This Week in Global Mobile | August 13, 2010

At times its difficult to keep pace with all the latest global mobile developments. I hope this selection of news stories from the past week will help you navigate the ever-growing global network of connectivity:

• On Monday Google and Verizon released a joint policy proposal urging the FCC to protect the open Internet, although it controversially asks for no regulation over all things wireless. Read Sam’s reflections here.

• Rwandan genocide survivor Samuel Dusengiyumva is leading an initiative to give every school-aged kid in the country a laptop, seeing a knowledge-based society as the way to heal Rwanda.

• Serbian authorities launched the “Digital Schools” initiative, which allots 650 million Serbian dollars ($790,000US) towards digital labs and classrooms in primary schools.

• Melissa Ulbricht takes a look at the success of the Freedom Fone and how it helped create participatory radio in Africa.

• Saudi Arabia called off its ban on BlackBerry services after reaching an agreement with the device’s manufacturer, while India became the latest country to voice its concern over the phone’s encryption techniques.

• Crowdmap is a new service provided by event-mapping platform Ushahidi which allows people with virtually no coding experience to rapidly deploy Ushahidi in emergencies.

• A doctor at Nationwide Children’s hospital significantly increases compliance rates among diabetes patients through her pilot program which sends personalized mediation reminders via SMS.

• A Red Cross survey showed that 74% of Web users “expect response agencies to answer social media calls for help within an hour.”

• To combat charity fraud in Singapore, a new service allows mobile users to text a shortcode to receive instant verification on whether a charity is authorized to solicit and accept donations.

• The Guardian’s Micah White discusses how “clicktivism” is ruining leftist activism by reducing social movements to numbers, ads, and mouse clicks.

• A new storybook iPad app is the first of its kind to include a sign language to make the story accessible to deaf children.

• A new project led by DARPA and the NIST puts smartphones in the hands of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan to assist with real-time language translation.

• A new report indicates that, setting aside Americans under age five, the U.S. now has over 100% mobile penetration (be sure to read this great analysis clarifying the relationship between mobile penetration, ownership, and subscriptions).

• Google’s Korean headquarters were raided by police for gathering and storing user data taken from wi-fi networks.

• Worldwide mobile device sales grew 13.8% in Q2 2010, driven by lower prices caused by higher competition in the market.