What if you could help conquer cancer or AIDS and find cleaner energy solutions with the click of a mouse? Or help clean up your local waterway with the snap of a picture on your smartphone?
People for a Smarter Planet offers a dynamic network of activities and conversations that you can participate in to help build a sustainable and smarter world. Activities include the World Community Grid, which pools your computer's idle time with a growing grid of 1.6 million other computers that compute-power-starved researchers can then use to take on the world's most pressing challenges. And there's Creek Watch, an iPhone app that lets you take pictures and record quick data points on waterways to help water boards monitor your river and creek systems.
Our goal with the People for a Smarter Planet network on Facebook is to move from just telling people about Smarter Planet to actually letting them experience and take part in what it means to build a smarter planet. Creekwatch and World Community Grid are just the start. Through 2011 we plan to make available other services and experiences that allow you to participate and, in so doing, get a deeper sense of the possibilities of an interconnected, intelligent, and instrumented world.
We aim to foster conversations in the community that cover the spectrum of Smarter Planet topics -- from innovative data visualization and analysis to entrepreneurship to building smarter cities and more. Readers of this blog know we've been tracking these topics now for two years here (and will continue to do so); now we're expanding our social ecosystem to include the Facebook P4SP community, too. And with P4SP on Facebook, you can easily share information, videos, quotes, and ideas with members of your network, including family, friends, colleagues, and clients anywhere in the world.
So, be sure to join People for a Smarter Planet today. Stay connected, informed, and engaged to help build a smarter planet.
Sorry, but re-inventing the wheel doesn't always make for a better wheel. Not looking for ET, you say? How about Rosetta@Home, that looks for new medicines by folding proteins in new and imaginitive ways on your computer? That's just one of the many programs other than SETI@Home available on the BOINC application, which has been around for more years than some people have had computers. It's nice that IBM was able to harness some of its massive advertising budget to create a social program that might someday produce something of merit, but is shouting "Me, too!" at the top of your lungs really all that grand? I'll take a look at their offerings, and if they are worthy of my discarded cycles, I'll consider donating them. But an iPhone app? Seriously? Apple's minions of doom are universally self-centered to the point of actually being comical, so the idea that they would be down by the Old Mill Stream taking photos and sending their commando spy shots to some shadowy quasi-governmental agency is a bit of a stretch. Try an Android app, and I might look into it. I'll wish IBM the best of luck in this endeavor; despite my snarky wit, I truly do wish them success in this effort. I'll just believe it when I see it.
Excellent yes, but I think IBM should be a little more modest about this, since UC Berkeley, Stanford, etc. has been using my computer's spare and wasted cycles since before 2000, and not just for ET, although I believe that was indeed the first application.
Hi Adam, this is a great initiative, thanks for bringing it to our attention.
There is so much spare computing power that goes wasted every second. So if you are not interested in looking for aliens@home, why not use it for a good cause?!
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