As humanity creates increasingly smartphones each and every year there's an unintended glut of nonetheless competent but less fascinating one-12 months-historic or two-year-ancient smartphones that take the backseat to new units. Whilst many of these retired smartphones nonetheless work and have usable sensors like cameras, accelerometers, touch monitors and Bluetooth radios, colossal swaths of them remain unused or worse yet, end up in landfills.
A research by IDC shows “that more than 280 million working smartphones were replaced without being recycled last year.”
With this info in mind, Tomo, along with Keisuke Shiro, Kosuke Takahashi and Seibe Takahashi, established Phonvert, an open-source application platform that can convert retired smartphones into usable web of matters nodes.
You put in Phonvert onto your historical smartphone after which that you may make it usable and useful once more for a style of tasks like Fridge Cam, Mailbox Cam, Video baby screen to call just a few.
It’s important to note that the team — based in Tokyo — thinks of itself more as a movement than a startup. They are also open to collecting new ideas for how smartphones can be reused with their software on Twitter via the hashtag #phonvert.