Cell Phones Help Bring Basic Sanitation to Africa

It is predicted that by 2015, 2.7 billion people will lack access to sanitation—this is an especially disheartening figure if you consider that, today, more people have access to mobile phones than toilets. Optimistically, however, a number of innovators around the world are attempting to use this new found access to technology to address the [...]

Toxin Sensing Mobile Phones

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have just finished the first phase of an initiative to develop a mobile sensor capable of detecting toxic chemicals in our environment. With a small startup called Rhevision Inc., the chief researcher on the project, Michael Sailor, has devised the sensor, a porous flake of silicon which [...]

All City Art

Semaphore Mobile recently developed a new application, All City Art, essentially a handheld mobile guide to global street art. Addictive and accessible, the application is ripe for graffiti enthusiasts and the average voyeur alike. Easily tag and upload street art spots you find and discover new ones you haven’t seen yet. And, connect the dots.

Mobile Phones as Sensors for Enhancing Lifestyles

I thought this video (despite being long) provided a fairly thoughtful look at potential use for the data our mobile phones are collecting. If you stick with it, it’s worth it.

Mobile App Developers in Africa

This week John Sutter has an interesting piece on CNN.com which teases out mobile app developers formidable contributions to solving some of Africans biggest problems. Sutter focuses on the problem of opaque markets in information while discussing the common experience facing the average farmer in Africa—farmers rarely reap the benefit of high market prices as [...]

SimpleGeo

This week, the New York Times technology blog, Bits, highlighted the technology startup SimpleGeo. SimpleGeo is a small firm which is capitalizing on the scarcity of access to local location data. In recognizing that many mobile games, mobile services and mobile applications are inherently limited by their access to location data, the founders of SimpleGeo [...]

New Socialight Platform, New Socialight Business Model

Socialight, the New York based location-based social networking site, launched a new offering for potential users this past week. The Socialight Community Platform lets people, companies, and organizations easily launch apps around location-based content and community.

Peeking Urban Art with Adidas, Berlin

In the last year Adidas emerged as an unassuming protagonist for mobile-driven marketing. By building applications and experiences that create new value for users, Adidas manages to promote its street wear and give it real street cred where credit’s due. Whereas other companies and actors in the private sector are eager to talk about mobile [...]

From ‘Hack the System’ to ‘Apps for Democracy’

Talk to anybody involved in public policy within municipal governments today and they are likely to talk in laudatory terms (perhaps tinged with envy) about Washington D.C.’s arguably brilliant Apps for Democracy Contest (APPS08). What exactly is the APPS08 initiative? Peter Corbett, the iStrategy Labs founder and CEO and the architect behind this initiative, gives [...]