The American and Australian scientists at STAR have received a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to develop the cough-analyzing software for developing countries where access to health care is more limited than in first world nations. Despite the poor economic conditions of these under-developed countries, there are a plethora of mobile phones which are being used for everything from early warning systems to mobile payments to health alerts. An mobile app that diagnoses disease would fit right in.

The way the diagnostic software works is by comparing the sounds of the mobile user's cough to a database of coughs associated with all the different types of respiratory diseases. There would also be multiple coughs per disease stored in the database to take into account variations by age, gender, weight, and other factors.

While to our untrained ears, many coughs sound just alike, a tuned-in doctor - or in this case, a mobile app - can listen to the entire structure of a cough from the initial intake of air to the final 100-150 milliseconds of a cough that contains the distinctive "wet" or "dry" and "productive" or "unproductive" sounds that help to classify the cough's seriousness, explains an article on Discovery News. Even the loudness of a cough is taken into account - healthy people have coughs that are 2% louder than a sick person's.

At the moment, the software exists as a computer application but the scientists plan to have it re-written, when complete, as an application for mobile phones.

There's no word on when the mobile application will be released, but the scientists will need to collect around 1000 cough samples before the database is ready. If they're able to then design a successful analytical tool for mobile phones, the impacts to people's health would be far-reaching - and not just in developing countries, but everywhere in the world.

Said BART website manager Timothy Moore, "We hope this partnership will encourage users to check out different stations and neighborhoods, and will show people who aren't already BART riders some of the great things to do that are easy to get to on transit."

Despite the fact that a number of BART-related Foursquare tips are going to document urine stains and public drunkenness, the reality is that absolutely anything beats driving the US-101 during rush hour traffic. BART check-ins are likely to encourage tired drivers to get out of their car and into a greener and less frustrating alternative. Those interested in official BART tips can visit the transit authority's profile page at foursquare.com/user/SFBART.

In the past ReadWriteWeb covered RFID and its rocky road to consumer adoption. Nevertheless, the enterprise market continues to find new uses for RFID. In fact, this is not the first time where RFID tags have appeared in hospitals. Companies like Wavemark have been working with health institutions to track cardiology machines and other inventory. In this particular case, because the indexing process does not require speed or long distance accuracy, Implanet makes use of IBM's RFID technologies.

The Danger of Quizzes

With each question in the ACLU's Privacy Quiz, you're not only told what information a quiz author can see - you're shown it. For example, after answering the first question, you learn that almost everything on your profile, even if you use privacy settings to limit access, is available to the quiz. Then, a graphic is shown which reveals selected information retrieved from your profile including hometown, groups you belong to, events attended, favorite books, and more.

The second question is even more disturbing. It informs you that everything on your profile is made available to the developers when your friends take a quiz. To drive this point home, the ACLU's Quiz loads up information pulled from your friends' profiles and displays that data below the answer for your perusal. Here, information on your friends is shown including hometowns, favorite books, political views, networks, birthdays, number of wall posts, and even personal photos. Thanks to the quiz, all that info which you can see on your friends' profiles is now available to the quiz author, too.

Lest you think your info is safe because somewhere, somehow Facebook is looking out for you, the third question shatters any illusions you may have about that, too. According to the answer to this quiz question, not only do Facebook's default privacy settings do nothing to prevent application developers from scouring your information, Facebook also doesn't screen developers for trustworthiness, nor do they require the developer to comply with a privacy policy (something we've mentioned before). It's also noted that Facebook does not use any technical measures to limit how developers can collect and use personal information. Says Chris Conley, a technology fellow with the ACLU, it's difficult to know how developers use this data, which could, in theory, be collected and sold for marketing and advertising campaigns.

Finally, the last question prompts you to take action. When the quiz asks you what you should do, the correct answer is: "demand the right to control my information without sacrificing the right to use new technology." To get the word out there, the ACLU suggests you update your privacy settings, share their quiz on Facebook, and sign their online petition.

Is This True?

The nature of the quiz makes it sound a bit like fear-mongering, especially with statements like this: "Once details about your personal life are collected by a quiz developer, who knows where they could end up or how they could be used. Shared? Sold? Turned over to the government?" However, outside of these overly dramatic tactics, the claims made by the ACLU are true. According to CNET, Facebook doesn't even deny that quiz developers have access to this sort of information. The company does point out that users can limit how much information applications (including friends' applications) can see by tweaking their privacy settings.

Note: To do this yourself, go to Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Applications. From there, you can uncheck the boxes next to the items which you don't want apps to have access to.

Still, the ACLU suggests that access to personal information such as this be opt-in rather than opt-out, as it is now. Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt says the company "generally agrees" with the ACLU's recommendations and notes that the social network recently disabled hundreds of applications that were inconsistent with Facebook Platform policies. He also mentions the company has been working with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, to improve user data controls on Platform. 

This is just one of the concerns that will be addressed later today when Stoddart announces the agreement that has been reached between her country and the social network in terms of privacy protocols. Stoddart ruled last month that Facebook had 30 days to come up with a plan to comply with Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act or face court action.

From a research point of view, the point of NYC Waterfalls was to map the distribution of visitors to the exhibit, and reveal where they took photos and communicated with their mobile phones. So the scope of this project was more than the previous research in cities such as Florence and Rome, where only the presence and movements of tourists was mapped. It's important to note too that only aggregate cellphone data was used - so no individually identifiable data was recorded.

This time the lab analyzed two types of digital footprints generated by people in proximity to the New York City Waterfalls: cellular network activity via AT&T and photo activity via Flickr publicly available photos.

There's a surprising amount of data about people that the lab can gather via Flickr. In 60% of the photos uploaded to Flickr that the lab studied, users had disclosed their nationality. This enabled the lab to infer whether they were citizens of New York or visitors, which is a valuable statistic to assess the economic impact of the waterfalls. Also the lab studied geographical coordinates, date and time, and other data Flickr revealed - e.g. description of the photo provided by the photographer. The Flickr API was used too.

From all of this, the lab was able to determine popular points of interest, and the chronologically ordered set of photos showed the movements of different individuals (again, note it was anonymized data).

What Can Be Gained From This Data?

The lab's findings were many. While the results may not be surprising (the waterfalls attracted more visitors!), what's important is that cellphone data provided quantifiable data about how much of an increase in activity the waterfalls generated. For example, the number of phone calls showed an increase of the "attractiveness" of waterfall vantage points by 39.1% in comparison to other points of interests in the vicinity - such as the WTC site, City Hall and Wall Street. This was based on historical cellphone data of the area, as well as the waterfall time period.

Not only did the waterfall vantage points gain in popularity, but other points of interest on the waterfront in the vicinity also improved - e.g. Main Street Park, Brooklyn Bridge and South Street Market.

Overall the analysis of digital footprints showed the impact of the waterfalls, and how they drove people to new parts of the city over time. MIT says that this type of information can feed tourism studies and help a city to understand the behavior of people (tourists) who can have a large impact on the local economy. This type of data would also be useful for urban planning, of future events and attractions.

MIT says that the objective of these visualizations was to determine how a city performs during a special event or a sudden emergency.

One of the findings of this data is that the Inauguration was a multi-day event for many - there were marked increases in mobile phone activity on the Sunday preceding the Tuesday inauguration and mobile phone activity only returned to normal levels on the Thursday following the event.

The following version of The City features an animated map of the United States:

The World visualization shows phone data from international visitors who were present at President Obama's inaugeration. There were people from 138 countries, over half of all the countries in the world. The top countries represented were Canada, Great Britain, France, and Puerto Rico. Those countries all had a fivefold increase in call activity compared with a normal day. In the U.S., the top calling states were also the country's most populous: California, Florida, New York, and Texas.

How Can This Data Be Used?

These are all pretty 'info porn' graphics but, as we've questioned before with MIT SENSEable City Lab, what actual use are these visualizations?

Up till now, MIT claims, it has been "difficult to monitor urban dynamics in real time." Traditional methods have been head counts, surveys, aerial inspection, and satellite image analysis, but they are "costly and slow to produce quantitative results." The key to the approach demonstrated above is "to process existing information in real time from the telecommunications infrastructure."

Real-time: that's a term we're hearing an awful lot of this year. In the case of MIT SENSEable City Lab, real-time data is largely obtained via mobile phone networks - which MIT regards as "a nervous system for the city" and which can therefore provide useful information and services to people.

MIT says that the real-time feedback loop from mobile phone data "has the potential to influence many urban functions and can help local authorities, service providers, businesses, and citizens themselves to improve the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of the places they inhabit."

Evernote becomes a single destination for every note you have, including video, pics, to-dos, audio message, web clips, and web bookmarks. All notes can be tagged and synchronized between your Mac or PC, the Evernote Web app, and your BlackBerry. You can access your existing notes by searching for keywords, filter by tags, or simply browse for them.

In The Field

Many of us have been looking for a mobile note taking application that would be useful "in the field", since that's where we take most of our notes. Often we can't type fast enough on our mobile devices to keep up, so we jot down notes on *gasp* paper. With Evernote for Blackberry you can simply take a snapshot with your device, add a subject, comments and some tags and save it for later. When you get home you can sync everything up and have it available on your desktop or on the Web.

Prior to using Evernote for Blackberry, some people used to snap pictures of people's name tags at various events for future reference. Now you can put those in a folder in Evernote and tag, comment and archive them.

But Does it Work?

Taking text notes in Evernote for BlackBerry is straightforward and easy as are snapshot and audio notes. Trying to recognize words in some written notes can be a little sketchy, but Evernote does a pretty decent job of finding key words through a simple search. Overall the interface is a little clunky, and there seems to be no (obvious) way to add content to existing notes using the BlackBerry. Those are the only major complaints we have with it, although not being able to add to existing notes on the fly is a real bummer.

What makes this app especially useful is the ability to sync everything at once. That alone makes it an app we will continue to use. When you add BlackBerry's tagging capabilities with GPS, it becomes very powerful note taking tool indeed. Imagine being able to geotag a note and how that could be useful later. Add some snapshots, maybe a short video or audio clip and you have the makings of a very serviceable blog post or report.

Evernote for BlackBerry is certainly worth a try, check it out for yourself. It is available on the Evernote site or from BlackBerry App World. Of course there are several note taking apps for the BlackBerry, but so far this is the best one we have found, especially among the other free apps.

One denomination, the United Methodist Church, has opted for a boldly redesigned web presence to ask users, "What if church wasn't just a building, but thousands of doors? Each of them opening up to a different concept or experience of church - and a journey that could change our world. Would you come?"

Apart from being remarkably aesthetically pleasing and entirely modern, the site also blows the lid off of traditional expectations of static church websites. Even non-Methodists or non-Christians would get a kick out of the rich interactivity: The TALK page that allows users to respond to simple questions, the FIND page that directs users to the closest churches with programs most relevant to users' interests, the LISTEN page with audio news features and an iLike music player.

We caught up with one of the minds behind the site, Miiacom's Bayard Saunders, in Nashville, Tennessee. "The big idea," he said, "was to serve the content of the home page like a giant tag cloud based on feeds from news sources, blogs (including Twitter), keyword searches, site paths and referring pages. So by design, the site is constantly refreshed and always highlighting the most relevant content based on the most current topics relevant to seekers."

Saunders also revealed that an ad buy-fueled partnership with Google has allowed for additional relevant innovations, including a Methodist layer on Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Friend Connect, and content fed by individual UMC churches from Google Apps.

"It is ground-breaking, certainly for an official religious denomination's website," he said. "And it's been quite an interesting experience, designing a web presence for 'the God account.'"

Adobe, of course, isn't alone in trying to make a push for the living room. Microsoft is also trying to aim for the same market with its Silverlight platform. Although Silverlight has been used to power some high-profile events lately, including NBC's Olympics site, it is still only a minor player in the overall market.

Last August, Intel and Yahoo also announced an initiative to bring Yahoo widgets to TVs. Even though other vendors like Verizon already offer some widgets on their set-top boxes, these solutions are often too clunky to be really useful.

Similar to Silverlight, the new Adobe platform will not just focus on widgets, however. Adobe also plans to give content creators the ability to stream HD video directly to these devices.

Interestingly, Netflix, which currently uses Silverlight to power its browser-based players, is also among Adobe's launch partners.

Can Flash Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

Interactive TV has long held a lot of promise, but the idea never really caught on with consumers. Flash, however, may be able to change this. Adobe can rely on a dedicated group of third-party developers who will only have to make minor changes to their programs to make them run on these Flash-enabled devices.

Hopefully, Adobe will create an App Store-like experience that will allow developers to promote their apps and allow consumers the ability to pick and choose widgets for their TVs.

Fighting Back on YouTube and Twitter

In response to this uproar, Domino's decided to release its own video on YouTube, which features Domino's president Patrick Doyle. Of course, Doyle's video, which refers to the story as a 'hoax,' will not be able to draw half a million viewers, but Domino's Pizza is doing the right thing by going to YouTube, where, after all, the whole affair began.

The video, however, is not as effective as it could have been, as Doyle is clearly reading from a script and barely looks into the camera.

Domino's is also actively using the company's official Twitter account to reach out to customers who are talking about the company.

Solution: Ban Video Cameras in Stores?

Bruce Horovitz, in USA Today, describes some of the lessons that other companies can learn from from this controversy. Among other things, he recommends that companies actively monitor Twitter and other social media channels, so that companies can respond quickly when problems appear. Comcast is a good example of a company that is using Twitter to rebuild its image.

According to Horovitz, Domino's is now also considering banning video cameras from its stores, which will probably do nothing to alleviate consumers' concerns.

In the end, the only thing a company can do is to quickly react to these events. Doyle's video, however, looks too scripted, and instead of banning cameras, Domino's should welcome cameras in its stores, so that customers can see that this was an isolated incident that is not representative of behavior of the thousands of other employees Domino's and its franchisees have.

Update: we just got some interesting data from communications research company MediaCurves, which did a quick survey of consumer reactions before and after watching Domino's apology.

Here are the results:

"Which of the following actions are you likely to perform in the next three months?"

	Before Viewing Prank Video		After Viewing Prank Video		After Viewing Apology Video
	Total (n=243)		Total (n=243)		Total (n=243)
Go to a Domino's	29%		10%		20%
Order Domino's for delivery	46%		15%		24%
Visit Dominos' web site	25%		14%		24%
Search for information on Domino's	14%		10%		20%
Watch an advertisement/ commercial on Domino's	61%		27%		42%

"Do you think the apology response video released by Domino's USA President, Patrick Doyle, was effective in rectifying and restoring Domino's image after this incident?"

	Total (n=243)
Yes	31%
Somewhat	60%
No	9%

It's not only in scientific realms. We're seeing this on the Consumer Web too, as Marshall Kirkpatrick explained this morning in an article about social media monitoring tools. He wrote that data mining tools are being democratized and used more nowadays, similar to how online publishing tools were democratized in Web 2.0. The cloud computing servers that the University of Washington will utilize are relatively cheap and easy to use Web platforms that will enable data mining on a scale not seen before. These projects will access a cloud datacenter established for educational use in 2007, through a partnership between Google, IBM and six academic institutions (including the University of Washington).

Oceans and Galaxies of Data

Bill Howe, a researcher at the UW's eScience Institute, explained the impact of cloud computing on his ocean climate simulation project. Instead of running a simulation to test a single hypothesis, he said, climate scientists are now running long-term simulations and then sifting through tens of thousands of gigabytes of resulting data to discover trends.

Andrew Connolly, a UW associate professor of astronomy, explained that for his project analyzing astronomical images, cloud computing makes it easier to store and process information in the cloud and make the information available over the Web. He said that whereas scientists once competed for time on telescopes, recorded data and then studied the individual images in detail, now "telescopes continuously record high-resolution images that are available to all, providing millions of times more information." So the shift is that the data gathering has been automated and is available on a much larger scale than before for scientists to analyze it.

Data Rich - And Useful

This current era of the Web, which some are calling 'Web 3.0' (but we frankly don't know what it's called yet) is increasingly data rich. The same thing could have been said about the Web 2.0 era, when oceans of 'User Generated Content' were created. However the world of sensors is rapidly pouring even more data onto the Web. Ed Lazowska, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, noted that "the rapid evolution of sensors is transforming all sciences from data-poor to data-rich." He said that "the challenge is to use modern cloud computing resources, such as Amazon Web Services, and modern computer science advances, such as data mining and machine learning, to explore these massive volumes of data." He claimed that this new computational science will be pervasive and will have enormous impact.

We're always pleased when the Web has a meaningful impact on the 'real world' - and particularly on science projects such as this, where the findings could be profound.

There is still a clear North/South divide when it comes to Internet penetration levels in Europe. While all the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are highly connected, with penetration rates over 80%, countries in Southern Europe like Greece, Turkey, or Portugal hover around 40%.

Microsoft, however, expects that this will slowly change, as Internet usage continues to grow in Southern Europe, and as the Northern countries reach their saturation levels.

Broadband connections in Europe represent about 83% of all Internet connections, which is far ahead of the U.S., where broadband only accounts for about 70% of all connections.

Online Video

Microsoft assumes that TV, radio, and newspaper consumption, which has been flat in Europe for the last couple of years, will start a slow decline. Since 2004, Europeans are already spending less time on watching DVDs (-16%) and reading magazines (-6%).

By 2010, Microsoft predicts that Europeans will spend an average of 14.2 per week on the Internet, while they will only sit in front of their TVs for 11.5 hours per week.

Currently, about 9% of Europeans watch live TV on their PCs and 4% record TV programs to a hard drive, either through a dedicated media PC or with a DVR. Microsoft, however, doesn't believe that the TV will be left behind. Instead, the company predicts that the traditional TV will morph into an Internet-enabled device that will offer consumers the ability to watch on-demand videos and connect them to their social networks and other online activities.

While earlier variations of the Conficker worm prevented infected machines from accessing the servers of most antivirus companies, this new variant also blocks access to sites that offer tools for removing the worm like BitDefenders bdtools.net.

Oddly, the Conficker worm now also includes an instruction that tells the worm to remove itself on May 3 (the hackers clearly like deadlines), though after that, it will keep a port open on these machines that will allow the hackers to get back into these computers at any time.

The Big Picture: Spyware, Spambots, Pop-Ups

According to both Trend Micro and Symantec, Conficker, after downloading its update, also downloads a variant of the well-known Waledac malware. Waledac is one of the world's most active spambots.

Security researchers are still trying to understand the connection between Waledac and Conficker's new E variant (only a small number of antivirus products can currently detect this version of Waledac, by the way). Some, however, speculate that this connection could mean that Conficker was created by the same group of hackers that created Waledac and its predecessor, the infamous Storm botnet.

Business Model?

According to Kaspersky Labs' Alex Gostev, Waledac will download a rogue antivirus application onto infected machines, as well as an email-worm that can steal data and send spam. The fake antivirus software will ask users to pay $49.95 for "Spyware Protect 2009," which, of course, is anything but an antispyware product.

Protect Yourself (and others)

Of course, if your Windows machine is up to date and if you have kept your antivirus software up to date then chances are very good that you are well protected against Conficker.

If you want to learn more about Conficker and how to protect yourself, have a look at this list of resources we put together last month. If you want to see if you are infected, head over to this site from the University of Bonn.

The integration of sensors with social networks will lead to real-time data and more useful web apps.

In recent posts we reviewed an MIT experiment called WikiCity, that gathered real-time location data from mobile phones in Rome and graphically mapped trends from it. We then looked at a more commercial product doing similar real-time location data analysis, called Citysense. That product aims to let users find the most popular night spots in San Francisco and the most efficient ways to get to them. The next stage of projects/products such as Wikicity and Citysense will be to enable users to social network, using data from sensors as one input.

Emerging Trend: Integrating Social Networks and Sensor Networks

Sensors have become much more prevelant in mobile devices over the past few years. This means that when we talk about sensors, we're not necessarily talking about the microchip embedded in your fridge door. Increasingly, sensors are attached to a human via their mobile phone. Both the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95 contain GPS and accelerometer sensors. Sensor data is transmitted via GPS if available or via Wi-Fi positioning techniques.

In a recent W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, held in Barcelona in January, the trend of sensors mixing with social networks was discussed. An accompanying paper entitled Integrating Social Networks and Sensor Networks provides some useful information. Again, these are mostly research projects right now so not much has filtered into the commercial Web yet.

One application for sensors in social networks is to help people to meet others, using alerts based on their location at a particular time. These alerts could be triggered by either explicit opt-in by the user, or by implicit means. An example of the latter is a user receiving an alert on their mobile phone when someone that they exchange messages with on a blog is in the same room. There would need to be the appropriate permissions and privacy controls in place, of course - and this is one of the challenges that these applications are facing.

Sensors Aren't Just About The Socializing

Social networks are often still thought of as fun, consumer applications such as Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. However, the W3C paper notes that social networking + sensors can also be used in 'serious' markets such as healthcare. For example, the paper suggests that collaborative rehabilitation is possible using sensor-enabled portable devices:

"More and more portable devices are supporting sensor-based interactions, from peripherals (Nike+iPod) to integrated sensors (the original iPhone made good use of its accelerometer, while the latest iPhone 3G has added various proximity and light sensors). We can make use of the Social Web and Sensor Networks to create collaborative applications for portable devices to encourage exercise, à la the Wii. As an example of how this could be done, we could begin by finding contacts on the social network with similar interests or by GPS location (e.g. using FireEagle). This social network of friends can then be used to power collaborative applications (CAPTCHAs, the ESP game, quizzes) where progress can be made by the group when a certain level of exercise has been achieved. Then, as a final step, the resulting sensor data is sent to physicians for analysis."

The conclusion of the W3C paper is that "the integration of sensor networks with social networks leads to applications that can sense the context of a user in much better ways and thus provides more personalized and detailed solutions." The paper also outlines how the Semantic Web can be used to manage the interoperability between sensor networks and social networks.

Real-Time Data is Actually Useful Now

These kinds of sensor-enabled social networking applications are still far from being widespread. Citysense, after all, is limited to just one U.S. city right now (although a New York version is coming soon). But we can see how this could become the future of social networking, in a couple of ways. Firstly, for the younger generation, mobile phones will be the primary way they access and make use of their social networks. Just as kids today use Facebook and AIM and the like to organize their social activities, imagine being able to find out in an instant where all the "young and edgy" kids are hanging out in your local town on a particular Saturday afternoon by using a mobile app like Citysense or Brightkite (our pick last December for Most Promising App for 2009). Secondly, these apps hold equal promise for most other demographics, in areas such as healthcare and enterprise.

In the Web 2.0 era, real-time data has mostly been used to power fancy visualizations. It hasn't been used extensively yet to change peoples behavior or their environment. Indeed, a current criticism of Wikicity is that it doesn't do much more than provide nice looking charts; and hence, it's been labeled "info porn" by some. But with the next era of web apps, we will move beyond just data being 'visualized' and have it start to affect peoples decisions and actions. Hopefully, this will be in a positive way by improving peoples ability to connect with like-minded folks. There are still significant technical, social, and privacy challenges to overcome though, before apps like Citysense and Brightkite go mainstream.

Just how hot is it though? For context, we looked up some other activities and offer below a list of things that are less popular these days than being a registered user at Facebook. Bowling, for example, appears to be headed the way of MySpace - there are now twice as many Facebook users as there are people who play ten pin bowling around the world.

• Twice as big as the largest number of people who have ever watched a Superbowl game


• Twice as big as YouTube


• Twice as big as Skype


• Bigger than the number of people who own gaming consoles in their homes (190m)


• Bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world. (Just passed Brazil, next in line is Indonesia and then the US.)


• Twice as big as eBay.


• Four times as big as the number of people in the US who run on treadmills.


• It's twice as big as the number of malnourished people in India. Another way to look at that is to imagine that half of the people on Facebook were malnourished and living in one place.

These numbers can't be directly compared with any real meaning, but we think it's interesting for context. It's still cooler to live in France than it is to have a Facebook account, even if it is only 30% as popular.

Bowling photo by Flickr user Pål Berge.