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How Your Phone Can Make You Smarter

Your cellphone may soon be able to help you skirt a big traffic snarl. At least, that’s what Nokia believes, based on research that it did earlier this year to uncover more ways to use wireless technology.

The project was part of a trend called "crowd sourcing," which aims to harness the brainpower and energy of crowds to develop useful services.

People are using their cellphones to review restaurants, share their favorite hometown hangouts, discover new jogging routes, even dodge speeding tickets. "The Internet is about the long tail," "Mobile is about pushing that even further out to the ultimate edge: an individual, at all times, with his device."

Spotting an opportunity to make their phones more indispensable to consumers, Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people) is investing in crowd sourcing. It sees the most promise in services that leverage global positioning system (GPS) technology, mapping and the mobile Web.

"We see phones as becoming less phones and more a bridge between the analog world we live in and the digital world of the Internet," says Nokia Chief Technical Officer Bob Ianucci.

One example is the company’s Sports Tracker application, which enables runners and cyclists to record and share their workouts on a map-based software system. The initial concept, called "Personal Best," aimed to allow individuals to track their sports performance for personal use. But athletes began using it to network with one another, creating more of a community feel. Since April 2007, Sports Tracker has been downloaded more than 1 million times.

Now Nokia is hoping smart applications can solve traffic snarls. In February, its research arm teamed with the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Innovative Transportation to test the ability of phones to track traffic conditions in real time. For the project, 160 Berkeley students drove a California highway with Nokia phones that transmitted data about traffic speeds. The goal: to show that phones could provide data as accurate as more expensive traffic sensors.

The software could help consumers in myriad ways, says Ianucci. Linked to the phone’s calendar, it could warn users to leave early for an appointment, because the route is congested. It could also map out alternate routes that would deliver the user to the appointment in time.

All of which is good for business. Nokia wants to sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones by the end of the year. Ianucci says the traffic experiment could spawn a Nokia application in the future.

Smart applications can even save you from a speeding ticket. That’s the aim of Trapster, an application that lets drivers report police car sightings and speed cameras via a toll-free number, e-mail or text message. Users can also get warnings based on their car location sent to their phones. Everything happens in real time, which is the value of Trapster, says creator Pete Tenereillo. The rapid feedback generates a social networking effect–when one person submits a report, several others soon follow.

In other words, it’s smart to be necessary–and necessary to be smart.

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