Perhaps it’s the constant ringing you hear - in your pocket, on your hip, in the car.  Or the fact that even a cursory look at the local mall or a city street seems to indicate that humans have mysteriously developed a new appendage, one complete with a dial tone.  Or maybe it’s the haunting realization that the way to your teenage daughter’s heart appears to be through an iPhone.  You may not have heard, but your surely intuit, that the world recently reached a tipping point. There is now one cellphone for every two people on the planet.

The mobile phone has been hailed as the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history.  As with any technology of this magnitude and reach, what follows is revolution - social revolution, to be exact. From fish farmers in India to mobile financing in Africa, the ability of the mobile phone to effect social change is one of the most exciting and important stories being written today.  This week’s Friday Five highlights just a few examples of the growing trend of “mobile activism.”  

Texting for Social Change - FrontlineSMS

In many developing countries mobile phones are not only far more ubiquitous than computers and landlines, in many cases they are the only means of communication.  Organizations such as NGOs rely on tools like text messaging to reach out to the communities they work with. FrontlineSMS is a text messaging system that allows a user with a laptop and a GSM mobile phone the ability to send a large number of text (SMS) messages; because it depends on cellular networks instead of the Internet, it will work in any country on any GSM network. In the first two years since its release, FrontlineSMS has been used by NGOs in 41 countries for a wide range of activities including monitoring elections and disease outbreaks, blood donor recruitment and the exchange of market price information for vegetable and coffee growers.

Mobile Phone Reporters - Voices of Africa

Launched in May 2007, the Voices of Africa project is creating a cadre of “mobile reporters.”  Armed with mobile phones, the reporters are known as ‘camjos’ (short for ‘camera’ and ‘journalist’) who use mobile phones to write, takes photos and makes videos about daily life in Africa on subjects they find newsworthy. Using the mobile phone as the reporting platform is critical, as many journalists don’t have access to the Internet to file their stories. According to the project site, Voices of Africa aims aims to “put Africans in a much better position to take part in discussions that have been taking place about their continent  for centuries without their knowledge and participation.”

Environmental Monitoring - MESSAGE on a Bike

This New Scientist article reports that cellphones used by bicycle couriers are monitoring air pollution in Cambridge, UK, and beaming the data back to a research lab. The project, called MESSAGE, is developing low cost sensors to provide data for the planning and management of environmental impacts in urban areas. Sensors are embedded on vehicles and people to act as “mobile, real-time environmental probes, sensing transport and non-transport related pollutants and hazards.” One very practical application: working with doctors to correlate their patient’s asthma symptoms with the air pollution around them. (thanks to Changeist for the heads up)

Mobile Acitivism = MobileActive

MobileActive is a global network of people (and their tools, projects, and resources) focused on the use of mobile phones in civil society. It’s without a doubt one of the most comprehensive and connected sites on the web documenting the use of mobile phones for activism and advocacy, featuring hundreds of examples, case studies and resources (see this Boston Globe article for a sample). Most importantly, MobileActive taps into activists around the world, connecting a community that is literally creating social change one cell phone at a time.  For anyone interested in following the emerging trend of mobile activism from the ground up, the organization’s news aggregator and del.icio.us feeds are must-reads.

“Socially Networked Consumption” - CarrotMob

What if the most important step you could take to help solve the world’s most challenging problems was to drop into the corner store on a certain week and buy a certain brand of toothbrush? This is the question posed by Carrotmob, a new non-profit that organizes consumers to make purchases that reward companies who make environmentally friendly choices.  At its initial launch Carrotmob organized 300+ people for a few hours of shopping at a local market in San Francisco. The company, K&D Market, pledged to allocate 22% of gross revenue from Carrotmobbers towards energy-saving measures. The big idea, according to founder Brent Schulkin, is to improve the world by helping companies embrace socially responsible choices, leveraging the power of “socially networked consumption”* to do so.  

*4/22/08 update: Stephanie Gerson, a student at UC Berkley, wrote to tell me that she coined the term “socially networked consumption”; while the term isn’t explained in detail on her blog (only: “peer consumption via consumer networking sites”), according to her email she’s writing a thesis on the topic.

We like to think of the FringeHog Friday Five as a weekly starter-kit to the future: each week we feature five perspectives on “the future of” a particular theme from food to design to yes, boxes.  The science behind choosing the topics is simple: satisfy our insatiable curiosity about how to world is changing in both profound and minute ways. This week is a brief look back at some of our favorites.

Have an idea for a future Friday Five?  Drop us an email.

Five Things to do with your Genome

Genes are becoming the Legos of life, a super-size carton of biological toys that can be endlessly combined, cut, spliced and reengineered.   The average human has about 25,000 genes - that’s a lot of A, C,T & P’s floating around. Scientists are still clueless about what to do with most of them, so here’s a few ideas for putting your spare genome to good use (including hang it on a wall and use it as musical inspiration).

Future Cities

Does the world seem a little more crowded these days? If so, it might be because on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 a subtle but significant tipping point occurred: for the first time in human history, the world’s population became more urban than rural.  On that day say researchers, the global urban population exceeded that of the global rural population by 125,849 people. The after-shocks of this seismic shift are just starting to reverberate in cities throughout the world. This Friday Five features cities of the future, including megacities, “smart” cities and the increasingly popular carbon-neutral city.

The Future of Water

While more than 1 billion people on Earth - about one sixth of the global population - lack access to dependable, safe drinking water, yet industrialized countries readily pay a small fortune to drink tap water out of a bottle. Here at five views about the future of water, one of the most critical - and contentious - issues facing the humankind in the coming decade. 

Super Size Innovation

What will inspire the next world-changing innovation?  It just might be money.  The X-Prize Foundation calls it “revolution through competition”; I call it Super-Size Innovation. What it is: cash prizes to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges. A new crop of public “innovation challenges” have emerged, all offering large cash prizes for armchair innovators who are able to solve some of our most pressing problems: global warming, space travel, clean water, to name just a few.

The Future of Robots

For nearly fifty years, robots have captured our collective imagination.  From Rosie, the arthritic robo-housekeeper in the Jetson’s to Robin William’s emotionally available Bicennential Man to every guy’s favorite cyborg assassin, the media has played to our fascination with all things humanoid. Here we look at the increasingly social role robots will play in the future, from violin-playing androids who care for our elderly to, um, sexbots.  

How do we visualize cyberspace?  For all of the serendipitous surprises the web has to offer, it’s ironic that the traditional metaphors for cyberspace are about as appealing as a rush-hour traffic jam (”information superhighway” anyone?).  Ah, but the web is so much more than an electronic pileup of bits and bytes!  Looking for a little visual pick-me-up, this week’s Friday Five sent us spelunking for some of the more interesting and entertaining visualizations on the web.  Enjoy!
 

Packet Garden

One of my all-time favorite web apps, Packet Garden allows you to harvest your IP traffic and grow your own personal Internet garden.  As the website explains “To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.” A world based on your digital data is born.

Flight Patterns

Whatever else you do today, watch this video.  It’s simply one of the most mesmerizing visualizations you’ll ever see.  Digital artist Aaron Koblin used FAA flight tracking data of aircraft traveling across the United States to create this visually stunning interpretation of globalization.

 Universe

I’ve said in the past that I’m the (unofficial) president of the (unofficial) Jonathan Harris Fan Club, and here’s another reason why.  “Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe  presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from DayLife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.”  Like all of Harris’ work, it’s beautifully rendered and brilliantly thought-provoking.

TwitterVision 3D

Sometimes it feels that Twitter has turned the world into an “endlessly chattering global family.” The micro-blogging site has nearly quadrupled its user base in the last nine months, registering over 900,000 members.  Where are all those Tweets coming from? The 3D version of TwitterVision gives you a pretty good idea: it visualizes random Twitter posts from around the world in all of their profound and mundane glory.  Created by Dave Troy, Twittervision is part of the new MoMA exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind.

3D Mailbox

OK, this one’s just for fun. 3D Mailbox has a seemingly impossible mission: Make email fun.  The program turns your email program into a simulation of LAX airport traffic. From the site: “Every email you send or receive is represented by a jumbo jet. New email comes to the arrivals terminal, or to custom hangars (mailboxes) that you define… departing mails leave via the departures terminal. Based on the origin or destination of your mail, each message is depicted by any of over 80 world airlines. Get a message from the UK, it comes by Virgin, British Airways. Send a message to Italy, it goes out on Alitalia or EuroFly. Emails with attachments are carried by the couriers: FedEx, UPS, DHL, and CargoLux.” While the program has gotten its share of mixed reviews (primarily from tech analysts who perhaps take email a bit too seriously), the video trailer alone is worth a look.  And yes, that’s “Spam Air” in the picture above.

If you could have one superhuman power, what would it be? 

Admit it: we’ve all harbored some fantasy about what it would be like if we could fly or walk through walls or move objects just by looking at them. The wildly popular tv show Heroes taps into our inner superhuman desires, telling the stories of ordinary people who discover that they have superhuman abilities (including a cop who can read minds and a cheerleader who can heal herself). How closely does fantasy mimic reality?  Turns out pretty closely, in some cases.  The heroes on the show gained their powers via a genetic mutation, but several superhuman abilities are within reach, mainly thanks to some well-funded military research. This week’s Friday Five explores future superpowers we can look forward to, and what they might mean for society.

Bionic Eyes

This Discover article reports that engineers at the University of Washington are developing contact lenses that contain electronic circuits that would allow wearers to see information superimposed over their view of the world in front of them (such as driving control panels and immersive virtual games) and “surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.”  Someday, the lenses might also offer tele/microscopic vision, the ability to see infrared frequencies, or the ability to take pictures and videos.

Super Strength

From the Incredible Hulk to Superman, the ability to pick up large objects (such as cars and meteoroids) seems to be the most common attribute of superheroes.  So it’s no surprise the military is investing heavily in giving its soldiers super human strength.  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is first in line, developing an exoskeleton - a frame that fits over the body designed to help soldiers move faster and farther, carrying heavier loads and weaponry.  The key?  The robotic frame contains miniature internal combustion engines moving each powered joint.  This New Scientist article provides an update on the research, which is expected out sometime this year.

New Limbs

This much-watch video from IEEE Spectrum showcases Dean Kamen’s “Luke Arm”, a robotic arm named after Luke Skywalker’s mechanical hand in Star Wars.  It’s amazing footage of a emerging vison of next-generation limb prostheses that are fully functional, neurologically controlled, and have normal sensory capabilities.  More than that, it’s also incredibly inspiring: the soldiers featured testing the arm (some of whom are double amputees) talk about the feelings of liberation and independence the arm is giving them.

Mind Reading

Perhaps the most potent (and the most controversial) of future superpowers is the ability to read minds.  Psychics claim that this is an inherent ability, but science is taking another approach: last year researchers used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future.  While the ability to truly read minds is likely still decades away, the brain scan technology is also driving developments in human-computer interfaces such as mind-controlled computers that would allow people to operate email and the internet using thought alone.  Check out this Guardian article for more.

Super Humans

Joel Garreau’s best-selling book Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human discusses the implications of human enhancement.  In the future, how will “Natural” and “Enhanced” children compete in school?  In life? I’ve argued that we’re on the verge of a socially fracturing debate about what it means to be human; Garreau explores how this debate will affect us at every level. It’s a great read, one that will change what you thought you knew about the future.

Technology roadmaps are like a GPS for the future: done well, they provide a theoretical and visual geography of the terrain of possible developments and a big-picture view of how a particular technology (or industry) might evolve. Taken together, these five roadmaps offer an interesting perspective on the futures to come.  Because this is the “Friday Five” the following is an abbreivated list of roadmaps. Are there others we should add to the list? Let us know!

Metaverse Roadmap

Because I couldn’t have said it better myself, this comes straight from the website: “The Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is the first public ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets, and potential social impacts. Areas of exploration include the convergence of Web applications with networked computer games and virtual worlds, the use of 3D creation and animation tools in virtual environments, digital mapping, artificial life, and the underlying trends in hardware, software, connectivity, business innovation and social adoption that will drive the transformation of the World Wide Web in the coming decade.” The overview is written by three of FringeHog’s favorite metaverse friends: John Smart, Jerry Paffendorf and Jamais Cascio. Even if you think you know something about the future of the 3D web, read this.

DARPA Tech 2007

For those with an appetite for the real fringe, DARPA Tech 2007 is for you.  In case you’re not up on your military acronyms, DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; it’s the central R&D organization for the U.S. Department of Defense. In a nutshell, what DARPA does is “mine the Far Side” - the high-risk, high-reward areas of research and technology that only the military budget of the world’s largest superpower could support. What this means in practical terms, is that the scientists at DARPA get to go to work every day and play with some really freakin’ cool ideas. Things like Programmable Matter and Inner Armor. Why should you care? Because many military technologies eventually make it to market : think ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet, or MIMICS, the essence of our cell phones and miniature GPS devices. It may not look like a traditional technology roadmap, but collectively the presentations from this annual gathering of DARPA hotshots is the closest (unclassified) look at the long-term future you can find.

EURON Roboethics Roadmap

As a follow-up to last week’s Friday Five on the future of robots, this week we offer up the EURON Roboethics Roadmap.  Developed by the European Robotics Research Network (EURON) the roadmap provides a systematic assessment of the ethical issues involved in robotics R&D. According to the report, the first version is concerned with the ethics of human beings involved in the design, manufacturing and use of robots. It covers a broad array of issues, including anthromorphization of machines, technology addition and the humanization of the human/machine relationship. (Note: the South Korean government is also working on Robot Ethics Charter).

Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems

Amidst the oft-reported hype about nanotechnology - somewhere between wrinkle free khakis and drug-delivering implantable nanobots - lies the future. The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems aims to identify the gap between the basic nanostructured materials of today, and the potential of “productive nanosystems”, bridging the differences of expert opinion regarding when we can expect to see widespread commercial applications. According to the Roadmap, some near-term applications include sensors, metrology standards and quantum computing. Warning: it’s a dense document, chock full of tech jargon.  The two pages of abbreviations for terms such as Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube (SWNT) helps, but not much.

Microsoft’s Toward 2020 Science

Bill Gates may have left the building, but his fingerprints remain on Microsoft Research’s Toward 2020 Science, a 2005 report which sets out to produce a roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and research in the next fifteen years.  With characteristic Microsoft attitude, the report states that “it is, to our knowledge, the first to articulate a comprehensive vision of science towards 2020, the impact of the convergence of computer science and the other sciences, and to identify specifically what the science community and policy makers can do to ensure the vision we outline becomes a reality.” Uh-huh.  Hyperbole aside, this is a good read, the main thesis being that science-based innovation will eclipse technology-based innovation in a number of emerging fields. A wall-size poster of the map (suitable for framing, we’re told) can be found here.