Mobile technology can be a very useful tool when trying to learn more about people’s daily movements and on our everyday life habits. This particular study generated very rich data when it tracked 100,000 individuals selected randomly from a sample of more than six million mobile phone users in a European country. Information was collected for six months and research like this can among many things be used be to track down the spreading of infections such as the avian flu. This is of course a very sensitive subject regarding personal integrity issues, but imagine if a whole city would volunteer to be tracked for a limited period of time, say one month – certainly no wiretapping involved- , and in return get better city planning.

Reuters has introduced a service which has shown to be very useful among Indian farmers. It is called Reuters Market Light and provides farmers with weather reports as well as information about where they can sell their crops for best profit.

As Kapil Jachak tells BBC in this interview:

“By getting the weather reports we can see exactly how much water our banana plants need,” he says, “I keep my cost down, and get the best crop I can.”

“This has increased my profit,” says Kapil, “I don’t have to make some headache, and go to any market, any shopkeepers, wholesalers. I can do my marketing easily and get more and more money.”

I think this is a beautiful example of when economic realities promote both a pragmatic use of the everyday life medium and the development of innovative mobile services.

I’ve just read this very interesting piece by Dan Hill titled “The street as platform”.

He begins by describing our invisible but still very real digital surroundings and takes us through a stream of information in a city full of “data-clouds”.  The narrative seems futuristic even though the technology exists and provides us with a very likely near future scenario of a wireless city “in action”. As we all know, the future will happen when the technology of today is at the everyday-life-fingertips of tomorrow’s average citizen.

He goes on and raises some serious questions about future city planning since “informational systems are beginning to profoundly change the way our streets work, the way they are used, and the way they feel”.

Maybe this ought to be taken into account by the people who are shaping our public spaces, and as he points out “holes in data, public and private, may become more relevant than the pothole in the pavement”.

In this interview with Reuters the 79-year old father of the mobile phone Martin Cooper talks about his visions of the future. A daily update on your health status via your mobile sounds good to me but it comes at a certain price. I´m not so sure about this one: ”In about 15 to 20 years, he expects people to have embedded wireless devices in their bodies to help diagnose and cure illness // You could get diagnosed and cured instantly and wirelessly.”

And this kind of freaks me out a bit:

“Here you’ve got this wonderful power supply called the human body that’s generating energy all the time,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have these devices built into you and powered by your body?”

Perhaps future generations will be more open to cybernetic inplants.

Anina is a fresh phenomenon. She is a super model based in Paris but also a tech-nerd dedicated to the gospel of new media, seeing its great potential as a creative and inspiring tool for delivering a rich experience to all the fashionistas out there.

360 fashion is a network of fashion professionals using the latest 2.0 web and mobile technologies and is another project created by anina.net

You also have to check out her mobile app. where you can try out different sets of clothes on an avatar at http://mobi.aninadressup.com

Amazing lady indeed.

Drew Neisser, CEO for US-based experimental marketing agency Renegade published a “top ten” of marketing industry trends for 2008 a couple of months ago and we think that it pretty much sums up what we at Street Media 7 thinks as well. First of all, what he says about Mobile Marketing, no 4, is of course spot on

“Mobile marketing can deliver highly personalized, and useful, information when and where needed and as long as marketers don’t spam, mobile marketing may be the missing link in personalized communication.”

But the rest of his list includes basically all relevant marketing trends we can come to think of right now. A must read.

I have always believed in the mobile device as the killer app for sharing those special moments. Here is one that tries to do it in a rich media environment. Juice Wireless has launched Mobile Video Search (MVS), which it says is the first search application for accessing user-posted videos on wireless devices. Apparently it is growing by 20.000 users a month. 

JuiceCaster