choudhury said.
The application combines the capabilities of distributed networks (like Wikipedia), social networks (Facebook), mobile phones, computer networks and geographic positioning capabilities, such as GPS or WiFi.