Tracking owls with mobile phones

When I originally read the title of this post over at Boing Boing, I assumed it involved tying phones to owls and using GPS to track them - queue Monty Python characters debating the carrying capacity of the African Swallow - anyway, it turns out to be much more interesting than that.

The research team have set up mobile phones, in a forest, through which they can play owl calls and then listen for the number of distinct responses they receive.

I think the reason the story caught my eye is that it made me stop of think about the impact of cellular comms on our life. The cost of cell phone technology is now so low that it really can be built into almost any aspect of our lives. But, have we really embraced that idea. Are we still doing things manually/physically, which could be done so much better/cheaper through cell comms?

If you knew that you would have cheap, reliable, communication with anyone, or anything, anywhere in the World, how might that change the way you work?