Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold - the Internet guru about the future of mobile social networks
While the mobile economy in Europe, USA and Asia will make decent progress in 2003 there is a very special book that you must read as soon as possible if you really want to better understand what early adopters are doing today with the new power of mobile communication and computing technologies. The author of the book titled "Smart Mobs - The Next Social Revolution" is Howard Rheingold who the Internet veterans among you know very well from his book called "The Virtual Community". This time Howard Rheingold not only aggregates a big number of valuable insights and ideas but also his own virtual community of smart mobbers in the interactive online environment resident at www.smartmobs.com.
After having read Smart Mobs I immediately distributed the book to my Mobile Economy colleagues and made it required reading in our company. The main reason for this is that Howard Rheingold very well touches upon many technologies and products that will ultimately enable a lot of new mobile lifestyles in private or business situations. Having traveled to Japan, Scandinavia and around the US the author visited many of the leading mobile epicentres where researchers, innovative companies and their progressive customers test what can be done today and tomorrow.
Many hot subjects that any decent mobile expert should know about are covered in the book. This includes one of our favourite themes which is mesh-based ad-hoc networking. Smart devices with enough computing power and long battery lifes will very soon route and exchange data from peer to peer over enhanced WLAN protocols such as the one of Moteran or newly developed radio interfaces such as MeshNetworks’ proprietary Quadarature Division Multiple Access (QDMA) radio protocol. Whatever the resulting maximum shared bandwidth will be in such a network, it is a tempting idea to circumvent the price making powers of mobile network operators. Think about multicasting video streams in such a network and you will soon dream about underground TV stations in local or wide area networks fed by smart mobs of voluntary video reporters, hobby journalists or hyper-active bloggers.
Another fine example of using mobile communication technologies to satisfy urgent needs is to enhance the mating capabilities of singles in big and small cities. Minimize loneliness and maximize happiness by carrying a matchmaking device similar to the first Japanese embodiment called "Lovegety". You can configure your current love profile and get more love with the help of Lovegety's proprietary radio protocol that does not miss a single match in the street anymore. Problem is that people have to buy new hardware for this sex-enhancing application. So, do expect a good number of bluetooth-based Lovegety successors to hit the mass market rather sooner than later.
So, before I get carried away with the myriad of great thoughts and ideas I had while (re)reading Smart Mobs, let me close this feature by simply recommending to read it yourself.
