Idea: 42
Wednesday, 11 February 2015
By. Roland Ligtenberg
— Distributed computing via mobile CPU
For years, companies have been sending data to cloud companies to compute their data for them. They go to mass server farms and pay by the data they process. Every day 100s of millions of people have their smartphones plugged in charging and not doing anything, these are all wasted cycles.
Imagine if a carrier could give away free phones, with free data, but as part of the contract, the phone’s CPU cycles would get used toward processing data. The company that would pull this off would get data to process, split it up into hundreds/thousands/millions of chunks, sent down to the IDLE phones for computation, then sent back to the main server and then back down to the customer. Since there is no hardware or infrastructure costs, this would be much cheaper than anything currently out there. And would allow for carriers to subsidize phones for 3rd world or low-end market and make it entirely free to the end user (or maybe just the cost of the hardware).
Imagine if you could turn on and off this functionality, and it would automatically start processing once you’re charging and on wifi — and you’d be able to slowly process/compute and “earn-back” your monthly bill.
Alternatively a large PE focused on infrastructure investments could fund 100 million phones (cheap Android), get them in the hands of consumers for free… then make residuals on the payback overtime.

