Mobile Social Communities Connecting for the Greater Good; Mogility Creates Communities Of Citizen Sensors; Smart Mobs On Steroids? » mobilegroove

In-Brief: In-depth analysis of Mogility and its solution to link users in a new kind of mobile community.

Here’s a cool concept and company that caught my attention (and imagination) over the weekend. Mogility is gaining traction with a patent-pending “agile mobile application framework” that allows users to create orchestrated mobile social networks for the common good.

The tie that binds is an applet called a Gizmo that interacts with mobile phone functions such as cameras, GPS, SMS messages and the overall mobile network to create a kind of workflow linking all the users and devices.Gizmos are at the core of Mogility’s Local Eyes solution. In a nutshell, Local Eyes does what it says: it turns every user (and every user’s device) into a sensor in a larger network of “citizen sensors.” Citizen sensors – much like citizen journalists – report what they witness.

However, the connectedness Gizmos enable between users and devices in a larger mobile social network, for a single-minded purpose, takes this concept to a new level. Recent improvements in the approach, allowing Mogility to work in an SMS text environment, mean the solution can work across any handset and any carrier. According to the company website, users with a multimedia-capable device and a matching data plan will receive a Gizmo that takes advantage of that functionality.

To create a Gizmo and mobilize a social network, the coordinator designs a scenario online and decides if photos, text, location or all of the above should come in from each member of the network as an “attachment” to their report out in the field. After the scenario is defined and the role of the citizen sensors is clear, the coordinator uploads a list of phone numbers of the members who have opted to be a part of the social network.Members are then alerted by SMS and pull Gizmos directly to their phone by clicking the link in the text message. As situations occur that they should monitor, members submit what they have captured with their phones back to the control site for that Gizmo, where their profile and findings are made available to the coordinator. If conditions change, then the Gizmo can be updated making sure the entire mobile community is informed. This contextual awareness results from the two-way communication Mogility enables, allowing coordinators to communicate one-to-one with a community member or connect with the whole community.

It’s easy to imagine some exciting use cases for Local Eyes that leverage a community committed to the common good – and it’s refreshing to see service that does more than organize members to exchange user-gen content. Count on me to follow this one and circle back with updates. In the meantime, check out this trilogy of detailed white papers and let me know what you think…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 10:04 am and is filed under Location-Based Services, Mobile Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.