A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

We have an insatiable desire to make sense of the world around
us. How do we best observe and record the details of time, nature,
location, events, and our own personal experiences? How can we
understand the interactions among data and utilize them with
intelligence and responsibility? To explore these questions, Nokia
has spurred an explosion of sensor-based research in which the
mobile phone plays a front-line role in sensing, processing, and
communicating an array of valuable information.

[Source: Nokia Research Center - Sensing the World with Mobile Devices (PDF)]

Why do I blog this? The concept of people-centric sensing is intriguing, humans with their total mobility are carrying Internet-connected mobile phones nearly all the time and thus it shapes a social sensing overlay of tremendous scale. Sensing anywhere and anytime. Definitely worth reading the vision of Nokia Research.

urban sensing is about people like you—equipped with today’s mobile + web technology—systematically observing, studying, reflecting on, and sharing your unique world. through discovery and connected participation, you can see the world anew. you can tell your local story. you can make change.

welcome to urban sensing

[Source: UrbanSensing CENS/UCLA Research Group]

It’s worth taking a look at the urban sensing projects they are working on.

Why do I blog this? The idea of participatory sensing or people-centric sensing is tremendous with regards to the  Mobile Web revolution we will face in the next years, mobile sensing of sensor data and user-generated content will open up new interesting data streams.

Tagcrumbs is a non-domain specific platform for user-generated textual place annotations with a focus on the Mobile Web. With regards to mobile sensing applications I see potential for the augmentation of sensor measurements (e.g. pollution data) with the Tagcrumbs place data to grasp a better space-time context. It’s about opening up very specific niche mobile sensing applications to increase value and interoperability in the long-run.