Ideas are rarely created through a "eureka" moment. It may seem like Doc Brown fell off his toilet and invented the flux capacitor, but really the idea for time travel and how to do it were converging in his brain for quite some time before the blow tothe head. Instead of an "aha!" moment, Johnson believes that ideas are born of a "slow hunch" that are made possible through periods of technological innovation and evolution. If you are creating a startup, where do you get your ideas from?

That sounds familiar - taking data and mapping it to suit your mission and illuminate theories or facts. Essentially, anybody can do that now with GIS software and an .xml data set. The Centers for Disease Control use mapping to determine outbreaks and recently Google released its Google Flu Trends that accumulates flu data throughout the season. Yet, it was not Snow's own genius that came up with the solution to the cholera outbreak (disputed at the time) but rather a set of groups in various sectors using their collective intelligence to solve a problem.

The Hive Mind & Collective Intelligence

"It is just this idea that if you diversify and have an electric range of interests and you are constantly getting interesting stories about things that you do not know that much about or are adjacent to your particular field of expertise you are much more likely to come up with innovative ideas," Johnson told ReadWriteWeb.

The same approach would work well for developers and innovators working on the next technology breakthrough. Startup founders should take step back from their project and ask what type of similar projects have been undertaken in a completely different field and see if those lessons can be applied to their project.

"The trick is to look at something different and borrow ideas. It is like saying 'this worked for that field, if we put it here what would it do in this new context?'" Johnson said.

In today's world, the ability to branch out of your field of expertise has been made much easier through social media. You can follow what is happening in your niche through a specifically created Twitter list, but it is also beneficial to create lists of people working in different sectors as well.

"The important thing is that this is not some kind of hive-mind wisdom of the crowds, collective intelligence network smarts," Johnson said. "The unit is still the individual or the small group. There are some examples of group intelligence. This is an example instead of taking individuals in small groups and making them smarter by connecting them to a wider range of influences."

In a short press statement released today, the network said that the Egyptian government had invoked emergency powers to instruct the mobile networks of Mobinil, Etisalat and Vodafone to send scripted messages to subscribers.

"These messages are not scripted by any of the mobile network operators and we do not have the ability to respond to the authorities on their content," says the company. Vodafone claims it has protested the Egyptian government's demands and regards these messages as "unacceptable."

"We have made clear that all messages should be transparent and clearly attributable to the originator," today's statement reads.

The company has come under fire for its role in the week-long Internet blackout.

But here's the actual total cost, courtesy of Ben Gracewood and Geekzone:

Note that kiwis can just buy the phone only, without the plan. But the price is a far cry from the $199 touted a month ago when the iPhone 3G was announced by Steve Jobs. To buy the phone sans plan will cost kiwis $979 for the 8GB and $1129 for the 16GB.

Unfortunately this goes to show once again that phone carriers are greedy opportunists. It also makes a mockery of Apple's claims at its conference last month that it would cost just $199.

On local television news tonight, TV3 presenter John Campbell grilled Vodafone marketing executive Mark Rushworth, noting that Vodafone was "charging like a wounded bull". The Vodafone spokesman had no response, other repeating than a rote description of their outrageous pricing plans. You can see a video of the interview here.

There is a petition on Facebook, started by Michael McGimpsey. Go sign it, even if you're not from NZ (very likely, given that less than 1% of our readers are from there). Carrier greed worldwide is probably the major reason why the Mobile Web is struggling to take off.