How our life will be run by mobiles
It is called the Spark Room and it takes pride of place in the shiny new offices of Logica, the technology firm in King’s Cross, north London. On computer screens, what looks to the untrained eye like a series of dots and squiggles, graphs and web pages are downloading at great speed. Each one represents people: you and me. They move, like us. They talk, like us. They are us.
The images are the building blocks of the biggest revolution in IT since the advent of the internet — and one that will eventually have a direct impact on the lives of almost everyone.
“We’re not talking about something that we’ve always known would be good but could not work out how to make happen,” explained Elaine Doherty, Logica’s head of media innovation. “What we’re doing is something that was unimaginable even five years ago.”
Doherty is talking about “collective intelligence”, or “the network”. It is the latest buzzword to leak out of California’s Silicon Valley.
For a big idea it is remarkably simple. It means a world in which people are permanently connected to anything and everything: to our friends and families, to our employer, to our home, doctor, bank, even to our past, present and future. The squiggles and dots on Doherty’s screens represent those links, produced by a complex algorithm that runs using Logica’s new Interaction software.
How does it work? It is all down to the mobile phone. Thanks to hardware advances and super-fast 3G network connections, phones have become handheld mini-PCs capable of running any program. As we use them, our phones record the details of our lives. Global positioning technology in our handsets reveal where we are, when we get home and where we like to go at weekends. Thanks to our online search history, phones know what food, music, sports, authors, and holiday destinations we like.
