A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

Unlike scientific applications, many sensors for urban applications are already ‘out there,’ watching and listening. Mobile phones provide us with sounds and imagery from our homes and neighborhoods, and the near ubiquity of wireless access in many future urban settings will allow us to publish or share data easily, immediately. Soon private citizens will have access to a great diversity of sensors, allowing them to make even more detailed observations of their communities. They will be able to cross-reference spatially and temporally tagged data they gather with publicly available data from private and municipal monitoring of the city—traffic, weather, air quality, pedestrian flow—the environment and rhythms of urban life.

At the edges of culture, lightweight web applications, built on this publicly available information and free web services, emerge already almost daily to explore new linkages among these varied data.

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We suggest that urban and social sensing applications will flourish only given a flexible sensor information fabric that allows a wide range of data remixing, correlation and fusion applications.

[via: Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, Urban Sensing Project]

Why do I blog this? Go to the well-done Urban Sensing website to find detailed descriptions about a variety of mobile sensing application scenarios. Why not start with the PEIR Personal Environmental Impact Report?

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.

Sensing is going mobile and people-centric. Sensors for activity recognition and GPS for location are now being shipped in millions of top end mobile phones. This complements other sensors already on mobile phones such as high-quality cameras and microphones. At the same time we are seeing sensors installed in urban environments in support of more classic environmental sensing applications, such as, real-time feeds for air-quality, pollutants, weather conditions, and congestion conditions around the city. Collaborative data gathering of sensed data for people by people, facilitated by sensing systems comprised of everyday mobile devices and their interaction with static sensor webs, present a new frontier at the intersection between pervasive computing and sensor networking.

[via: UrbanSense08 - International Workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems, took part Nov '08]

Why do I blog this?

A great state-of-the-art sum-up, more and more applications facilitate the available sensors on mobile phones and the next step is the sharing of this data not just within your social network but also with your sensor-enriched surroundings. A lot of potential and it’s clear that sensor data is becoming pervasive and demands to be integrated into everyday applications and services. New programmable smartphones, improved tools and libraries to access sensor data and the Internet as the platform are a solid foundation to build interesting prototypes.