SmartPlanet Over Mobile?

Imran Ali describes a fascinating concept called crowdsensing, which would require turning mobile phones into something called a spime – a term coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling (a man who, I believe, once wrote in one of his mid 1990s novels that copyright would be impossible to enforce on the Internet). A spime, according to Wikipedia, comes from the convergence of six technologies – six facets that essentially allow it to be tracked through space and time (sp+ime), amongst other things. These facets include identification (RFID), location (GPS), data mining (search engine), design (CAD), rapid prototyping (3D printing), recycling.

The crowdsensing description that Imran gives does not contain all of these facets, but it makes for something that sounds like science fiction: the ability for a mobile network to sense various environmental conditions including weather and crowds using the mobile handsets of subscribers as a collective sensor net. And you thought cell phones were only for calls. Apparently a step towards crowdsensing has been taking with a new deal between Vodafone and Tom Tom.