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He is officially called the "Messaging Community Lead" for IBM's WebSphere message queue (MQ) architecture, which is a title that grants some modicum of honor without claiming too much authority. Andy Piper has become IBM's point man for the concept of a planet enmeshed in billions, perhaps trillions, of signal-sending, communicating devices. The case may be made that anything that can be "on" could be made to send a signal on a network - perhaps something as simple as "on" itself, periodically. The possibilities for a world where the operating status of any electronic device may be measured from any point on the globe, are astounding.

Two weeks ago, IBM and its development partner Eurotech formally submitted Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol to the Eclipse Foundation open source group. It's being called "the" Internet of Things (IoT) protocol, but in fairness it's only one candidate. It would serve as the communications mechanism for devices whose size may scale down to the very small level, with negligible power and transmission radius of only a few feet.

One example application already in the field, Piper told RWW, is in pacemakers. Tiny transmitters inside pacemakers communicate using MQTT with message queue brokers at their patients' bedsides. Those brokers then communicate with upstream servers using more conventional, sophisticated protocols such as WebSphere MQ.

The first GSMA Mobile Observatory report to focus on Africa has come back with some fascinating conclusions. First among them, Africa has passed Latin America to become the world's second largest mobile market. The global mobile association examined the 25 African countries that account for 91% of mobile use (calling them the "A25"). Here are some of the most interesting of the report's conclusions.

The report "integrates data from a wide range of existing sources to provide a comprehensive picture of the African mobile industry. These include public sources such as the ITU, World Bank and research by National Regulatory Authorities as well as commercial providers such as Wireless Intelligence, Informa, Gartner, Buddecomm and ID." Africa now has 620 million mobile connections, passing Latin America Regional penetration has risen from 2% in 2000, to 57% this year Over the last decade, the number of mobile connections has grown an average of 30% per year, forecast to reach 735 million by the end of next year Mobile provides 3.5% of African GDP Highly competetive sector has resulted in price decreases of up to 60% in some areas, with an overall average of 18% decrease in the last year 96% of is pre-paid with voice services currently dominating, however data is increasing rapidly - Kenya data revenues, for instance, including SMS, have increased at a 67% annual growth over the last 4 years, representing 26% of total revenues in that country

The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s “Teens and Mobile Phones” report indicated that black teens were more than twice as likely as whites to go online on their mobile phones, at 44% versus 21%. Hispanic teens were also relatively active on the mobile Web.In addition, teens living in households with annual income under $30,000 used the mobile Internet at almost twice the rate of more affluent groups. They were notably less likely to have access through a home computer. Pew reported that, overall, 21% of teens who had no traditional PC access to the Internet went online via mobile phones.See more at www.emarketer.com

Twitterers paid to spread Israeli propagandaIsrael’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel. Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government’s line on the Middle East conflict. The existence of an “internet warfare team” came to light when it was included in this year’s foreign ministry budget. About $150,000 has been set aside for the first stage of development, with increased funding expected next year. About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a programme called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.Read more at www.globalresearch.ca This kind of knowledge warfare was pioneered by the Russians and must now be used extensively by all governments. As Clipper abailart says: “One wonders whether it is worth it since the sort of chattering ‘politico’ twits who bounce soundbites off each other seven days a week are fortunately hermetically sealed in their own collective fantasies.” However, the manipulation of statistics as Trending Topics which muddies the water. Unfortunately, open also means open to abuse. I wonder if it means that those of us who want open discussion (and meaningful inferences from the flow) will need to do it in closed groups?

AND Chief Executive Officer Maarten Oldenhof says the company experienced a challenging start of 2011. “We are in close contact with various big companies, however we depend on the decisions of these parties and their long approval procedures. We see opportunities in the strong growing Smartphone market and social networks, such as Facebook, Groupon and Twitter. Social media on the smartphone is very powerful and location-based services are a must.” Revenue in the first four months of 2011 has declined, which has led to a loss in the first four months of 2011. Given the current size of AND, the development in revenue and results are greatly influenced by whether or not closing orders in a given period, both large and small. Further, big companies in the market are very careful with making decisions because of quickly changing market developments and especially the influence on their business models.

Outlook for 2011 The economic climate, market developments and business models are all very uncertain in the market for digital maps. The development of the results in 2011 will depend on the strength of the economic recovery and developments in the market for navigation and location based services. Therefore, AND is not in the position to provide an outlook for the full year 2011.

(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/f92935/global_mobile_br) has announced the addition of the "Global - Mobile Broadband - Location Based Services Insights" report to their offering. Despite the hype regarding this technology since around the year 2000; we have just recently begun to see applications for this technology become available to mass audiences. This is thanks to services like FourSquare and Facebook Places offering users the ability to check-in. The future of mobile Location Based Services will continue to emerge as handsets with smarter capabilities, new apps and user interfaces continue to permeate the market. This report provides a broad global overview of trends and developments in the mobile location based services industry, including a brief overview of GPS.

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/f92935/global_mobile_br

Researchers have reported evidence that cell phone radiation has a variety of alarming biological effects, which are sure to fuel concerns about whether or not phones impact human health. Scientists reportedly found that GSM signals fragmented insect DNA in ovarian cells, that a brief "mild electromagnetic field" affects bone formation in fetuses, and that cell phone-frequency radiation increased the permeability of the blood-brain barrier in young adult male rats.

These findings were reported in a press release issued by the Environmental Health Trust, which notes that the rat brains can be "used to correspond to the brains of human teenagers." "This work provides a warning signal to all of us," said Professor Wilhelm Mosgoeller from the Medical University of Vienna. "The evidence justifies precautionary measures to reduce the risks for everyone of us."

other research findings, while potentially interesting, appear to be in-vitro studies of isolated cells. Proving biological effects of radiation on cells is useful in determining the ways radiation might impact humans in the real world, but it does not directly prove much beyond the experimental criteria.

A common mistake for those seeking to cope with this profound disruption is to confuse technology with innovation. Algorithms, apps and search tools help make data useful but they can’t replace the value judgements at the core of journalism.

Genuine innovation requires a fundamental shift in how journalists think about their role in a changed world. To begin with, they need to get used to being ‘curators’; sorting news from the noise on the social web using smart new tools and good old fashioned reporting skills.

I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we can trust it? * Delivery: How do we turn that content into stories for a changed audience?

Waze launches its social sat-nav app for traffic-mad UK drivers “For those unaware of Waze, here’s how it works. Just by using the app (on Apple iOS, Android, Nokia, RIM), drivers generate a real-time map of the traffic ahead and can even share live road reports on accidents, hazards, speed cameras and roadworks (though typing is disabled while driving, in case you were wondering). A recent feature enable drivers to create voice-based hazard reports by recording a quick voice message – this then alerts other Waze drivers behind them. This is potentially much more accurate that having a road organisation like the AA try and feed real-time information into the system via old fashioned means like road cameras. Waze’s real-time traffic news is even being fed to some local TV stations in the US. And I daresay the speed camera aspect will go down a storm in the UK. In addition, ‘driving groups’ let users to connect with other nearby drivers such as fellow commuters, friends etc heading in the same direction. It can also be used by taxis or delivery trucks and connects to Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.”

"Remember the Sandvine report from earlier this week that said Netflix gobbles up 30% of Internet traffic during peak hours? It needs clarification on a couple of important points, says blogger Kevin Fogarty. First, yes, Netflix traffic spikes during prime time, but only across the last mile. Second, ISPs underestimate what a 'normal' level of Internet use really is. 'When AT&T announced its data caps – 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB for broadband – it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report (PDF).'"

re creating smartphone loyalty, determining which OS and device a consumer may buy. At least that’s what a recent Gartner report will have you believe. The sales report ranks Android, Symbian, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone sales in the first quarter of 2011, noting the impact of mobile apps on the market share of new sales. It seems the mobile device market is only gaining in strength, Google (GOOG) taking 36 percent market share, leading with 36.3 million unites sold. Symbian comes in second, with 27.4 percent market share at 27.6 million units, leaving Apple (AAPL) at 16.8 percent market share with 16.9 in sales. RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry comes in fourth, with 13 million and a 12.9 percent take of the market.

“Every time a user downloads a native app to their smartphone or puts their data into a platform’s cloud service, they are committing to a particular ecosystem and reducing the chances of switching to a new platform,” notes principle research analyst Roberta Cozza. “This is a clear advantage for the current stronger ecosystem owners Apple and Google. As well as putting their devices in the context of a broader ecosystem, manufacturers must start to see their smartphones as part of a computing continuum.”

Apps have certainly created an expansive ecosystem for mobile industry, but just like the mighty dinosaur, this era may one day become extinct. The death of mobile apps has been predicted by MIT writer Christopher Mims, pegging web apps as the future. It’s their potential ubiquity across platforms that extends access to web users, instead of drawing lines in the sand around mobile browsing versus the web you access on a PC laptop. Mims calls for a browser-based utopia where offline access and standards like HTML5 harmonize our desperate web experiences, but notes that offline access is far from perfect. Things still boil down to business, where Google’s marketplace has lower operating costs than Apple’s, with a broadening reach.

For Apple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike that of religious devotees, according to a BBC documentary series that cites neurological research. The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says. The first episode of the documentary shows Apple employees "whipped up into some sort of crazy, evangelical frenzy" at the recent opening of an Apple store in London. Observers and Apple critics have long accused fans of the tech company of taking their infatuation to an extreme. People have gone to great lengths to prove their love of Apple with tattoos, bumper stickers and home shrines to outmoded Mac computers. Apple's cult-like following was highlighted in a 2009 documentary called "Macheads." A blog, aptly titled Cult of Mac, wrote on Thursday about Oakland, California, resident Gary Allen's cross-country pilgrimage to Apple's first store in Virginia to celebrate the retail chain's 10th anniversary this week.

pple fans, the brand triggers a reaction in the brain that's not unlike

E-readers are outpacing tablets by a rapidly widening margin, Pew said in a new study. After a brief amount of parity for the second half of the year, e-readers doubled from just over six percent ownership in the US last November to 12 percent this May. Outside of a brief spurt during the holidays, the growth of the iPad and other tablets kept the same pace and rose from five percent to eight in the same period.

Overlap between the two was significant: three percent had both. Nine percent of Americans have just an e-reader and no tablet, where only five percent have just a tablet.

In spite of the adoption, either category still trails well behind others, Pew says. Thanks to about ten years of Apple's own efforts with the iPod, 44 percent of the US has an MP3 player. More than half have a computer or a DVR, and 83 percent have cellphones. Notebook PCs are now virtually on par with desktops for popularity with just one point of difference between the two.

Researchers for the Chetan Sharma Consulting group have put together a 2011 State of the Global Mobile Industry mid-year assessment and have come up with some very interesting results. The entire global mobile market weighs in at about $1.3 trillion or close to 2% of the world's gross domestic product. Of that giant $1.3 trillion pie, about $300 billion is expected to be through data revenues. That means that people are starting to use data at much higher rates and Americans are on the forefront of data usage even as India and China are the fastest growing mobile markets in the world.

"Mobile is fundamentally reshaping how we as consumers spend from housing and healthcare to entertainment and travel, from food and drinks to communication and transportation. Mobile not only influences purchase behavior but also post purchase opinions. When the share button is literally a second away, consumers are willingly sharing more information than ever before. Mobile is thus helping close the nirvana gap for brands and advertisers who seek to connect advertising to actual transactions. The long-term battle is however for owning the context of the users. Having the best knowledge about the user to help drive the transaction is the simply the most valuable currency of commerce."

There will be more than six billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2011. According to the report, it took 20 years of mobile development to reach one billion connected devices. The jump from five billion to six billion took 15 months.

If there’s one thing Twitter users know, it’s that advertising is coming — and not just a few “promoted tweets” or “promoted trends” here and there, but actual branded advertisements appearing right in a user’s real-time stream. There have been several recent reports that ads will be rolling out soon, including a Reuters report that says Twitter is planning a trial of “self-serve” ads for major corporations. There’s no question that the company needs to do bring in revenue, but how will users of the service react to the sudden appearance of advertising in their streams? At least one analyst thinks that Twitter is making a big mistake.