Tens of thousands of mobile users in Bangladesh's flood and cyclone-prone areas will now receive advance warning of an impending natural disaster through an alert on their cell phones, reports Reuters.
... Bangladesh, with a population of around 162 million, has more than 46 million mobile phone subscribers.
Syed Ashraf, communications specialist for the country's Disaster Management Bureau, told Reuters by telephone that the messages would not be the usual SMS format, but would flash automatically on the screen of mobile phone sets, instead of going to message boxes.
This way, people would not have to even push a button on their handsets, making it very user-friendly, he said.
According to USA Today, a new survey on kids in cyberspace finds that one in five teens have "sexted" — sent or received sexually suggestive, nude or nearly nude photos through cellphone text messages or e-mail.
The world's largest chip maker has teamed up with the world's largest mobile phone maker to create what they say will be a "new exciting industry". The BBC reports.
Intel and Nokia said their "technology collaboration" would deliver new mobile computing products - beyond existing smartphones, netbooks and notebooks.
But both companies added it was still too early to talk about product plans.
The deal gives Intel its first real breakthrough in the multi-billion dollar mobile-phone market.
Just a few days ago, the EFF pointed out that ASCAP is arguing in federal court that every time your musical ringtone rings in public, you're violating copyright law by "publicly performing" it without a license.
ASCAP has fired up its spin control machinery and issued a statement to Billboard, including this talking point, doubtless meant to be reassuring:
To be completely clear, ASCAP’s approach has always been to license these businesses – not to charge listeners/end-users.
This is an archetypal example of copyright doublespeak. What ASCAP should be saying is: "It's not infringing when your ringtone goes off in public." That's because the Copyright Act specifically provides in Section 110(4) that public performances "without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage" are "not infringements of copyright."
Instead, ASCAP's statement essentially amounts to "you're all pirates, but don't fret, we'd never sue you for it, just every company that provides you with services."
Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become 'Iranians' it becomes much harder to find them.
Erwin Mazariegos has posted some interesting comments on news apps on Poynter.org.
If we're discussing news apps, there are different kinds, such as aggregators, single-source publishers, RSS readers, and dedicated search tools.
In the search category, there's an app that provides access to over 25,000 global news sources. It's not 99 cents, but at $9.99, I think the math still works out.
The app is politicoTracker, and although this app is focused on news about politicians, it ships with the full database of over 6600 US federal, state, and local elected officials - and even better, you get to choose which politico you want to see the news about.
There's a ton more info at politicoTracker.com and it's also available in a Twitter edition.
Another interesting news app is Taptu, notable for its pretty interface. It falls mainly in the aggregator category.
The AP Mobile app is a great example of the single-source publisher genre. It is one of the first apps with push notifications, which is also quite interesting.
Maybe this is the end of print journalism, maybe not - but journalism itself will continue - no doubt.
The Dyson Energy Bracelet - by designers: Mathieu Servais, Camille Lefer, Clément Faydi & Mickaël Denié - is a gadget that uses Seebeck effect (= the thermoelectric effect is the direct conversion of temperature differences to electric voltage and vice versa. ) to harness energy and power your mobile phones for a few precious minutes more, when you desperately need it.
As protests continue in Iran, details are emerging of the technology used to monitor its citizens. The BBC reports.
Iran is well known for filtering the net, but the government has moved to do the same for mobile phones.
Nokia Siemens Network has confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls. It told the BBC that it sold a product called the Monitoring Centre to Iran Telecom in the second half of 2008.
The product allows authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic.
But Nokia Siemens says the product is only being used, in Iran, for the monitoring of local telephone calls on fixed and mobile lines.
Rather than just block traffic, it is understood that the monitoring system can also interrogate data to see what information is being passed back and forth.
A spokesman described the system as "a standard architecture that the world's governments use for lawful intercept". He added: "Western governments, including the UK, don't allow you to build networks without having this functionality."
... Nokia Siemens markets the Monitoring Centre product to 150 countries around the world where it does business. The firm says it does not supply the system to China or to Burma.
Traffic in and out of Iran is largely controlled by Iran Telecom. On 13 June, the day after presidential elections, data traffic come to an almost complete halt, according to analysis by network security firm Arbor Networks.
Since then, traffic has gradually recovered, and analysts have speculated that the slowdown and re-start was caused by authorities putting in place filtering and monitoring systems.
Because Iran is effectively reading every message, this results in an inevitable slow down of traffic.
The chairman of a Senate panel on antitrust issues last Tuesday called on the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department to scrutinize competitiveness in the cellphone industry, pointing to a 100% increase in some text messaging charges by four companies that control most of the market. The LA Times reports.
Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin) said that from 2006 to 2008, the price charged by the four biggest carriers for sending and receiving such messages rose from 10 cents to 20 cents.
And the increases seemed to occur in "lock step" -- first from 10 cents to 15 cents and then from 15 cents to 20 cents, with each set of increases occurring within a period of months or even weeks, said Kohl, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights.
"Are these price increases the result of a lack of competition in a highly concentrated market?" Kohl asked.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that sending SMS messages potentially violates the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits companies from using automatic telephone dialing systems to make calls to cell phones unless the owners have consented.
The decision appears to mark the first time that a federal appellate court has said that the telephone law applies to text messages. The ruling could have far-reaching effects on mobile marketers who send SMS ads.
A huge thanks to MacAndStuff who explains the simplest way to get an iTunes iPhone App URL, something I'm embarrassed to say, that has had me stumped for months.
Simply "Ctrl-Click" on the apps name and a dialogue box pops us: "Copy iTunes Store URL". This copies the URL to the clipboard. And, from there you can paste it.
According to Shiny Shiny, an application based on obnoxious BBC TV character Alan Partridge called Pocket Allen is The Number 1 paid-for iPhone app in Britain.
The application features 22 classic catch phrases to play with, like calling your friends with Alan's voice.
Lost in translation. Unless of course you are an Alan Partridge fan.
The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale. The Wall Street Journal reports.
Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections.
The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.
... China's vaunted "Great Firewall," which is widely considered the most advanced and extensive Internet censoring in the world, is believed also to involve deep packet inspection. But China appears to be developing this capability in a more decentralized manner, at the level of its Internet service providers rather than through a single hub, according to experts. That suggests its implementation might not be as uniform as that in Iran, they said, as the arrangement depends on the cooperation of all the service providers.
And interesting, an article which was published on the BBC website Friday, with a theory on why Iran had turned off state-owned telecoms.
According to Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks, the authorities were buying time to install the filtering tools they needed to have a functioning internet infrastructure, but one over which they had some measure of control. So he reckons they gradually turned the tap back on as they put the filters in.
According to Cellular News, a financial services technology group is developing standards for making secure mobile payment transactions.
The project is an effort of the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), an industry group comprising banks, technology vendors, researchers and government organizations, which develops technology standards for the financial services sector.
The goal of the project is to develop standards and processes so that banking customers are able to securely pay a merchant or another bank customer using their phone, no matter what mobile device or carrier they use.
Over the past few days, news media reports have described how Twitter is being used by ordinary Iranians to receive and broadcast real-time information on the political unrest in the country after recent elections. The New York Times reports.
But a still developing and less benign use of Twitter in Iran has been its application in denial-of-service attacks against key government officials, including those affiliated with President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
... Tweets have begun circulating that allow users to target a Web site that will eventually be overcome by simply clicking on the embedded URL in the message. As soon as a user hits the page, as many as 24 frames open up simultaneously and refresh continuously, causing a DoS attack against the 24 separate Web sites.
A Cyberwar guide for Iran elections reposted on BoingBoing exhorts would-be cyber warriors to be careful about using Twitter to launch such DoS attacks.
According to a study conducted by Joel Benenson of Common Sense Media, teens send 25-percent of their total text messages while killing time in class. Switched reports.
The pollsters broke the numbers down and found that students send 110 texts a week during class time, which equates to over three texts per class.
The study also determined that half of all students have used their phones to either store notes they can consult during a test, or to text a friend for a test answer. Only half of all the students polled believe this phone cheating to be a "serious offense."
The iPhone's latest evolution could affect sales of navigation devices, camcorders and even its own sibling, the iPod Touch. ... Personal navigation device manufacturers acknowledge that equipping the iPhone with turn-by-turn directions will cut into sales.
It's expected to boost YouTube uploads, touch off a wave of new accessories and also affect some of its independent developers.
"It's no question there are other devices that allow you to upload video to YouTube, and yet as we see on the photo side or with the mobile Web statistics, iPhone users just do things more," said Avi Greengart, research director for Current Analysis.
Does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two mass protests in a matter of months -— in Moldova in April and in Iran last week - oversell the technology? The New York Times reports.
Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means — individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites — were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion.
As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or “tag,” each of their tweets with the same bit of type — #IranElection — so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution.
But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth.
Someday, when you ask your Twitter followers to recommend the most comfortable running shoe or the best digital camera, you might be able to go one step further and buy the product on the Twitter site. Bits Blog reports.
E-commerce, including links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms, is a likely revenue stream for Twitter, said Todd Chaffee, a Twitter board member and general partner at Institutional Venture Partners, which has invested in Twitter. That gives us one more hint about how Twitter will make money.
Many companies are already on Twitter, monitoring what customers say about them and offering discounts and promotions to their followers. And many people use Twitter to ask for recommendations, like which type of gadget to buy or which movie to see. Since Twitter is already becoming one of the best shopping resources, Mr. Chaffee said, why not enable people to make purchases from the site as well?
According to the EFF, ASCAP appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in public, you're violating copyright law by "publicly performing" it without a license.
At least that's the import of a brief it filed in ASCAP's court battle with mobile phone giant AT&T.
This will doubtless come as a shock to the millions of Americans who have legitimately purchased musical ringtones, contributing millions to the music industry's bottom line. Are we each liable for statutory damages (say, $80,000) if we forget to silence our phones in a restaurant?
ASCAP's outlandish claim is part of its battle with major mobile carriers (including Verizon and AT&T) over whether ASCAP is owed any money for "public performances" of the musical ringtones sold by the carriers. The carriers point out that the owners of the musical compositions (i.e., songwriters and music publishers) are already paid for each ringtone download, but ASCAP claims that it's owed another royalty for the "public performances" (i.e., ringing in a restaurant) of those same ringtones.
As a growing number of poker players are beginning to send out short messages to the world via Twitter, existing poker media is being disrupted and the news sites are scrambling to out-compete with each other in responding to the players' direct and immediate communication with their fans. Players are reading each others' Tweets, too, and that has consequences.
A useful app. Find Internet Cafe finds the nearest US Internet Cafes based on the user's current location.
Features:
- Detects your current location automatically and displays search results based on proximity.
- Shows interactive map with driving directions.
- Tap to call the business phone number.
- Tap to visit the website.
- Bookmark your favorites places for quick and easy retrieval.
In what seems like an amazing tool to violate someone's privacy - but anyone being able to check someon'es credit rating is common in the US I think (that's why the Swiss value banking secrecy) - Credit Card Check app is a simple software to help you check validity of a credit card number.
In their own words:
You dont have to go online or transmit sensitive credit card information.
A must-have for anyone taking orders over the phone or international orders. Perfect for call centers or small offices. Download and start using this tool to instantly eliminate fraudlent orders and invalid card numbers.
It checks for the valid length, prefix, card type debit or credit and check digit for the major credit cards such as: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discovery, Diners, JCB, Maestro and Visa Electron.
Gaping gaps in weather and climate data across Africa may be filled by a partnership between humanitarian groups and mobile phone companies, reports the BBC.
The project aims to deploy 5,000 automatic weather stations across the continent mounted on phone masts.
They will gather data on aspects of weather such as rainfall and wind, and send it to national weather agencies.
Former UN chief Kofi Annan says the project could help save lives of people on "the frontlines of climate change".
"The world's poorest are also the world's most vulnerable when it comes to the impact of climate change, and the least equipped to deal with its consequences," he said.
"Today you find cell phone towers in almost every part of Africa. We have never been able to establish weather monitoring on that scale, until now."
Tens of thousands of mobile users in Bangladesh's flood and cyclone-prone areas will now receive advance warning of an impending natural disaster through an alert on their cell phones, reports 
... Bangladesh, with a population of around 162 million, has more than 46 million mobile phone subscribers.
The world's largest chip maker has teamed up with the world's largest mobile phone maker to create what they say will be a "new exciting industry". The
Erwin Mazariegos has posted some interesting comments on news apps on 
Another interesting news app is 
As protests continue in Iran, details are emerging of the technology used to monitor its citizens. The 
According to a report in 
According to 
The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale. 
Over the past few days, news media reports have described how Twitter is being used by ordinary Iranians to receive and broadcast real-time information on the political unrest in the country after recent elections. 
Does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two mass protests in a matter of months -— in Moldova in April and in Iran last week - oversell the technology? 
Someday, when you ask your Twitter followers to recommend the most comfortable running shoe or the best digital camera, you might be able to go one step further and buy the product on the Twitter site. 
According to the 
As a growing number of poker players are beginning to send out short messages to the world via 
A useful app. 
In what seems like an amazing tool to violate someone's privacy - but anyone being able to check someon'es credit rating is common in the US I think (that's why the Swiss value banking secrecy) - 
Gaping gaps in weather and climate data across Africa may be filled by a partnership between humanitarian groups and mobile phone companies, reports the 
