Think that blogs and wikis are passé? Already bored with Twitter?
Not to worry… the development 2.0 toolkit is continuously expanding.
At first, there were virtual worlds for better policy making (for more examples make sure you check out the new blog http://www.betterverse.org).
Now it’s the time of augmented reality. Appfrica has the full story.
Imagine visiting a village and having a handheld a device that allows you to “tag” the real world around you and pull all information that is relevant to your location: who has visited the project before you, their reports, videos they have taken of specific issues that need follow-up. Or a visual display indicating the flow of money into the village or household survey data. The possibilities are endless, and perhaps the greatest promise is that much of this information could be displayed and collected with minimal effort, real-time and which much richer context than traditional methods. Could this be the end of the dreaded project database?
If augmented reality is too much for you, you might at least be interested in “reality mining” (hat tip: Chris Kreutz). By tracking the movement of people through their mobile phone's location, researchers hope to solve problems as diverse as the spread of epidemics or traffic congestion.
Is this all hype? The challenge, it seems to me, is to find business models that make these innovations sustainable and easy to scale up.
Any good examples out there?
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