Our perception of the Internet is shifting by two main factors, an explosive growth of proactive mobile
devices, and an overabundance of data that is growing beyond tractable operation. Thus, the increasing
volume of data is in fact becoming less accessible in terms of coherence and synergy, contrary to what
search engines would want us to believe! There was a time when IP address space was the major
hindrance. Now, the bottleneck has shifted from connecting new devices to handling their data demands
(both generated and requested) and cascading replications over the network. In this talk we overview the
growing momentum for Information Centric Networking (ICN); a paradigm that envisions networks built
around data, rather than the latter being a mere constituent of stale architectures. We highlight two major
factors that drive ICN, namely, globalizing the utility of resources that serve the network architecture and
cost-effective data harvesting and delivery. We first elaborate on our research in establishing networks on
the fly. As networks grow, and the demand for data readiness becomes more stringent, the adoption of
application-specific networks presents a major hindrance. At any given location, we need to find the
resources that could collect data, process it, and delivers it to designated backhauls at the least cost. To
the first end, we overview our work in real-time data collection over opportunistic and participatory
sensing networks, overarching a major realization in VANets. We then present our work in optimizing
data delivery in dense and infrastructure-less realizations of transient networks. We consider factors of
placement, localization, time delivery constraints and cost of delivery over multi-proprietary networks.