I returned to South Africa to attend the 2010 edition of Mobile Web Africa, a conference focused on the remarkable adoption and development of mobile networks and technology in Africa.

The conference took place on 29th & 30th September 2010 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I presented a workshop on social media network analysis, see: http://www.mobilewebafrica.com/marc-smith-workshop.php

The conference twitter hashtag #MWA2010 received a significant amount of traffic.  I mapped the collection of collections formed when people who tweeted “#MWA2010″ also followed, replied, or mentioned one another.  The following two EventMaps of the #MWA2010 twitter hashtag illustrates the development of the network.

Map of the connections among people who tweet “MWA2010″ on October 5th, 2010

Map of the connections among people who tweet “MWA2010″ on September 29th, 2010

The later graph is defined by three leading contributors who each generated significant retweeting along with mentions and replies.

I attended the previous 2009 Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, organized by AllAmber Media which also featured a focus on the next wave of mobile devices and services.

Mobile is BIG in Africa.  The “Remote control of the Universe” = Mobile Phone.

The speaker from Samsung last year noted that for many Africans, the mobile device is their first and main method for managing digital objects.  A phone is not just a phone, it is a still and video camera, music player, watch, web browser, flashlight, wallet and file system.

The representative from Yonder Mobile Media noted that mobile phones have now exceeded the installed base of the previously most widely used communication technology: FM Radio.  But mobile is different from FM: mobile devices are two way, provide a method for exchanging payments, and are a primary method of access to the internet for many billions of people.  Mobile is the “first” screen for many people in Africa, not the third screen role that it plays in more developed economies.  Regional services like MXIT and The Grid are offering Internet services tailored to affordable mobile devices.

Photos from this year’s event:

Photos from last year’s event:

Photos from Cape Town:

Mapping mobile social networks with NodeXL: finding key users, groups, and locations

The video is now available:

The video reviews the creation of maps like this:

That illustrate the connections among people who tweet the term “#ecomm2010″, scaled by the number of followers.

Abstract: Social network analysis (SNA) is a powerful method for gaining insight into the massive collections of connections created when many people connect to one another through mobile devices. SNA has been widely applied to desktop social media and is moving into the mobile world. Prominent studies of the “call graph” have been produced at national scales.

Mobile providers are applying SNA to identify key subscribers who can reduce churn and help gain adoption of new services and products. Network analysis has historically had a steep learning curve, but now new tools are making SNA easier for less technical users. This talk will describe social network concepts and their application to mobile data sets. A free and open add-in for the popular Excel 2007 spreadsheet called NodeXL (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) can perform many complex SNA tasks like data import, scrubbing, metrics calculation, clustering, and visualization. Applying this tool to call graph and subscriber data sets can reveal key positions in the network that can attract and hold other subscribers in the system.

Examples of network analysis of social media and mobile data sets can be found on the Connected Action blog (http://www.connectedaction.net).

Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Here is the slide deck I presented at the “Studying Society In A Digital World” conference at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.  They just posted most of the conference slides.  I took some pictures and posted to flickr.  Here is the slide deck I presented along with my talk at the conference.

The theme of mobile sensor data shared via social networks was one reinforced by the many presentations at the conference. In my talk, I focused on the idea that information want not to be free or expensive, rather, information wants to be copied.  Like DNA, the goal of any string of bits is to make a duplicate copy of themselves.  Several technical realities mean that while information may exist on a spectrum from private to public, it only moves in one direction (public) and almost never back.  Once made public on the Internet, even if only for a moment, a photo, document, or other digital object is almost certainly to have been copied, indexed, backed up, or replicated.  All efforts to delete a digital object once widely distributed is like trying to take wine out of water.  This is because all cryptography become brittle over time, most bits end up exposed after they get distributed, and more events trigger widespread distribution of bits than expected (for example, linking a photo, and a location, to a tweet that gets copied to LinkedIn and Facebook, that then appears in an RSS feed and is copied from there to Friend Feed.  As it travels, information looses more of the access controls that initially made it relatively private until it is effectively public.

Held in conjunction with SocialCom ’09
29th-30th August, Vancouver, Canada
http://thesocialmobileweb.org

The mobile space is evolving at an astonishing rate. At present there are over 3.5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide and with continued advances in devices, services and billing models, the mobile web looks set to inspire a new age of anytime, anywhere information access. The inherent characteristics of mobile phones enable new types of interactions, e.g. mobile phones are personal to the individual, they are always on and always connected. And as such we are seeing a shift towards mobile devices for social mediated tasks. The world is also witnessing an explosion in social web services. Online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace continue to experience huge increases in usage, with more and more users seeking novel ways of interacting with their friends and family.

In this workshop we are interested in the combination of these two exciting research spaces: the social web and the mobile space. We believe that the social mobile web is going to be a highly influential research area in the near future. As such this workshop will investigate the current state of the social mobile web. Topics of interest to this workshop include (but are not limited to) the following:

* Novel social interactions on mobile devices.
* Social mobile content sharing and distribution services.
* Context aware mobile services – beyond location based services.
* Social mobile search and social mobile browsing.
* User evaluations of social mobile services.
* Mobile user interfaces that incorporate social elements.
* Mobility and social networks.
* Models of mobile social behavior and mobile traces.
* Urban gaming, mobile mixed reality, etc.
* Innovative social mobile applications.

This workshop is targeted towards researchers working within the mobile web and social web spaces.  Participants are invited to submit: (1) a short position or demonstration paper of 2-4 pages in length or (2) a full length technical paper of up to 10 pages in length. Papers should be in IEEE publication format and should be submitted as a PDF file via email to organizers@thesocialmobileweb.org. Workshop papers will be published by IEEE CS Press. Note that at least one author of accepted papers needs to register and attend the workshop.

Organising Committee
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* Karen Church, Telefonica Research, Barcelona
* Josep M. Pujol, Telefonica Research, Barcelona
* Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland
* Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, Evanston

Program Committee
————————–
* Lada Adamic, University of Michigan
* Alex Arenas, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
* John Breslin, DERI Institute, NUI Galway
* Meeyoung Cha, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
* Augustin Chaintreau, Thomson Research
* Nathan Eagle, MIT/Santa Fe Institute
* Andreas Flache, University of Groningen
* Jill Freyne, CSIRO
* Scott A. Golder, Cornell University
* Carmen Guerrero, Universidad Carlos III
* Tom Heath, Talis
* Matt Jones, FIT Lab, Swansea University
* David Lazer, Harvard University
* Nuria Oliver, Telefonica Research
* Alex Payne, Twitter
* Ramon Sang¸esa, Technical University of Catalonia, Citilab
* Albrecht Schmidt, University Duisburg-Essen
* Marc Smith, Telligent Systems
* Roger M. Whitaker, University of Cardiff
* Peter Mika, Yahoo Research Labs

Important Dates
11th May 2009: Deadline for submissions
5th June 2009: Notification to authors
15th June 2009: Final paper version deadline
29th-31st August 2009: Conference dates

Website
Further details are available from the workshop website at: http://thesocialmobileweb.org

After a lovely dinner you order a third glass of wine, take a sip and your mobile phone rings.

Its your health insurance company’s computer. You take the call.

“We’re delighted to see you are enjoying yourself this evening!” the cheerful voice synthesis exclaims.

“Please note, however, that you are now at the policy limit for blood alcohol level. To purchase a 24 hour waiver that will allow you to exceed this limit, press 1. A fee of $20 will be charged to your monthly co-payment invoice. To decline waiver coverage, press 2. Please note that if you decline coverage your blood alcohol level must drop under the policy limit within 45 minutes. Continued elevated blood alcohol above your policy limit will constitute breach of your coverage agreement and you may loose all coverage for alcohol related illnesses including injuries received from accidents that may be caused by impairment.”

With a paid-for glass of wine on the table, many people may just go along with the offer (their judgment may already be somewhat impaired).

Real-time health monitoring is an application that is rapidly developing.  Our mobile devices are likely to play a central role in enabling a wide scale real-time continuous monitoring of health related data.  The Quantified Self meet-up is exploring many aspects of this space, but discussion of ways large institutions could use this data has not been a large focus so far.

Medical compliance is a huge issue: most of us do not take prescribed medicines the way we are “supposed to” – skipping doses, doubling up, or quitting a series of medications once symptoms subside.  A real-time assessment of our blood (among other measures) would go a long way to reducing the costs of illness and treatment.  In a world of scarce medical resources, can competitive societies allow their members to be slothful and subsequentially expensive to maintain?

The Intel Health Guide is a good example of this emerging trend, although still in a “desktop” form factor.

Intel Health Guide Device

Other examples can be found in the iPhones app store where health and navigation and travel categories of applications are starting to collide.