Mobile messaging revenues worldwide are expected to grow to $233 billion in 2014, up from about $150 billion in 2009, according to a new forecast issued by Portio Research. Portio reports that global SMS traffic exceeded 5 trillion messages in 2009, a total expected to double by 2013--more than 4 billion subscribers have now embraced texting, the firm adds. In addition, MMS continues to grow, with full-year revenues for 2009 close to $27 billion worldwide (comparable to what SMS generated five years ago).

Despite the recent economic carnage experienced the World over during the last two years mobile messaging revenues continue to rise and the sector as a whole looks to be in excellent health. The appetite for mobile messaging continues unabated and is likely to be sustained for the foreseeable future. The new edition of the report, 'Mobile Messaging Futures 2010-2014', discusses the vast mobile messaging industry worldwide, currently generating revenues in excess of USD 150 billion, and set to continue growing to more than USD 233 billion by 2014.

Read more at Fierce Wireless

The Mobile/Social Internet is ramping faster than the original internet breakout, and will prove to be an even more disruptive factor in the global economy. Facebook is evolving into a unified communication platform and multimedia creation tool. Social Media is the new 'killer app' running on mobile.

Sounds like a sensationalistic headline, but if you read Morgan Stanley's latest series of reports on the Mobile Internet, you'll walk away with the same impression. Morgan Stanley's global technology and telecom analysts documented the rapidly changing mobile Internet market to provide a framework for emerging trends and direction. To set the stage, Morgan Stanley forecasts that the mobile Internet market will be at least 2x the size of desktop Internet when comparing Internet users to mobile subscribers.

According to the report, Apple's iTunes + iPhone/Touch ecosystem has created what "may prove to be the fastest ramping and most disruptive technology product / service launch the world has ever seen.

Read the whole story at Brian Solis PR2.0

How far we have come!

It was on this day in 2004 that Mark Zuckerburg launched Facebook (at first called "the facebook"). The Web site's name comes from the student directory book with names and photos that is distributed to incoming students at many universities. Harvard sophomore Zuckerburg, a comp-sci major, had gotten the idea for doing an online facebook when he was slightly drunk on a Tuesday night. He'd just been dumped by his girlfriend, he was looking for a distraction, and he hacked into a Harvard database and copied student names and photos from dorm lists and put them online into a site for which he'd written the code. It was immensely popular: In the first four hours it was up, 450 Harvard students used it to look at 22,000 photos of their classmates. A few days later, the site was shut down by Harvard and Zuckerburg was charged with a number of disciplinary things, including violating privacy rules and breaching security. Eventually, the university dropped the charges, and Zuckerburg moved to Palo Alto set up Facebook, Inc. without graduating from Harvard. Today, about 350 million people around the world actively use Facebook as a social networking tool.

See the original post on Writers Almanac.

Pepsi is betting $20 million, multi-decade, and highly coveted position as the lead Superbowl advertiser to run an amazing social media program. The Pepsi Refresh Project is about getting the global community to nominate projects that need funding in local communities. A good cause, but this is a pretty big bet on a marketing channel that is still only in its fledgeling stage. Pepsi apparently thinks that that social media is a smarter investment than to continue to be a cheerleader for a highly popular but ultimately meaningless game. The apparently see the handwriting on the wall for conventional TV advertising.

Real all about it at Pepsi's "Refresh Everything" site.

This is some of the best news we've seen on the security front in a long time. Security developers have created a system that that can map the physical location of computers infected with the malicious software, or malware, used to run botnets. Additionally it can identify the type of bot software on the infected machine and even pre-empt the next moves of the bot.

A TELESCOPE that can peer into the depths of the net to spot the gathering threat of a botnet could help combat cyber-attacks.

Botnets - networks of compromised computers that are controlled by someone with malicious intent - are an increasingly common feature of the internet. They can be used to flood a target website with useless data to bring it down, launch spam, or spy on computer users by looking for their banking logins and passwords.

To combat this threat, Endgame Systems of Atlanta, Georgia, has come up with a system, called the internet telescope, that can map the physical location of computers infected with the malicious software, or malware, used to run botnets. It can even identify the type of malware on the machine and pre-empt its next moves.

Read more at New Scientist

If you're like me you've been waiting for this. This may not be a surprise but it will still be a nightmare for computer lugging travelers, and an expense for manufacturers and resellers trying to ship a laptop computer by air. Airline safety rules could make it very difficult and hugely expensive to transport lithium batteries by air.

Buying your next laptop computer or smartphone online could suddenly get a lot more expensive if a little-known U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to tighten rules around the shipment of small, battery-powered devices by air goes through, says an industry group opposing the move.

Airline passengers would be affected too, as rules banning spare lithium-ion batteries in checked-in luggage would also be extended to alkaline and nickel metal-hydride batteries...

Read the whole story at ComputerWorld

There are many aspects of human stimulus response that are involuntary. Artists build paintings around involuntary visual responses, writers craft literature around our response to particular words and combinations of words, music is no different. Good art makes us experience what artists want us to. Advertising professionals have historically experimented with these same techniques in the hope that they can compel consumers to buy when prompted. The evidence is that it works.

If you're like most people, you're way too smart for advertising. You flip right past newspaper ads, never click on ads online and leave the room during TV commercials.

That, at least, is what we tell ourselves. But what we tell ourselves is hooey. Advertising works, which is why, even in hard economic times, Madison Avenue is a $34 billion--a--year business. And if Martin Lindstrom--author of the best seller Buyology and a marketing consultant for FORTUNE 500 companies, including PepsiCo and Disney--is correct, trying to tune this stuff out is about to get a whole lot harder.

Read the whole story at MartinLindstrom.com

I'm suspicious. Google says that it wants easier access to renewable energy to power its operations. Sounds like a good political move, but I think there's something else going on. They are now a licensed electric utility! Google is simultaneously branching out into retail bandwidth delivery with their 100 mb per second network experiments and plans to operate as some kind of Super ISP in 50 urban and rural markets. Excuse me - rural markets? How are they going to do that? I think I know. With their electric utility license in their pocket and their ultra high speed delivery network aspirations, is Google zeroing in on a Broadband Over Power play?

Google has received federal approval to buy and sell energy on the open market, giving it more options for the way it powers its data centers and opening the door to a potential move into the energy-trading business.

Google applied for the authorization last December through a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Energy. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved its application Thursday, granting Google "market-based rate authorization," or the authority to buy and sell energy on a wholesale basis.

Read the rest of the story at InfoWorld

We're down to just two significant search engines - Google and Bing. This article includes a useful review of the sequence of search engine mergers that we've endured in the last decade.

This week Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) announced that they have received clearance for their search agreement, without restrictions, from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission.

This means that Yahoo! will close down its own search engine and start using Bing search results instead, probably as early as next week.

Read the whole story at Pandia.com

Finally we have a decisive take down of a criminal botnet. This was a highly orchestrated action that involved Micorsoft and leading researchers operating under the auspices of a court order. The botnet in question is now completely eliminated, and we have a marvelous technique for doing it again with a different offender. We should see more of this.

Four days ago, top-notch computer security researchers launched an assault on Waledac, a highly sophisticated botnet responsible for spreading spam and malicious software.

As of Thursday, more than 60,000 PCs worldwide that have been infected with malicious code are now under the control of researchers, marking the effort one of the most highly successful coordinated against organized cybercrime.

Read the whole story at InfoWorld

Customer service inquires are part of the job when utilizing social media in your business strategy. Here are 5 tips on how to handle praise, criticism and customer feedback.

1. Be quick
2. Be polite
3. Be helpful
4. Be ready to admit defeat
5. Be proactive in building relationships

For more details on each tip, visit socialsmallbiz.com