Joi Ito of Creative Commons Video - Smartphones

http://www.ideasproject.com/ Big Idea - Smartphones Make Computing Mobile

Europe and Japan have been way ahead of America on mobile devices, on use cases, applications, on adoption, and the Japanese - the notion of cyberspace is a very American idea, of having a screen and being online or offline. And in most of the world, you're always online because you've got a mobile phone. The problem is Japanese don't know how to write software very well. Americans are very good at writing software, so the smartphone first of all brings the open standards, rigorous Agile Software Development world from Silicon Valley to the mobile platform.

ADDITIONAL IDEAS

Network Connectivity Creates Huge Values for the Developing World

For people who live in the Middle East and Africa and Southeast Asia, whether they're human rights workers or young girls in villages or - there are all kinds of places where we don't have Internet yet, where people could benefit tremendously from being connected. And I think that that combination of open platforms, great software, lower costs, and entering markets that are currently void of network connectivity, I think that combination is explosively disruptive. And I think people underestimate how much value is going to come out of that and hit the rest of the world because you've got millions of smart people who are going to be using this stuff to come up with new applications, and also develop new software. I mean I've seen in Beirut these kids creating software that you would never create in the United States because you don't have the need for it, but it's that software that then is much more applicable to the developing worlds.

A Cell Phone Incentive to Prevent Deforestation

In India there was a lot of deforestation happening because the monsoon seasons were changing, so they were going into woods and cutting down trees and boiling the roots and with the wood in order to eat them. And it was causing deforestation. So what they did was they created this solar heater that would boil the roots, and that would charge the phones, and they gave them free minutes, but the free minutes only happened if this thing was functional and being used, and so if it broke, everybody lost their free minutes. And so there was a policing mechanism of people to maintain this solar heater to prevent deforestation. And the way that they enforced it was by giving or not giving minutes on the mobile phones. And it's kind of a funny hack but it's an interesting application. And again, these are needs that have a huge impact globally at a variety of levels, but you would only come up with once you were deploying in these regions.