As people talk, text and browse, telecommunication networks are capturing urban flows in real time and crystallizing them as Google's traffic congestion maps.

Cities are 2% of the earth's crust, but they are 50% of the world's population.

Today, for the first time - and the Obama campaign showed us this - we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one.

Makr Shakr aims to share this new potential - design-make-enjoy - with everyone in just a few minutes: the time taken to prepare a new cocktail.

We have this condition where digital technology is becoming increasingly smaller and distributed in the environment. In a certain sense, this is the first time ever we can describe a city in real time.

When you have all these traces of trash moving around, you can ask yourself how can we make the system more efficient. Then we can make better decisions. And perhaps we will not throw away the plastic bottles that go every day to the dump.

The deployment of geolocating tags attached to ordinary garbage could paint a surprising picture of the waste management system, as trash is shipped throughout the country in a maze-like disposal process - as we saw in Seattle with our own Trash Track project.

Phone networks can capture life on our planet.

The plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change.

One of the ideas that was developed at MIT in a workshop was, imagine this pipe, and you've got valves, solenoid valves, taps, opening and closing. You create like a water curtain with pixels made of water. If those pixels fall, you can write on it: you can show patterns, images, text.