is in Palo Alto, CA, where Nokia opened a new Research Center near Stanford University in 2006. It was an especially exciting place for me to visit after I arrived in California as a fellow in Stanford’s Innovation Journalism program.
The center’s director, John Chen, says one of their primary research programs is focused on very-large-scale systems for data acquisition, storage, and analysis. Their C3 Team (Context, Content, and Community) works with what Nokia calls Nokoscope, a software program users load onto their mobile phones. With Nokoscope, the mobile phone is connected to the Internet at all times, transmitting information to a huge Nokia cloud database about the user’s location, phone calls, text messages, which web pages were viewed, what music was played, and other data.
Nokia calls it “large-scale indexing of the physical world” and “deep understanding of human behavior.” Chen assured me the phone user is in charge of his or her own data and thus controls his or her own privacy.
So how will Nokia scientists use this very sensitive personal data? They want to make future wireless devices more intelligent. For example, they want your mobile phone to realize that it has entered a church or movie theater and switch itself to silent mode. They want it to know