Today there are 1.5 billion mobile phones in the world. This technological revolution has subtly transformed the way we live and work. The emergence of mobile phones around the world since 1977,is overwhelmingly momentous. Sales of mobile phones dwarf the sales of televisions, stereos, even the hallowed personal computer. It has become so integral to our lives that it is difficult to remember how the heck we ever got on without it.

Seeing our youngsters manipulating mobiles on every street corner, and our two mobile competitors fighting for new markets, gives us a very good indication of their use. Already you can use them to browse the web, take pictures, send e-mails and play games. But this is not all. Mobile technologists think the ultimate promise of mobile phones, as they get smarter, smaller and faster, and enable users to connect to the internet will be our alter ego. Now let us look at two new incredible uses of mobiles and how we are caught in our own technological web.

Firstly mobiles are good for matchmaking. Today many phones are equipped with Symbian Dater, a program that promises to turn the cell phone into a matchmaker. By downloading Symbian, we install a 20 character encrypted code that includes details of who we are and what we?re looking for in a mate. Whenever we go out, our matchmaking phones sniff out other Symbian Daters over the Bluetooth radio frequency. If profiles match up, the phones beep wildly and send out short video messages; and two hearts and who knows, two souls, are united.

Since the service started in September last year, more than 155,000 people mostly in Western Europe and Southeast Asia, have installed it on their phones. If the growth of wired online dating is any indication, the potential market is enormous. Already, more powerful programs are on the way. Scientists are working on another matchmaker, called Serendipity, which is more powerful and efficient than our local agwas.

<B>Virtual globe</B>

The urge to find love after all is nothing if not powerful.

The second potential of our mobiles concerns digital mapping which is about to change our world by documenting the real world, then integrating that information into our computers, phones and lifestyles.

Rolled over and spurred by space photography, global satellite positioning, mobile phones, search engines and new ways of marking information for the World Wide Web, the ancient art of cartography is now on the cutting edge. Just by clicking, you swoop like superman down, to a location on terra firma.

Millions of road-trippers download custom maps from web ventures. You are in a city and want to find the nearest lavatory or pool hall ? so simple, you just have to Google things by location.The whole area of mapping is exploding in a lot of different directions. And just over the azimuth is the holy grail of mapping,where every imaginable form of location-based information is laying onto an aggregate construct that mirrors the whole world.The mobile phone has changed our global world into a virtual globe.

But we are all too familiar with the concept of technology as a double-edged sword, and the cell phone is no exception. Yes, the idea of shedding wires is exhilarating: we can go anywhere and still maintain intimate contact with our work, our loved ones and our real-time footballscores. But the same persistent connectedness may well lead us towards a future in which our cell phones tag and track us like FedEx packages, sometimes when we are not aware.

Those handsets with incorporated GPS can be very useful in many ways; employers may verify digital time logs on their workers in the field, and may also track how fast the workers drive; parents may use similar schemes to make sure their kids are safe. These are only a few practices until it really explodes as mobile phone makers continue to incorporate GPS.

The prospect of being tracked turns the freedom of mobile telephony upside down. This concerns government surveillance and the storage of one`s movements indatabases. Imagine you are on sick leave and you are tracked at the seaside? An even darker view is the advent of ?geoslavery?: a practice in which one entity, the master, coercively or surreptitiously monitors and exerts control over the physical location of another individual to routinely control time, location, speed and direction for each and every movement of the slave.

But the irony is that the widespread adoption of tracking will be done not against our will but initially with our consent. As with other double-edged tools, the benefits will be immediately apparent, while the privacy drawbacks will emerge gradually. We will be paving a future with nowhere to hide. Pursuing our love affair with cell phones will result in the loss of a hither to unheralded freedom ? the license to get lost. So be wiser than wisdom; if ever you suspect you are being geo-fenced, just switch off your mobile.

<B>Soorab BOODHOO</B>