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Hubble Network can track your devices from orbit

Illustration: Hubble Network satellite in space
An artist’s conception shows one of Hubble Network’s satellites in orbit. (Hubble Network illustration)

A Seattle space startup called Hubble Network is unveiling a system that uses satellites and low-power Bluetooth signals to monitor devices and sensors around the globe.

The system, known as the Hubble BLE Finding Network, can open the way for applications ranging from locating lost pets to monitoring supply chains and watching out for wildfires, Hubble Network CEO and co-founder Alex Haro said.

“Agriculture, oil and gas, mining, defense … There are all these important verticals and industries where there is need for this very battery- and cost-efficient network that can have global accessibility,” Haro told me.

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What mobile phone data can reveal about you

Image: Rwandans with phones
The mobile phone penetration rate in Rwanda is more than 70 percent. (Credit: Joshua Blumenstock)

Researchers have analyzed data about mobile phone use in Rwanda to figure out how wealthy a phone’s user is – and they say they might be able to do the same kind of analysis for any other country.

The study, published today in the journal Science, applies big-data models to look at much more than income. The Rwandan data, for example, could be massaged to predict which phone users owned a motorcycle or a TV.

Joshua Blumenstock, the study’s lead author and an information scientist at the University of Washington, is now working on a follow-up project to see how easily the computer models can be applied to places beyond Rwanda.

“In every country, we hypothesize that there’s a relationship between how people use their phone and how wealthy they are,” he said in a Science podcast. “The exact nature of that relationship is going to change from one country to another, and it might even change from one year to the next within a country. But fundamentally, you’d think that there are these relationships that exist.”

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