Ever noticed that so-called ‘real-time traffic’ sometimes isn’t? Wondering if there is a better way to use traffic data to get to your destination efficiently? The Mobile Millennium project aims to solve these problems, at least for the San Francisco Bay Area. The project is the result of a collaboration between Nokia, NAVTEQ, and UC Berkeley. Put simply, Mobile Millennium uses mobile phone location and speed data from thousands of participating users to deduce traffic levels for Bay Area roadways.

Mobile Millennium represents a handy and appropriate use of ‘Crowdsourcing‘. It demonstrates how mobile devices can send useful data back into the cloud, not just communicating through it.  The fact that users can benefit directly from their own collaboration creates a strong incentive to participate, which should make it easier to distribute the technology among the local population.

Crowdsourcing holds immense promise for mobile devices - far more people own mobile devices than PCs. The fact of being mobile and closely tied with individual people actually adds to the potential for useful applications and data to emerge from devices like phones. Crowdsourcing can lead to and support things like citizen journalism, especially given that most phones (iPhones aside) can shoot video and record sound. Crowdsourcing is equally useful for up-to-the-minute political organizing, consumer advocacy, even emergency services. When you use Yelp to look up other people’s opinions of restaurants, you are benefitting from a simple form of crowdsourcing, since individual people come together to discuss and rate places and things, and the wisdom of the group influences the presentation. The big advantage with mobile devices is that they add immediacy - crowdsourcing can occur from wherever the users happpen to be. On top of that, passive data from the device (as in Mobile Millennium) can be used without a big investment of time or effort from users.

There are certainly drawbacks to crowdsourcing. Amateur postings vary in quality, and require systems to manage content. Sharing of passive data sharing raises privacy and data usage concerns. Nevertheless, good crowdsourced applications can also leverage group intelligence to improve their content. In addition, many privacy concerns can be allayed by requiring user permission/opt-ins and protecting the anonymity of crowdsourced passive data (coupled with tangible benefits to the crowds involved).

There’s at least one potential future where we are all amateur journalists - or possibly paparazzi. The first step along that path is mobile devices that can (with our permission) record and transmit what we do.

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