This Week in Global Mobile | November 12, 2010
At times it's difficult to keep pace with the latest global mobile developments. I hope this selection of news stories from the past week will help you navigate the growing global network of connectivity:
- British health officials are developing a mobile phone which can process urine or saliva samples in order to diagnose sexually-transmitted diseases.
- Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes explained his upcoming project Jumo, a social network for philanthropists, in an interview with Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang.
- An African National Congress (ANC) official believes that IT solutions are the key to reducing high unemployment in South Africa.
- Worldwide mobile phone sales grew 35% in Q3 while smart phone sales increased by 96%, according to the latest report out by Gartner.
- Just days before the country’s elections on Sunday, Burma’s Internet effectively slowed to a standstill, raising suspicions that “Burma’s military authorities could be trying to restrict the flow of information over the election period.”
- Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s digital agenda commissioner, rejected the notion of introducing net neutrality rules on the continent in a speech in Brussels.
- The Asia-Pacific region will consume a quarter of global mobile data by 2015, triggered by an increasing availability of 3G networks in the vast Indian market, reports ABI Research.
- Obama’s once-revolutionary support from the netroots has withered significantly since its heyday of the 2008 elections, reports Daniel Lyons in Newsweek.
- This holiday season, Google will provide free in-flight wireless Internet to about 15 million passengers on over 700 planes in the U.S.
- Internet heavyweights Facebook and Google clashed this week over a dispute on privacy and data collection policies for importing Google contacts into Facebook.
- Broadband subscriptions increased sevenfold since 2001, but the digital divide persists in the U.S., according to the latest census report.
- On Wednesday the FCC announced that it launched an investigation into a potential data breach by Google’s Street View service.
- While only 12% of parents believe mobile apps could be great learning tools, one study indicates that smart phone learning apps can improve vocabulary scores by 27%.
- The folks over at Mobile Active take an in-depth look into the emerging intersection between mobile money and mHealth.
- Google Maps is increasingly becoming a digital battlefield for international border disputes, as Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reports.
- Facebook is about to introduce its very own e-mail system, jumping on the fact that the services message system has replaced e-mail for many users.
- Samhir Vasdev's blog
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