With Ford's new SYNC technology, it has now become easy to simply talk to your car and ask it to send a Tweet. Now we need 'mobile specific' social experiences that integrate the fact that we are rolling down the road and our need to 'social-ize' with our similarly mobile cohorts. New applications are in the works that will build on mobile location awareness and help us make sense of our social lives 'in motion'.

Ford, the University of Michigan, Microsoft and Intel gave students a rare opportunity to develop their ideas of future in-car connectivity. The research project resulted in experimental applications combining social networks, GPS location awareness, and real-time vehicle data in ways that help drivers get where they want to go efficiently, while having fun along the way.

In the class, the students explored and built applications based on access to Fiestaware: a Ford developmental application platform built on Windows 7 and Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. This enabled them to harness the power of social networks that safely and responsibly connect to the cloud. The software system is the first of its kind, and provides access to vehicle performance data, networking services, voice recognition, social networking tools and other data, as well as the Windows Azure cloud services platform. Students in the class were able to use the platform to conceptualize and build a new class of applications as class projects. ...Like: Caravan Track - software that allows clusters of vehicles traveling together to track each other along the journey.

Read the whole article at TheFordStory.com

There has been a great deal of complaining and hand wringing about the fact that the Apple iPhone does not support Adobe's Flash. Apple has said repeatedly that, for significant technical reasons, it doesn't think that Flash is the right solution for mobile devices. Adobe has accused Apple of blocking Flash for narrow business reasons. This might seem like a silly squabble between business rivals, but it actually has huge significance for web designers, web developers, and any one trying to deploy video on the web. Who's right? Here's what Steve Jobs has to say:

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe's Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven - they say we want to protect our App Store - but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain. First, there's "Open".

Read the rest of Steve Jobs's article at Apple .com

Wi-Fi on the go is a promise that we've been teased with for quite a while, but the reality is that mobile Wi-Fi is often a hassle, and generally overpriced. Whether you are in an airport, a hotel, or a coffee shop, there is a wide spectrum of possible payment structures, some of which are just plain highway robbery, and others that are refreshingly free... it all depends on the enterprise that it offering it. It's like a road system with out any standards, a variety of toll roads, mixed with occasional free roads, and no interoperability. For the mobil user it's a nightmare. For web designers and internet marketers it is a growing aggravation.

The promise of anywhere access when on the go is old hat, promised but not delivered by all sorts of providers for more than a decade. How long have you heard about Wi-Fi on airplanes, Wi-Fi hotspots wherever you travel for business, municipal Wi-Fi, and so on?...

Where we are today is that there's more mobile Wi-Fi available, but the fractured fiefdoms add hassle and cost. The providers need to figure out how to stitch their services together and stop trying to carve out all these separate silos -- they inhibit usage that way. I figure in another five years, this mobile Wi-Fi thing may finally work right.

Read Galen Gruman's story at InfoWorld

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

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

Are you using you desktop computer less and your mobile device more? You're not alone!

"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

--The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

Read the whole story at Clickz.com

Are you using you desktop computer less and your mobile device more? You're not alone!

"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

--The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

Read the whole story at Clickz.com

Are you using you desktop computer less and your mobile device more? You're not alone!

"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

--The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

Read the whole story at Clickz.com

Are you using you desktop computer less and your mobile device more? You're not alone!

"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

--The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

Read the whole story at Clickz.com

Are you using you desktop computer less and your mobile device more? You're not alone!

"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

--The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

Read the whole story at Clickz.com

Are you using you desktop computer less and your mobile device more? You're not alone!

"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

--The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

Read the whole story at Clickz.com

Are you using you desktop computer less and your mobile device more? You're not alone!

"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

--The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

Read the whole story at Clickz.com

Are you using you desktop computer less and your mobile device more? You're not alone!

"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

--The Mobile Internet Report, Morgan Stanley, 12/09

Read the whole story at Clickz.com

The category is escalating its name for itself - from 'cell' phones, to 'mobile' phones, to 'smart' phones, and now 'super' phones. It seems like the term 'phone' is getting outdated. We need a new umbrella concept for this category.

Just when the world got familiar with the smartphone, the mobile phone community is starting to talk about the "superphone." Google dropped the superphone title on the general public when it launched its Nexus One phone on Tuesday. Now, at CES, industry analysts and others are describing any mobile phone with 1Ghz processors, or even phones with especially sophisticated design, hardware or software, a superphone.

Read the whole story at Computerworld

Add this to the debate about the "harmful" effects of cell phone exposure. New research provides evidence that cell phone use may actually protect against and even reverse Alzheimer's disease.

"It surprised us to find that cell phone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer's symptoms," said lead author Gary Arendash, PhD, USF Research Professor at the Florida ADRC. "It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer's mice."

Read the whole story at Physorg.com

While it might seem hard to believe, the 'mobil revolution' promises to be faster and more wide spread than the general internet explosion of the last decade. As cell phones morph into "smart" phones and ultimately into hand held computers in the next few years, more and more people will be logging on to the internet with mobile data devices. The trend lines predict that by 2015j more people will access the web via mobile devices than from desktops.

"We believe Facebook has the potential to serve as a communications platform/engine of one-to-one, one-to-some and one-to-many (and visa versa) for the mobile Internet," Morgan Stanley says. "Facebook has already become a primary way for millions of people to stay connected and Facebook's lead is likely to be extended as more consumers use increasingly powerful mobile devices (with photo/video + high-speed access) and the communications options on Facebook (like voice/video chat and other services) continue to rise."

Read the whole story at FierceMobile

The trend is clear - mobile communication is growing at an astronomical rate, with no end in sight. Contributing greatly to the adoption of mobile technology is Twitter. Twitter use is up 3500% in the first half of 2009! Twitter status-updates offer uniquely compelling properties for social media raconteurs.

Microblogging site Twitter is having a positive effect on the number of consumers using their mobile phone to access the web, says research firm Novarra. Research by the internet mobility company revealed that page views of Twitter from handsets increased by 3500 percent in the first half of 2009. Novarra also said that page views of URTL shortening services bit.ly and tinyurl.com grew by 1,068 percent this year.

Read more at PCWorld

Is seems counterintuitive but, young people are not automatically attracted to Twitter. The average age of a Twitter user is 31. This statistic may be changing with time, but Twitter appears to be an example of an Internet application that skipped a generation and was adopted first by an older group.

They think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't even know what it is.

Even so, more young adults and teens - normally at the cutting edge of technology - are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives.

It's not always love at first tweet, though. Many of them are doing it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressures them or a teacher or boss makes them try the 140-character microblogging site.

Read the whole story at CBSNews.com

You may not think that Twitter is for you, or that it is very important in the larger scheme...but...
Titter is becoming a very big deal. The numbers alone make this an important phenomenon, and companies that are using it are seeing a positive impact on sales. The more you know about Twitter the more sense it starts to make. If nothing else, think of Twitter as a mechanism for broadcasting bookmarks, and links to cool stuff on the web. What's not to like?

Microblogging service Twitter topped the 5 billion tweet threshold earlier this week according to a counter posted on the GigaTweet website, which analyzes Twitter messages in real time. GigaTweet notes that Twitter is currently averaging about 23 million tweets per day, down from earlier in October, when users broke the 25 million per day benchmark. Mashable notes that the GigaTweet counter stood at 1.6 billion tweets as of April 2009, meaning Twitter users have posted about 3.4 billion tweets in just the last six months. Twitter currently boasts about 54 million users worldwide, and is valued at about $1 billion despite the absence of a discernible revenue model.

Read more at FierceMobile.com

If you've been fretting about how quickly you'll get an ultra-fast 'fiber' connection from the internet to your home, it may be time to relax and shift focus. Mobile connectivity may be more important to your future than fixed bandwidth delivered via 'fiber to the home' (FFTH) can ever be. A growing body of communication industry trends and indicators is adding up to a clear picture of our internet supercharged future, a future where the key to personal and professional success lies not how much total bandwidth you have at your desk, but rather in how much practical internet functionality you can take with you everywhere you go. From ultra portable handheld computers like iPhones, Blackberrys and now netbooks, to rapidly evolving high speed wireless protocols like 3g, 4g, LTE and WiMax, all the signs point to 'mobility' as the defining feature of our internet future; a future where 5 Mb/second of bandwidth in your hand may well be worth more to you than 50 Mb/second of bandwidth at your desk.

Read the whole story at Telephony Online

We've been hearing about the eventual shift to solid state storage for years, but now it really seems to be happening. Soon we won't have hard drives in our lap tops; we'll use chips like the ones we use in our cameras for storage. The math is pretty clear: Flash memory like the kind need to create solid state storage devices (SSD's) is coming down in price (because of Moores's Law) at a rate of 60% per year. A Gigabyte of SSD costs between $2 and $3.50 today. A Gigabyte of hard drive costs 38¢ today. In two or three years the cost of the SSD will be less than the hard drive of the same capacity. The fun is that SSD's will deliver speed improvements of that could immediately double or even triple the speed of internal data storage; this will change a lot of things. You lap top will be lighter, faster, and much more rugged... it will also get thinner. It's all good!

As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.

By making the drive part of a system's core architecture -- instead of a peripheral device -- data I/O performance could initially double, quadruple or more, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at market research firm In-Stat.

"Instead of using a SATA interface, let's break that and instead of making it look like a disk drive, let's make it look like part of the memory hierarchy," McGregor said. "Obviously, if you break down that interface, you get more performance."

Read the whole article in ComputerWorld

With young people everywhere eschewing fixed lines and going 100% cellular for their primary phone service, it's not much of a stretch to imagine that these same people will want to use the next generation of mobile data devices to surf the web while they are moving around. Mobility is the next "big thing".

Most consumers will be accessing the Web through their mobile phones by 2020, according to new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Pew conducted surveys with about 1,200 online experts, journalists and technologists, and the majority predicted that the affordability, easy accessibility, widespread use and portability of mobile phones will make them the "primary" Internet connection.

http://www.adotas.com/2008/12/report-most-will-access-net-via-phone-by-2020/

A survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves.

They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/270/report_display.asp

Thanksgiving this year will bring us a momentary break from the relentlessly bad economic news and a pause before we see what happens on Black Friday. By all accounts retail is going to take a beating this year, and friday, normally the busiest shopping day of the year, will present a grim preview of our holiday retail season. An interesting bright spot in all the gloom is the growing consensus that mobil technology in the form of smart phones will escape the grim economic picture and enjoy strong holiday sales. People may be cutting back on their land line subscriptions but there's no let up in the upward trend in cell subscriptions. Mobile data is fast becoming the place to be for advertisers.

Subscriptions including broadband Internet access, mobile phone plans, pay-TV and content subscriptions such as Netflix are the most insulated from the economic downturn. 63% of respondents expect their spending to be about the same next year as it was this past year, and 9% plan to spend even more. Only 28% plan to spend less on network subscriptions.

Read the whole article

A stunning prediction from my friend Tom Evslin. Tom knows more about telecom issues and technology than anyone I know.

By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country. One of the challenges facing the Federal Communications Commission and the new administration is how to deal with the fallout from the end of this venerable technology. It's gonna get ugly for some people - people who can't afford to do without communication - unless we're proactive about this problem.

Here's what's happening as you probably know. Young people don't bother with landlines (unless they live beyond cell coverage); they just use their mobile phones or Skype for voice communication. The slightly older set are buying cable's bundle of entertainment, Internet access, and VoIP. They cancel their landlines. People who have broadband access don't need the extra line they used to rent for their dial-up Internet access.

Read the rest of this article

Gartner says smartphone sales to women doubled last year, and that these sales figures continue top grow at a faster rate than among men. We've known for some time that Japanese teenage girls were the most aggressive users of state of the art mobile communication devices in the world. We should not be surprised that western women would eventually discover the social and community enhancing powers of mobile technology. Mobile tech is simply not about geeks anymore, it's about community; having something to contribute, a need to participate, things to say, and to learn from each other. Clearly women have something powerful to bring to the table in this area.

In general, women may not be the earliest adopters of new gadgets or technology, this is true. However, as a New York Times article by Laura M. Holson tells us, that doesn't mean women haven't been scoping out the scene the whole time, waiting for their perfect moment to buy. They are experienced shoppers, and when they do go to make that purchase - they've already done all the research and will quickly become their new tech gadget's biggest fan!

Read more

Sales of "smart" phones doubled in North America in the first quarter, outstripping the category's growth in the rest of the world, research firm Gartner, quoted by an Associated Press report, said.

Read more

In the last year the number of American women using smartphones more than doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men, according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks wireless trends.

Read more

After years of hype the mobile advertising medium is starting to gain real momentum. Advertisers who are willing to invest in customizing their messages for this new medium are gaining real advantage in their markets, particularly with localization. The future belongs to mobil devices; if you doubt this just look at what your kids and their friends are doing with cell phones; the small size of the screen is no impediment to this group.

The differences between advertising on the mobile Internet and the PC-based Internet are due to the physical differences between the devices -- most notably the limited size of the interface, which creates new user habits and necessitates innovative approaches for those advertising on the mobile screen. This may seem obvious, but advertisers who recognize how to turn these differences to their advantage are far ahead of the game in mobile advertising.

Read the rest of the story at Adotas

Here's more evidence that we're going to be pushing more an more web content and web applications onto mobile devices; eventually everything will be delivered to small mobile devices that are decedents of your cell phone. The future belongs to the wirelessly connected "pocket computer", not the tethered desktop, or even the laptop computer.

Your laptop is likely to soon go the way of 5.25-in. floppy disks, made obsolete by smaller, more useful technology: the smart phone. Based on current trends for low-power chips used in devices like cell phones and iPods , we're likely to see eight times the CPU power in handheld devices by 2010 that we have today... The progress behind such advances isn't the overall boost in processing capabilities seen under Moore's Law (doubling the density of transistors on a chip every two years), Cockcroft said, but the increasing robustness of low-power chips and devices that use them. In other words: handhelds are advancing faster than laptops. For example, laptop memory capacity typically doubles every two years, while pocket devices are seeing such doubling annually.

Read the whole article at ComputerWorld.com

Imagine that you are traveling in an unfamiliar area and you need to know where to find a public rest room; or you need to locate a store that sells AA batteries. Or imagine that you would like to know if any of your friends are within a few blocks of you, so you can arrange a lunch get together. Or imagine that you are trying to figure out what that land mark building on your right is, as you drive from the airport into an unfamiliar city. By now we are all aware of in-car GPS devices that offer driving directions, but very soon, building on increasingly cheap and ubiquitous GPS technology, we will be immersed in a flood of amazing new 'location aware' services that will be deployed over GPS enabled smart phones. Not only will we always know where we are, but we'll always know where everyone else is as well.

With the imminent availability of the iPhone 3G, we're seeing the emergence of a new category of personal productivity applications that will prove as important as e-mail, word processing, and the spreadsheet: Location-aware applications, software that knows where you are and helps you take better advantage of what's around you.

Read the whole article

As mobile data becomes ubiquitous and wireless connection speeds climb higher and higher, the boundary between desktop and handheld is blurring more and more. Your cell phone is morphing into a mobile computer with an interface to the global network; an interface that is becoming as capable as your desktop connection. Combining this capability with social networking will usher in an explosion of localized personal social communication services that will reach deeply into all aspects of our lives.

Mobile social networks are quite popular with the Millennial generation, just as social networking is, reports In-Stat http://www.in-stat.com . Blogging, photo and video sharing, location-based socialization services, games, SMS, and IM will eventually be combined to afford the mobile user the entire social networking experience from a handset application, the high-tech market research firm says. The mobile handset will simply become an extension of the user in most aspects of life.

Read the whole article