As mobile phones spread rapidly around the world, activists and truth lovers are turning to them as tools for organising and communicating. Scientists and do-gooders sharing innovations and ideas on Wednesday at a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference, repeatedly pointed to mobile phones as weapons in battles for better lives.
TED is known for eclectic, brain-stimulating presentations delivered in rapid-fire succession by brilliant, accomplished people. "Technology has gone from something that is intimidating to something that is empowering and liberating," said Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, who is credited with ushering India into the information technology age.
"The mobile telephone has become an instrument of empowerment." Mobile phones are proliferating at "astounding rates" with an estimated 3.5 billion of them world-wide by the end of 2008, according MobileActive.org, an online organisation devoted to using mobile technology for social change.
Mobileactive.org has used mobile phones for goals ranging from connecting people during disasters to using computerised smart phones as microscopes for medical research.
Organisations have used mobile phones to swing elections through get-out-the-vote activities; monitor voting; send health alerts to dispersed populations; document political abuses, and lobby for environmental laws. Bright Simons co-founded mPedigree, which offers ways to thwart medicine fraud in Africa or India by enabling people to use mobile telephones to check that prescription drugs are authentic. Mobile phone innovations and testimonials came on an opening morning at the TED conference.
Brazilian wildlife geneticist Juliana Machado Ferreira told of using forensics to fight poachers, such as the songbird thieves that routinely plunder that nation's forests.
"It is like CSI, but for nature," Ferreira said, referring to a popular US detective television series based in the science of solving crimes. "Who says biologists aren't hard-core?"