Changes in movement as a predictor of health issues:  In the article - Smartphone Tracker Gives Doctors Remote Viewing Powers we have another example of how patterns regarding location changes, combined with other personal data, can help medical staff determine if a patient is either off their medication, or has taken a turn for the worse.

This software was developed by Ginger.io, the same group that helped provide the epidemiology data analysis in the "Big Data from Cheap Phones" article previously posted.

This does require that patients give up some personal privacy, but the data is still covered by HIPAA rules - while providing better access to medical staff which can be a boon for patients with a variety of medical issues, such as diabetes, heart issues, chronic back pain, Crones, etc.

Changes in daily patterns of travel and communication can also indicate changes in stressors or possible lethargy; and using predictive analysis, the application can help alert medical staff to reach out to individuals that may be at risk.

It's unclear how the system will deal with lost or stolen phones, or out-of-coverage and/or battery and charging issues.  Nevertheless, it's a good first step forward in proactive medical analysis.

Google Earth Sky - a new concept: We spend a lot of time pointing our cameras at ourselves, and at our surroundings, but we rarely seem to look 'up'.  I'd propose a new program where we setup cameras so that anyone from anywhere can see what the sky looks like in near real-time from any location on the planet.  This information could be fed into weather systems for analysis, but it could also be used to observe any minor atmospheric or other 'sky' related occurances that might be missed by the casual observer - much like the meteorite impacts on the moon that have recently been documented by NASA near Mare Imbrium: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8dXIxZzBMk I call this 'Google Earth Sky' because absorbing, analyzing and making the data available to the general public for this kind of 'big data' would be difficult for all but the largest of organizations; such as Google, Bing/Microsoft, or say the US government.  However, this kind of crowd-sourced image data could be put together by individuals and businesses with relative ease.  Eventually, the whole earth sky could be a lens that we could all look through from anywhere, at any time.

Mapping the Tornado's path: Here is a link to a crisis map provided by Google Maps with information regarding the path of the tornado in Oklahoma, as well as information about shelters in the area, and overlays at wider zooms showing a weather storm snapshot: http://google.org/crisismap/2013-oklahoma-tornado

Sci-Fi Interlude: I went to go to see 'Star Trek: Into Darkness' today. It was relatively good. In general I like the new series - while being fresh and new, it continues to pay homage to the original series and movie spin-offs. One of my favorite quotes was from when Admiral Pike was giving Spock and Kirk a lecture (paraphrasing from memory) - Pike: "Are you giving me attitude Spock?" Spock: "I am attempting to convey multiple attitudes as the same time, to which are you referring?".  Using that sharp intellect  to convey the logical and forthright response, and yet delivered to be stingingly irritating at the same time was a nice bit of writing.

I had the pleasure of working on the iTRAK® WebApp over the past several months: http://www.gpsworld.com/itrak-webapp-enables-fleet-management-on-smartphones-tablets/

  I had worked in PHP before, but this was a new effort combining PHP with HTML5 and AJAX.  Development for individual devices such as the iPhone, iPAD, and Android and trying to keep the interface the same across all platforms has been a challenge.  Using the web-app approach has simplified our development efforts significantly, while allowing us to very quickly deploy across multiple smartphone platforms at virtually the same time.  The one exception was Android, which had some issues with the menu interface for the release of 'Ice cream Sandwich', but these were resolved by upgrading to 'Jellybean'.  This has given our clients in the wireless GPS fleet tracking market instant access to their accounts using their mobile phones - and since we included all 9 languages, we were able to deploy it to all of our customers regardless of region.  This was the kind of 'write once, run anywhere' promise of Java, that never really came to fruition.

The USA continues to upgrade their GPS constellation with newer satellites - the 2F-4 is launched to replace the 2A-25 which will become a backup: http://www.space.com/21192-gps-satellite-launch-atlas-5.html

An excellent article by the MIT Technology Review on the use of Big Data and gross location information from phones for epidemiological studies regarding malaria infection (and eradication): http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513721/big-data-from-cheap-phones/